On Duty With the Queen: My Time as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary (7 page)

During our pre-visit recce to Hungary we had learned that Budapest was going to present both logistical and security-related challenges. Two walkabouts were scheduled – one in the Central Market Hall, and the other in a nearby square alongside the river Danube. Both locations posed potential threats to the royal couple’s safety.

There was particular concern for the Princess. Press speculation was rife with regard to how much weight she had lost. There was no question that she was on the skinny
side of slim, but there was also much muttering, especially in the tabloids, about whether she might be suffering from bulimia. I didn’t know anything about that, but I had observed that she didn’t cope well when she was overly hot or flustered. Any crowd situation – chiefly one in which she had to be dressed formally – had to be monitored carefully.

The Market Hall visit was one in which we could readily see the chance of ‘losing it’ – press office speak for when the principals are engulfed by a mob of well-wishers. We therefore suggested to the Hungarian security team that they erect barriers along the walkabout route.

The suggestion fell on deaf ears. The security detail looked at us as if we had suggested putting each member of the crowd in chains. ‘Barriers keep people
in
,’ the lead security officer pronounced, ‘and here in Hungary, which is now a democracy, we do not see any need to erect barriers.’

His stern expression made it clear that there was no room for argument.

Fast-forward to the royal visit itself, and exactly what we had predicted came to pass. The royal couple entered the Central Market Hall, and with well-wishers keen to have their moment, we did indeed lose it…and in turn lost them.

No harm was done. We managed to retrieve them just past an array of local cheeses. Having endured minimal trauma via the medium of extreme well-wishing, neither royal visitor appeared to be too traumatized by the experience. Not surprisingly, by the time we reached the next walkabout, in Vidago Square by the river Danube,
there were enough barriers in place to adequately contain a thousand fanatical Bolsheviks. After all, no democracy, however proud and new, wants to be responsible for mislaying members of the British Royal Family.

For all the anxiety of the first walkabout, both Charles and Diana worked wonders. This was quite a coup for an eastern bloc country. The local people had never seen royal luminaries at such close quarters, and as they walked, chatted and shook hands one could feel the palpable warmth and affection in the air. Even so, the crowds had taken a toll on the Princess.

‘Dickie,’ she whispered to me, as we neared the end of the walkabout in Vidago Square. ‘I’m feeling terrible. I think I’m going to pass out.’

Though there are plans and protocols in place for countless numbers of potential royal mishaps, there are none for a situation like this. It is generally left to the initiative of whomever is closest at the time. In this case, me.

Her Royal Highness clearly needed to be removed from the site, and quickly. The last thing either of us wanted was for her collapse in the middle of the crowd. Fortunately, the motorcade was parked nearby, in a side road just off the square, which had been sealed off in the event we needed an escape route.

‘Just keep walking close beside me,’ I told her. ‘Keep walking and don’t look back. We’re nearly there. Take deep breaths…that’s it…just keep going.’

I knew where the motorcade was parked; now it was just a case of getting the Princess to it without her keeling over.

Under normal circumstances a person feeling faint is not necessarily a cause for alarm, but these were not normal circumstances. Speculation was ongoing in the newspapers about whether the Princess was struggling with bulimia. I refused to enter into it. All I knew was that to provoke another rush of excitable chit-chat on the subject would benefit no-one, least of all the Princess and her sons.

We made it to the car. Once there, I ensured that she was comfortable. She simply seemed to be suffering from crowd-fatigue. I told the chauffeur – one of ours, who had driven the Prince’s Bentley from London – to give her water and to keep an eye on her. I walked back to where the Prince and the Household were saying their goodbyes and briefed the lady-in-waiting as to what had happened, grateful that a small crisis hadn’t exploded into a global story.

The following day the Princess was back in fine form, and in a reflective mood. After a display of British fashions at the Museum of Applied Arts in downtown Pest, the Princess was across the river in the old town of Buda. Amongst other magnificent buildings stood the Calvinist Church overlooking the Danube, and the equally magnificent parliament building on the opposite side of the river.

Diana was keen to visit the church, and I had a pretty good idea why. As I had seen her do before, she wanted to slip away from the hustle and bustle for a moment to centre herself through prayer.

I hung back and kept a watchful eye on her from a respectful distance. She went to the front of the nave, fell
to her knees and buried her head in her hands. It was an intensely private moment and I lowered my eyes to look away, but not before catching a glimpse of a camera lens poking through a side door.

I crossed the space to collar the surprised photographer, knowing exactly what sort of action to take. Snappers know well how to handle such situations. They keep a spare roll of film handy so that when they’re caught taking unsolicited photographs, they hand over a decoy roll.

I was not going to let that happen. ‘I want all of it,’ I insisted. He didn’t try to argue as he knew he’d never see the pictures published without facing a lawsuit. All of his rolls were handed over.

There were no hard feelings. Such is the game between the press and the press office, one in which the score is generally about even.

B
y the beginning of the 1990s, it was abundantly clear that all was not well within the Prince and Princess of Wales’s marriage. Nothing had been said on the subject, and nothing would be. Not by the staff at any rate. As employees, we were expected to be the souls of discretion. Loyalty to my employer and her family meant that I wouldn’t enter into gossip about what might or might not have been going on in their private lives.

There was no doubt that the Prince and Princess’s living arrangements hinted at a marital rift. The Royal Family has always kept multiple residences, but by now the Princess was spending all of her time at Kensington Palace, while Prince Charles was usually to be found at Highgrove. Whenever possible he would always try to return to Gloucestershire, even if he had engagements that required him to be in central London.

With relations as they were, logistics became an even bigger issue in terms of joint engagements. Charles and
Diana had a full diary of commitments which they were expected to attend together. They would arrive and depart from each engagement as a couple, but what the press didn’t know, was that often the royal car would make a stop in Friary Court, St James’s Palace, which was in Marlborough Road between the Mall and Pall Mall. There, another car would be waiting to take the Prince to wherever he might be going, while the Princess would continue home to Kensington Palace. It was a necessary performance to avoid giving the circling hacks any indication that trouble was afoot.

I had become accustomed to performing. By the time I began working for the Royal Family, I had experienced many years as both an actor and a broadcaster. Going before the cameras in my new role would have come easily had it not been so frowned upon by the Palace.

That said, one Friday in June 1990, I was left with a difficult choice.

I was at Highgrove with the Prince of Wales, where he was filming a piece for a television documentary marking the 15
^th
anniversary of the Prince’s Trust. Charles was a consummate professional in front of the camera, and so the shoot was brief. Once he wrapped, he hurried off to play polo in Cirencester.

Highgrove has a staff dining room just off the kitchen. As soon as the camera crew left I took the opportunity to grab a bite to eat before heading back to London. No sooner had I sat down, then a call came through to let me know that the Prince had taken a tumble and was being
driven to nearby Cirencester Cottage Hospital with a suspected broken arm.

Lunch curtailed, I made a run to meet him there. This particular polo match wasn’t a major event on the sporting calendar, but both the media and public were always keen to see the Prince play.

With Charles on his way to the hospital, I knew an eager band of journalists wouldn’t be far behind. My job was to get there first in order to prevent some poor unsuspecting hospital worker being seized by an overzealous reporter chasing a scoop.

As His Royal Highness was wheeled into theatre – an X-ray having confirmed that his arm was broken in three places above the elbow – the assembled press pack continued to multiply. Armed with what little information had been made available to me, I stepped outside to give a briefing.

The Prince was under anesthetic, and the questions came thick and fast.

‘If the arm is broken in three places, will Charles be able to play polo again?’

‘If the arm is broken in three places, what are the chances of Charles playing polo again?’

‘How will the bones knit together in order that…’ – you guessed it – ‘…the Prince will be able to play polo again?’

The press often asks the same question repeatedly in the hope of tripping up a designated spokesperson. I had already told them the simple facts: yes, the Prince had broken his arm in three places, and yes, he would be
able to play polo again. Reporters on the hunt can’t help but want for news with more substance. After all, their livelihood depends upon acquiring sufficient copy to fill their editor’s bulletins and pages. They persist in squeezing out every last detail from situations which otherwise wouldn’t require more than a couple of lines.

With a partially satiated press, I went back inside to call the office with an update.

The Prince returned to his room a couple of hours later, having had the fractures set. I spoke at length to the orthopedic surgeon who had performed the procedure to be absolutely clear on the facts. The afternoon was wearing on, and the crowd out front was becoming restless. Deadlines for the evening news bulletins were rapidly approaching and reporters were desperate for something to put on the air. I made an executive decision, and strode outside once again to give the assembled press a briefing… this time on camera.

It was short and succinct. I explained where and how the arm was broken, detailed the treatment that had been administered and offered assurances that HRH would be back in the saddle again soon.

I returned to pay a final visit to the Prince who was settling in for what his doctors anticipated would be a two-day stay. He had seen my briefing and was gracious enough to thank me for doing as he would have wished without having to ask.

That being my job, I thought nothing more of it. Meanwhile, what was potentially a much bigger news story was unfolding. HRH had a visitor – a Mrs Camilla
Parker Bowles. Where she had sprung from I had no idea, but Charles was clearly pleased to see her. Though he was still woozy from the anesthetic, he was less agitated in her company. She didn’t stay long, just long enough to make sure he was comfortable and to assure him that she was close by if needed.

Personally, I never gave her presence much thought. The senior members of the Household knew what was going on, and if the worst came to pass, we would batten down the hatches and ride out the storm.

Over the course of the next two days, I returned to Cirencester to corral the press, and on the morning the Prince was discharged, I was on hand to provide a final briefing.

It had been an eye-opening couple of days. I wasn’t privy to Charles and Camilla’s meetings, but had I been, and had I ventured an opinion about the potential for exposure, I would have been told in no uncertain terms to get lost.

It was my first real glimpse into the grim reality of the Waleses marital situation. When the Prince left hospital, he and the Princess put on an impressive display of unity, but in reality they were anything but unified.

I had a sense that difficult times lay ahead, but when I finally left for London, my principal feeling was one of profound relief that no-one had cottoned on to the bigger picture. The resultant headlines, particularly in the
tabloids, would have been a gift to editors, and the front pages that might have been didn’t bear thinking about.

I returned to the Palace feeling rather buoyant. The Prince’s arm would heal; the press was satisfied, and best of all there had been no leaks hinting at the much larger fracture – the state of the Waleses marriage. I was surprised, therefore, at the conclusion of the morning meeting when Charles Anson, my senior, asked me to stay behind.

The royal press office then was a very different beast to the one operating today. Where now there is a team of some 27 people, in the late 1980s and early 90s, we were a much smaller affair. There was the press secretary in charge, and three other press secretaries, each with an overall portfolio. John Haslam looked after the Duke of Edinburgh, the Princess Royal and the royal finances. Geoff Crawford looked after Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of York and Prince Edward. I looked after the Prince and Princess of Wales. Five information officers ably backed us up, one of which was responsible for the Court Circular and public enquiries. We were a grand total of nine, and a pretty close-knit team, so I was dismayed to have been singled out to stay after the meeting. I had a feeling that I was about to get a good dressing down. The question was, why?

Charles Anson wasted no time in telling me. My sin proved to be the on-camera briefing I had given outside the hospital. It was not the royal way to speak on camera, and I shouldn’t have taken it upon myself to do so. No Buckingham Palace press officer had ever spoken on camera before. Our role was to brief the correspondents off the record, full stop.

I was more than a little irritated. I had done my job professionally, and to the Prince’s satisfaction. I was almost 50 years old, and yet I’d been treated like I was new to the game.

I kept my thoughts to myself, but after leaving Anson’s office, I put in a call to the Prince of Wales. It was an impulsive act, something I’d never done before, but given that Charles had thanked me personally, I felt that the situation needed to be rectified. In the grand scheme of things it was a minor transgression, especially given the much bigger crisis that had been avoided with reference to Mrs Parker Bowles.

I felt both cheered and vindicated that my little knee-jerk act of petulance paid off. At the morning meeting the following day, Charles Anson explained that HRH had called to say how pleased he was with the way I had handled the broken arm incident.

Despite the call from the Prince, there was no change in Palace policy. The royal communications strategy was stuck in the dark ages, but I toed the line from then on. It would have been nice to set a broadcasting precedent, but I was on staff, and one simply didn’t break the rules.