Not in Front of the Corgis (10 page)

There cannot be many places in London where the staff can claim that they use The Queen’s swimming pool. Buckingham Palace’s indoor pool is located at
the rear of the building, on the right hand side as you look from the front.

The Staff Sports Club allows its members to use the pool at certain specified times, when no member of the Royal Family wants to swim. The rule is if a staff member is swimming and one of the Royals appears, they have to get out, unless invited to remain, which often happens. If when the staff member turns up a Royal is already in the pool, the servant, and this includes senior Members such as the Private Secretary or Keeper of the Privy Purse, will not attempt to join them. It’s a rule that seems to work well, and these days the Duke of Edinburgh is the only permanent royal resident at the Palace who still uses the pool
regularly
. But it is expected that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge may well avail themselves of the privilege when they take up residence in their London
apartment
at Kensington Palace.

There is a thriving film society in the Royal Household, which meets once a month to view the latest releases in the Buckingham Palace cinema. It is free to staff and they manage to obtain any film they want long before it is on general release.

Perhaps one of the main benefits is that anyone in the Royal Household is able to get tickets to any theatre or concert hall in London. Managers keep back a supply of seats for the Palace and most of these are complimentary, including at the Royal Albert Hall.

The only place where they have to take their turn is the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, where the Royal Box is reserved strictly for members of
the family. As Prince Charles is the only one who is passionate about opera, he uses the box frequently and even if the others want to see a performance, they have to check with him first to see if he is going. He takes precedence over everyone except The Queen and as she never goes to the opera anyway, the Royal Box is his personal fiefdom.

Tickets to Test matches at Lords and The Oval are always available and among the most highly prized are those reserved for members of the Royal Household at Wimbledon. The family are able to use the Royal Box at the invitation of the President of the All England Club, while middle management officials usually find they are relegated to seats some way back. But they are still worth having, so no one abuses the privilege and tries to sell them on.

The Household football, cricket, bowls and golf clubs have no difficulty in finding fixtures as every club wants to be entertained on a royal sports ground or golf course. And they love having correspondence written on Buckingham Palace headed paper.

New recruits are told what to do if they should meet The Queen during the day. The rule is that they should stand still until she has passed and they should not speak unless she addresses them first, which she often does, even if it is only just a mere nod of the head.

But servants no longer have to hide behind the curtains if they see a member of the Royal Family approaching as they did in the early days of The Queen’s reign; not on her orders, but those of the Master of the Household. And neither is a maid instantly dismissed
if she hasn’t finished her work by noon, as she would have been in the past.

The Queen takes a personal interest in her Household and wants to know everything that’s going on below stairs as well as with her senior officials. With her personal staff – Ladies-in-Waiting, Pages, dressers, maids and footmen – she can be very friendly, particularly if she is alone in her sitting room during the evening. She will often engage whoever is on duty in conversation asking about their family, and even if they have any pets. But it’s always a one-way
conversation
. The Queen never discusses her own family with anyone.

At one time there were five dining rooms for staff at Buckingham Palace: the Household Dining Room where the Members were served by uniformed servants and where the menus were all printed in French; the Senior Officials Dining Room, where those in that category also ate their meals in splendid surroundings; the Officials Dining Room, not quite as grand but still rather like an officer’s Mess; the Stewards Hall, presided over by the Palace Steward and where his senior domestic colleagues enjoyed being waited on by junior staff; and the Servants Hall, where everyone else had their breakfast, lunch and dinner.

A recent Lord Chamberlain, supported by the Duke of Edinburgh, decided in the interests of economy – and in spite of protests from all concerned – to abolish all these different dining rooms and amalgamate them into a single central establishment that is now known simply as The Dining Room.

It is situated on the first floor, overlooking Buckingham Palace Road, near the side entrance to the Palace, and the entire Household eats there.

On any working day, you might find the Lord Chamberlain and The Queen’s Private Secretary queuing up alongside the most junior footman to receive their food on a tray from the Servery. It’s a very democratic system, that certainly saves a lot of money, but it’s not universally popular. Also the Dining Room no longer serves alcohol, which again does not go down too well.

On the recent State Visit of President Obama of the United States, the Dining Room was overwhelmed by the hundreds of secret service personnel accompanying the President and his wife, who swamped the room at breakfast and refused to stand in line, saying it was not the ‘American’ way.

There is still a Household Dining Room that is normally not open every day. But when the occasion demands, such as visits from foreign Households, the Members are able to use its facilities. And most of them love the genteel atmosphere redolent of one of the older gentlemen’s clubs.

The prestige alone of working for the most famous family in the world is no longer sufficient to attract the cream of domestic staff to the Royal Household. They have been forced to make concessions that in previous years were unnecessary.

Once a footman or housemaid has served a six-month probationary period, they are eligible for health cover and to join the Royal Household Stakeholder pension scheme. The Queen pays 15 per cent employer’s contribution into the scheme on the servant’s behalf and if a staff member should die while in service, there is a death benefit payment amounting to four times the annual salary.

Among the other benefits, all staff are entitled to twenty-five days’ annual leave, rising to twenty-seven after three years’ service and thirty days after ten years. Part-time staff receive leave on a pro rata basis.

As some of the staff have to travel into central London from their homes, they are granted
interest-free
loans to buy season tickets, some of which can cost several thousand pounds a year.

Everybody who works at Buckingham Palace is entitled to a free lunch on the days they are working, and staff quite frequently pop in, even when they are off duty, to take advantage of the offer. The Master of the Household knows this happens, but he prefers to turn a blind eye. If it keeps his staff happy, what’s the harm?

The Household, and this includes those working for other members of the Royal Family, offers an attractive car-leasing scheme with staff able to rent vehicles at discount rates. Until a few years ago, this included luxury makes such as Jaguar and top-
of-the
-range Rovers. But the scheme now applies only to middle-of-the-range makes and models. It still accounts for savings up to £2,000 a year in some cases, so it is a benefit well worth having, particularly
for those who are based in royal residences miles away from London.

The Household prides itself on being family friendly. So it offers not only maternity and paternity leave but also leave to those who are adopting children or men and women who require fertility treatment.

Among the hidden benefits of working for the Royal Family is the cash-in-hand supply that every servant worth his salt knows about and one or two exploit.

There are plenty of opportunities for a little private enterprise on the side if you know where to look and who to approach, particularly during the summer season when the Palace is open to paying visitors. A small number of staff – and this includes the ‘temps’ employed just for the summer period – are able to tell which visitors might be amenable to a little ‘
arrangement
’. It could be just family or friends who are
visiting
the Palace and are looking for a bargain, so there’s no real harm in a staff member using his discount in the shops for their benefit.

A year-round benefit is the ‘moonlighting’ that goes on. For many years domestic staff have run a tiny but profitable sideline in working for outside parties, serving drinks and canapés, waiting at dinner tables or just opening doors. They do not wear their
official
uniform but each one has something that to the untrained eye passes for the next best thing.

There is a ‘fixer’ in every department of the Palace who will arrange for a couple, or however many are required, to serve at these functions, and the Master of the Household and the Royal Family turn a blind eye. They all know what’s going on. Both The Queen and Prince Philip have found themselves being served cocktails by their own staff from time to time, and Prince Philip in particular will often give a wink to a young housemaid, ‘moonlighting’ as a waitress, just to let her know he is in on the secret.

The Master of the Household actually encourages some of his younger staff to work outside as it gives them additional experience, as well as helping them financially. The going rate is around £10 an hour for a waiter or waitress; £15 an hour for a fully trained butler and £20 an hour for one of the royal chefs.

There are also a couple of footmen who visit houses in nearby Belgravia once a week to polish and shine all the boots and shoes on the premises. The going rate is around £20 a time.

There’s only one rule: it’s a strictly cash business. No cheques or credit cards accepted.

The regimental bands that play in the Palace
forecourt
every morning during Changing the Guard, also have their own little sidelines. Anyone with the money can hire any combination from a trio to a full orchestra, to play in their off-duty hours. Their repertoire runs from well-known excerpts from opera and ballet, to the big band sounds of the 1940s and 1950s to rock’n’roll and anything in between. For the bandsmen (and women) it makes a nice change from
the military marches they are required to play every morning and they love letting their hair down.

The bandmasters all welcome their musicians accepting these ‘gigs’ and there’s nothing ‘under-
the-counter
’ about the arrangement. It is all done with the blessing of the regiment and the Ministry of Defence.

ess than a dozen people right at the top of the Royal Household earn more than £100,000 a year, with several hundred down at the bottom on less than £20,000. So nobody joins the Household in order to get rich. If they do they are soon disillusioned. The top echelon consists of those who run the Palace – the people whose decisions affect not only the rest of the Household, but The Queen herself.

The most important and influential person at Buckingham Palace is The Queen’s principal private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, but he is not the highest paid. That honour goes to Sir Alan Reid, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in other words, the man who controls the royal chequebook and who pays everyone else. His salary is £180,000 a year compared with Christopher Geidt’s £146,000 (a slight increase
on David Cameron’s £142,500), but both these salaries are down on what they were paid the previous year.

Number three in the money stakes is Air
Vice-Marshal
David Walker, Master of the Household, who earns £120,000 a year, up from £112,000 last year. Lt Col. Andrew Ford is Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, the man who organises all royal ceremonials, and he is paid £101,000, a comparatively modest increase of £100 a week on his last year’s salary of £96,000.

Their titular boss, The Lord Chamberlain, the Rt Hon. The Earl Peel is paid less than any of his department heads with an annual salary of £82,000 (up £1,000) but his is considered to be a part-time appointment and he is expected to be inside the Palace for only a few days each week. However, most of the recent Lord Chamberlains have taken their jobs very seriously, and they work practically full-time.

In addition to these salaries, the men mentioned above all have payments made into their pension plans.

Air Vice-Marshal Walker is on secondment from the Ministry of Defence on a contract that is reviewed every year (he actually retired from the RAF in August 2011 with the rank of Air Marshal) while Lt Col. Andrew Ford is paid in line with Senior Civil Service pay scales, plus a performance-related pay element up to a maximum of 4.5 per cent.

Apart from the two just mentioned the
salaries
of the others are set by the Royal Household Remuneration Committee whose members at the time of writing are: The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, The Permanent Secretary to the Treasury,
Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the Lord Chamberlain (the only member of the Royal Household allowed responsibility for setting his colleagues’ salaries) and the Treasury Officer of Accounts and Secretary to the Committee, Paula Diggle.

The non-executive members of the Committee are not paid for their duties.

While the salaries of these top men might seem generous to outsiders, where the average annual income is said to be £25,000, any of them could leave tomorrow and move into commerce and more than double their salary overnight.

Christopher Geidt is not only The Queen’s senior adviser at the Palace; he is also one of the most
influential
people in the United Kingdom. After the election of 2010 when there was no clear winner, it was Geidt who advised Her Majesty to appoint David Cameron as Prime Minister, only when a decision was ‘clear and uncontroversial’. In this way he protected his royal mistress from becoming embroiled in party politics.

He liaises with his opposite number at 10 Downing Street in the Prime Minister’s office.

Christopher Geidt is the power behind the Throne; the man The Queen trusts above all others outside the family. He guides her not only through the lines of communication between the Palace and Government, but also between herself and the Presidents and Prime Ministers of all Commonwealth countries.

He is her eyes and ears and since he joined the Royal Household in 2002 as an assistant private
secretary
– he got the top job in 2007 – he has forced the Household into adopting modern business practices,
so that today an air of professionalism is felt
throughout
Buckingham Palace.

One of the secrets of his success with The Queen is his ability to tell her what she needs to know, rather than what he feels she might want to hear, as some of her early private secretaries were wont to do.

Until the advent of Sir William Heseltine (1986–90) an outgoing Australian, who was a breath of fresh air, private secretaries had been recruited for their
diplomatic
skills through the ‘old boy’ network, rather than for any experience of the outside world.

Christopher Geidt is the latest (following Robin Janvrin and Robert Fellowes) who is a realist and
pragmatist
, and who is not afraid to speak his mind, even if by doing so it might make him unpopular.

One quality he shares with his predecessors is his attention to detail, which is legendary in an
organisation
where it is taken for granted that everything runs to time.

Christopher Geidt, as a former soldier in
intelligence
, believes implicitly in forward planning. He anticipates problems before they arise and knows the answers to any questions almost before they are asked.

A Cambridge graduate, he speaks several languages and he was asked by The Queen to help shape Prince William’s image before he emerged on the royal scene as the latest generation of the family to undertake public duties.

When one looks at the responsibilities that the private secretary assumes – liaison with the armed forces (he is the only private secretary to The Queen who was not commissioned, but served as a sergeant),
the sometimes tricky relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury and then handling the hundreds of organisations, both civil and military with which Her Majesty is associated – it is not difficult to see how he earns his £2,800 a week. The Queen believes he is worth every penny and he justified her confidence with his organisation of her visit to Ireland in May 2011, which is regarded as one of the most successful of her reign – in what could have been the most difficult circumstances.

The Queen recognised Christopher Geidt’s value to her in the 2011 Birthday Honours List when she made him a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, her personal Order of Chivalry which she awards without advice from or reference to anyone, including the Prime Minister. To be invited to join the Royal Victorian Order is the biggest compliment The Queen can pay one of her staff and the new Sir Christopher, as one of the latest recruits, is fully aware of the honour.

During his military service, Sir Christopher acted as an interrogator in Bosnia, using skills he has since brought to the Royal Household. He knows how to ask the right question to the right person at exactly the right time – and how to evaluate an answer correctly. He’s a difficult man to bluff.

As the chief executive of ‘House of Windsor Ltd’ he is the first man at his desk in the morning and often the last to leave at night. But he is not a one-
man-band
. A large and efficient team of assistant private secretaries and deputies support him, knowing that no matter how hard they work, he works even harder. He
insists that his office is a team effort, but his staff know that in every team there has to be a captain and there is no doubt who it is in this department. In securing Christopher Geidt, The Queen is said to have made the bargain of the year. He could easily walk into a top job in the City and command a salary of at least £500,000 a year.

Although the Private Secretary is the most important man in the Royal Household, he is not the highest paid. That distinction goes to the Keeper of the Privy Purse, which in modern terms means the man who controls the royal chequebook and everything else to do with spending at the Palace. That is why he is paid £40,000 a year more than the Private Secretary. Royalty always follows the golden rule: Go where the money is.

The Keeper is one of the oldest positions in the Royal Household dating back to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Apart from two early
appointments
, every Keeper of the Privy Purse has been a man. The exceptions were Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, who served Queen Anne from 1702–1711 to be followed by Baroness [Abigail] Masham who continued until George I came to the throne in 1714. Since then the post has been a male-dominated province.

The present Keeper, Sir Alan Reid, has held the top job since 2002, and is only the second person
appointed to this prestigious role to be a professional accountant. The first was his immediate predecessor, Sir Michael Peat, both of whom came from the same stable as head of the leading international accountancy firm, KPMG. Prior to this, all the Keepers had
traditionally
been former military men with little or no expertise in financial matters.

The Keeper looks after The Queen’s private
financial
affairs, including her bank account, which is held at Coutts in The Strand, now part of National Westminster, which in turn is an arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Coutts not only provides The Queen with her chequebook, but every other member of the Royal Family, and they have done so, with the utmost
discretion
, since 1760, when King George III became the first British monarch to open an account with them – and to take advantage of their overdraft facilities.

However, Coutts, unlike other royal suppliers, do not hold a Royal Warrant. This is because bankers are ‘professionals’ like doctors and lawyers, and only ‘tradesmen’ such as shopkeepers, plumbers and
butchers
, are eligible for the warrants. The Royal Warrants have been in existence since the Middle Ages and are awarded only to tradesmen and suppliers of goods. They are a mark of recognition of excellent service to members of the Royal Family. At the present time only The Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales award warrants and the recipients are allowed to display the Royal Arms on their products as well as the legend ‘By Appointment to…’ The town with the largest number of Warrant Holders is
Ballater, near Balmoral, where practically every tiny shop and business is able to show it has served royalty for generations.

The Keeper of the Privy Purse has a thankless task in that other departments within the Royal Household do not like many of the decisions he is forced to make on the grounds of economy.

If the Master of the Household wants to spend money on refurbishing staff accommodation or new outfits for his footmen, he has to go cap in hand to the Keeper for approval. It is not always forthcoming, as the Keeper has different priorities. He has to look at the broader picture, always remembering that at the end of the year he has to balance the books.

The accounts are kept in immaculate order. Bills are paid promptly, with discounts negotiated wherever possible. The Keeper has registered Her Majesty for Value Added Tax, as a business, which means she pays 20 per cent on nearly everything she buys, but as long as it is for business reasons, she is then able to claim it all back, and she has the use of the money for three months as VAT is paid every quarter.

Another of the Keeper’s responsibilities is to ensure that when members of the Royal Family, or the Household, travel abroad, foreign currency is obtained at the best rates and at zero commission.

Apart from The Queen herself, the Keeper of the Privy Purse is the only person in the world who knows the full extent of her wealth. How much cash she has; how many shares and in what companies and all her other investments. Even the Duke of Edinburgh does not know the intimate details of his wife’s fortune.
So it is just as well that he is totally uninterested in finances anyway.

One would think that Coutts, as her bankers, would be aware of Her Majesty’s worth. But they only know what the Keeper and his staff allow them to know. As The Queen no longer writes personal cheques, because people had a habit of not cashing them but preferring to keep them as mementoes, which, in turn, caused chaos in the royal accounts, her bank has only a limited knowledge of her wealth. But it is a fair guess to say that she is not overdrawn, and never has been, even if her mother was said to have died with an overdraft at Coutts of over £2 million – which was settled on her death by The Queen.

Within the Keeper of the Privy Purse’s department there is a small sub-department known as the Royal Almonry. The Lord High Almoner, the Lord Bishop of Rochester, heads this ancient-sounding office. In centuries past, this office was responsible for
distributing
alms to the poor on behalf of the Monarch. Today it has but one task, to look after the administrative details of the annual Maundy Service when The Queen gives a bag full of specially minted coins, to the deserving men and women of different parishes in the realm. The bag gets heavier each year, as the number of coins equals one for each year of her life.

Apart from Her Majesty’s public funds, the Privy Purse office also controls all payments made from her private sources. The Queen makes considerable gifts to charity every year; some of which are well-known organisations, while others are simply individual cases that have been brought to her attention by her family
or members of the Household. There is only one
condition
attached to these gifts; no publicity is allowed, on Her Majesty’s strict instructions. She is already the recipient of hundreds of begging letters every year and if it were revealed that she had responded to any of them, the floodgates would open and she would be deluged.