Her Majesty by Robert Hardman Read Free Book Online

in order of Private Secretary, Deputy Private Secretary and Assistant Private Secretary – one of whom is always in attendance. One day in 1996, a high-flying civil servant from Downing Street arrived to take the number three role. Mary Francis, a Cambridge historian and previously Private Secretary to John Major, became the first woman ever to reach the top tier at the Palace.
    ‘I was told the Palace wanted someone with a background like mine,’ she recalls. ‘It was the first time they’d had a woman and the first time they’d had someone from a Treasury or Civil Service background as opposed to the Foreign Office or the Forces. They wanted someone to help think about change and future strategy.’
    She found some of her new colleagues as unusual as they, no doubt, found her. ‘I had never met a group of people for whom militarybackground was far more important than anything to do with university,’ she recalls. ‘There was a recognition that they actually needed the injection of some rather different people.’ But she also realised that she was working for a boss who was ‘entirely pragmatic’ about the challenges ahead.
    Her colleague and Deputy Private Secretary Robin Janvrin was already driving what she calls ‘the change agenda’. Among the new projects was the creation of a Co-Ordination and Research Unit – the CRU – to monitor the spread of royal activity and act as a royal think-tank. ‘More and more people were being brought in with a more analytical approach,’ Francis explains. ‘We got a very talented diplomat from New Zealand and we used headhunters to hire in a few bright lads and lasses – the sort of people you might get to be special advisers – to work for him.’ If they uncovered some awkward home truths, says Francis, then so be it. ‘The research unit found some very interesting things. For example, the amount of time the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh spent visiting private schools compared to state schools was disproportionate to the distribution of children in the country and, when they visited a private school, they were spending longer when they got there. It turned out that they were visiting the manufacturing sector far more often than the services sector – because it’s easier to visit people making widgets whereas 80 per cent of the economy was actually in the services sector. It was a case of getting into these issues and writing it down in a wholly dispassionate way. That was the kind of thing that would then get discussed by the Royal Family at the Way Ahead Group.’
    As a result, the Queen’s ‘head of the nation’ role soon became more and more proactive. ‘The change was gradual but it was quite considerable,’ explains Francis. The Queen’s diary was a case in point. ‘When I arrived, the Queen’s engagements were decided by looking through the invitations. By the time I left, it was a case of asking: what are the important things going on in the country that our Queen should recognise and how can we put together some visits that will do that?’
    Charles Anson, the Queen’s Press Secretary of the period, says that the reformers were pushing at an open door. ‘We all agreed that we needed to get ahead of the media and not always be reacting,’ he explains. ‘There were lots of visits to hospitals and old people’s homes, walkabouts and so on. But where were the issues of modern Britain and how was the monarchy signalling that it knew and cared about these? Then we asked the Lord-Lieutenants [the Queen’s representatives in the counties] for ideas. Subsequently, we started drawing up a programme and finding the right people. It might not always be right for the Queen to do something completely new but could the Prince of Wales pick up some of these modern themes? And so it went on.’
    Another senior Household official likens these years to the meltdown which hit the financial sector in 2008. ‘You could say it was a case of managing change by