The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor

by Penny Junor

  The experiment of mixing royal work with a business career had been a disaster, and in 2002 Edward and Sophie gave up the unequal struggle and, with the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations providing a dignified excuse, retired from the business world to spend more time with the Family Firm. The decision must have damaged their pride and it certainly didn’t help their bank account. The Queen was said to have paid them £250,000 to compensate them for loss of earnings but that was pure speculation; in fact, she paid nothing. They now live on the £141,000 a year that Edward was awarded in 1990, plus the £45,000 increase he got when he married. It’s a hefty amount by most standards, but it does have to cover their office and household expenses plus the cost of official duties, plus the upkeep of Bagshot Park, their absurdly oversized fifty-six-room house in Surrey. At least with a baby, Lady Louise, born in November 2003, not quite so many of the rooms are empty now.

  Marrying into the Royal Family after a normal life imposes other difficulties, too. When Sophie Rhys-Jones walked up the aisle she was known to everyone as Sophie. When she walked down with Prince Edward on her arm and a ring on her finger, she was Your Royal Highness; and whether she liked it or not, or insisted upon it or not, people’s attitudes towards her changed. And as a working member of the Royal Family that change was imperative.

  Paul Arengo-Jones, who until his recent retirement ran the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award International Association, has known Sophie for many years – they were trustees of a breast cancer charity together. He has known Edward for many years too; they have worked together, travelled together and spoken regularly and often for more than ten years. An avuncular figure, I asked if he ever saw them socially.

  I see them a bit socially but with members of the Royal Family there is always going to be a line beyond which you do not cross, and that’s one of those things that is not so easy for the younger generations. Within the Organization here it’s a very interesting debate. If you want to have a focal point for an association – or a nation – you want someone on a pedestal; someone with an aura about them. They have a title, they have certain rights you don’t have, they’ve got a certain situation that is not yours to have, because they are something for you to look forward to meeting, somebody who can be of great value, they can open buildings, fundraise, be an attraction.

  If you’re going to do that, you have to say that they are ‘Their Royal Highnesses, the Earl and Countess of Wessex’ and when you meet them you call them that, and you sit them in a car – you don’t clasp them round the shoulders and say, ‘Hey, Early, come with me’. Before the Countess was allowed to do things on her own I got her involved in the Haven Trust as a trustee, I wanted her to get involved in something which in the long term she could make a contribution to, and she comes to trustees’ meetings and makes a contribution and is a valued member of the team, and is very good with people, very confident, very photogenic. To begin with she was known as Sophie Wessex because she wasn’t being used in a formal capacity; but when we started using her in her royal role for fundraising, I had to say to the staff there I thought it was inappropriate for them to carry on calling her Sophie. Because if you’re going to ask someone to pay £200 to sit down and eat a meal attended by Her Royal Highness, you’ve got to put her on a pedestal whether she likes it or not; and if you do that, you have to surround them with an aura. It’s the same with the President of the United States. You don’t say, ‘Hi, George’; you call him Mr President, you give him an aura and he’s God. You put a line round them too, beyond which you don’t cross – and that, I think, is the loneliness of being in that position, as well as a fact of life. For someone like the Earl and other members of the Royal Family, they were born into it and have to accept it, but for someone like the Countess it’s quite a tough line to step across, but if you want her to be HRH you have to put her in a glass case. We need people in glass cases. And, yes, she’s become grand; grand enough for us to be able to sell her. It would be an embarrassment if you put her in a glass case and she kept trying to climb out of it, if she didn’t turn up suitably dressed or say the right things to people, but she’s not grander than she ought to be. Some people say she has become too grand but I say, for goodness sake, she’s a princess, she’s HRH. You can’t have it both ways, you put them up there and that’s the role you want them to play. She does it very well, she’s very relaxed.

  Arengo-Jones feels sorry for the Wessexes.

  The Earl of Wessex works hugely hard. He had a rocky start being the youngest and, like all of them, he didn’t have a job. He legitimately thought he’d better go out and try and get one, and didn’t much like being tea boy to Andrew Lloyd Webber, has always had an interest in the arts and the theatre, then when he did eventually get some backers and do the thing he was interested in, he wasn’t allowed to do it, essentially, and neither was she, and so they have been left with no option but to go out and be members of the Royal Family, that’s the only thing the general public will let them do. I feel very sorry for them in a way. They don’t have great estates to fall back on, they can’t just go and hide and disappear, they’re not allowed to get a job, and so they have no choice. Yes, they made errors, but there but for the grace of God go all of us, but we do it and come back another way; they can’t. They are never allowed to forget it.

  Another chapter in his life which Edward has never been allowed to forget – apart from It’s A Royal Knockout – was his sudden and premature departure from the Royal Marines in 1987. Life in the Armed Forces was always going to be a safer option than business but Edward couldn’t hack it, and Paul Arengo-Jones, who was a Marine himself for three years and did the same course as Edward, has always admired his courage for that decision.

  It is much harder to say you want to leave the course than stay on. It is such a tough course you cannot pass it unless you give 110 per cent. It is physically extremely demanding and if you’re not able to give 110 per cent you’re not going to pass it, and 99 per cent of people haven’t got the courage at that point to say they want to leave, because the peer pressure is so great; so they stay in and fail. He said no, my heart’s not in it. He knew what would happen and I thought, how brave; and it was so unfair because people don’t know what that course is like. Most Marines thought it was a very strong decision.

  Mike Gretton agrees. ‘Why he went into the Royal Marines I’ll never know. Maybe out of loyalty to his dad who is Commandant General of the Corps. Edward is aesthetic; he’s much more interested in things like personal development of young people, the disadvantaged and music. He loves music.’

  But once the press has it in for you it is very hard to alter the public perception. Yet Edward does some sensitive things and nice stories abound. Just before he went into the Marines he went to a National Youth Music Theatre performance of The Ragged Child at the Edinburgh Festival. ‘A whole crowd of people were in the foyer,’ recalls Jeremy James Taylor, director of the company, ‘and one of our young front-of-house staff had some peanuts. She offered one to Edward who said no; then she backed into someone and all the peanuts went flying and were all over the floor, and, poor love, she bent down to pick them up, and Edward – I shall never forget this – said, “Perhaps I will have one after all”, and bent down and ate one off the floor, then helped her pick them up. I thought, that’s wonderful.’

  Shortly afterwards, Edward became the NYMT’s president. ‘He has been everything we could have wished for,’ says James Taylor.

  We were doing The Beggar’s Opera at the Lyric Hammersmith in September 1997; Edward was coming on the Tuesday to the opening night and on the Sunday Diana died. All royal engagements were off. I got instructions on the Tuesday to have the whole cast on stage at 6.45, and Edward came along, wished everyone good luck, said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay but have a wonderful evening, I’ll be thinking of you.’ It was a wonderful gesture; he was worried that with all the hype of a royal opening the kids would be upset if he didn’t turn up.

  Prince Harry is i
n grave danger of being branded as Edward was, and as the second son – the ‘spare’ as his mother called him – he has no clear vision of his own future. Prince William does. He has inherited a sense of responsibility, a sense of destiny and gravitas, that are entirely lacking in his younger brother, and also a sense of humility that seems to run in the blood. Harry is not likely to feel out of place in the Army – he is a much more rugged type than his uncle and, if he can cope with the discipline, it will probably be the making of him – but he is seen as the wild child, the irresponsible one, the volatile one, the rogue, the womanizer, the good-time boy who will always find trouble. He is utterly charming and far more sensitive than he is ever given credit for but he has not been disciplined and the chances are he will find trouble. Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, was also rebellious and her behaviour was quite shocking when seen alongside the Queen’s. She was vivacious, colourful – in language as well as personality – she fell in love with the wrong people, had affairs, had a divorce and managed, despite all of that, to bring up two very level-headed, charming children. Her friends speak very warmly of her; she had compassion and she was deeply religious. But she never lost the ‘spoilt and difficult’ label from her youth.

  Princess Anne is the one member of the family who has managed to turn around her publicity. She was once the most unpopular member of The Firm; she was rude and ungracious, uncooperative and surly. And I would say, from my experience of her and that of several people I know, still is today. But that’s not how she is regarded. She is seen as hardworking and thoroughly admirable. And there’s no doubt that she is. And like her father and her older brother she has made a real difference to the world. Through the Princess Royal Trust for Carers which she founded in 1991 (having thought of the idea while sitting round a kitchen table with friends in Scotland) she was the first person to recognize and address the isolation and needs of that army of unpaid people in this country – more than 6 million and some of them as young as four – who care for friends and relatives with long-term illness. ‘One in ten of us are carers and the figure’s going up because of the ageing population,’ says Alison Ryan who is the charity’s chief executive. ‘Two out of three of us will be carers within the next ten years and some of them are very young, children looking after disabled parents, and if there are mental health or drug or alcohol problems they tend to go underground. The person who identified that these people needed support was the Princess Royal. She saw it as an absolute consequence of community care. If you’re a princess you tend to open things, so she was opening day centres and replacement facilities when they closed the long-term hospitals and she was the one who asked the question, “What happens at the weekends, in the evenings, what happens in the summer when you’re closed?” And on the whole there was a lot of shuffling feet and no very good answers. So she thought there might be a gap there.’ The first Carer Centre opened in Banbury in 1992 and there are now 143 nationwide.

  ‘It’s a huge issue, the amount of money saved by carers doing the work they do has been evaluated by the Institute of Actuaries and it is £57 billion, exactly the same cost as it takes to run the NHS, so there’s a parallel unpaid-for NHS. It’s a huge issue all over the world, even in the undeveloped world, and the first country to have a thorough-going comprehensive support system for carers is the UK and that organization is the Princess Royal Trust for Carers. We are in demand now all over the world to tell people how to do it and it was her idea, she identified it.’

  Anne went through a divorce and married again and, a few years ago, there were rumours that her second marriage was in trouble. Adam Helliker reported in his diary column in the Mail on Sunday that she was leaning heavily on Andrew Parker Bowles at this difficult time. Andrew, who is Camilla’s ex-husband (now married to Rosie Pitman) was a boyfriend from Anne’s youth, and is Zara’s godfather. There were a couple of follow-up stories elsewhere at the time but nothing since. Friends say the rumours are nonsense, that she and Tim Lawrence are happily married and that is the end of it, and I don’t doubt it. Anything similar about her brothers, however, whether true or not, would never have passed with such little coverage; but just a look from Anne is enough to wither the boldest reporter. She went hunting in December 2004, just after the ban was announced, something she hasn’t done for years, and was out again in 2005 just weeks before the ban came into force to make a point presumably. The publicity was negligible. Who would cross someone who looked as terrifyingly humourless as Anne – particularly on a horse?

  A High Court judge of my acquaintance was seated on Anne’s left at dinner one evening. For the first two courses she ignored him and spoke to the person on her right. As the pudding was served she turned to my acquaintance. ‘And what do you do?’ she asked. ‘I’m a judge,’ he replied. ‘Oh really? Dogs or horses?’

  Anne has a very good sense of humour and can be good fun – and when she smiles she can be very pretty, too. Her friends adore her and say she is deeply loyal and not remotely grand; there are no butlers or footmen at Gatcombe Park, her house in Gloucestershire, simply a housekeeper; it feels like a family home and Anne sometimes does her own cooking. However, the teenage daughter of a friend of mine was once invited there by Peter Phillips, her son, and Anne was so rude to the girl she rang her father and asked to be taken home. And I confess to having been faintly appalled one day at the Savoy Hotel in London when the Princess Royal was presenting awards to Women of Achievement to mark the 75th anniversary of her old school, Benenden. She gave the most perfect speech from the podium, turned to put her speaking notes on the chair behind her, picked up a pair of gloves and put them on before shaking hands with some of the most remarkable and able women in the country.

  Anne doesn’t go out of her way to be friendly or even polite. I was at Benenden with her. I was a year older but it was not a vast school, and, although we were not friends because we were in different boarding houses, we knew one another, had friends in common and overlapped for four years of our teenage lives incarcerated in the depths of Kent. When I saw her in Uzbekistan thirty-odd years later I expected there to be some acknowledgement – as there is with every other Senior (as old Benenden girls are called) I meet. During the course of two or three full days Anne, known as PA at school, didn’t even catch my eye. Though we stood, at times, no more than four feet from each other looking at archaeological marvels, she studiously avoided eye contact. I had joined an unusually small group of journalists and photographers – five in all, if I remember correctly – on the last leg of her trip. Most of the rat pack had followed the Princess of Wales to Africa and Princess Anne, on her first foreign tour with her new husband, was a secondary attraction, but I had been asked to write about it and, having made arrangements through her Press Secretary at Buckingham Palace, arrived to join the party in Tashkent. My fellow journalists had been with the royal pair for over a week and yet, in all that time, in all the bizarre and uncomfortable situations they had experienced – the desert storm, the sheep’s eyes – she had not addressed one word to any of them and had not once smiled in the direction of their cameras. Having only ever previously been anywhere with the Prince and Princess of Wales, both of whom invariably said good morning to the press, I was stunned.

  When I followed Anne on a day out in Kent a couple of weeks later, visiting some of her charities, where I was the only journalist, she was exactly the same. A hatred of journalists, I thought to myself, until we happened to arrive at our local railway station one evening and found our cars parked so closely together that I had to hold my door closed to enable her to open hers. This time I thought she was bound to say something – if only ‘thank you’, as one would to any stranger who did the same. But no. It was a hatred of me, I decided. I wondered whether I had written something rude about her in the past but had no memory of it, and the piece about her visit to Uzbekistan – including the cerebral palsy hospital (which she might have found rude) – had not been published. Maybe she was still smarting
from what I have just discovered my father had written about her in the Sunday Express in November 1978 …

  It must have been tough for Princess Anne to find herself publicly pilloried because she failed to show warmth to a small boy in hospital who was demanding to be cuddled and to have, as a result, angry Norwegians demanding that she go back to Britain.

  I saw the incident on TV and I do not believe for one minute that the Princess acted with deliberate coldness. All she showed was her natural shyness and reserve.

  Even so, and to prevent international incidents in future, might it not be wise when she goes on goodwill tours abroad if instead of visiting sick children in hospitals she contents herself with administering sugar lumps in stables?

  No one is ever likely then to mistake the look of genuine love and compassion in her eyes.

  Baroness Chalker, the former Tory minister, has known Anne for years and is very fond of her. She admits she can be tricky but is impressed by how effective she is.

  We share a number of charities together and she is clearly far more on the ball than I realized. I was at a function the other night and her husband Tim Lawrence was there. I’ve known Tim since before he started courting her and he came over to see me and he asked about one of our charities and I said, ‘Bit of sticky weather at the moment’, and he said, ‘Yes, I think you and my wife are of the same opinion.’ I said, ‘What could that be, Tim?’ And what he came out with was a hundred per cent right. I hadn’t told her; how she’s picked it up I don’t know but she’s picked up the thing I’m having a battle about. It’s nothing drastic; it’s a management thing, which is why it’s all the more interesting that she knows what’s going on. She has her finger much more closely on the pulse of her NGOs than others have and that’s partly because she will not employ somebody to do it. She sees me as president and chairman of the board herself, and she sees the chief executive every few months.