At the time, the political and security situation in the province was highly unsettled and any royal visit to what was practically a war zone had to be arranged in the greatest secrecy. This added an extra and not unwelcome touch of drama to the planning for what was in any case, from my point of view, a fascinating insight into the role of an infantry battalion in the uniquely demanding circumstances of helping to enforce law and order in Londonderry in 1990.
The weather could not have been more uncooperative. As we disembarked from the royal aircraft at RAF Aldergrove, freezing sleet was blowing almost horizontally across the airfield. The sense of having accidentally arrived on the set of a James Bond movie was irresistible as I looked out at the dark, camouflaged helicopters, their rotors turning, which waited to escort us on the next leg of the journey, the hunched shapes of the armed guards posted around the apron and the small line of military top brass waiting formally to receive the royal visitor, buttoned up to their necks in greatcoats, the slush almost covering their boots.
Hovering in the background was a tall figure talking into a discreet radio. He looked as if he might have played in the second row for Ulster at one time. In fact he was the officer in charge of all VIP security in the troubled province. During the many visits that followed, the sight of this genial bear of a man never failed to impart to me a feeling of utter reassurance. As I grew to know him and his wife in subsequent meetings, I slowly came to understand the daily danger which his job forced him and his family to confront. Of all the brave men and women in all the security forces I encountered around the world during my time with the Princess, this man stood literally head and shoulders taller than the rest. To me he also symbolized a whole breed of people whose help was essential if the royal show was to create the desired impact, who received little recognition for what they did and who, in their modesty, would have dismissed my view that their association with it brought more honour to the institution for which I worked than anything I would ever contribute.
The helicopter rotors turned in vain. As we disembarked from the plane, the decision was taken that the weather was too bad to fly the 60-odd miles to Londonderry and we would have to make the journey by car. The trip was made at high speed, in a small convoy of vehicles, through country thought to be potentially dangerous and in atrocious weather. I sat in one of the RUC cars, listening to a complicated security operation unfolding with minimum fuss over the radio. For the last few miles we picked up an escort of soldiers from the Princess’s regiment and soon the great corrugated-iron gates of Ebrington Barracks clanged shut behind us.
The Princess spent all day watching members of her regiment demonstrate the training needed to carry out their internal security duties in streets where the urban terrorist threat was a constant reality. She listened to technical briefings about their daily operations, heard about the dangers they faced and the successes they had achieved. She met the soldiers in their barracks, the NCOs in their bar, and had lunch with the officers in their mess. She clearly found the whole process quite enlightening, but her main concern, of course, was to cheer up the troops.
In this she succeeded better than any other visiting celebrity. It does not take a great genius to work out the therapeutic effect of dangling a beautiful Princess in front of a captive audience of several hundred fighting-fit young men. The effect, I might add, was mutual and heightened by the Princess’s inspired decision to wear standard-issue camouflage combat dress throughout.
Eventually we made the long trek back to Aldergrove. It was getting dark and the wind and sleet showed no sign of abating. I began to worry about the flight home. Sure enough, at the airport we were told that conditions were too bad to fly, at least for the next few hours. Unbeknown to us, in England storms had been wreaking havoc the length and breadth of the country and very little flying, least of all royal flying, was taking place.
We borrowed a room in the RAF mess, for the Princess, myself and a handful of close security officers. A steward lit the fire and somebody drew the curtains against the gathering gloom of the winter night. It was one of those touch-and-go situations, in which the royal foot could metaphorically be stamped in frustration at not being able to end a long and tiring day in the expected comfort of one’s own aircraft, prior to returning to the comfort of one’s own Palace. Alternatively, as sometimes happened, it might have the opposite effect, when distinctions between royalty and commoner could become blurred in the face of what we could pretend was a common adversity.
While the Princess was deciding which of these options she would choose, I sent for a bottle of Bushmills, on the basis that there was no point in us all being miserable and an outbreak of conviviality among those around her might produce the desired result in her own internal debate.
Hardly had the whiskey arrived when her mind was made up. ‘Gather round, boys!’ she said, picking a chair by the hearth. So she sat in the flickering firelight, a Princess in squaddie’s denims, while the strong, silent men of the RUC moved closer to the warmth and sipped their whiskey.
They talked of their work, their worries, their families. All were subjects about which she herself must have harboured anxious thoughts, yet she was content to sit, with her own glass in her hand, listening intently, offering words of encouragement and whenever she possibly could – and even when I swore she positively could not – finding something in what we discussed to laugh about. After that evening, in a tradition that was entirely her own, the Princess would present her regular bodyguard with a bottle of Bushmills during every visit she made to Ulster.
If mental hospitals marked one extreme of the Princess’s range of work and ‘meeting the troops’ came somewhere in the middle, at the other extreme was her growing popularity as a guest at diplomatic events. She relished the chance to exercise her increasing supply of first-hand overseas impressions – to say nothing of her supply of chic cocktail dresses. At Rampton, in the soldiers’ mess hall and in all the smarter Embassies, she had the right word for everyone, or so it seemed.
The French Ambassador, an enthusiastic supporter of the arts, lent his residence for a fundraising dinner for the English National Ballet, of which the Princess was a very active patron. Securing such a prestigious venue for its fundraiser was typical of the ENB’s resourceful approach to gathering support and typical, too, of its imaginative use of its patron’s pulling power.
As we arrived at the residence’s grand entrance the sounds of a party in full swing, complete with jazz band, could be heard inside, and there was the Ambassador himself, bowing low and preparing to dispense his legendary Gallic charm. The Princess rewarded his efforts with some legendary charm of her own and they ascended the steps to the grand salon in what appeared to be convivial conversation.
The band was playing at full tilt at the top of the steps and I saw the Ambassador lean even closer to the Princess in order to hear her reply to some question he had put to her. Suddenly he recoiled, as elegantly as his Gallic charm would permit. He seemed to have gone paler and a look of quizzical uncertainty spread across his face.
As soon as I had a chance, I discreetly asked the flustered Princess what had gone wrong. ‘Oh God, how embarrassing!’ she said. ‘On the way in I’d been admiring the huge Christmas decorations that were hanging from the hall ceiling.’ I had noticed them too and unusually, although they were every sort of festive shape, every one of them was white. ‘On the way up the stairs,’ she went on, ‘I thought he was asking me about the decorations, but I misheard him. Actually he was asking me about the band. He asked me if I thought they were any good. “Oh yes,” I replied. “Marvellous. And they’re all so beautifully white too …”’
I sat thoughtfully at my old desk in St James’s Palace and watched Anne’s secretary finish boxing up her personal files. It was late January 1990. Under new arrangements I was to become the Princess’s assistant private secretary, supplanting Anne in most of her duties. It was a daunting prospect.
I had been aware for some m
onths that the Princess was contemplating a change at the top of her private office. A member of household – nominally the top tier of royal employees – received no more shrift than a housemaid when the royal eye grew weary of his or her anxiously smiling face.
With her usual wide-eyed innocence, the Princess had set about undermining Anne’s position as her senior adviser (John Riddell, the private secretary she shared with the Prince, though theoretically Anne’s superior, had little regular contact with his boss’s wife) by the effective but unattractive means of making her job increasingly impossible. This she achieved by distancing herself personally and in day-to-day business in a dozen small ways, each individually no more than a nuisance, but in combination a deadly expression of lost confidence. Phone calls became frostier, written proposals received grudging or unhelpful replies, and the light of the royal countenance was generally turned in other directions.
This time the light was turned towards me. I was still naive enough to be flattered and unscrupulous enough to become the Princess’s passive accomplice in a game of musical chairs which, I suppose, has had its echoes in every court since our ancestors decided that they could not cope without a royal family. Anne, being devoted to the Princess but having no illusions about her skill with the knife, wisely saw the blow coming and resigned.
In a gesture that could appear generous – and which I am sure did wonders for her conscience – the Princess asked Anne to remain in the largely honorary role of principal lady-in-waiting. As such she would always be a commanding presence in royal circles, but her departure nevertheless marked the end of an era and I was not going to be the only one who would miss her benign but critical eye on our day-to-day proceedings, or the clarity with which she saw right and wrong in a world where little was really as it seemed.
Whatever her personal feelings about leaving St James’s Palace, and I believe relief was among them, Anne showed me nothing but generosity and helpfulness. After our brief turnover of current business, I installed myself in her elegant office and with a sudden, unbidden envy watched her collect her remaining belongings and depart, as one commentator put it, ‘like a skater making her dignified departure from the royal ice rink’.
I had already seen several bright young hopefuls move into new offices in royal Palaces and I was to see many more. For sure, we knew our lease on our enviable little bit of Palace was a transient one, but this time, we told ourselves, it would be different. We could arrange our books, settle in, feel at home. We could install our families in their grand new accommodation, in my case a tiny house in Notting Hill Gate. We could commission our personal stationery, admire the car and its parking space. We could preen at garden parties, stride the red-carpeted corridors and pretend to be statesmanlike in the face of shock-horror tabloid headlines. Best of all, we could adopt an attitude of maddening inscrutability whenever anyone, from a taxi driver to a mother-in-law, asked us any question on any royal matter, however inconsequential.
Especially in those early days, I probably embodied every one of these vanities and I offer belated thanks to my friends and family who endured them. The truth was that our offices were overdecorated, our status was overblown, our perks overgenerous and our loyalties overtaxed.
I did not see it like that at the time, of course. For one thing, I was too busy conferring with the Princess’s interior design consultant, Dudley Poplak, about the redecoration of my office. The first priority was to get that lavatory soundproofed … The Royal Library at Windsor provided yards of impressive-looking old books to fill my new floor-to-ceiling bookcase. The Royal Collection provided portraits of Princesses of Wales past, under whose haughty eyes I idled away many minutes admiring my new curtains and carpet – not to mention my new desk, which could easily have doubled as a landing pad for one of the royal helicopters in which I could now confidently expect to fly regularly, far into the distant future.
As further proof of my inflated importance, the Princess appointed a new equerry to take on my old duties. How I enjoyed the selection process from my new position inside the members’ enclosure, and how I enjoyed the arrival of my new subordinate. Squadron Leader David Barton had been my opposite number years before when we had both worked in Plymouth as ADCs to senior officers. He was unflappable, efficient, loyal and good humoured. Best of all, he stood well over six and a half feet tall in his elegantly cut Air Force uniform, a factor in the selection process to which the Princess may just have given an extra ounce of importance.
I gave David all the advice I could, amassed over my several years at the Palace, and warned him among other things that, regardless of outward appearances, words could hardly describe the depth of our employers’ indifference to us as people. This may have been overstating it slightly, but I was anxious to avoid the consequences for me of an equerry who might understandably fall victim to red carpet fever, or in some other way become besotted with his beautiful mistress, or at the very least suffer the depression which could set in from the occasional bouts of rejection which would inevitably come his way.
I was also anxious, if I was honest, to avoid him becoming too comfortable behind his smart new desk. Whatever I tried to tell myself, I had let self-interest take too large a hand in my own transition from temporary equerry to permanent household member and, as the only potential loser in any contest, I did not want David to feel inclined to follow my example. Nor, for that matter, did I want him to become a tempting target for the Princess’s desire to manipulate even those most dedicated to serving her. I had readily fallen in with her rather unattractive machinations to unseat Anne and knew very well that she would not hesitate to employ similar tactics against me if, or when, the mood took her.
It says something for the attractions of the job, or for my cockiness, that not even that daily prospect was enough to make me want to find safer employment, perhaps as a lion tamer. The best safeguard against becoming the object of any such plot was to make myself an indispensable part of any long-term plan she eventually evolved for her future or, in its absence, to make myself the indispensable source of such plans. The other safeguard was to foster an atmosphere of friendly interdependence among our small team in which information was freely exchanged, thus denying the Princess one of the more elementary methods of dividing her staff by benefiting today’s favourite with information tomorrow’s scapegoat might have needed to avoid incurring further censure.
The role of messenger about plans for the future was given to me almost unconsciously by the Princess. My mere appointment gave the message to her husband that she, not he, would now exercise control over whom she hired and fired. The Prince had no input (or no visible input) in David Barton’s selection, whereas his had been the casting vote when I had been chosen as equerry only two years previously.
The message to the other Palaces and to the wider world was also there, if they cared to look for it. With the departure of Anne Beckwith-Smith and John Riddell – who left a few months later – the Princess could no longer be counted upon to acquiesce when it came to conforming to conventional ways of doing royal business.
The message to her own constituency of organizations, charities and admirers was that her office had a new face and in many ways a new philosophy. In my self-confident mood I did not share Anne’s instinctive wish to form a united front with the Prince’s staff whenever possible.
Personally, I felt my position was like that of the driver of a speedboat. The Princess’s public popularity and senior position in the royal hierarchy represented enormous potential horsepower. Steering the thing was a team effort, in which the Princess told me roughly where she wanted to go and I worked out what I thought was the best way of getting there. There were only three certainties in this: (1) after any mishap it would be found that my hands were on the wheel; (2) the Princess would probably change our destination in mid-voyage; but (3) wherever it was, we were going there at breakneck speed. Without straining the analogy, I might add that later on it began to get very dark and s
tormy and we had very few lighthouses to show us the way.
To reinforce the message of a new start, I instituted a programme of weekly meetings which the Princess would attend at my office in St James’s Palace, along with the equerry, the press secretary, the head of security and any others I thought might amuse her with their input. At our next lunch, Anne received this information with polite amusement. ‘I don’t see that lasting very long,’ she said and in this, as in so much else, she was absolutely right. It did not last very long. By then, however, with the weekly meetings and a number of other obvious pieces of window-dressing, such as relocating all her secretaries into one room from their dispersed locations around the office, I think the message had been made clear enough. The Princess was under new management – her own.
This was an exciting thought. Nonetheless, as the official with the job of turning it into reality, I had no illusions that hazards lay in wait round every corner. I was also uncomfortably aware that every failure was newsworthy. To keep myself constantly alert, it helped to imagine that I had an invisible companion watching everything I said, did and wrote. He was the editor of the Sun.
I had hardly settled into my new office when I was sharply reminded of the pitfalls in store. I had arranged for the Princess to spend a day carrying out engagements in Edinburgh, concluding with a concert at the Usher Hall. Still flexing my organizational muscles, I had ordered up the royal train, to take us north in style and to provide a convenient base in which the Princess could change and prepare for the evening engagement.
The royal train was used regularly by the Prince, but the Princess said it had unhappy associations for her and she seldom suggested we should use it. As we pulled out of King’s Cross, however, and I explored the delights of the private secretary’s compartment, not to mention the train’s other unique attractions such as the royal accommodation, the dining carriage and the household compartment, I could not help hoping that her reservations about using the train could be overcome in time.
Shadows of a Princess Page 25