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Airways. Relations between Palace and press (who behaved with admirable restraint
with regard to Prince William during his adolescent years) took a sharp turn for the
worse when a tabloid reporter, posing as a rich sheikh in need of public-relations
advice, entrapped Sophie Rhys-Jones, now the Countess of Wessex, into unguarded
remarks about the royal family and leading politicians. The result was an unedifying
spat between the Palace and the Press Complaints Commission, and the episode fuelled
public discussion – centring on the Wessexes’ roles as television producer and publicrelations
executive – of the extent to which members of the royal family might use their
position for commercial advantage. The row deepened in the autumn of 2001 when
Edward’s television production company, Ardent, was accused of breaching the rules
covering Prince William’s arrival for his first term at St Andrews University by
continuing to film after all the other media, conforming to the agreement, had left.
Ardent’s action was universally condemned, not least by the Prince of Wales.
There has been a noticeable dilution in recent years of the upper-class element in the
household, an acknowledgement of the need for change in the wake of the turmoil
created by the ‘People’s Princess’. Elizabeth herself, when speaking in public, has lost a
good deal of her cut-glass accent, and people even claim to detect a strain of ‘estuary
English’, as spoken in the popular television soaps. There has been an upgrading of the
status of women; for the first time the Press Secretary is a woman, Penelope Russell-
Smith, although the first woman Deputy Private Secretary, Mary Francis, has returned to
the business world and the positions occupied by other women are relatively minor.
Women in their traditional role, gracious, well-dressed, charming, are acceptable as
ladies-in-waiting or, on a lower level, as secretaries – ‘lady clerks’ – dressers,
housekeepers and chambermaids (chefs are always male). The senior women in the
royal family – Elizabeth, the Queen Mother and Margaret – are as much responsible for
this attitude as are the senior male members of the household. While the senior royal
ladies show good judgement in the women they choose to be ladies-in-waiting and have
an excellent rapport with them (Margaret, the most demanding, difficult and capricious
of the royal women, has the most intelligent ladies-in-waiting), they all of them prefer
men as companions and conversationalists and in a professional capacity. The Queen
Mother, who was young in the 1920s and 1930s, probably the most bitchy and
competitive era as far as society women were concerned, tends to the traditional view
that all beautiful women are stupid and intelligent women ugly, although she admitted
the biographer Elizabeth Longford as the one exception.
Although there are no black faces in evidence within the Palace walls, no one could
accuse Elizabeth of being racist. The Commonwealth Secretariat is set up just down the
Mall from Buckingham Palace in Marlborough House and its head, the Secretary-
General, has the right of direct access to the Queen as head of the Commonwealth. To
anyone who attends Commonwealth occasions, such as the annual Commonwealth Day
reception, it is obvious how happy Elizabeth is in that ambience and how much she is
genuinely loved and appreciated there. Many Commonwealth people have been
surprised and offended by the recent sustained British attacks on the monarchy. The