On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary (19 page)

In response, I said only, ‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’

We spoke briefly about the Palace summer opening and about the restoration at Windsor Castle before it was time for me to go.

Five minutes waiting for a bus feels like an age. Five minutes with the Queen flashes by in an instant.

With the exception of a second place trophy for go-cart racing with Diana in 1991 and certificates awarded by the Royal Drawing Society in 1954 and 1956, I have never won anything of substance.

In March 2014 my agent, Sylvia Tidy-Harris, called to say I had been invited to present an IRN/Sky News award to the most promising up-and-coming radio reporter. I accepted the invitation, and on the night presented the
award at the appointed time before sitting down to watch the rest of the ceremony. As the evening drew to a close, IRN’s former Managing Editor, John Perkins, took to the microphone and began to speak about a reporter who had made a name for himself in the days since joining LBC/IRN in 1974. As he continued it dawned on me that I was the reporter to whom he was referring. I glanced at Sylvia, who had been in on the ruse from the beginning. She looked back at me, the picture of innocence. The climax to John’s tribute was the announcement of my first and only broadcasting award – The IRN/Sky News Gold Award, given for lifetime achievement in broadcasting.

I was flabbergasted. Though never short for words, I was rendered speechless. For all my bluster about awards, I really was tickled pink to have been recognized by my peers.

Penning this memoir has been something of a journey of discovery. Originally envisaged as a professional overview of an intense and turbulent time in the Royal Family’s modern history, it soon developed into a memoir with a more personal flavour. Once I sat down and started thinking about my years of involvement with the Royal Family, it became impossible to leave my personal life, thoughts and feelings out of the material.

Prior to this writing, I don’t think I had ever given much thought to the twists and turns that led me to my career path. Nor had I considered just how much of an influence strong, independent women had been in my life, a truism that continues to this day.

Take for example my mother. In reflecting on her abandonment of me in early childhood, I have found myself looking further back, to her own childhood in Germany, and to the abandonment by her mother. While there is no doubt that my mother was tough on me, I can see now that she was only teaching me how to be strong, even as she faced her own difficult challenges, of which there were many.

A young refugee when she arrived in the UK, not knowing a word of English, she soon found herself bringing a child into a war-torn world, though she was barely 19. It is difficult for one to accept her running away from my father at a time when he was so gravely ill, but one can only admire how hard she worked to make amends – doing her best to establish her independence, providing us with a good life in spite of the odds, even if doing so meant travelling half way round the world. No matter how many difficulties my peripatetic childhood presented, my mother never stopped expecting high standards from me. She worked tirelessly at her job until her retirement in her mid-60s, and was never prepared to accept second best.

I have spent much of my own personal life and career in the company of similarly tough, uncompromising and independent women. Perhaps my experience with my mother has helped me understand them better than I might have otherwise. I have worked and thrived with countless female broadcasters and journalists who have successfully staked their claim in a predominantly male world.

Then there is the young princess who had to mature from an intensely shy young debutante into a confident, level-headed public figure.

I can now see the parallels between Diana and my mother during her formative years. Both came from divorced backgrounds only to divorce at a young age themselves. Both learned to become reliant on a reserve of inner strength to get them through whatever life threw at them.

I have also begun to view my own personal trials against those of the royals around whom my career centered. As was the case with some of the royal marriages, the disintegration of my own first marriage was a source of great sadness. No child of divorce and separation wants the same for his or her children. I do not blame my ex-wife for anything. I had a job that often kept me away for long hours and long periods of time. Our union may well have been doomed from the start, as it is difficult to maintain a connection when so much time is spent apart.

That it was I who took on the lion’s share of raising our daughter is perhaps surprising. But I felt I was well equipped to bring up Victoria alone precisely
because
of my own fractured childhood. I certainly wasn’t daunted by the prospect of becoming a single parent. In my early life, it was all I ever knew.

No doubt I got some things wrong, but today I delight in the fact that my daughter has avoided many of my parental pitfalls in the raising of her own beautiful son. Victoria has developed many of her Grandmother’s strengths, and to my joy has become an extremely capable and independent wife, mother and journalist.

The apple did not fall far from the tree. Still based in New York, Victoria is a respected writer and royal commentator for CNN. What a thrill it was to have her in London
in the months leading up to Prince William’s marriage to Catherine Middleton in 2011. There on assignment for CBS News, our paths crossed often during those harried months, and on the day of the royal wedding we even appeared on-air together for a segment for the Canadian network, CTV. It was a moment I will cherish always.

It is strange for me to think that in three successive generations of my family, the maternal figure left the home. My mother and her brother were left with their father in Aachen in 1932. My mother left me with my father at the age of four in 1944. My ex-wife, though still present in our daughter’s life, left Victoria in my care at the age of three-and-a-half in 1977. They say things run in threes. I certainly hope our pattern stops there.

Of all the strong women who have influenced me, there are none quite like my boss of 12 years – Her Majesty the Queen. My memory of washing up with her (or drying up, as was the case) is just as delightful to recall today as it was when it actually happened.

By any measure Her Majesty is a remarkable woman. Faithfully supported by her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, for more than 66 years, she is the first to admit that she could not carry out her role without his loyalty and love. It is true that by anyone’s standards she lives a life of privilege and comfort – a primary source of contention for many of her detractors.

What cannot be argued, however, is Her Majesty’s sheer commitment to duties that she wasn’t even been born to do. Though well beyond retirement age, she maintains a
seven-day working week, performing a job for which she has racked up more than six decades of experience, and one for which – unlike some of her European counterparts – she personally receives no pay.

She is also capable of the most exceptional acts of kindness. The Windsor Castle restoration was completed (under budget and ahead of schedule) on the fifth anniversary of the fire, also the day of her 50
^th
wedding anniversary. The anniversary ball, to which I was invited, was to be the first function held in the newly restored castle. However, I felt that it would be appropriate to first host a thank-you reception for the workers who had so admirably completed the restoration.

The idea was accepted, and on Friday, 14
^th
November, 1997, Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh hosted a reception for 1500 members of the workforce in order to thank them personally for their service. This was no jolly for CEOs and executives, rather an evening in honour of the men and women who had rolled up their sleeves and literally delivered the nuts and bolts of such an ambitious undertaking.

At a reception of this kind, Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh would normally stay no more than 90 minutes. So pleased was the Queen with the finished work, however, that they stayed for two hours, a gesture that did not go unnoticed by those being honoured.

Our Queen is also reliable to a fault. She never gives less than a 100 percent, and never fails to fully engage with those fortunate enough to meet her. But she also has a deep awareness of the needs of her family, which is rarely witnessed by members of the public. I experienced this for
myself when I spent a day at Windsor before an upcoming State Visit.

At lunch I was seated next to an ailing Princess Margaret who, following various bouts of ill health, had suffered an unfortunate scalding accident that had left her in a wheelchair. She was a shadow of her former garrulous self. The Princess wore wraparound sunglasses throughout the meal and was doggedly monosyllabic, deflecting every polite conversational opener I tried to send her way.

I felt sorry for her. While I’m sure it was good for her to be among company, I’m not sure the Princess felt quite up to it. Ever observant, the Queen seemed to have drawn the same conclusion. Later at dinner, I was seated next to Her Majesty and she brought up the subject almost immediately, we exchanged a few words and sympathetic smiles, and the conversation moved on. Needless to say she always seemed to have a strong yet subtle connection with every member of her family.

Having feared at 55 that retirement would prove to be something of a challenge to one as active and driven as myself, I am pleased to report at 74 that my years since leaving the Palace have been some of the most fulfilling of my life. While it is gratifying to reflect on my unique and varied career, I also eagerly anticipate the years ahead, which will no doubt include an opportunity to commentate on the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022.

H
er Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is Britain’s 40
^th
monarch, and only the sixth queen to have ruled since William the Conqueror took the crown of England over a thousand years ago. Though she may be taken for granted in some quarters, she has notched up many impressive statistics over the course of her 62-year reign.

Representing the country’s interests abroad, the Queen has travelled to 116 countries and undertaken 261 official overseas tours, including 96 State Visits (in which one head of state invites another to visit his or her country). It is quite difficult to gauge a precise tally, but by conservative estimates, she has undertaken more than 30,000 engagements in the United Kingdom alone, and in doing so has met people from all walks of life. She has welcomed over a million and a half people to garden parties at Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Holyrood House. She has conferred over 410,000 honours at more than 650 investitures, and as the United Kingdom’s second
longest reigning monarch, she shows only marginal signs of slowing down, and none of giving up. Queen Victoria reigned for 63 years and 216 days. God willing, Her Majesty will break that record on 9
^th
September, 2015.

It is inevitable, however, that the Queen’s reign will end, and that her place will be inherited by her son, the Prince of Wales. This is the nature of the Monarchy. The cast is ever changing, and there are many royalists who follow those changes avidly. Despite the protestations of cynics and anti-monarchists, the Royal Family’s popularity is far from waning.

At the time of Diana’s death, newspaper reports suggested that there would never be another royal funeral as widely spectated. The assumption was that when the Queen Mother passed away, public sentiment would be fairly indifferent. While it would be met with great sadness, her death at a grand old age would not be as shocking as Diana’s untimely demise. When the Queen Mother did pass away in her sleep at the age of 101 in 2002, it was clear that the press had got it wrong.

A vast majority of the British population had grown up with Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. An estimated 200,000 mourners paid their respects to her as she lay in state in Westminster Hall. On the day of her funeral hundreds of thousands more lined the route from the service in Westminster Abbey to the interment in St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Similarly, later in 2002, when Buckingham Palace announced plans for the Golden Jubilee weekend (marking the Queen’s 50 years on the throne), the usual newspaper
doom-and-gloom merchants suggested that no-one was interested and that the whole thing would flop like a damp squib.

Wrong again. It was in fact cause for national celebration. Between February and August of that year, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited 70 cities and towns across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as 50 counties.

Her Majesty travelled more than 40,000 miles around the world to countries including Jamaica, New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

A special website launched for the Golden Jubilee received over 28 million hits during a six-month period. Over 3,000 members of the media from more than 60 countries were accredited to cover the central Jubilee weekend in London at the beginning of June.

Throughout the weekend, one million-plus people gathered daily outside Buckingham Palace and all the way down the Mall to Trafalgar Square to celebrate the Queen’s distinguished reign. Hardly the ‘damp squib’ the press had predicted at the beginning of the year.

When the 2012 Diamond Jubilee came around a decade later, no-one was surprised that it, too, was a resounding success. Despite the miserable weather over the course of that celebratory four-day weekend, more than a million people gathered every day at Buckingham Palace and at events throughout London. Crowd levels mirrored those of 2002, again trailing all the way down the Mall to Trafalgar Square.

Whatever the media says, a large percentage of the
British population loves its Royal Family, and the institution of monarchy continues to endure, always evolving, just as it has done for the last 1,000 years. It is by any standard a robust and resilient establishment.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some blips in terms of the line of succession. Charles I had his head disconnected from his shoulders in 1649, and tragically, despite 17 pregnancies, Queen Anne died leaving no surviving children in 1707, thus ending the reign of the House of Stuart. But due to the Act of Settlement that same year, what followed was a memorable and largely harmonious period with the newly-established House of Hanover having come to eminence. Georges I, II and III followed, but as a result of George IV’s daughter having predeceased him, he was left with no natural successor upon his death in 1830.

The crown passed to his brother, the Duke of Clarence, who became William IV. Although he had ten illegitimate children with Dora Jordan, a very well-known Irish actress in her day, not one of his five legitimate children with Queen Adelaide survived him. Upon his death he was succeeded by his dead brother’s daughter, Victoria, who became Queen in 1837. Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert saw the end of the House of Hanover. The royal house of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was established in 1842.

There was another near-catastrophic blip at the end of 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated and his reluctant brother, Albert, or, as he was affectionately known, Bertie, acceded, becoming George VI. It was that momentous event and subsequent change of direction that led to the young Princess Elizabeth succeeding to the British throne in 1952.
The new generation of senior royals are now hard at work establishing their own roles within ‘The Firm’ – a moniker coined by Prince Philip. Prince William, having completed his three years as a search and rescue helicopter pilot at RAF Valley in Anglesey, Wales, is playing a more active role, carving out a niche for himself, as well as supporting his grandmother, the Queen. William is also a fiercely private young man aiming to achieve for his own family something he never had growing up – a stable environment for his baby son, Prince George.

Harry has served two tours of operational duty in Afghanistan, one in 2008 and the second in 2013. As has now been widely reported, the first of Harry’s tours was, with the co-operation of the media, kept a tightly guarded secret.

The thinking at the time was that if his presence was publicised, he and his fellow comrades would become a prime target for the enemy. This became an all too real concern when German newspaper
Bild
and Australian magazine
New Idea
broke the embargo and documented the Prince’s deployment. In response to this major breach, the UK’s Ministry of Defense decided to err on the side of caution and withdrew Harry after only ten weeks of his planned three-month deployment.

On reflection it was probably the right thing to do. A government doesn’t spend tens of thousands of pounds training a soldier only to have him sit at home twiddling his thumbs.

It was perhaps inevitable that Harry’s second tour as an Apache helicopter pilot with the Army Air Corps
was
well publicised, and thankfully he completed his tour without incident.

As of this writing Prince Harry has returned to the Household Cavalry Regiment, where he has undertaken a desk job at HQ London District on Horse Guards. His current role involves helping to co-ordinate significant projects and commemorative events that involve the army in London, while at the same time (his military duties permitting), carrying out more official engagements on behalf of the family. Stories regarding Harry’s on-again/off-again romances continue to dominate newspaper columns, but for now his one true passion continues to be his involvement with the Invictus Games, hosted in London in September 2014.

While William is generally regarded as the more measured and serious of the two brothers, Harry has been tagged by the media as a bit of a wild child. In his early 20s he was the epitome of royal paparazzi fodder, often making front page news for all the wrong reasons – leaving night clubs a little worse for wear, being photographed wearing a WWII German Afrika Korps uniform with a swastika arm band and getting caught drinking under-age and smoking cannabis.

On the whole the British press does treat the Princes pretty fairly. Occasionally Harry is taken to task for his errors in judgment – accepting a skiing holiday to Kazakhstan, for example. Given the country’s less-than-stellar human rights record, and considering there were any number of ski resorts he could have visited, his advisors should have given Kazakhstan the thumbs down. Likewise, it wasn’t a particularly brilliant decision for Prince William to go hunting in Spain in February 2014, the day before he was due to launch a high-profile campaign to end the illegal wildlife trade.

Unfortunately, there is still a belief within the Royal
Family that the details surrounding private visits or holidays are on a purely need-to-know basis. In other words, to them private is private and their advisors don’t need to know.

Prince Harry is quick learner, however, and he doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Another of his attributes is his ability to muck in as part of a team. In 2013 he joined the Walking With the Wounded South Pole Allied Challenge, for which he joined 12 injured servicemen and women from the UK, USA and the Commonwealth. He took on the expedition in his own right, as a serviceman rather than as a royal. The teams trekked 200 miles in appalling conditions before finally reaching the South Pole on December 13
^th
– proof that with the right team and the right attitude, anything is possible.

This particular generation of royals rising through the ranks is made up of doers. No longer are royals merely showing up to cut ribbons, unveil plaques or plant trees. Today they are getting stuck in at ground level. In December 2009 Prince William spent a night sleeping rough on the streets of London in an effort to highlight the work of the homeless charity Centrepoint of which he is patron. In March 2011 Prince Harry joined a team of injured servicemen for the first five days of their trek to the North Pole, and in early 2014 the Princes showed up announced in Datchet, Berkshire to help the local community with flood relief. This commitment to others is something for which Diana would have been especially proud. That the Princess left this world too soon goes without saying, but she was with her sons just long enough to ingrain in them a deep seeded understanding of those less fortunate.

One area in which the Princes continue to struggle is in
their relationship with the media. They know they need the press in the same way the press needs them, but they wrestle with what truly is private, and what is worthy of public interest. Diana did court the attention of the media from time to time, but the flip side of that coin was that she often complained of feeling hunted and haunted. William and Harry saw it all, and they are savvy enough to avoid falling into the same trap. For now they are striking a good balance, working to their own agenda rather than one set by the media, but it is a delicate balance that can shift at any time.

2014 has seen the Queen’s popularity riding higher than it ever has in her 62 years on the throne. The British monarchy has survived executions, divorces, illicit affairs, illegitimate children and wildly eccentric behaviour on the part of its kings and queens, but it continues to persevere. Republicanism, with a popularity rating in the region of 13 percent, has been around for centuries, but the anti-monarchist group Republic declared in 2012 that, ‘The Queen is untouchable.’

In spite of her many public triumphs she has endured many personal sorrows. Having been brought up to believe that divorce was un-royal, during her own tenure the Queen has had to deal with the divorce of her sister, Princess Margaret, as well as the subsequent divorces of three of her four children. In 1979 Lord Louis Mountbatten, beloved uncle of Prince Philip, was assassinated by IRA terrorists while out on his fishing boat in County Sligo, Ireland. In 2002, the Queen also suffered the loss of her own much-loved mother and sister within a
seven week period. All of this occurred under the watchful gaze of the media. I don’t believe any elected head of state would survive or even tolerate the constant media scrutiny, invasion of privacy and irrational prejudice that the Queen has had to abide decade after decade. With no alternative but to carry on, she has done so unflinchingly.

From time to time the ugly word ‘abdication’ creeps in, never more so than when Queen Beatrix of Holland abdicated in January 2013. At 75 she thought it was time for the younger generation to take over. King Albert II of the Belgians, aged 78, followed suit shortly after, stepping down in July 2013 after a string of scandals and
controversies
. Most recently, 76-year-old King Juan Carlos of Spain stepped down citing ill health in June 2014. Will the Queen, an octogenarian, follow suit? In a word, no.

She was never destined to become Queen, but she has dedicated her life to service and duty. During a radio address on the occasion of her 21
^st
birthday, Princess Elizabeth said – ‘I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’ – a declaration she reaffirmed at her Silver (1977), Golden (2002) and Diamond (2012) Jubilees.

The Queen’s public image has noticeably softened in recent years, as made apparent during her visit to Northern Ireland in June 2014. It was an open visit, meaning it was announced, and not shrouded in secrecy due to security concerns, as had been the norm in the past. This time much of her itinerary was made public, which gave the Queen the opportunity to engage with the people of Belfast.

The headlines said it all:

Queen ushers in new normal!

The Queen, up close and personal thrills the crowds!

The Queen makes astonishing jail visit with former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness!

Her Majesty would be the first to accept that no matter how painful, life moves on. By building bridges in Northern Ireland, the Queen is ensuring that she leaves a monarchy in good stead with friendships reaffirmed and hands of forgiveness shaken. The world is changing rapidly and, like their grandmother, Princes William and Harry must continue to adapt and evolve to meet the needs of the 21
^st
century. During the Diamond Jubilee’s Buckingham Palace balcony appearance, the Queen sent out a very clear message regarding the future of the Monarchy. Instead of the entire family stepping out as is custom following the Trooping of the Colour ceremony, she was joined only by her heir, the Prince of Wales, his heir, the Duke of Cambridge (along with their wives) and Prince Harry, who was third in line at the time.