It was a major undertaking which took a full year, but in 1987 Peat came up with a report that ran to 1383 pages, with no fewer than 188 recommendations for change. They were wide-ranging but fundamentally changed the working practices of every department in the Palace, from the dining arrangements to the way in which the private secretaries operated.
Michael Peat gives all the credit to David Airlie, on the grounds that identifying what was wrong was the easy bit; persuading the Queen and everyone else in the Royal Family and the household to accept it and to agree to change, was quite another matter. And, to his lasting credit, David Airlie achieved it, although he is equally modest and says that Michael Peat was the mastermind. In truth they were a formidable double act who both became extremely unpopular in the process. It was an unhappy time in the Palace with everyone uncertain about their future. One of Airlie’s stipulations was that there would be no job losses – natural wastage yes, but no one would find themselves out of a job. That was paramount because he could not put the Queen in a position where she had to sack people – they couldn’t afford bad publicity during this process – but there was a lot of uncertainty and edginess nevertheless and a feeling that each department was the next for change. But between them they achieved what many thought was the impossible.
I can’t help thinking about A. A. Milne again and his wonderful poem, ‘The King’s Breakfast’ in which the King laments the lack of butter on his breakfast table. He isn’t a fussy man but he knows what he likes. And so he tells the Queen and the Queen tells the dairymaid who goes to tell the cow. But the cow wants to go to sleep and suggests he try marmalade on his bread instead of butter. So back goes the suggestion from the cow to the dairymaid and the dairymaid to the Queen and from the Queen to the King. But the King is forlorn and sobs and whimpers and when the news reaches the cow, via the Queen and the dairymaid, the cow relents and gives him milk as well as butter. And the King is so delighted he does a little jig.
I am not sure that the dairymaid actually attended the royal breakfast before Lord Airlie called in Peat Marwick McLintock to see how Buckingham Palace might be modernized, but the royal household was certainly overrun with flunkies – ‘Why have I got so many footmen?’ the Queen was said to have asked when she saw the report. And whether A. A. Milne knew it or not, milk and butter for the royal breakfast does come from a royal herd of Jersey cows in Windsor Great Park, delivered to the Palace each morning before dawn.
The Palace dining arrangements were definitely in need of an overhaul and Peat and Airlie discussed them but decided this was one change too far for the immediate future. In the grand scheme of things, five tiers of dining and waiting staff in tailcoats was a mere detail compared with the other 188 problems they had earmarked for change, and they feared that coming between their colleagues and their comestibles might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
It was a very quaint system nonetheless and one which was only changed a couple of years ago. The most senior members of the household ate in the grandest dining room; that included the Lord Chamberlain, the private secretaries, the Master of the Household, ladies-in-waiting, press secretaries, and chaplains, senior Women of the Bedchamber, the Mistress of the Robes and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. A second dining room was the province of senior officials such as the assistants to the Master of the Household, the Chief Housekeeper and the Paymaster. Then there was one for the officials – secretaries and assistants, clerks, press officers, typists and administrative personnel. Next rung down were the stewards: pages, yeomen, the Queen’s dressers and her chauffeur. And below stairs – in the basement – was the fifth and final dining room for the most junior members of the domestic staff: under-butlers, footmen, chefs, maids, porters, postmen, plumbers, gardeners, grooms and chauffeurs.
The first summer the Palace was opened to the public, the most senior of the dining rooms was given over to the summer opening administrative staff which involved some very unpopular rearrangements. The occupants of that room took over the room belonging to the next tier down, and they in turn were forced to double up with the junior staff in the basement. Some of them had never ventured into the basement and so many got lost en route that they had to put up signs to direct them. August was not a happy month.
When change finally came, in June 2003, the four dining rooms were reduced to two. The household continues to eat separately, except during the summer opening and on a few other occasions, and everyone else has a snazzy new self-service restaurant. There is also a separate room with comfortable chairs for coffee and tea which is also open to every grade of employee. Since so many work shifts and odd hours it was the only sensible solution, and in a stroke attacked the rigid hierarchy that most enlightened companies abandoned years ago.
The organizational structure Lord Airlie discovered inside Buckingham Palace when he arrived there as Lord Chamberlain in 1984 was unique. And although he implemented well over 160 of 188 recommendations for change to make it more efficient and businesslike – including the role of the Lord Chamberlain – it remains unique to this day. Nothing compares, and yet the monarchy is more of a business today than it ever was in previous reigns. In a typical company you have a chairman, a chief executive who reports to the chairman, and four or five departmental heads who report to the chief executive. All of these posts exist in the royal household, by one name or another, but in the final analysis the Queen is the one who makes the decisions about the day-to-day affairs and so the departmental heads have direct access to the Queen over the head of the Lord Chamberlain. ‘The Lord Chamberlain is a sort of hands-on chairman of a company with one shareholder’ is the way it was described to me. The departmental heads do report to him and he chairs regular meetings with them all, but he does not get involved in the detail of whether the Queen goes to New Zealand or Birmingham, who she invites to lunch or which state coach she uses for a state visit. Before Lord Airlie took up the post there was no cohesion at the top of the household, no communication and no reporting structure, and although it is still not set in stone because of the Queen’s role in the decision-making process, it is a lot more efficient than it was before.
The names of the posts, however, are still from another era. The Lord Chamberlain is not, as the name might suggest, in charge of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. That is the Comptroller’s job – currently held by Lieutenant Colonel Sir Malcolm Ross, a thoroughly charming old Etonian of sixty plus, who spent twenty-three years in the Scots Guards and the remainder of his career in the royal household. He is a wonderful product of the two and perfect for the job of running the ceremonial side of the monarchy, which he does except when there are ‘issues of import’ such as the Princess of Wales’s funeral to be arranged. In that event, the Lord Chamberlain swings into action and takes charge of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, which is where you would have expected him to be in the first place.
Once he had completed the report, Lord Airlie arranged for Michael Peat to stay on at the Palace for the next three years to help him develop and implement the recommendations Peat had made. The two men had worked very closely together during the writing of the report and got on well together; Airlie’s past experience at Schroders and General Accident had taught him that it was vital for the chairman to work closely with the consultant. Airlie knew that many of Peat’s ideas would never fly and he was able to say so right away and eliminate unnecessary work. The entire thing was the art of the possible and some reforms had to be sacrificed in the interests of progressing more important ones.
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