By the late sixties, more innovative voices began to prevail at the Palace. Instead of treating the media as an irritant, the Queen agreed to let the cameras in to produce two broadcasting landmarks – the first royal documentary, Royal Family, and the televised investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales. These were turning points in so many ways.
The whole world seemed an increasingly dangerous and volatile place. Vietnam was on fire and the Cold War threatened cataclysmic horrors. At home, Northern Ireland had just imploded. The Royal Family not only seemed to offer reassurance and stability, they also seemed to have undergone a transformation. They were no longer aloof, ‘tweedy’ and out of touch. Suddenly they were human and dynamic. Dare one say it, in fact, they were what you might call modern.
The Queen had appointed a more professional, more adventurous team around her and it was working. The steady post-Suez decline had been halted. The ‘contented’ years were back. She would go on to enjoy a period of happy, uncomplicated romance with the public. There would be political rows over royal finances and the Commonwealth but they had little bearing on the mutual affection between the Monarch and the people. In 1973, the television cameras – and thus the public – were given pride of place at the wedding of Princess Anne, setting an entirely new tone for Royal Family events. The Silver Jubilee of 1977 restored the monarchy to a new high. The economy might have been on the brink of collapse but at least Britain had something to celebrate. For a whole new generation it was something of an awakening. ‘I have a very strong memory of 1977,’ says Prime Minister David Cameron, ‘of a proper village party with trestle tables.’
When the Lord Mayor and the City of London held their jubilee feast for the Queen at the Guildhall it was a far cry from 1954. They limited themselves to the catering company’s second-choice menu (salmon trout, beef and melon) at £13.50 a head.*
In his speech, the Lord Mayor of the day, Sir Robin Gillett Bt, took a rather gloomy view of the first twenty-five years of the reign. A former Royal Navy officer, he lamented that Britain had turned ‘swords into ploughshares’ and that, in the Commonwealth family of nations, it seemed as if ‘all the children had grown up and sought, as children do, to spread their wings and leave the nest’. The Queen, however, had taken the throne in the opposite direction. Saluting the advent of the walkabout, he declared: ‘To humanise the monarchy without detracting from its essential mystique and to bring it adapted but intact into this modern world requires exceptional talents with which Your Majesty has been amply endowed.’
Thus was the monarchy seen as both traditional and progressive in equal measure. The Coronation-style street parties which broke out all over Britain involved every generation and would be repeated in honour of the weddings of the Prince of Wales (1981) and Prince Andrew (1986). Soon, the Queen was being upstaged by grandchildren and glamorous daughters-in-law. She did not seem to mind one bit, although this did not go unnoticed by her officials. Another stunning royal documentary, Elizabeth R, was arranged to mark her fortieth anniversary on the throne, this time with a much greater focus on the Sovereign. What could possibly go wrong? And yet, within the space of nine months in 1992, it all went very wrong indeed. Marital breakdowns in tandem with renewed attacks on the royal finances would cause far greater damage than anything sustained between Suez and Woodstock. ‘We were running out of respect and money,’ admits one senior Royal Household adviser of the time. ‘We were stuck in the mire.’ And that was before a neglected builder’s lamp ignited a wall covering. The fire which destroyed much of Windsor Castle at the end of 1992 lent an almost biblical sense of catharsis to the Queen’s troubles. ‘There is a certain symbolism in the fact that the Windsor fire should have been caused by a spotlight burning away a curtain,’ reflects Sir Antony Jay. The Queen would call it her annus horribilis, yet the unhappiness would last much longer than a year.
As we shall see, though, it was a period which ushered in some of the greatest royal upheavals in a century. Some far-sighted reforms were already quietly under way. Others were pushed through in ways perhaps inconceivable in happier times. ‘When the press started turning against the Palace over marriage, money and the castle,’ recalls one former Private Secretary, ‘that concentrated people’s minds wonderfully.’
If monarchs are judged on their performance in adversity, this was when Queen Elizabeth II earned her laurels – far more so than in the early years when it required little more than a smile to bring any nation to a jubilant standstill. Here, to use Princess Margaret’s phrase once again, was a genuine ‘phoenix-time’. Out of the ashes of Windsor Castle there grew a renewed sense of royal vigour. For a monarch approaching her seventieth birthday it might have been tempting to retrench or even retire, as all her contemporaries had already done. Instead, she followed the pattern of the late sixties: stay calm, think again, listen to new ideas.
Buckingham Palace was opened to the public. Behind the scenes, the Royal Family started to discuss its own raison d’être at a gathering of family members and senior officials known as the Way Ahead Group. As in the late sixties, the profile of the executive cadre started to change once more. The Private Secretary’s Office is the engine room of the monarchy. At any given time, there are three private secretaries – ranked in order of Private Secretary, Deputy Private Secretary and Assistant Private Secretary – one of whom is always in attendance. One day in 1996, a high-flying civil servant from Downing Street arrived to take the number three role. Mary Francis, a Cambridge historian and previously Private Secretary to John Major, became the first woman ever to reach the top tier at the Palace.
‘I was told the Palace wanted someone with a background like mine,’ she recalls. ‘It was the first time they’d had a woman and the first time they’d had someone from a Treasury or Civil Service background as opposed to the Foreign Office or the Forces. They wanted someone to help think about change and future strategy.’
She found some of her new colleagues as unusual as they, no doubt, found her. ‘I had never met a group of people for whom military background was far more important than anything to do with university,’ she recalls. ‘There was a recognition that they actually needed the injection of some rather different people.’ But she also realised that she was working for a boss who was ‘entirely pragmatic’ about the challenges ahead.
Her colleague and Deputy Private Secretary Robin Janvrin was already driving what she calls ‘the change agenda’. Among the new projects was the creation of a Co-Ordination and Research Unit – the CRU – to monitor the spread of royal activity and act as a royal think-tank. ‘More and more people were being brought in with a more analytical approach,’ Francis explains. ‘We got a very talented diplomat from New Zealand and we used headhunters to hire in a few bright lads and lasses – the sort of people you might get to be special advisers – to work for him.’ If they uncovered some awkward home truths, says Francis, then so be it. ‘The research unit found some very interesting things. For example, the amount of time the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh spent visiting private schools compared to state schools was disproportionate to the distribution of children in the country and, when they visited a private school, they were spending longer when they got there. It turned out that they were visiting the manufacturing sector far more often than the services sector – because it’s easier to visit people making widgets whereas 80 per cent of the economy was actually in the services sector. It was a case of getting into these issues and writing it down in a wholly dispassionate way. That was the kind of thing that would then get discussed by the Royal Family at the Way Ahead Group.’
As a result, the Queen’s ‘head of the nation’ role soon became more and more proactive. ‘The change was gradual but it was quite considerable,’ explains Francis. The Queen’s diary was a case in point. ‘When I arrived, the Queen’s engagements were decided by looking through the invitations. By the time I left, it was a case of asking: what are the important things going on in the country that our Que
en should recognise and how can we put together some visits that will do that?’
Charles Anson, the Queen’s Press Secretary of the period, says that the reformers were pushing at an open door. ‘We all agreed that we needed to get ahead of the media and not always be reacting,’ he explains. ‘There were lots of visits to hospitals and old people’s homes, walkabouts and so on. But where were the issues of modern Britain and how was the monarchy signalling that it knew and cared about these? Then we asked the Lord-Lieutenants [the Queen’s representatives in the counties] for ideas. Subsequently, we started drawing up a programme and finding the right people. It might not always be right for the Queen to do something completely new but could the Prince of Wales pick up some of these modern themes? And so it went on.’
Another senior Household official likens these years to the meltdown which hit the financial sector in 2008. ‘You could say it was a case of managing change by disaster. Our attitude was almost: “We must use this crisis well.” Both the Duke and the Queen could see that things couldn’t remain the same. So when people suggested something like the CRU, they were right behind it. Sometimes, you get a moment where you can do things you couldn’t otherwise do.’
As far as the media and much of the world was concerned, all this was of minor importance compared to the marriages of the Queen’s elder sons, both of which came to an end in the Family Division of the High Court in 1996. The sudden death of Diana, Princess of Wales a year later would present the Royal Family with a personal tragedy and also the gravest crisis of the Queen’s reign. ‘That’s when the stakes were highest,’ says one former Private Secretary. ‘I can’t honestly say that I thought it was going to be the end of the monarchy but the serious republican element thought there was a chink in the armour and they were going for it.’ Once again, as we shall see, the Queen’s instinct, experience and a capacity for judicious change would prevail. So, too, would the reservoir of goodwill built up through nearly half a century of assiduous devotion to duty. A week after the Princess’s death, a MORI poll showed that public attitudes towards the monarchy were just the same as they had been before and have continued to remain since (give or take a couple of percentage points): 18 per cent in favour of a republic, 73 per cent in favour of the monarchy and 9 per cent unsure.
It is a remarkably consistent figure, as any pollster will confirm. Indeed, it has barely changed since the giddy days of Coronation Britain when the Queen could do no wrong and yet 16 per cent of people still favoured a republic. Whatever changes people wanted to impose on the monarchy in that unhappy autumn of 1997 – and they were never short of suggestions – one thing was resoundingly clear. The vast majority did not want to see it disappear. The Princess’s death was followed, within weeks, by the golden wedding anniversary of the Queen and Prince Philip. Addressing a lunch given by the Prime Minister, the Queen acknowledged that monarchs did not always find it easy to read the public mood, ‘obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion. But read it we must.’
By now, the Queen, her family and her officials had a clear target at which to aim five years hence. As one ex-aide puts it: ‘The Golden Jubilee was the culmination of several years of thinking: what would it take to close the door on the nineties?’
The Queen was almost endearingly keen on avoiding ‘a fuss’ over the fiftieth anniversary of her accession. A huge fuss, of course, was inevitable but her officials did not want an event which was in any way contrived. ‘A lot of effort went in to making it look unplanned,’ admits one. Any suggestion that the Palace was attempting to whip up synthetic support for a battered institution could have proved very damaging. In any case, royal officials were confident that the event would gather its own momentum. Some were privately relieved when the press started predicting a lukewarm public response, ‘PALACE FEARS JUBILEE FLOP’ said The Times in January 2002. With such low expectations, the jubilee could only go from strength to strength. It did so before the celebrations had even started, albeit in sorrowful circumstances.
On 9 February 2002, the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, died at the age of seventy-one following several years of poor health and a series of strokes. Less then two months later, the Royal Family was in mourning again. The public response to the death of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother on 30 March 2002 took everyone – left, right, royalist, republican – by surprise. As she lay in state in the Palace of Westminster, police soon had to divert the queue to the west of Parliament, over the Thames and back down the other side. ‘As soon as I saw the length of the queue to walk past Queen Elizabeth’s coffin in 2002, it spelt to me that the troubles were now passed,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘In fact, it dumbfounded me. I was one of the school who thought that she was a wonderful old lady but she was nearly 102. Even I did not expect queues as far as Blackfriars.’ At one point, the line of mourners went even further, stretching from Westminster, across the Thames and eastwards towards the Tower of London. Informed that they faced a twenty-four-hour wait to file past the coffin, some simply shrugged and replied that they would wait.
The Golden Jubilee tour finally began in the Cornish rain on 1 May 2002. The crowds were modest at the opening fixture in Falmouth but the reason became clear a few hours later when the Queen entered Truro. It transpired that most of the county had descended on the cathedral city. From Northern Ireland to New Zealand, it was a similar story all year. ‘The whole tone was looking forwards,’ says one of the senior architects of the jubilee. ‘It was about “her” thanking “us”.’ David Cameron, then the new Conservative MP for Witney, remembers the surge of affection. ‘People were wondering: “Is it going to be a big event? Not sure.” And suddenly there was this massive thrust and everyone got involved. In my constituency I went to several events and they were all brilliant and totally oversubscribed. Every village street party, every single barbecue suddenly had 25 per cent more people than they could cope with.’ The Golden Jubilee concerts – one classical, one pop – in the grounds of Buckingham Palace were screened around the world and drew more than a million people to central London to listen outside and watch the fireworks. Concorde flew down the Mall. ‘God Save The Queen’ rang out on Brian May’s electric guitar from the Palace roof. Exactly ten years after the annus horribilis, the monarchy was back on track.
For all the occasional problems, the years since 2002 fall into the ‘contented’ category, culminating in the marriage of Prince William to Catherine Middleton before a global audience thought to rival – or exceed – an Olympiad. On a personal level, the Queen must have been equally thrilled to see the marriage of her eldest granddaughter, Zara Phillips, and the christening of her first great-grandchild, Savannah Phillips.
It has all served as a splendid prelude to an extraordinary celebration which has only happened once before – in 1897. It will be supervised by a passionately royalist Prime Minister who camped in the Mall to watch the 1981 Royal Wedding – ‘I was in the best place, just where the Mall meets the statue outside Buckingham Palace’ – and David Cameron has no doubts that the country will be doing much the same to mark the Queen’s sixtieth anniversary on the throne: ‘The Diamond Jubilee will be much bigger than anyone expects.’
This jubilee is an event which allows us to stand back and see the nineties in context rather than as the prism through which this reign has often been assessed. The jubilee helps us to reflect on the happiest and most miserable periods of the reign and to see that the euphoria of the mid-fifties was no more sustainable than the seemingly endless run of disasters a generation later. Instead, we can assess the success of this reign by the state of the institution sixty years on. If we take the Queen’s full title – Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith – then there are unquestionably cracks and fissures in the institutions which she leads. The Church of En
gland is divided over gay clergy, women bishops and overtures from the Vatican. The United Kingdom is less united than at any stage since Irish independence with four legislatures beavering away in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Great Britain, the original 1707 Anglo-Scottish partnership, is less entwined than at any stage since the Act of Union (to the point that English period dramas like Downton Abbey are now deemed unsuitable for Scottish television audiences). In the 2011 elections it was the separatist Scottish National Party which won an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament. The Commonwealth is larger than ever yet increasingly flabby and inconsequential as it seeks a twenty-first-century role for itself. Of all the Queen’s responsibilities, her ‘other Realms and Territories’ might have been the likeliest area for dissent. But, despite periodic grumbling and a handful of failed plebiscites, republicanism is an occasional issue in occasional areas rather than a constant grievance. Few expect a country like Australia to retain the Crown in the long term. Yet, when offered an opportunity to replace the monarchy in 1999, the people voted to retain the Crown by a margin which surprised everyone. Even among ardent republicans there is a strong personal affection for the Queen. And when much of Australia sat up into the night, gripped by the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in April 2011 – with that country’s republican Prime Minister in the Westminster Abbey congregation – it was abundantly clear that the issue is, for now, a non-starter.
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