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

‘because we want to have a joined-up, working-together sort of family’, as Paul Havill puts it. ‘There was a feeling that the different households didn’t know what the others were doing; each member has their own office and their own patronages and interests and there was a need to bring them together, to be more coordinated.’ Paul goes to all the six-monthly planning meetings when each member of the family sits down with their own staff to map out their diaries for the following six months. He advises everyone of the Queen’s movements. There is a pecking order in The Firm and she is at the top, then the Prince of Wales and so on down the line of succession (excluding, for these purposes, Prince William and Prince Harry who don’t yet carry out official engagements), and their planning meetings are held in order of precedence. Each member needs to work around those higher up the food chain, and if someone is needed to cover for the Queen, a date that she can’t make but an engagement which needs some sort of royal presence, Paul puts in his bid for another member of the Royal Family to take it on. And because he has an overview of what everyone is doing, if there is a disaster somewhere, such as the Madrid bombings, he can find a member of the family to drop everything and go.
    And, as the name suggests, the CRU researches. ‘It providesan executive resource for the Queen’s private secretaries’, in civil service-speak; effectively it is a Palace think tank, picking up on what’s going wrong in the Family Firm and coming up with ideas for doing things better. And in the aftermath of Diana’s famous Panorama interview in 1995 – which happened at much the same time as the CRU was being set up – there was a strong feeling among the Queen’s staff that quite a lot was going wrong and the Princess of Wales was stealing a march on them all.

SIX
Lessons Learnt
    The public loved Diana for all sorts of reasons but not least because people felt she was in tune with them; she went down to the Embankment in London and met the homeless, she went to drug rehabilitation centres and she visited AIDS victims and held their hands. She connected with the public in a way that they liked. It wasn’t the royal way. Princess Anne once tetchily remarked, ‘The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find utterly amazing.’ She has a point; but Diana’s informality and the raw, controversial causes she adopted, symbolized a humanity that compared badly with the unemotional hands-behind-the-back approach of everyone else.
    According to one of the private secretaries involved in the process of finding a new way forward:
    That interview showed what a very different model Diana was and would continue to be, and it certainly gave impetus to the work that was going on in the Palace for change. What was their attitude to her style? Less hostility than I would have expected. There was an acceptance she was very popular and I never heard the Queen criticize Diana, but there was almost a sense of bafflement and a feeling thatthis wasn’t the style of the rest of the family. The Queen had a very strong, admirable sense herself of the need to be herself and not be something different. The Duke of Edinburgh will say, ‘We are not here to electioneer, to tout for short-term popularity’, and there was an understanding that they couldn’t adopt Diana’s style and pretend to be the kind of people they weren’t. But working out how they could be themselves and yet do somewhat different things, and show interest in somewhat different things, was something they needed a lot of help with.
    The CRU began trying to steer the Queen and other members of the family towards official engagements that were more closely aligned to what was going on in society. They used MORI and other opinion surveys to track key issues and establish people’s views on a variety of issues. They looked at current polls which