‘The Scots don’t forget,’ Mary Francis recalls. ‘But there was no question of the Queen wearing Coronation clothes this time. So we commissioned a Scottish dress designer and, unprecedentedly I think, the Queen asked me to join her and her dresser when they had the discussion with the designer, which was very nice.’
The result was a three-part creation by Scotland’s Sandra Murray featuring a dress of light green wool, a long-sleeved mauve coat of silk and wool and an Isle of Skye scarf. Not a word of Scottish displeasure was heard.
For years, the Queen’s wardrobe was the fiefdom of the invincible Margaret ‘Bobo’ MacDonald, the former nursemaid who had been with her since she was a baby.* These days, the Queen seldom troubles the big-name designers, preferring to leave her outfits to a small in-house team led by Angela Kelly. Diners at a certain Belgravia restaurant often do a double take when they spot the Queen with her wardrobe team enjoying a lively ladies’ lunch in the corner. Kelly is one of a small inner sanctum of trusty intimates who loosely fall into three camps: staff (including the Windsor stud groom who looks after the Queen’s personal horses and her pages), senior officials (including her Private Secretary) and ladies-in-waiting (two of whom have notched up a century’s service between them). ‘The Queen doesn’t really have a “best friend”, it’s just not her,’ says a trusted aide.
Another Queen Mary dictum is as true as ever: avoid over-familiarity. ‘If the Queen ever feels affronted about something, she has the perfect answer,’ explains Kenneth Rose. ‘She just stares at the person with open eyes, absolutely no expression.’ Even experienced staff occasionally find that they have transgressed the unmarked line through what might seem an innocuous remark. A former official recalls: ‘Once, when everyone had just come back from their Christmas holidays, I said to the Queen: “Did you have a nice Christmas?” I got a very cold stare back. It was the kind of remark that you would make to anyone else but you were not encouraged to make to the Queen. Everybody had the same experience. You’d think: “Wow, we’re getting on really well.” And then she’d do something that just reminded you, that just pushed you back at a distance.’
It was not a mark of displeasure or rudeness. On another occasion, all was explained: ‘The Queen told me that she was very influenced by Queen Mary who had given her tips about how you behave as a Queen. One of them was that you never allow yourself to get too close to your advisers. It was very clear in the Royal Family generally, but the Queen was very strong on this.’
To outsiders, it can seem a peculiar code of behaviour but the royal/courtier working dynamic is a unique one. ‘You’re not there to be their mate. You mustn’t cross the line for very good reasons,’ says Elizabeth Buchanan, Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales until 2008. ‘When I got there, I was startled by how much you get to know about their life. People see things that are very intimate. A huge amount of trust is put upon your shoulders and it has to be respected. People might say to me: “How is Charles?” And I would think: “I don’t know anyone called Charles.” And I really would not think of him as “Charles”. That’s why titles are crucial. If you don’t buy into that basic respect, then the whole thing’s going to wind up very quickly. It’s the same with ministers who want everyone to call them by their first name. It disrupts the relationship very quickly.’
No one, however grand, is immune from the royal ‘stare’. Queen Mary – ‘probably the last woman to believe in the Divine Right of Kings’, says Kenneth Rose – once reduced Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, to jelly with a killer stare. The Duchess had kissed her hand and left lipstick on the royal glove. London’s embassy circuit is still talking about the recent annual diplomatic reception at which one diplomat arrived late and missed his allotted place in the introduction line. Rather than miss out on his handshake and chat with the Queen, he pushed into the line further down. It was not a wise move. Not only was there no chat but he received ‘the stare’ and was promptly escorted away by officials.
A former Cabinet Minister, who periodically found himself on duty with several members of the Royal Family, admits that there was ‘this invisible line between formality and informality’ and not much guidance. ‘Because we’re in the modern world now, I find myself wondering: “Is this appropriate?” And I think, on balance, that it probably is; that if we choose to have a monarchy, it is different from other systems and they’re never off duty. There isn’t an entirely private life except within their own family.’
It’s part of the royal paradox. We want our monarch to be just like us and yet we want her to be different. ‘To be part of the nation and yet apart from the nation is always a difficult balance,’ Sir John Major acknowledges. She may be the most famous woman on earth but those close to the Queen testify to a robust sense of position, though not of self-importance. And she has an implacable aversion to insincerity, however well intentioned. The Queen cannot abide pretence. A former Private Secretary recalls suggesting what might almost constitute a gag. ‘I wanted a joke in this speech about Private Eye – it may have been using the phrase “Shome Mistake” – and she just said to me, very firmly: “It just isn’t me to talk about Private Eye.” All the private secretaries had the experience of recommending her to do various things when she was out and about and more than once she said: “I don’t think that’s quite right.” It was a firm touch.’
One of those private secretaries was the late Lord Charteris who recalled drafting a speech for her which began: ‘I am very glad to be back in Birmingham.’ The Queen read it, picked up a pen and crossed out the word ‘very’. It was not a slight to Birmingham. It was simply that – in her eyes – it smacked of insincerity.
‘She’s just not a consummate actress like her mother,’ says a member of the inner sanctum. The late Queen Mother, it must be said, had no qualms about dispensing a little superfluous praise. When a storm forced an emergency landing in a godforsaken Canadian outpost called Cold Lake in 1985, the locals were even more delighted when she declared: ‘Ah, Cold Lake. I’ve always wanted to come here.’
It was Lord Charteris who remarked that the Queen ‘combines her mother’s charm with her father’s shyness’. She has endured the public spotlight more than anyone else alive but has never enjoyed it greatly. ‘You never feel that she courts popularity. Sometimes you rather wish that she did more,’ says a former Private Secretary. ‘But her judgement is impeccable. By not courting it, she is more popular than if she did court it. She’s not an ambulance chaser.’
Prince William is emphatic on the subject. ‘She cares not for celebrity, that’s for sure,’ he says firmly – and approvingly. ‘That’s not what monarchy’s about. It’s about setting examples. It’s about doing one’s duty as she would say. It’s about using your position for the good. It’s about serving the country and that really is the crux of it all.’
Once or twice, the Queen’s reticence has not served her well. Ask senior Palace figures past and present to list the blunders of this reign and none will get beyond the fingers of one hand. But two examples usually recur: Aberfan (the Welsh village where 144 people, 116 of them children, died beneath a collapsing slagheap in 1966) and Lockerbie (crash site of the Pan Am Boeing 747, downed by a terrorist bomb in 1988). In both cases, the Queen was criticised for her slow response to the disaster. She did not visit Aberfan until six days after the tragedy and did not attend or send a member of her family to the Lockerbie memorial service in January 1989. In both cases, she would subsequently acknowledge to her advisers that she – rather than they – had got it wrong. Her critics at the time inferred a lack of compassion. In truth, say those who know her, it is down to a deep reluctance both to intrude upon private grief and also to show raw emotion in public. Those who accompanied the Queen to Aberfan – where she had tea with a family who had lost seven members – say that she was in tears. Few have seen her so distressed as when she visited Dunblane following the 1996 massacre of sixteen children and a teacher. ‘It was almost unbearable,’ says a membe
r of her team that day. ‘But you wouldn’t catch her betraying that in public. It was done behind closed doors.’ All those who have worked closely with the Queen point out that one of her greatest assets is what they call her ‘negative judgement’, her capacity to say ‘No’. As Bagehot argued, sound constitutional monarchy is often about ‘well-considered inaction’.
‘She’s as good at deciding what she doesn’t want to do as saying what she does want to do,’ explains Charles Anson. ‘The Queen’s got good instincts. She’s open to new ideas if people make a convincing argument but she’s not necessarily going to suggest it herself. That’s natural – it’s the nature of constitutional monarchy.’ Nor does the Queen like arguments. Her preferred method of expressing disapproval of an idea is to ask a lot of questions about it. Another way of dispensing a gentle thumbs-down is to deploy a time-honoured phrase: ‘Are you sure?’
‘The Queen has the most incredible capacity to listen and to learn,’ says the Duke of York. ‘She is not above society. She’s in it and reflects it. That comes through experience and I think we’ve all learned from her experience. All of us are in a long-term relationship with society and, as it were, the people.’
Few creatures of habit are more habitual than royalty. It’s hardly surprising when your life is pre-ordained by the rituals of the national and religious calendars. Easter equals Royal Maundy. November equals Cenotaph. Christmas equals broadcast to the Commonwealth and so on. Royal memories can be elephantine. As William Shawcross has pointed out, the late Queen Mother retained a lifelong dislike for Dutch landscapes because they had lined the walls of the Palace air-raid shelter during the war. And having stayed at Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s Derbyshire seat, at the height of the Abdication crisis, the unhappy associations meant that she never stayed there again during the remaining sixty-seven years of her life. But she was equally robust in her loyalties, be they to the Black Watch, the Eton College Beagles, the Sandringham Women’s Institute or a teapot presented to her by a British Rail steward. It followed her on her travels for ever after.
The curious, often stifling pace of royal life means that the Queen craves those moments when she can ‘blend in’ and enjoy what other people might call ‘normality’. As the Duke of York puts it: ‘We’re not that much different to anybody else. It’s just a slightly different reality.’ A favourite event is the Royal Windsor Horse Show, partly because it was where she competed in ordinary competitions as a little girl but also because it is somewhere she can wander around in a headscarf, being part of a crowd rather than its object.
On her return from the 2002 tour of Australia, the Queen thoroughly enjoyed an hour in the duty free section of Singapore Changi Airport while her plane refuelled. ‘It was a secure area, no one was expecting her and she had a lovely time browsing at the Clarins counter while Prince Philip went off to look at gadgets,’ says one of the royal party. ‘Those sort of moments, that we take for granted, mean a lot to her.’ It is why she remains so close to favourites like stud groom Terry Pendry and dresser Angela Kelly. ‘They talk to her about day-to-day life in the real world,’ says one member of staff.
Similarly, the Queen’s loved ones find her endearingly envious of their own relative freedom to have conversations or express opinions which might be acceptable for a member of the Royal Family but not for the Sovereign. ‘There are occasions when the Queen will say to you, “Oh you didn’t do that, did you?”’ laughs the Duke of York. ‘And I know full well that it’s a comment: “Oh, I wish I’d been able to do that.”’ Because it’s removed the issue one step from the Monarch and allowed something to be said.’
Like anyone, the Queen has her likes and dislikes. Most are well known – horses: good; spicy food: bad, etc. She likes driving fast but hates seatbelts. She likes charismatic, confident men around her but prefers female staff to be more subtle and less demonstrative. As one former senior adviser puts it: ‘She was born in the twenties and brought up to believe that men get on with things whereas women exercise power through quiet influence, not shaking their fists.’
When she has made up her mind about something, it does not easily unbend. The most obvious manifestation of that is the corgi. The current royal menagerie includes Labradors, retrievers, spaniels – not to mention cows, sheep, parakeets and a pigeon loft – but it is the corgi which has reigned supreme in the Monarch’s affections since her father, then Duke of York, bought the first royal corgi, Dookie, from a local kennels in 1933.
The Queen continues to share her father’s keen eye for decorations, an interest she has in common with most members of the Royal Family. As well as inheriting an extensive repertoire of honours, she has also created her own Royal Family Order. Outsiders may imagine that gongs are liberally sprinkled among relations and staff like confetti. As one courtier explained to royal biographer Gyles Brandreth: ‘The Queen is the Fount of Honour so it is hardly surprising those closest to the fount get splashed.’ But the details of who has (and has not) been awarded certain honours continue to fascinate royal Kremlinologists. Neither the Duchess of York nor Princess Michael of Kent, for example, has been offered the (women-only) Royal Family Order.
No courtier ever underestimates the importance of symbols. Senior officials still shudder as they recall the saga of the flagless Palace mast in the days before the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. First a handful of mourners, then the papers, followed by the phone-ins, the politicians and finally the Queen’s own senior advisers advocated a half-mast Union flag. But the Queen stood resolute in defence of symbolism. Only a Royal Standard should fly above the Palace, she decreed with mounting (and uncharacteristic) fury, and no death, including her own, should lower it. Mary Francis says that the flag saga was the only occasion she could recall of the Queen expressing real anger. Eventually, the Monarch was persuaded to amend tradition (today, the Union flag does indeed fly in the absence of the Standard) but not before a very senior adviser was heard to say: ‘I have been scarred by the Queen.’
But if she is such an arch-traditionalist, how come so much has changed on her watch? One senior adviser puts it down to the Queen’s ability to ‘compartmentalise’, to keep her head of state persona separate from her private life. ‘If you propose a change or amendment and it is well argued, she would be gracious and sensible and say: “OK, yup, fine,”’ he says. ‘But “OK, yup, fine” doesn’t necessarily mean “I agree.”’
The opening of Buckingham Palace – originally to fund fire repairs at Windsor Castle and now to fund the Royal Collection – was a case in point. Sir Malcolm Ross, former Comptroller and architect of great state occasions for fifteen years, recalls that, ultimately, the decision to open up was a straightforward if momentous one. ‘It was a necessity, not a choice. It was a very well-presented case and it was made clear to the Queen that it wouldn’t affect her personally. Now she always enjoys looking round the Palace exhibition before it opens because they are always finding and displaying things even she has not seen. She likes meeting people who say: “It was lovely to see the Palace.”’
Sandringham, in Norfolk, is a prime example of somewhere that doesn’t change yet remains at the forefront of new ideas. The dining room may not have altered much since the late Queen Mother changed the colour scheme to light green in 1938. And the Royal Pigeon Loft continues to exist because George VI liked it and used to take Princess Elizabeth there as a little girl. But whereas he used to sell estate apples to Marks & Spencer in King’s Lynn, the Queen takes great pride in her brand-new apple juice factory which distributes all over the country. She has even manned the bottling line herself.
The Queen believes in tradition, as long as it has a point. ‘Protocol and ceremonial – and they’re brothers-in-arms – must be relevant,’ says Sir Malcolm Ross. ‘You shoot yourself in both feet if you produce an event which is frankly nothing more than an historic re-enactment. It’s got to be relevant.’
As old certainties and social norms recede, so the Queen is ac
tually more open to suggestions than ever. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the older she gets, the less stuck in her ways she becomes. It is not necessarily what one expects of the longest living monarch in history. But, then, her age is often overlooked. That stock image of Queen Victoria is one of an elderly woman, forever in mourning clothes and a lugubrious state of retrospection. We have a stock image of the Queen, too. But while she has now outlived Victoria by several years, we still see her as active and engaged. It is an image that has barely changed in thirty years. Given that the Queen seems to carry on doing the same old things at the same pace all over the world year in year out, she seems to be at a perpetual stage of life; a lady of a certain age but not an old lady.
Jim Callaghan wisely observed that, for better or worse, each generation forms a composite view of the face on the coins: ‘Every monarch makes his or her own niche in people’s minds and hearts and this Queen has done that.’
We see a purposeful woman in a headscarf, perhaps with dogs or horses; we see a woman with a shy smile and a handbag walking down streets full of over-excited mothers and tongue-tied children; we see a proud woman dwarfed by extremely tall men in uniform and bearskins; we see a solemn woman in crown and robes processing through Parliament.
They are all images which betoken that dependability, loyalty, common sense, calmness. They might, with another person, suggest grandeur, coolness, detachment, elitism. And what is a monarchy if not grand, aloof and faintly untouchable? Yet those are not the impressions left on the vast majority of people when they see the Queen. Rather, they feel like the young academic who had just met the Queen during her tour of a science exhibition in 2010. ‘I’d never given her much thought but it was a lovely opportunity to meet her,’ he said afterwards. ‘Then a few of us went for a drink and I realised I was shaking. My heart was pounding. And it dawned on me that I’d just done something extraordinary.’ Despite being an extremely bright, articulate young man in the front line of medical scientific research, he could not recollect a word of what he had said during the encounter, nor could he offer any rational explanation for his state of benign shock. It was most unlike him, he said, but he was not bothered. Because he had just met the Queen.
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