Monarchy: The Royal Family at Work

ABOUT THE BOOK

Every year over 5000 royal engagements take place around the world, from the Queen’s famous summer garden parties to the mysterious world of the Privy Council and high-profile overseas tours. But little is widely known about the inner workings of the institution that lies at the very heart of the British nation. For the first time ever, The Monarchy takes the reader behind the scenes, meeting the people that keep the royal machine running like clockwork.

With unprecedented access to the key players and organizations involved, The Monarchy follows the working life of the Queen over the course of a whole year, both home and abroad. Ever wondered who opens the Queen’s mail, who pays the bills, or even how the royals follow the score in the Ashes? Alongside such trivial matters sit weightier concerns, such as audiences with the Prime Minister, the formal honouring of bravery and excellence, and the sensitive issue of the royal response at times of controversy or crisis.

Accompanying a major BBC1 television series, The Monarchy provides a fascinating insight into the public and private lives of this most familiar of families. Written by the Daily Mail’s, Robert Hardman, and lavishly illustrated with exclusive colour photographs, this book will appeal both to avid royal-watchers and anyone fascinated in the history and heritage of the United Kingdom.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Hardman has been writing about the Monarchy for more than 15 years, first as royal correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and now as the author of the ‘How I See It’ column in the Daily Mail. During a distinguished Fleet Street career, he has also been, among other things, a political sketchwriter, a diarist, a sports columnist and a restaurant critic. His royal interviews have included Prince Philip, the Emperor and Empress of Japan, the King and Queen of Norway, the Queen of Denmark and the ex-King of Afghanistan. He is the writer and associate producer of the BBC1 series A Year with the Queen, which accompanies this book. He did the same for BBC1’s acclaimed 2005 series, The Queen’s Castle. Educated at Wellington and Cambridge, he lives in London.

To my parents, Richard and Dinah Hardman

INTRODUCTION

Even the most powerful man on earth admits that it will be rather a special occasion. In his six years at the White House, the President of the United States of America and the First Lady have entertained almost every world figure of note. But no visitor has warranted a fairy-tale white-tie banquet. Until now.

Thousands of miles away, in a tiny nation where democracy has only just reached its teens, another president is planning one of the biggest parties since his country attained freedom. It will be quite a fairy-tale occasion there, too.

On the lawn of Buckingham Palace, a woman arrives for a tea party which will change her life. Outside one of the Palace’s many drawing rooms, a poet, a bishop and a colonel are sitting nervously on huge sofas, waiting to be summoned. In the Houses of Parliament, the most senior legal figure in the land is practising a ten-second ritual. It does not require him to utter a word but he is a bundle of nerves. On a dusty Iraqi airfield, a combat-weary battalion is in a state of high excitement. So, too, are 300 proud relatives, gathered in the Buckingham Palace Ballroom to see their loved ones honoured by the nation. These are just random snapshots plucked from random weeks in a random royal year. Some of these occasions will lead the news bulletins. Others will warrant no more than a paragraph in a local newspaper. But, in most cases, those on the receiving end will remember the moment for as long as they live. Few forget an encounter with the Monarchy.

There have been countless books and productions devoted to the Royal Family. One film recently won an Oscar. There will, of course, be many more. The first question they tend to address can usually be summed up as: ‘What are they really like?’ The answers vary but they have helped to define a cast of characters which the public feels it knows reasonably well.

I am not sure outsiders will ever know what members of the Royal Family are ‘really like’, just as we will never know what it is ‘really like’ to be them. Many biographies, no doubt, will continue to address these questions but that is not the purpose of this book.

President Bush joins the Queen in a toast at the White House.

No family in history can have endured more personal scrutiny than the post-war House of Windsor but whatever the fact, fiction, conjecture and polemic, that scrutiny appears to have done little to alter the fundamental attachment which the British people have towards the Monarchy.

What do I mean by ‘Monarchy’? If the Royal Family, led by the Sovereign, makes up the cast, then the Monarchy is the production. And it is a system which also produces the Head of State for fifteen other independent countries and a further fourteen overseas territories (not to mention the Monarch’s role as Head of the Commonwealth, a post-imperial cousinhood spanning nearly a third of the world’s population).

Another question, frequently asked but perhaps more pertinent, is: ‘What are they for?’ Former Prime Minister Tony Blair believes that most people have a pretty clear idea. ‘The public has come to an acceptance that the Monarchy is the best form of constitutional authority and a good way of keeping the country together in a changing world,’ he says. ‘It is, I believe, completely secure both in the affections of the people and in their understanding that it’s got a role to play.’

Generations of ‘constitutional experts’, historians, journalists and politicians from every part of the spectrum have attempted to define the role of the Monarchy. None, though, has surpassed a political journalist whose observations remain the standard work on the subject after 140 years.

Most countries have a conventional written constitution; Britain has a constitutional monarchy instead. Laws are made by Parliament and the Monarch governs within those laws. So perhaps the closest thing we have to a written constitution is the brilliant piece of analysis by a nineteenth-century editor of The Economist. If monarchs have a manual, it is, surely, The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot. Originally a series of essays, it was published as a book in 1867. The British Empire was near its peak and yet its matriarchal figurehead, Queen Victoria, was starting to attract criticism for retreating into private grief following the death of Prince Albert six years earlier.

Chatting to guests at Buckingham Palace.

Enjoying the rain at a Holyroodhouse garden party.

Bagehot’s achievement was to explain the role of the Monarchy to its squabbling subjects. Everyone knew that the Sovereign was a human link with the past and the signatory to all Acts of Parliament. But what else was he or she for? Bagehot split the machinery of State into ‘elements of the constitution’ and divided them between the ‘efficient’ and the ‘dignified’. The first, notably the Cabinet and the Commons, were the parts of the State which actually ran the country. The ‘dignified’ elements were those which lacked direct power but enjoyed influence and inspired reverence. Chief among these was the Monarchy.

Bagehot observed, rightly, that the ‘dignified’ bits had an absolutely crucial role in propping up the ‘efficient’ elements. It was the Sovereign, he explained, who gave the State and its Government a human persona. ‘The use of the Queen, in a dignified capacity, is incalculable. Without her in England, the present English Government would fail and pass away,’ he wrote. These were not the words of a toady. In the same paragraph, he described Queen Victoria and the then Prince of Wales as ‘a retired widow and an unemployed youth’, but he went on to explain their allure:

‘Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions.’

The State Opening of Parliament.

As far as Bagehot was concerned, the Royal Family, supporting the Monarch, only further underlined that sense of family, hearth and home at the apex of the nation. Equally, the Monarchy’s position as custodian of the Church gave the Government further respectability.

The Queen alone could appoint prime ministers and dissolve Parliament. Above all else, Bagehot defined the Monarch’s greatest powers as follows: ‘The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.’

Bagehot’s conclusions have stood the test of time and today remain the most authoritative guide to the constitutional function of the Monarchy. But Bagehot was not right about everything. One of his sternest warnings concerned privacy: ‘Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.’

But Bagehot could not foresee television, mass media and the Internet, let alone the shape and values of twenty-first-century society. The Monarchy has been well and truly poked about. It has endured the probings of a select committee. Historians and everyone else can argue whether daylight came in with newsreels, the televising of the Queen’s Coronation, the modern documentary or the tabloid press. But it is, surely, beyond question that if the curtains had stayed resolutely drawn, the Monarchy would be withering away, if indeed it was still around at all.

In the course of writing this book I have spoken to many, inside the Palace and out. All of them believe that the pace of royal change has actually gathered momentum in recent years. It might seem odd that an institution run by the same person for more than half a century should be busier, livelier and more proactive since the boss turned 80 than it was when she was 30. But it is undeniable that there have been more fundamental changes to the Monarchy since 1990 than at any stage since the Abdication Crisis of 1938.

Opening the doors to tourists, the gardens to pop concerts and the accounts to the taxman and the world would have been inconceivable as recently as the late 1980s. Having just retired after six momentous yeas as Lord Chamberlain, the Queen’s top courtier, Lord Luce is well-placed to offer an overview: ‘The Monarchy cannot just exist. It depends on popular support to survive, and that means adapting,’ he says. He is fond of quoting the most famous line from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s classic novel, The Leopard: ‘If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.’

To survive, the Monarchy has always had to adapt, evolve and modernise. The present Sovereign made that clear in 1997, some weeks after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. There has been endless conjecture – in print and in film – of the Monarch’s thinking during those turbulent months. This, though, is what the Queen said at the Prime Minister’s luncheon to mark her Golden Wedding anniversary. Having acknowledged that both monarchies and governments depend on the support and consent of the people, she went on: ‘That consent, or the lack of it, is expressed for you, Prime Minister, through the ballot box. It is a tough, even brutal, system but at least the message is a clear one for all to read. For us, a Royal Family, however, the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion. But read it we must.’

And read it she has, according to the Prime Minister who was sitting alongside her that day. ‘The most important thing to realise about the Queen,’ says Tony Blair, ‘is she has understood that the fundamental link in the modern world between the Monarchy and the people is around the concept of duty. She understands that, provided that there is a clear sense of duty for a Monarch, people then reciprocate with loyalty and affection.’

Today’s Monarchy is mindful of other duties and responsibilities well beyond those laid down by Bagehot, who was writing long before the Commonwealth came into existence. These more modern duties are not codified or enshrined in some oath. They are simply the ways in which today’s Queen has come to define her own role. That is why she splits her duties into two distinct categories: Head of State and Head of Nation. If the former comprises her constitutional role, the latter is the more human stuff.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair has an audience of the Queen at Balmoral.

So, I will leave it to others to keep on asking, ‘What are they really like?’ And I feel that Bagehot, his successors and the Queen herself are better qualified to answer the question: ‘What are they for?’

This book, like the BBC television series which accompanies it, does not attempt to judge the Monarchy. This is not a history book but a portrait of an entire year. It aims to answer another serious question: ‘What do they do?’

During the year in question, the Sovereign and thirteen members of her family will perform some 4,000 engagements, ranging from, say, a visit to a mosque in Pakistan to a coffee morning in Hampshire. If you work on the very rough basis that every engagement involves either a handshake, a conversation, a simple ‘hello’ or a passing nod to 100 people, then, each year, nearly half a million individuals will have some sort of royal encounter.

Add to that the 40,000 people who receive an invitation to a royal party every year, the 2,500 people who receive an honour at an investiture every year (plus the 7,500 people who will accompany them), and you start to understand why one former private secretary describes the Monarchy as being in the ‘feel good business’. How does it all happen? And what are the results?

Over the course of our year on the inside, I have sought to examine just what goes on in the working life of Britain’s best-known family.

We know the big, televised rituals because they come round like the seasons – the State Opening of Parliament, Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph, the Christmas Broadcast. But we have little idea of what goes on behind the scenes, of all the planning which goes into even the most ritualistic of events. We may read that the Queen held a garden party. We will not read of her inspection of the medical facilities or the chocolate cake in advance. Nor will we read what happened to the guests.

Only the most assiduous readers of the Court Circular will note that an ambassador or a spiritual leader has had an audience of the Queen. And they certainly won’t know what was said. They won’t be aware of the detailed computer analysis which decides royal movements six months in advance. They will not see the frantic efforts being made to track down the appropriate retired admiral to represent the Queen at a particular memorial service or the dance of the furniture at Buckingham Palace as a state room switches from dinner mode to party mode and back again. They won’t see the royal chef travelling to meet the animals which will end up in his oven for the next state banquet. And, crucially, they won’t see the other side of the equation either – the quiet pride of a ship’s company after a visit from their Lord High Admiral; the satisfaction of the headmistress whose years of patient, hard graft have not passed unnoticed.

The crowds gather outside Buckingham Palace after Trooping the Colour.

Fine, some will say, but that is the Monarchy’s job and that is what we pay for. Some, indeed, will argue that we pay too much or that these are tasks which could be performed by an elected head of state. Cost aside, there will always be those who argue for an alternative system on ideological grounds, claiming that a Monarchy perpetuates the class system or that it is unfair for the top job to reside with one family. But opinion poll after opinion poll suggests that the vast majority of people in Britain are happy with a system which is quintessentially British, ancient, colourful, familiar and immune to tampering. No politician, however over-mighty, can take the Crown.

That is not a debate I intend to enter here. Just as one can write a book about the work of the Church or the Army without veering off into a debate about the existence of God or the ethics of killing, so one can examine the work of the Monarchy without a lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of alternative systems of government.

After more than fifteen years of reporting on the life and times of the Royal Family all over the world, my own view is that the United Kingdom has been fortunate to have a constitutional monarchy. Britain might take its own stability, continuity and individuality for granted but, seen through the eyes of the rest of the world, these are enviable strengths. And at their root lies the Monarchy.

I do not vouch for the peoples of Australia, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea or any of the other realms which share the same Head of State but, inevitably, have a different relationship with a Sovereign based overseas.

In Britain, we have a system which is certainly popular and benign. It receives more scrutiny than almost any other public institution and, as a result, regular doses of criticism. Sometimes this is fair, sometimes this is exaggerated, sometimes this is wrong. But this institution has learned to take the long view and move with the times rather than the headlines. In good weather or bad, it has just got on with the job.

This book and the BBC series that goes with it will, I hope, help to explain the job.

CHAPTER ONE

HEAD OF NATION

SHANE HUGGINS IS on a mission. Absolutely nothing is going to stop him marching across the classroom to present the Queen with a trio of plastic-wrapped tulips. ‘They’re red,’ he says thrusting them into the Queen’s hand. ‘Thank you,’ the Queen replies, scooping them up. ‘Do you know what flowers they are?’ ‘They’re red,’ Shane replies, with faultless three-year-old logic. ‘Yes, I suppose they are,’ the Queen replies, catching the wide-eyed pride of Shane’s mother, Maria.

Emerging from the classroom, the Queen shakes another fifty or so hands everyone from managers to midwives and walks out into the car park of the new children’s centre in Whitehawk on the outskirts of Brighton. It’s not the grand, Regency quarter of the raffish old South Coast town which grew into a handsome resort on the back of royal patronage. This is the rough end. ‘Most of our clients come from round here,’ whispers a police officer. Perhaps that is why the welcome is louder here than it was earlier in the city centre where this royal away-day began with a concert at the Theatre Royal and a bicycle ballet in the street. Whitehawk does not get much in the way of VIPs, let alone monarchs. The engines start and a small royal convoy four motorbikes, one State Bentley, one minibus for officials and one police Range Rover moves off slowly. Hundreds of children try to run alongside for as long as they can as the convoy cruises through the council estate up to the main road. It picks up pace and drives at a sedate speed for a few miles back to the local railway station.

Along the unmarked route, the reaction is so similar that, from inside the convoy, it almost seems a genetic impulse. A handful of bored students, waiting at a bus stop, do it. So do a group of paint-splattered builders waiting to cross the road. They are going about their business on a pleasant spring afternoon when they suddenly see the most famous woman in the world looking at them. Without even thinking about it, they all stop in their tracks and wave. And, once the car has passed, they all turn to the people around them and lower their jaws. No doubt, all these people have varying views on life and society. They are not manic monarchists – if they were, they would have gone to see the Queen at one of her designated engagements. These are just ordinary people who, while walking down the street, have bumped into that reassuringly familiar face which has been on every stamp, coin and jubilee mug for as long as most people have been alive.

At Brighton station, the Queen boards the Royal Train. The Royal Class 67 diesel locomotive, ‘Royal Sovereign’, slowly heaves its claret-coloured carriages out onto the branch lines of southern England. The train will take a slow, roundabout route to Windsor, weaving in between the rush-hour schedules. The Queen’s day will not make the national headlines, but it will be long remembered in East Sussex. The local paper is already clearing the decks for a twenty-eight-page souvenir supplement. The Queen has a souvenir of her own. Settling down into her small sofa, she starts to browse through the farewell gift which she received from Whitehawk: a book of children’s hat designs for their Monarch. ‘I was rather amused by that,’ she says, smiling at a picture of herself sporting a huge green splodge. ‘Very inventive children, aren’t they. But there’s always the usual thing of why wasn’t I wearing a crown?’

She starts laughing at another picture of herself in a pirate’s hat. But less lively reading material is on its way. Her Assistant Private Secretary, Edward Young, arrives with the afternoon’s red box, a slightly battered leather-bound thing the size of a deposit box, which bursts open with folded state papers when unlocked. The Queen puts aside her book of hats and works her way through a pile of dreary-looking Government correspondence before settling down with a Foreign Office profile of the President of Ghana who is coming to stay at the Palace next week. There are also notes on her forthcoming state visit to the USA. The British Ambassador will not make any key decisions without her approval.

It has been an unremarkable day in the sense that this is the sort of thing monarchs have been doing for years: visit a region, shake hands, open something, commemorate something, salute various deserving causes and meet as many people as possible before heading off to meet a visiting head of state. This is the day job of royalty. It is not the constitutional, parchment-signing side of being Monarch; that might be termed Head of State. This is the human side which is just as important. This is the Queen as Head of Nation.

On board the Royal Train, the Queen prepares to study the day’s state papers.

At an age when most people are stuck rigidly in their ways (she was born in 1926), the Queen is very conscious that the Monarchy has to move with the times. Few will be aware that today’s programme has been planned with forensic analysis. And few will appreciate that if a tour like this had taken place just twenty years previously, there would have been outrage. Some would have suggested that Her Majesty’s advisers had taken leave of their senses. How could she come to Royal Brighton and not visit the Royal Pavilion? Why was she taken to unlovely Whitehawk instead? Why was the civic reception full of ordinary charity workers instead of important local dignitaries? There will be no complaints after this visit, though. All the elements of today’s programme were personally approved by the Queen (as they always are). After more than fifty years in the same job, a bit of change is a blessed relief. Today has been a simple lesson in the basic rule of Monarchy: just keep on doing the same thing – differently.

The famous East Wing of Buckingham Palace – royal headquarters.

HEADQUARTERS

This is the Palace tour you do not get with a £15 summer ticket. Stand at the front of Buckingham Palace and look through the railings. There will usually be someone going in or out of the entrance on the right-hand side, the Privy Purse Door. This must be the smartest tradesmen’s entrance in the land. Provided you are expected, you crunch across the gravel, past the sentries, and there is no chance to knock before the door is pulled open by a footman in the Palace livery of black tails and scarlet waistcoat. You are now inside royal headquarters, 650 rooms ranging from the grandest imperial state apartments to drab little basement cubicles. The Queen and Prince Philip occupy only one section of one floor of one wing, but the Monarch always has a pretty shrewd idea of what is going on everywhere – upstairs and downstairs. ‘She really does take an interest in it all,’ says Lord Luce who recently retired as Lord Chamberlain, the most senior non-royal figure in the Palace. ‘It is always a mistake to assume that the Queen does not want to be bothered with minor details.’ The Queen may not regard this as ‘home’ – Windsor Castle serves that function – but it is her headquarters, and it is from here that the Monarchy is run all year round. No one has spent more time in this place and no one knows its ways and its quirks better than the present boss.

EAST WING

Buckingham Palace is really a mish-mash of extensions and renovations bolted together over a couple of centuries. But think of it as a giant square. The best-known side is the East Front which looks out onto the crowds and up the Mall. It is this façade which the world recognises instantly. Beyond it, on the principal corridor above the arches, is a series of conference rooms and guest suites. Above these are royal apartments with staff accommodation on top. Immediately behind the famous balcony lies the ornate Centre Room with its Chinese decorations. On either side, the royal housekeepers are dusting down the rooms for the forthcoming state visit by President Kufuor of Ghana. His senior staff will stay in this part of the Palace. (The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, stayed here during the American state visit of 2003.) They will enjoy a wonderful view up the Mall and some old-fashioned luxury in rooms with the feel of an elegant hotel circa 1950 – sheets and blankets, not duvets; baths, not showers. Beneath cream-flecked wallpaper and portraits of Alexandra Federova, Empress of Russia, and Queen Charlotte, the occupant of Suite 227 will be able to recline on a large, bronze-coloured sofa and stare out at the London skyline. The resident reading material might be a little dry for some tastes: bound volumes of the 1898 Magazine of Art and copies of the works of Virgil stamped ‘Osborne Library’. But guests can request whatever they want.

The other side of that famous balcony – the Centre Room.

Suite 227’s bathroom, a huge expanse of green carpet with a big bath, basin and loo tucked into a corner, is nearly as big as the sitting room. This room was clearly designed before the shower had attained social respectability. There is a half-hearted shower apparatus protruding above the bath, but it appears to be more of a gesture than an instrument of hygiene.

On the floor above, three well-dressed women are sitting at desks covered with cards, letters and paintings. This is the office of the Ladies-in-Waiting, who act as companionscum-assistants to the Queen wherever she goes. When they are not ‘in waiting’, they handle much of her correspondence up here in a small suite with the atmosphere of a girls’ school common room. China corgis and old photos line the mantelpiece. Lady Susan Hussey, a Lady-in-Waiting for forty years, is writing a reply to a girl called Katie who has sent the Queen a beautifully decorated birthday poem which she reads out: ‘I hope you receive cards galore/loving wishes by the score…’ Lady Susan makes sure that Katie’s card is logged on a computer and adds her own words to a pre-prepared thank-you letter. ‘The trouble these children take!’ she says. ‘I hope they know the Queen sees it and appreciates it. These are her letters, after all.’

Lady Elton, a self-confessed ‘new girl’ having been in the job for only 20 years, says that the Queen has started receiving large amounts of post from young people in former Soviet republics. ‘They probably don’t expect to get a reply,’ she says, ‘but everybody gets one.’ Every reply is by post, never email. Annabel Whitehead, previously a Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret, says the Queen is also in great demand as a party guest: ‘A lot of people invite her to their wedding. They’d probably be appalled if she said yes!’ On the right-hand corner of this wing is the Information Office, where Emma Goodey, the editor of the royal website, is updating a site which routinely attracts 300,000 visitors and several million hits every week. In the far corner, Jane Smith, the Palace’s information officer and resident agony aunt is trying to prepare the day’s Court Circular, the official list of royal activities which will be circulated to the newspapers. But she is busy fielding the sixth anguished call of the morning from the same lady caller in France who believes there is a Government conspiracy against her. ‘Anyone can call the Palace and if they don’t know who to talk to, they come through to me,’ says Jane (it is not her real name – she avoids getting personal).

‘Most people want help with something. When is the Queen next coming to Devon? How do I nominate someone for honours? Sometimes, they have a real problem and they want the Queen to help. It might be someone struggling with a pub quiz question – we don’t help with those. And there are the hoaxers. I can usually spot them. I had someone last week asking if he could borrow the flag from the Palace. He sounded like a radio station. I just said that we were using it ourselves thank you very much.’ Next door, in the press office, the Queen’s Assistant Press Secretary, Stuart Neil, is dealing with a succession of American television networks who are busy making plans for the Queen’s forthcoming state visit to the USA. No, she will not be doing any live interviews.

Ladies-in-Waiting in the office.

The Main Players

THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN

Companies have a chairman. The Royal Household has the Lord Chamberlain, a conciliatory and erudite presence who is the chief link between the Monarch and her staff. This ancient position dates back a thousand years to the days when the Lord Chamberlain had the key to the Monarch’s bedchamber and his jewels. To this day, the incumbent carries a special key of office, although no one has any idea what it unlocks. He chairs a monthly meeting of the five main heads of department and also liaises between all the other members of the Royal Family. ‘You are there to listen to problems, to appoint good people and to give fearless advice,’ says Lord Luce, the former Arts Minister, who recently retired as the seventh Lord Chamberlain of the present reign. ‘You’ve got to lead the whole Household and make sure it’s a happy place. If it’s not happy, it’s not doing its job for the Queen.’

The Queen welcomes her new Lord Chamberlain, Earl Peel.

The Five Departments

PRIVATE SECRETARY’S OFFICE (PSO)

Run by the Private Secretary, with a Deputy Private Secretary and an Assistant Private Secretary, this is the official link between the Monarch and the world. The PSO runs her diary at home and overseas, administers her constitutional duties and deals with events as they arise. At any given time, one of the three private secretaries will be with the Queen, even during holidays and Christmas.

The Office’s responsibilities also include overseeing the Press Office and the Co-Ordination and Research Unit, which helps plan the work of all the members of the Royal Family. The PSO handles between 50,000 and 100,000 pieces of correspondence in any given year and despatches thousands of cards for 100th birthdays and other anniversaries. The Queen’s red boxes – which contain everything from state papers to internal memos – are prepared here.

LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S OFFICE (LCO)

This department runs all ceremonial events, large and small, and is responsible for a bewildering range of royal duties. Despite the historic title, it has very little to do with the Lord Chamberlain himself and is run by a senior courtier called the Comptroller, usually an ex-military man. Investitures, garden party invitations, royal weddings and funerals and most state occasions are arranged through here. The LCO has responsibility for the Central Chancery (decorations and regalia), the Ecclesiastical Household (the Queen’s Chaplains), the Royal Medical Household, the Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps, the Royal Warrants, the Royal Mews (both horses and cars) and all ceremonial bodyguards, such as the Yeomen of the Guard and the Royal Company of Archers. If anyone has a fiendish question about some arcane aspect of royal life, this office and its surprisingly youthful team of experts will probably have the answer.

THE MASTER OF THE HOUSEHOLD’S DEPARTMENT

With around 250 staff, this is the largest department in the Palace and keeps the whole royal machine ticking over. The Master, usually a senior figure from the Services, is responsible for delivering all royal services, from cleaning and cooking to planning a state banquet or mending the roof. He is in charge of F Branch (food), G Branch (general staff such as footmen and builders), H branch (housekeeping) and C Branch (craftsmen). At any moment, this team might be planning a private luncheon for the Queen, a garden party for 8,000 or the installation of a new bathroom.

THE PRIVY PURSE AND TREASURER’S OFFICE

The Keeper of the Privy Purse, also known as the Treasurer, is the man in charge of the Monarchy’s finances. As Treasurer, he manages the Queen’s public funds from the Civil List, which cover her duties as Head of State, and also the Grants-in-Aid, Government funds to cover buildings maintenance and official travel. As Keeper of the Privy Purse, he supervises the Queen’s private finances, most of them deriving from the Duchy of Lancaster. The Privy Purse funds other members of the Royal Family and the residences at Balmoral and Sandringham. The department also covers personnel matters, travel budgets and the finest stamp album in the world, the Royal Philatelic Collection.

THE ROYAL COLLECTION DEPARTMENT

This department restores and maintains all the royal paintings, furniture and other treasures. Although the collection belongs to the Queen as Sovereign, she cannot sell it and it receives no public funds. To maintain some of the world’s finest art – it includes priceless works by Leonardo da Vinci, Van Dyck and Gainsborough – the Royal Collection needs the paying public. Around one million people visit Windsor Castle each year and nearly as many again visit Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s Gallery next door and Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse. The Royal Collection also has shops and a range of merchandise which generate extra income worth nearly £10 million which is reinvested in the collection.

Other Royal Households

Aside from the Monarch, there are thirteen other members of the Royal Family who perform public duties. The Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall and Princes William and Harry have their own household, based at Clarence House and funded by the Duchy of Cornwall. The other members of the Royal Family have their own private offices – usually a private secretary and a couple of assistants – which are funded by the Queen from her Privy Purse income.

IN ATTENDANCE

The Queen likes to have dependable people around her to smooth any situation. If she embarks on a walkabout, she cannot shake every hand or grasp every bunch of flowers. And it is always useful to have extra eyes and ears. So, whenever you see the Queen at an engagement, two members of the supporting cast always stand out. One will be in a very elegant dress (though not so elegant that she upstages the Queen). The other will be in uniform.

Commander Heber Ackland, Equerry to the Queen, accompanies the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

LADIES-IN-WAITING

Unpaid and utterly trusted, ladies-in-waiting serve as assistants, letter-writers, bouquet-gatherers and general companions to the Queen in public and in private. At any engagement, at least one of them will be in attendance and, on a state visit overseas, there will usually be two. In public, they might help the Queen scoop up gifts or liaise with the local dignitaries. In private, they answer a lot of personal royal correspondence and are always on hand to meet and greet (and calm nerves) when visitors arrive to meet the Queen. Led by the Mistress of the Robes, they are often, though not exclusively, longstanding personal friends of the Royal Family.

Diana, Lady Farnham, a Lady-in-Waiting, assists the Queen in Romsey, Hampshire.

EQUERRIES

Dating back to medieval times, the position of equerry once revolved around the Monarch’s horses. Today’s equerries are drawn from the Armed Forces and act as diary planners and quick-thinking Sir Walter Raleigh types who can be relied upon to drop a metaphorical cloak over any puddle in the royal path. The Queen has a Senior Equerry, an ex-Army officer who also doubles up as Deputy Master of the Household and is responsible for her more private social engagements. Below him is the Equerry, always a rising officer on secondment from the Armed Forces. The three Services take it in turns to fill this prized post but the Queen also has a temporary Equerry, traditionally an officer from the Coldstream Guards, who helps out at big occasions. When she is visiting one of her realms – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and so on – she will be assigned an equerry from that nation’s armed forces. Other members of the Royal Family have their own equerries. An ability to ride a horse is no longer a prerequisite.

The Palace lake.

NORTH WING

We head down the North side of the Palace, the real nerve centre of the place. At one end, is the London residence of the Queen and Prince Philip. They live, quite literally, above the shop with their own side door, a ‘Watch Out. Corgi About!’ sign and a lot of white decor to counter the darkening effect of facing north. Today, in her Private Audience Room, the Queen is appointing a new Lord Chamberlain to oversee the Royal Household. Lord Luce has formally retired with a rousing send-off from the entire workforce and his successor, Earl Peel, arrives to be installed. ‘This is your badge of office,’ says the Queen, handing him a ceremonial key. ‘I’ve heard all about it,’ Lord Peel replies. ‘You wear it in a very strange place,’ the Queen explains. ‘Dare I ask where?’ the new Lord Chamberlain enquires delicately. The Queen points. ‘Here, at the back – which always seems a silly place to put it because somebody might pinch it!’ Below them is the Private Secretary’s Office, led by the man in charge of the Queen’s diary and her dealings with her various governments around the world. The retiring Private Secretary, Sir Robin Janvrin, a former Royal Navy officer and diplomat, has received the customary 11 a.m. call from his boss. He has gone upstairs to discuss the weightier matters of the moment.

When he has finished, the Queen rings down to her Deputy Private Secretary or her Assistant Private Secretary. A unique buzz lets them know that the Queen is on hold. ‘Good morning, Ma’am,’ they will say automatically. ‘Are you free to come upstairs?’ she always replies. Neither has ever answered ‘No’. One of these two will go upstairs to run through more immediate affairs – Church and Services appointments or Royal Warrants which need approval, away-day programmes which need to be discussed. The Private Secretary’s Office is the reception point for the 50,000 personal letters which the Queen receives in an average year (it can be double that in a big year like the Queen’s 80th). Most royal intelligence-gathering is done here, too. What should the Monarchy be doing more of? What should it be steering well clear of? Some of this comes through the ancient network of Lord Lieutenants, the Monarch’s representatives in the counties. Some of it evolves through a trusted reservoir of informal contacts – a canny retired Dean here, a perceptive business leader there. Some of it is hard marketing data.

Buckingham Palace seen from the forty-acre grounds.

We move out into the Private Secretary’s Corridor, a long, dark stretch of red-carpeted gloom, interspersed with the odd bust or portrait. The other wings are full of light but this floor is for work. In one annexe, Warwick Hawkins is leafing through thick files of statistics and cross-checking with a computer screen. A senior civil servant on secondment from the Home Office, Warwick is in charge of the Co-Ordination and Research Unit (CRU) which serves as the royal database. With his team of three researchers, he will process the thousands of annual requests for a visit from a member of the Royal Family. He has a complex filtration process. A school in one county wants the Queen to celebrate its 200th birthday, but she visited that county last year. Is another member of the Royal Family due to be in the area? If so, when? As the Princess Royal puts it, ‘We try to avoid each other.’ If the Queen is visiting an area with several minority communities, the CRU will check these are all included at the appropriate locations. ‘The Royal Family cannot go anywhere if they haven’t got an invitation but some sections of society might not think of inviting them, so I might call a Lord Lieutenant and suggest a particular group,’ Warwick explains.

He compiles a thick, closely guarded annual dossier called ‘Analysis of Royal Engagements’, which breaks down a year’s royal work in the United Kingdom – usually around 2,500 engagements, not including foreign tours. These are then split up by sector – agriculture/elderly/faith/health and so on. The Queen visits the average county every four or five years, less in the case of smaller populations. ‘If a visit is overdue, I might gently sound out the Lord Lieutenant. They usually bite your hand off.’

A corgi on sentry duty.

The London suburbs are, it transpires, an unlikely area of royal neglect. Since the Golden Jubilee, the Queen has been keen to put that right. ‘A lot happens in London and a lot outside it, but the outer boroughs are huge, and yet there has been a tendency to overlook them.’ Warwick’s wall has a map of the capital covered in a multitude of little stickers. Where next? ‘Bromley looks a pretty good candidate. It’s big and it’s got no dots.’

To one side, a narrow stairwell leads up to the Anniversaries Office, where Jo Wilson and a team of two are performing one of the Monarchy’s happiest tasks – sending out congratulations. The tradition goes back to 1917, when George V decided to send a telegram to any royal subject reaching the age of 100. When the Queen came to the Throne, the annual tally of these telegrams was roughly 300 in Britain and another 100 in her other realms. Today, those figures are, respectively, 4,500 and 2,200 per year. Instead of a telegram, she sends a card with a photograph and a printed signature.

Centenarians are only part of the picture. Those who reach 105 get a card – and they continue receiving one for every subsequent year of their life. By far the biggest demand is for diamond (60th) wedding anniversary cards. In 2005, a bumper year because of the number of marriages at the end of the Second World War, the Queen sent out 24,000 diamond wedding cards around the world, 18,077 of them in Britain. Cards are also despatched for 65th and 70th (platinum) anniversaries and every year thereafter. ‘We get some lovely thank-you letters and the Queen sees them,’ says Jo, a former office administrator for a firm of accountants. ‘They can be very touching,’ she says, holding up a photograph of a diamond wedding couple with an inscription: ‘You made their day’. Jo’s fax machine hums ceaselessly with copies of birth and marriage certificates flooding in from relatives and care workers who want to notify the Palace that Granny’s big day is looming. Every anniversary must be authenticated and every card will be despatched by special delivery two days in advance (if the anniversary falls on a Sunday, Jo must ensure the card lands on the Saturday). Each card is contained in a sealed package and woe betide the postman who fails to confirm delivery. ‘Failure to do so by 09.30 will initiate an enquiry from The Palace,’ reads the stern warning on the postal package.

Nearby, the Loyal Greetings Office is preparing one of the 1,500 loyal greetings sent out each year to organisations which request one. The members of the Royal Artillery Clerks Association have just sent a loyal greeting to their Captain General – the Queen – ahead of their 73 rd anniversary reunion in Woolwich. The Queen has personally approved a reply: ‘As your Captain General, I much appreciate your kind words and in return send my best wishes to you for a successful and memorable evening…’ It always goes down well with the old soldiers.

The Eleven O’Clock Meeting

When you have travelled the globe more times than you can remember, the prospect of a trip to Weston-Super-Mare might start to pall. But the Queen seems positively excited about her forthcoming trip to the Somerset coast. She has even been reading up on local issues. ‘Last night’s report from Parliament – I was rather intrigued by it,’ she tells her Private Secretary, Sir Robin Janvrin. ‘The Severn Estuary Barrage scheme. Do you know anything about it?’

Sir Robin Janvrin and the Queen begin their eleven o’clock meeting.

Sir Robin promises to gather further details. ‘It says it could generate five per cent of our electricity supply which sounds quite useful,’ the Queen continues. ‘It’ll be relevant to the Weston-Super-Mare visit, Ma’am,’ Sir Robin concurs. Furthermore, the Queen has a letter inviting her to tea when she is in the town. ‘They’d be “more than happy to offer a refreshment”, which I think is very kind of them,’ she says with a smile.

And then the discussion switches to a new Transport Bill, the death of a soldier in Afghanistan and a Cabinet Minister in need of a travel permit. Des Browne is heading for a NATO summit but, as Defence Secretary, he can’t leave British soil without his Sovereign’s consent.