Free The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor by Penny Junor

newspaper as recently as November 2004 and sparked off a massive row about education. The then Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, weighed in and openly criticized the Prince of Wales for meddling in something he knew nothing about, thus breaking the convention that members of the government never criticize members of the Royal Family in public. In fact the Prince of Wales knows a damn sight more about education than most politicians, but it would be a shame to let the facts get in the way of giving the Prince a good kicking.
    It has to be said that safe methods of communication are diminishing. The Duke of Edinburgh has seen his private letters to the Princess of Wales published for public consumption courtesy of Paul Burrell and his book, and the Prince of Wales knows all too well about the dangers of mobile phones, after finding his amorous late-night ramblings intercepted and dished up for the world’s entertainment. No wonder he doesn’t use email.
    The Prince, in fact, still writes everything in longhand, pages and pages with plenty of underlining for emphasis. He fires off memos to his staff and to his charities – Julia Cleverdon at Business in the Community calls them ‘black spider memos’ because of the colour of his ink and the frantic scribbling as his pen tries to keep up with his thoughts. And he writes letters, a habit he acquired long ago, with no apparent thought about them falling into the wrong hands.
    Says a former courtier:
    He’s one of the great letter writers, except he needs an editor; his letters are far too long. But most people find letters of condolence the most difficult things to do. He would just sit down, pick up his pen and do four pages, or whatever, and it was always absolutely brilliant. He’s a very emotional man and his emotions, unlike ‘British’ emotions, are right there, available and articulated. That’s why he likes the descendants of Winston Churchill so much; they’re very given to tears. He likes the idea of people breaking into tears.
    Charles finds he can express himself with a fountain pen. He has never used a computer and has no plans to start now, but his Luddite tendencies are not reflected elsewhere in The Firm. His father, now in his eighties – nearly thirty years older than Charles – was probably one of the first people in the land to own a laptop and has been writing letters on it and using email for as long as email has existed. Even the Queen is ahead of her eldest son. During a trip to Brunei in 1998 she remarked to the Sultan’s family, ‘I can’t write any more. I can only write on computers. You can rub things out. It’s so simple.’ The Duke of York is another devotee and has all the very latest hand-held wizardry, like his younger brother. Having worked in the film business, Edward is entirely familiar with computers and better than most at knowing how they work. Wandering into the Press Office at Buckingham Palace one day he found Ailsa Anderson, Assistant Press Secretary to the Queen, staring forlornly at a dead screen and immediately fixed it for her. The surprising thing about Edward is that for all that exposure to the real world, and all the nice touches that people report time and again, he is the most regal of all his siblings and in some respects the least relaxed about royal protocol.
    The brainstorming that produced The Way Ahead Groupthrew up another good idea: the creation of a department that has no ties with the past and is staffed by no one with a military career behind them. The Coordination and Research Unit (CRU), which was set up in 1995, is currently run by Paul Havill, a civil servant who came from the Office of Fair Trading and is on secondment for three years, which has since been extended. He is the third incumbent. His two assistants are always from the private sector – usually from companies like Price Waterhouse or Arthur Anderson – and stay for a year, perhaps two. ‘The idea is to keep the