Free Her Majesty by Robert Hardman

wants to be consulted on all new ideas. ‘She’d tell you if it was a stinker.’ A state banquet might look like a time-honoured set piece but every aspect of it will be revisited every time. It’s hard to rearrange the furniture much at a place like Windsor where the St George’s Hall table is said to be the longest in Britain. But the Queen always likes to fine-tune the arrangements. A few years ago, she decided that state banquets were, simply, going on too long. She discussed it with the Master and a solution was found: lose the soup. ‘It saves twenty minutes,’ says Walker.
    The Secretary of the Master’s Department, Michael Jephson, is used to suggestions from the very top when he is compiling guest lists for a reception. Sometimes the Queen will ask him to invite an interestingperson she has just heard on the radio. She has a similar eye for detail as an employer. ‘She is very beady. She has an uncanny way of knowing exactly what is going on,’ says the current Lord Chamberlain, Lord Peel. ‘I wasn’t prepared for the level of in-depth knowledge.’ The loyalty of long-serving staff to the Monarch is reciprocated. ‘She really does feel as if she is part of a team and sometimes it shows,’ says a former senior official. In particular, she will not tolerate rudeness towards her own people.
    Many of her staff – and those who come up against her staff – talk about her pragmatism. She can display what former Prime Minister Tony Blair has described as ‘a certain hauteur’ (it would be surprising if a monarch could not) but she is not stuffy.
    Some have found that the best way of dealing with over-protective, second-guessing royal officials is to bypass them altogether and go straight to the top. It’s a high-risk strategy but sometimes it’s the only way, as the television producer Edward Mirzoeff discovered when he was filming the great 1992 royal documentary, Elizabeth R . The final scene was to be the Ghillies’ Ball at Balmoral – the social highlight of the Queen’s stay in the Highlands. It had been a fraught day. The ballroom was so gloomy that Mirzoeff had been forced to scrounge a vanload of lighting from his local ITV rivals in Aberdeen. He had even enlisted the van driver as a ‘sparks’ to light the room before the Royal Family arrived. Finally, after his crew had only been filming for a few minutes, Palace staff intervened. Mirzoeff was informed that his time was up. The cameras had intruded for quite long enough. Mirzoeff admits that he ‘nearly lost it’ with the courtiers: ‘I thought: “This can’t happen.” So I dashed across the dance floor and went straight up to the Queen – and said: “Ma’am, we have to keep on filming.”’
    He remembers the ‘Bateman looks’ * as he committed the ultimate dance-floor faux pas. But it worked. ‘I simply cannot tell you how marvellous she is in a situation like that,’ says Mirzoeff. ‘She said to me: “Fine, well just carry on.” And we got our ending. In fact, I had problems with everybody at one time or another making that film – except her.’
    As the royal biographer Kenneth Rose observes: ‘One of the most pertinent mottos of the Household is “Better Not”.’ The same is not true of the boss. After more than thirty years of sponsoring one of Ascot’s plum royal fixtures, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the diamond giant De Beers decided to step down. Only one companywas prepared to come forward with the requisite pot of money. And Betfair, an online betting company, was not what some of the Jockey Club grandees had in mind. But there was no objection when the suggestion was put to the overall boss of Ascot Racecourse. As one official explains: ‘The Queen accepted the reality. If no one else is willing to sponsor something, then there is no choice.’ What used to be called ‘Diamond Day’ became the ‘Betfair Weekend’.
    In any tricky situation, officialdom’s immediate instinct is to