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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society Production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And we're delighted to be joined for this special edition of the pod by Valentine Low, former Royal correspondent of The Times, who's written a new book about the relationship between Downing Street and the Palace.

It's full of fascinating anecdotes about how kings and queens have clashed with their prime ministers over the years as the. Powers of the monarchy have perhaps receded a bit, but its place in public affection has remained fairly solid. Valentine's book is called Power and the Palace, and it's published by Headline Press. And Valentine, the first thing I wanted to ask you about was that very point, the power of the monarchy is a [00:01:00] great deal less now than it used to be in the period. You start this book with Queen Victoria's reign. Queen Victoria was quite keen in intervening in British foreign policy, not least because Britain was often dealing with heads of states who were very close relatives of hers.

Valentine Low: Yeah, it's fascinating and it's the reason why I wanted to write the book because I wanted to understand how Queen Victoria was so politically active, meddlesome you might say, and how we got from there, to Queen Elizabeth II, who went out of her way to remove herself from politics or in the phrase of a private secretary, to be above politics.

And yeah, Victoria expressed opinions about who her prime ministers should be. She tried to get ministers sacked. One particular bugbear of hers was Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary, a very prominent foreign secretary who could have wanted to get on with the business of being foreign secretary. And she wanted to insist that all messages to ambassadors which went out in her name should go through her and things like that. And he thought that was a [00:02:00] frightful interference with Foreign Office business and used to just not do it.

Mark D'Arcy: He forgot.

Valentine Low: Yeah, he forgot. Exactly. And made excuses. And this used to enrage her and she tried to get him sacked. She failed.

But yeah, she was very, very politically active and she had strong opinions about foreign policy matters. For instance, during the Russo Turkish war when she was very, very anti-Russia, and she used to send missives to the Cabinet, laying out what she believed, which is a kind of reversal of what was even then thought to be the agreed position, which was the Cabinet advised her, not her advising the Cabinet.

Mark D'Arcy: Those were the days, and she had very strong opinions about her various different prime ministers. Her first Prime Minister was Lord Melbourne, who seems to have been a bit of a father figure towards her, to the extent that even after he'd been Prime Minister she would see him quite a lot. And his successor, Robert Peel, got quite concerned that she was taking political advice from someone other than him.

Valentine Low: Yes. That was not the only time. I think [00:03:00] after Disraeli being Prime Minister, she also spoke to him on the sly, totally against the accepted norms of behaviour. She should only be getting advice from her Prime Minister and from the Cabinet.

Mark D'Arcy: But was there even then a sense that the, as it were, the tide of power was receding from the Palace?

Valentine Low: Yes, very much so. And when we talk about the Constitution, we kind of act as if there's an agreed view on what the Constitution says at any one point. And there wasn't. When Queen Victoria wanted to get Palmerston kicked out, some people, I think the Prime Minister, said it was perfectly within her rights, and others vehemently disagreed.

And the same about her views about how the Foreign Office should be run. Lord Clarendon, who was a sort of very witty figure who was quite sort of sly in his criticism of Victoria, he used to call her the Mrs, and when he was Foreign Secretary and he and Queen Victoria had disagreements, he would say that the Mrs and I have had a bit of a tiff.

He said, vis-à-vis her interferences in Foreign Office matters, [00:04:00] Victoria and Albert seemed to have this peculiar idea that the Foreign Office is their own personal department and they have a role in how it's run. So he was very much against it. So people even then did not agree about exactly what the constitution said.

Mark D'Arcy: There was an occasion even later on though, where the monarch was still a force. Edward VII goes to Paris and has a state visit in Paris and wins over a previously rather hostile French population by the sheer sort of force of monarchical charm.

Valentine Low: Yes. And what was fascinating about that was first, how he had done it without informing the Government. So when he set off, he said he went on this sort of grand tour of Europe. He was going to take in, I can't remember where, possibly Gibraltar, possibly Italy. And he set off with sort of 70 pieces of baggage as a huge trip. And he didn't tell the Foreign Secretary, he didn't tell the ambassador in Paris, and he did not even tell his own wife that his real plan was to call in on Paris on his way back, no one knew, and it was only when he [00:05:00] was possibly in Gibraltar, it was only when he was there, that he told the Government that he was going to go to Paris and meet the French President. As you say, he won them over. And this was at a time when Britain was first to sort out its sort of strategic role in the world. This was 1903. And we had to decide whether to ally ourselves with France and Russia or with Germany, the two sort of growing power axes as it were. And the problem was, with the French, was that they didn't like us at the time. When Edward VII arrived in France, he was pretty unpopular. People used to shut "Vive les Boers!", the most insulting thing you could say to the British about a year or so after the end of the Boer War.

And with his charm, his knowledge of French and his schmoozing of French actresses in the French theatre, he won them over. And by the end of it, they were shouting "Vive le Roi!" And so the next year, you have the entente cordiale. Now, of course, Edward VII did not negotiate the entente cordiale. He had nothing whatsoever to do with it, but he did a very [00:06:00] successful job of setting the groundwork, setting the atmosphere in which that was negotiated. And writers at the time did acknowledge that he played a significant role in the success of that.

Ruth Fox: And Valentine, one of the big questions that we discuss on this podcast is House of Lords reform. A long running question. One can't imagine today King Charles gathering political leaders at Buckingham Palace to use his convening power and bang heads together to sort out a solution for Lords reform.

And yet, just a few years on from the period we've just been talking about, George V does exactly that in the aftermath of the crisis around the Liberal Party budget in 1910-1911

Valentine Low: And in particular, what George V does is he tries to solve the problem about the Home Rule Bill in Ireland. So that was hugely contentious, very difficult. They decided that there would be Home Rule for Ireland, but bits of Ulster would not be seceded, they would remain within Britain. And the problem was, and the problem, which remains to this day, you might [00:07:00] argue, is where to draw the border. And he invited people from each party, I think it was a total of four people from each side, to Buckingham Palace. It was a four day conference and of course he was hopeless, achieved nothing, because it was such an intractable problem. But it is kind of fascinating, the idea that he should try to solve it that way, because the idea of having a political conference in Buckingham Palace now is completely unthinkable. And it was, it was with the best of intentions and it was a sort of honest and sincere effort to be an honest broker.

Mark D'Arcy: These days, of course, as you say, something like that wouldn't happen and power has in many ways receded away from the monarchy. But the one thing that still happens is that prime ministers have very regular, usually at least weekly, meetings with the sovereign, at least while parliamentary term is on.

And those are quite an interesting institution in their own right, sort of confessional. There have been plays about it, although prime ministers are never actually supposed to speak about what the monarch says to them. How important is that? Is that an institution that's also [00:08:00] changed over the years?

Valentine Low: Yes. I mean, it became regularised in the second World War. So prime ministers and sovereigns have had regular meetings since forever. If you go back to when Queen Victoria's first on the throne and Melbourne is her Prime Minister, he was practically living at Windsor Castle. He had his own apartment there. They would go riding together in the afternoon. She'd be quite cross if he wasn't there at dinner.

So these meetings are built-in, in a sense. But other times, Lloyd George was forever cancelling meetings with George V. George V used to get quite cross about it, and even Lloyd George's mistress, Frances Stevenson, said he treated the King appallingly. But in the Second World War, after Churchill had become Prime Minister, he'd had meetings with George VI, and you know, sometimes they were a couple of times a month, sometimes they were less frequently than that or more, you know, it was not on a regular basis, but they decided quite early on to have lunch once a week at the Palace. And the lunch, initially, they had [00:09:00] Palace footman serving them their lunch, particularly trusted ones you'd be careful, who wouldn't, you could be sure wouldn't sort pick up some secrets and blab, but after a while they decided to ditch the servants and they would just help themselves off the sideboard to whatever it was, roast beef, I don't know. And that was the basis of the kind of formalised weekly audience.

And yeah, we never know exactly what's said. Peter Morgan in his play of The Audience did a good job of making it up. But I mean, it was a fiction. And I think some have been more convincing than others. Churchill famously used to go into his audiences with the very young Elizabeth II with a particularly jaunty air. And he was once asked what they talked about. He said, oh, racing mostly. Others I think were more sticky. I mean, I think the Queen found Macmillan a bit of a bore. He used to lecture her. I mean a Balliol man with a sense of intellectual superiority, who knew? But Jim Callaghan got it right, because Jim Callaghan, who got on very well with the Queen, [00:10:00] I mean, she once went for a walk around the garden of Buckingham Palace with him, it was particularly a nice evening after the audience, and she gave him a flower for his buttonhole He was absolutely tickled by that, but he correctly said that what the Queen offered you was friendliness, not friendship.

Mark D'Arcy: Interesting how often the monarch has tended to get on quite well with Labour prime ministers, even if they're initially suspicious of their socialism, starting with Ramsay MacDonald.

Valentine Low: Yes. I mean, the Palace was very suspicious of socialism, and, and they had been for quite some years. I recently saw a memo in the Palace of 1918, which referred to the rise of socialism and the possibility of a Labour government even then, and they were clearly quite exercised about it.

And you know, George V was, as Lloyd George used to say, an out and out Tory, no doubt about it whatsoever. And he was very worried about the Labour government, but he was determined to give them a fair shot and the first [00:11:00] meeting with Ramsay MacDonald, when Ramsay MacDonald becomes Prime Minister, goes extremely well. George V talked a lot at him. And afterwards, Ramsay MacDonald said that he was "most friendly". And they had a very good relationship, those two, and not just Ramsay MacDonald, there were other ministers in that first Labour government in particular, a chap called Jimmy Thomas, who's this sort of former Welsh railwayman who George V got on incredibly well with, and they used to laugh and joke the whole time.

Ruth Fox: And of course, as well as the socialists, of course, the late Queen had the first female Prime Minister. And of course we've had all sorts of stories come out about whether or not the Monarch got on with Mrs Thatcher. But the suggestion is that actually, it may have been awkward at times over issues like the Commonwealth and sanctions over South Africa and so on. But actually it was not a personally problematic relationship. And actually the Queen, you know, she attended her Margaret Thatcher's 80th birthday party, I think. And of course she attended Margaret Thatcher's funeral, which was [00:12:00] pretty close to state level funeral rights.

Valentine Low: Yes. They didn't have an easy relationship. They were such different characters. I mean, the Queen was a country woman. Margaret Thatcher wasn't, so Margaret Thatcher used to hate her trips to Balmoral. They kind of had different views. Queen was an instinctive conservative with a very small "c". She was in favour of, if there had to be change, that should be gradual change. Margaret Thatcher, of course, was an iconoclast, and as you say, they disagreed quite strongly about the Commonwealth. But I think the Queen didn't hate Margaret Thatcher, but I think she was possibly exasperated by her. And of course there were other issues on which they differed. The Queen was very concerned about the effects of the miners' strike, on the divisions it was causing within the country. So there were differences, but I think it was a better relationship than you might have gleaned by watching The Crown.

Mark D'Arcy: Was the source of the exasperation perhaps when Margaret Thatcher went in the later phase of her premiership into kind of gloriana mode?

Valentine Low: Yes. I mean, I think the Queen has been [00:13:00] asked about it and said, like all prime ministers, she didn't listen.

Mark D'Arcy: I wanted to talk a little bit about how the monarch gets involved in difficult political questions, even if it's very unwillingly. And fortunately for the purposes of this discussion, a a lot of that's encapsulated in the premiership of Boris Johnson, where there are a series of kind of constitutional moments.

Let's start off with the 2019 Prorogation of Parliament, where Boris Johnson advised Elizabeth II to suspend Parliament for a five week period. And this was essentially to stop his opponents in Parliament finding ways to interfere with his Brexit plans as he was negotiating with the European Union.

And he wanted to be able to wield the threat of leaving without a deal if necessary. And Parliament, a majority in Parliament, was determined not to let him do that. And the Prorogation came out of [00:14:00] that, but it was overturned in the Supreme Court and that was a bit of a whoops moment to put it gently.

Valentine Low: Yes. So famously, three members of the Privy Council - Jacob Rees-Mogg being President of the Council - went up to Balmoral to get the Queen to agree to formally set in motion for the Prorogation, but of course, it had all been agreed before. We read that Boris Johnson did speak to the Queen on the phone. Significantly, this was in the absence of the Cabinet Secretary. The Cabinet Secretary, Mark Sedwill, was on holiday at the time, it was the secret plan, Prorogation was a secret plan.

Mark D'Arcy: They did this around him rather than through him.

Valentine Low: They very much did it around him, and also the Deputy Helen MacNamara. So they had no idea it was going to happen, and they weren't expecting it to happen because Privy Councils rarely are held in August.

As someone said to me, turns out people can get on a plane. So Boris Johnson and two others got on a plane. And the Queen, when it was first put to the Palace that this should happen, the Palace has been a bit of a [00:15:00] quandary because the Queen acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. Which, to put it in crude terms, she does what she's told.

But this was very unusual and it was obviously for political motives. And the Queen's Private Secretary didn't seek formal legal advice - this is Edward Young - but he did take some soundings, very informal soundings from lawyers, and the message that came back was, this is highly unusual, but there's nothing legally wrong with it.

The Queen had no choice. Her hands were tied. But obviously after this thing gets overturned by the Supreme Court, some people in the Palace were pretty cross about it. They thought the Queen had been put in an embarrassing situation. She'd been embarrassed. And there was a view in Whitehall, they got the impression that the Palace thought this man, Boris Johnson, has done something which has been deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, why is he still there? Now the Palace has always tried to give the impression [00:16:00] that the Queen was quite sanguine about it all. I think in general the Queen was pretty sanguine about Boris Johnson. But I think the Palace more generally was quite cross, but there was nothing they could do.

Mark D'Arcy: These things are normally managed through something called the Golden Triangle, which is a combination of the Queen's Private Secretary, the Prime Minister's Principal Private Secretary, and the Cabinet Secretary. And between them, they kind of manage these questions and everybody's sounded out in advance and it's a kind of early warning system and that clearly didn't work on this occasion.

Valentine Low: Yes, you're absolutely right. The Golden Triangle is meant to be an early warning system. The Prime Minister's Private Secretary and the sovereign's Private Secretary can often talk on the phone every day. And someone put it to me that, at that time, the Golden Triangle wasn't really working.

Mark Sedwill, the Cabinet Secretary, was hard to get hold of on holiday, and you had a new Private Secretary at Number 10, Martin Reynolds, who was still finding his feet. And the [00:17:00] system just wasn't working in the way it should.

Mark D'Arcy: And that wasn't the last of it.

Ruth Fox: No, I mean the other, so I suppose the second, constitutional crisis of Boris Johnson's period is the decision to call the 2019 general election when we'd only had a general election two years prior.

And of course at this point Parliament is deadlocked by Brexit and what will happen. And the Prime Minister wants, basically, he thinks that the Parliament is no longer functional and he needs a general election to sort of flush it out so that he can go to the country, win the election and get his Brexit deal through.

But there were some who said, well actually, this is still a viable Parliament, you may have different views on things, but it is still a viable Parliament, it's only been in existence for two years. And again, there were questions about whether the Queen should have granted the general election, the dissolution.

Valentine Low: Yep. And, and there are these famous principles, the grounds on which a sovereign can refuse a request for dissolution. They call it the Lascelles Principle [00:18:00] after a famous letter that George VI's Private Secretary Sir Alan Lascelles wrote at the time under a nom-de-plume, "Senex", in which he laid out the various conditions under which a sovereign can decline a request for dissolution.

Now, the interesting thing about that is the question is, do those principles still hold? Because when the Fixed-term Parliaments Act was introduced by the Coalition Government, it did away with all that because the sovereign's prerogative to refuse a request for dissolution no longer was relevant. But then that Act gets repealed, which was a period of time that the Palace found very testing, because it involved restoring a Royal Prerogative, and they'd never done that before. No one really knew how to do it.

Mark D'Arcy: They had taken them away on many occasions, but this time one was coming back.

Valentine Low: Yeah. And the interesting question is that no one really knows whether these famous Lascelles Principles still hold.

Ruth Fox: Just for listeners' benefit, Valentine, just to refresh our memories about the Lacelles Principles, so [00:19:00] this is this constitutional convention dating back to 1950, under which the sovereign can refuse a request from the Prime Minister to dissolve Parliament. And there are three principles, three conditions. If the existing Parliament is still vital, viable, and capable of doing its job. If a general election would be detrimental to the national economy. And if the sovereign could rely on finding another Prime Minister who could govern for a reasonable period with a working majority in the House of Commons. So there we are. And are they still, as you say, are they still in existence? Can you magic them back into existence, abracadabra-like, having abolished them?

Valentine Low: I tried very hard when I was writing the book to work out whether they still existed, and I couldn't come to an answer. And I looked at all sorts of official House of Commons documents. There was nothing there which made it clear. And in 2021, the Government would only say that it was not possible to predict [00:20:00] every scenario that the country might face. And this kind of evasiveness and blurring of the situation, it often suits people. I've spoken to the Palace and they actually, for instance, they'd like the fact that we don't have a written constitution or a codified constitution, because it gives you the flexibility to adapt to circumstances.

And this is a classic example of that. It will give constitutional experts and lawyers plenty of things to do, plenty of things to argue about, should this ever arise. But at the moment it is certainly not clear. And perhaps we need another letter from an anonymous Private Secretary to the Queen, to The Times, to clarify it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, of course the thing that's missing in all of this that emerged in 2010, when in advance of the 2010 general election, in anticipation of what was going to be a difficult general election, and what turned out to be a Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition, was this concept of a Cabinet Manual. Taken, inspired from the [00:21:00] experience in New Zealand, of writing down some of these principles and conventions and drawing it all together so that the public and civil servants and others could have an understanding of the constitutional situation. Now that, I understand, has been updated. But apart from a few constitutional experts and lawyers and senior people, presumably in Downing Street and Whitehall and the Palace, nobody else has seen it because the revised version has never emerged - even though the House of Lords Constitution Committee has, I think several times, urged that it should be published and subject to consultation.

Valentine Low: And I've spoken to people who have seen it and they say it's gotten vastly longer - much to its detriment.

Mark D'Arcy: Isn't it extraordinary though, that we're talking about you've spoken to people who have seen it, this is treated as a kind of constitutional grimoire that is held in capitalistic secrecy in a locked cabinet somewhere in the Cabinet Office, and is never seen by mere mortals.

Valentine Low: Yes. And I don't know the answer to the question of why it's not [00:22:00] been seen. Maybe they realise it's deeply flawed.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a mess.

Valentine Low: Yes.

Ruth Fox: If it's written by civil servants, it perhaps will be, given that the first version on Parliament was not particularly good.

Mark D'Arcy: Another area where there was a lot of creative blurring in our constitutional arrangements was also touched on in the Boris Johnson period, which is what happens if a Prime Minister unexpectedly dies in office. And there had been a couple of occasions when this might have happened. Margaret Thatcher might have been unlucky when the IRA bombed her hotel in the 1984 Conservative Party conference. She survived. Tony Blair had a heart operation. He survived that very easily. It was a very routine operation. But again, he might not have. Boris Johnson famously was rushed to hospital with COVID and might not have survived. And no one quite knows what would happen. Because normally, if a Prime Minister departs before they go, it's their job to advise the sovereign on who to ask to succeed them. There's a little incident involving Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home we may touch on here. But at [00:23:00] this point, nobody knew what to do and someone had to make up a constitutional doctrine of what would happen, who would advise the sovereign to do what in those unhappy circumstances.

Valentine Low: This is a fascinating period. Because what did happen when Boris Johnson went to hospital is that he phoned his Private Secretary, Martin Reynolds, and said that he wanted Dominic Raab the Foreign Secretary to take over, essentially be acting Prime Minister, but I think he was going to be called first Secretary of State. As you say, unclear what's going to happen if Johnson dies.

And so what Mark Sedwill, the Cabinet Secretary had to do, was invent the constitutional convention, and it was quite a big thing to do.

Ruth Fox: Sedwill's Law,

Valentine Low: This is how our constitution changes over time. People make up rules and all the precedents because the Constitution is always about precedent. All the precedent pointed in the same direction, that it was up to the Cabinet to make a collective recommendation to the sovereign as to who should be appointed Prime Minister. [00:24:00] Now, what was interesting about this is if Sedwill did canvas opinion, who did he speak to? One can guess former Cabinet Secretaries. People like Vernon Bogdanor or who knows, but that's the sort of person you would imagine he would speak to. He didn't make the mistake of saying, what do you think should happen? Because of course you then get six different replies. What he did instead was say, I think this should happen. Do you agree or not? Unfortunately, they all agreed and that's how the Constitution evolves.

Mark D'Arcy: And so that's how another chapter in our unwritten constitution is penned. But it's a very rare circumstance. I can't think of a Prime Minister who's actually died in office all the way back to, I think Spencer Perceval, who was assassinated in [1812].

Valentine Low: Yes, exactly. The others have retired just before they're about to die.

Mark D'Arcy: But it's an area where in America, you know what happens. There's an order of succession, it's the Vice President, and if the Vice President isn't there, it's the Speaker of the House. And then there's a descending hierarchy of people who can step in. The British [00:25:00] unwritten constitution, I suppose one could argue it's more flexible, but it means that someone's got to muddle through at a pretty critical moment.

Valentine Low: Yeah. What's always interesting in this is the role of these constitutional experts People like Vernon Bogdanor, Rodney Brazier, people like that, they occasionally get summoned to the Cabinet Office for a lunch. This happened when the Cabinet Manual was being drawn up and they had a sort of convivial sandwich lunch, at which they discussed some key paragraph of the Cabinet Manual canvasing their opinions, and also importantly, getting them all on side.

Mark D'Arcy: Because the last thing you want is an op-ed piece by someone saying, this is nonsense.

Ruth Fox: Let's take a quick break

Mark D'Arcy: And we're back. Of course the monarchy is never supposed to have controversial opinions about any live political question, but there are a couple of occasions - oddly enough, both of them in referendum campaigns - where the views of the monarch have cropped up as an issue. The 2014 Independence referendum for Scotland for a start, where [00:26:00] the Queen was more or less drafted in, as you described by David Cameron.

Valentine Low: Yes, that was fascinating because it was a few days to go before the referendum vote. And on the Sunday the Queen is at church up at Balmoral and someone from the crowd outside asked her what she thought about the referendum or whether she had any thoughts to share.

And she famously said she hoped the people of Scotland would think very carefully. And the Palace absolutely denied at the time, bare-faced denial, that there was any intention in this. It was, she was just saying the obvious. All totally spontaneous. It later emerged that it absolutely was a plot between Number 10 who were desperate for help because the poll said actually it was going to be rather closer than they thought, they might even lose. They were desperate for help. It was a plot between Number 10 and the Palace, and they cooked up this very clever form of words, which on paper were [00:27:00] innocuous, but everybody knew what they meant.

Mark D'Arcy: And famously, David Cameron was later rather indiscreetly heard to say that the Queen had purred when the referendum result came in and it was a No vote to Independence.

Valentine Low: That's right. Yes. Cameron was very embarrassed by that afterwards, he'd been picked up on the microphone, and he had to apologise to the Queen.

Ruth Fox: A few years later on, in the European Union referendum on Brexit, she didn't say anything, but it subsequently came out she may have been a secret remainer.

Valentine Low: Yes. So the headline at the time, so a few weeks or months before the referendum vote, there was a front page story in The Sun, which said Queen Backs Brexit. And this is based on a lunch that had happened at Windsor Castle about five years earlier at which the Queen had expressed views about the European Union. I think she basically said she just didn't understand the EU.

Ruth Fox: She wasn't the only one. Turned out quite a lot of MPs didn't either.

Valentine Low: Exactly. [00:28:00] And there's a big round about this, you know who's behind the story. Nick Clegg accused Michael Gove of leaking this story. The Sun got its knuckles wrapped by the press watchdog. Because they said that the text, the copy in the story, did not justify the headline of Queen Backs Brexit. How could it? It'd been five years earlier, this lunch, before anyone was even talking about a referendum to leave. I then spoke to a minister who said that in the run up to the vote they had spoken to the Queen, and the Queen had said that she didn't think we should leave the EU. She thought, better the devil you know. Now, this is not to say that the Queen was a rampant remainer. I think you'd probably classify her as a reluctant remainer, but she definitely, if she'd had a vote, which she obviously did not, if she'd had a vote, she would've voted, Remain. Now, this conversation reached David Cameron's ears and he had to decide whether to use it in the campaign, and [00:29:00] he decided, I think probably rightly, because it had been confidential conversation with this minister and the Queen, he decided not to. But it's interesting to speculate on the what ifs of history. What would've happened if they had leaked it, and would people have been swayed?

Mark D'Arcy: And was there any comeback to the Palace for either of these kind of referendum breaches?

Valentine Low: What was interesting was when the Sun story appeared in the Brexit referendum about Queen Backs Brexit, they felt they had their hands tied because of what had happened with the Scottish referendum thing. So by clearly interfering then, even though they denied it at the time, they felt they couldn't say anything really of substance. When The Sun ran its story, they made their unhappiness known and they complained about the headline, but they couldn't complain about the substance. But of course their hands are tied in another way as well, which if they vehemently denied the story, it would look as if they were saying the Queen was a remainer. So they were kind of stuck between a rock and a hard [00:30:00] place.

Ruth Fox: One of the Labour Prime Ministers who it's said the Queen didn't get on with so well was Tony Blair. And there's a more sort of challenging relationship. But of course, particularly if you read some of the books and watch some of the dramas, some would say that it was the Blair administration and people around Blair and some of his closest advisers that helped save the monarchy at the time of the great crisis that followed the death of Diana. But that's not perhaps how the Palace saw it.

Valentine Low: Yes. I think it's a subtle and complicated picture immediately after Diana died. So she dies in the early hours of Sunday. That evening, various people from the Palace and the Government are at RAF Northolt as the plane bringing Diana's body arrives back from Paris and a senior person from the Palace, I think it's the Lord Chamberlain, says to Alastair Campbell, listen, we're having a meeting tomorrow about the funeral, I think it'd be a great idea if you came along. And Campbell says yes, and decides to bring other people, including Angie Hunter, with him. The Palace recognised they [00:31:00] needed help, but Number 10 was also very conscious of not being seen to sort of muscle in, not to make it their show, but there's no doubt that they played a strong role in shaping that week.

But also, there's no doubt this gets overlooked, that a lot of what happened is to the credit of the Palace. So for instance, the Palace recognised very early on that Diana's funeral could not be a normal royal funeral. And so for instance, the idea that representatives of Diana's charities should follow the funeral cortege, that was a Palace idea, and the idea that it should have an extended route so more people could see it, I think that also came from the Palace. So it's wrong to think that the Palace are these sort of traditionalist diehards who are resisting any change and not reading the tenor of the times, that's incorrect. But also there's doubt that the presence of Number 10 people, in particular Alastair Campbell, was an important part of what went on.[00:32:00]

But I think one of the most interesting things, so if you remember that week, it grew to a bit of a crisis in the middle of the week, because the Queen was still up at Balmoral with the boys, with William and Harry. There were a lot of demands for the Queen to say something publicly, and also there was a silly row going on about whether the flag should be at half mass or not over Buckingham Palace, because the tradition says No. And Tony Blair agreed with those who said the Queen should come down to London and she should say something. But, although he'd been Prime Minister for a few months, and obviously he'd been having his weekly audiences, he didn't feel that he had a strong enough relationship with her yet to be as blunt as he needed to be. So in fact, he rang Charles, who was obviously much closer in age to him, and he knew better in a way, and he spoke to him. And fortunately for him, Charles agreed. So he was pushing an open door with Charles, and Charles then spoke to the Queen, and then of course, as we know, the Queen did agree to come down to [00:33:00] London and did walk amongst the crowds, saw the flowers outside Buckingham Palace, and made that famous broadcast live broadcast on the Friday evening from Buckingham Palace. But it is just fascinating this idea that Blair just didn't quite have what it takes to say it directly to the Queen.

Mark D'Arcy: There seems to be a lot of effort involved in maintaining those personal relationships, and you can imagine it's a little beyond the timeframe you cover in your book, but the current crisis around Prince Andrew, and Sir Keir Starmer having to make various pronouncements about it in Parliament and elsewhere, must have taken a bit of managing for the Palace as well. I mean, with your experience of how these things work, what do you think had been going on behind the scenes there?

Valentine Low: Difficult to tell, but I'm sure there were conversations going on between the Palace, and I know there were. Exactly what was said, I don't know, but it's, I think it's significant that King Charles and Sir Keir Starmer clearly have a good relationship. I think they both worked hard at that. I think Starmer recognises the value of a [00:34:00] supportive monarchy and also recognised, clearly recognises, and we may come on to this, the value of the monarchy in terms of trying to cement relations with Donald Trump and the King, a relatively new king. He also recognises the value of having a supportive Prime Minister, and he is quite clear that Charles has wanted to be as accommodating and as helpful as he possibly can to Starmer's Labour government, and you saw that in the way that he agreed so quickly to extending to Trump an invitation to a second state visit, which is incredibly rare. They both recognised that in a way, Andrew was a problem for both of them, and they needed to solve it.

Ruth Fox: How much sort of discussion is there from your experience about whether to accept a state visit or not? Or is it just literally the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister, Number 10, they want it, it happens.

Valentine Low: There's discussion, there's a lot of discussion. I mean, generally speaking, if the Government want it, it happens. There's this thing called the [00:35:00] royal visits committee, which has various people from the Government, Foreign Office and so on, and the Palace, and they meet twice a year, and I think what happens there is that they don't make requests that they know will go down badly. Someone put it to me, as someone who has sat on those committee meetings, that actually the discussions happen beforehand. So for instance, you'll notice that Prince Charles, as he was then, was never sent to China, never asked to go to China. Because they realised he wouldn't want to, but Prince William did. So there's no point pushing someone to do something that's going to be incredibly awkward. But there had been times, so the Queen famously had Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania over in, I think 1979. She was quite unhappy about that. He was a ghastly visitor, but she had to do it. He was a notoriously awful guest. At one point, I think he was walking with his wife in the gardens of Buckham Palace and she actually hid behind a bush to avoid talking to him. [00:36:00] But as David Owen, who was the Foreign Secretary who engineered this visit, said, and I think absolutely right, the Queen had to take her share of the ghastliness of government, the compromises that we have to make. In the early 1970s, the Queen went to Iran, and she didn't want to go, not least because I think she found the Shah of Iran a frightful bore, but she went, it was her duty, she recognised that. But some Foreign Office official wrote in some documents a scribbled aside: Poor Queen, she really didn't want to go.

Mark D'Arcy: That I suppose, is show business. But I suppose there's one question here about the show business side of the monarchy. There's a lot of talk now that that Britain might edge towards a Scandinavian-style bicycling monarchy, a lot less formal, a lot less glamorous. If it does that, state visits are a bit less of a prize. The next American president might be a bit disappointed if he comes along and it's not the level of glitz that Donald Trump enjoyed, for example.

Valentine Low: Well, yeah, this is a really interesting [00:37:00] area because Prince William quite clearly wants to introduce greater informality into how the monarchy works. You know, I've seen him on endless visits saying, Call me William. He's hinted that when he becomes King, the coronation won't be like his father's coronation, without actually saying what it would be like. But it's kind of interesting that when the Palace was talking to the Government about Charles's coronation, they kind of presented a plan which someone senior in the Government described to me as Royal Wedding Plus, you know, so a certain amount of folderol and ceremony and tradition, but not too much. And the Government came back at them and said, no, actually we think you could go a bit further than this. Because the Palace was very conscious of the cost-of-living crisis at the time. They didn't want to be seen to be too extravagant and out of touch of the experience that people were going through, but the Government said, no, we think you should put on a bit of a proper show. I mean, not go crazy, [00:38:00] not be needlessly extravagant. So they pushed back, and I just wonder, when William is King, will a similar argument take place? Will the Government say, actually we do need a bit of a show, because of course, when Donald Trump came for his second state visit, what he wanted was that carriage drive, and it was one of the most absurd carriage drives ever, because the point about a carriage drive, open carriages, assuming it's not raining, the point about them is to be seen by the public. That's why you have them, so you can wave from the carriages as you go down The Mall. This state visit, the carriage drive was within the grounds of Windsor Castle and there was no public there whatsoever, so it was completely pointless, apart from television images and flattering Donald Trump's ego.

Ruth Fox: There is this vexed question that comes up in Parliament, as part of the public debate, is about the cost of the royals, and whether or not changes should be made. Obviously after the great fire at Windsor Castle, changes were made to the [00:39:00] taxation arrangements and so on. But a big, big issue. How much do they cost? How much do they pay in tax? Where does the money come from in terms of the Duchy of Cornwall and so on. Where do you think that's headed under Prince William?

Valentine Low: Well, it's very interesting. So this has all been raised yet a again because of the Prince Andrew crisis.

Ruth Fox: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as we must now call him.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes, the artist formerly known as Prince.

Valentine Low: I can't believe I did that. Mr Mountbatten-Windsor. Yep. I think these rows about money, they're always symbolic and performative rather than real. So it's how people feel about these financial issues. For instance, when the Queen realised it was about time she started paying income tax, her advisers said to her, well, you know, you can put an awful lot of things against tax and in the end you won't be financially that much worse off. So it was all about the symbolism about whether she paid tax [00:40:00] rather than the fact that she'd be having to cough up a lot more money. And when the Andrew crisis emerged, it was not about how much the royal family cost, as to whether the Crown Estate, which is where he lived, he lived in a place, Royal Lodge in Windsor, on a secretive deal with the Crown Estate, which has since been made public, and it turns out he basically coughed up a lot of money at the beginning and since then has paid a peppercorn rent, which basically means no rent at all. And the point there was whether the Crown Estate was getting value for money, because of course the money that the Crown Estate earns, that all goes to the taxpayer.

These things are difficult for the royal family. But when George Osborne was renegotiating how Palace finances worked, he was conscious of the fact that he wanted to get it solved. But he knew that in the greater scheme of things it didn't make much difference, because these were small sums compared to the sort of sums that he normally had to deal with - the cost [00:41:00] of the NHS, the cost of the latest great infrastructure project - small numbers of millions is what the royal family, and he just wanted to solve it. And I think that has been the attitude, but it doesn't stop the fact that people get extremely exercised about it. And we've seen recently David Dimbleby, after years of doing all these broadcasts in which he is almost revering the royal family as he commentates on weddings and so and so forth, he has done a series of documentaries in which he looks at the finances and it never looks good for the royal family. It's always a good stick with which to beat them, and they do have a problem. Normally, these issues go away. They arise for a while and then they sort of ebb away. And with the Public Accounts Committee looking into the Crown Estate and whether the deals for Andrew's rent, whether the deals for the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince [00:42:00] Edward, whether his rent was satisfactory in terms of, you know, financial benefit to the Crown Estate, that has the capacity to cause further embarrassment to the royal family.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so it could open up a can of worms. The other thing in Parliament of course, that's a, a moment of glitz and glamour, tourists particularly love it, is the State Opening of Parliament. It's quite costly, but it is a big moment and it's obviously a big important constitutional moment. The start of a new parliamentary session, the delivery of the speech from the throne by the monarch. How much back and forth is there about the wording of that speech? Because it is essentially the Government's speech, it's the outline of their legislative program. But I was reminded reading your book, of course, of the first Queen's Speech in the Blair years. Once they'd won in 97, where, to the slight horror of Tony Blair listening in, he'd apparently not taken much interest in the actual text of the speech, it had sort of been done by officials, and he hears these New [00:43:00] Labour terms emerging from her mouth.

Valentine Low: I think he described it later as New Labour twaddle, which may be a polite term for it. Yeah. And of course, but if you go back to Victoria, there were times when she would refuse to say something. She was very cross about how we'd handed back Kandahar to the Afghans after Afghan war and simply wasn't going to say it. Since then, it's been, well, actually was accepted at the time. Only she didn't recognise it. Since then, it has definitely been recognised that what is said in the Queen's speech or King's speech is simply Government policy. And no one is fooled into thinking it's actually the view of the King or Queen.

But yeah, the tone of it. And as you say, Tony Blair now cringes when he realises the rubbish that he got to the Queen to say. Not necessarily what he got her to say, but how he got her to say it. And this cropped up in Harold Wilson's time, Richard Crossman listened to one of the Queen's speeches when Harold Wilson was [00:44:00] Prime Minister and sort of thought it just sounded awful. She had to say these terrible words. And when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, there was a certain amount of back and forth between Number 10 and the Palace, again not about the content, but about the language. It shouldn't be too political. There shouldn't be anything there that looks as though it came from political campaigning.

Ruth Fox: Something akin to a party conference speech, it's not.

Valentine Low: Yeah, so they did get them to change the language about a couple of things. One of them was about Rwanda. They got to change the language about that, and the other was about Brexit. It was a bit too much "taking back control". They wanted to turn down the language there. Interesting. One of the few times the Queen has been known to actually say something about the content of Government policy was in reference to the Queen's speech, her last Queen's speech. She told Malcolm Rifkind. He asked her how she was getting on with Boris Johnson and what she thought of him. [00:45:00] And she said, she was finding it very interesting - good phrase that, very interesting - and she particularly liked something, the last paragraph of the Queen's speech that year, which was about the education of women and girls around the world, the steps the Government was taking to encourage this around the world. So there was something she liked at a Queen's speech.

Ruth Fox: And how much day-to-day knowledge does the monarch have of what is actually going on in Parliament? Because my understanding is that one of the whips writes a sort of a daily, probably a letter, but now perhaps an email, that is sent to the Palace, that goes in the box and that can potentially be quite gossipy sort of reflections. So he or she doesn't have to read Hansard, but they get a flavour of what's going on in the House of Commons.

Valentine Low: This used to be done by the Prime Minister years and years ago. Then it was done by the Home Secretary. So when Churchill, at the beginning of the last century, was Home Secretary, he used to write it, and he used to write very gossipy ones full of opinions. Actually had [00:46:00] a bit of a row with George V because he put too much opinion into it once, and there was a bit of a standoff there. The Queen, the late Queen, used to like them if they were full of life. So, Jack Weatherill, Speaker Weatherill as he later was, used to write very witty and amusing ones, which she liked a lot, and she instructed a private secretary to thank him for them. I'm sure some people write quite dull ones though.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: One of the elephant traps perhaps lurking ahead for the monarchy may come after the next election if the opinion polls are to be believed. It could be a hung Parliament, it could be a very, very complicated hung Parliament with lots of different parties vying for position.

Now the monarch has to send for someone and ask them to form a government, and they normally do that on the advice of an outgoing Prime Minister. And what then happens is that there's a King speech or a Queen's speech, which has to be approved by the House of Commons. For example, you talk about the 2010 hung parliament where eventually a Liberal–Conservative coalition was [00:47:00] formed, but there was some worry that what if Her majesty is invited to read a Queen's speech that is then rejected by the House of Commons, that was at least a bit embarrassing, even if everybody knew that the Queen wasn't responsible for the contents of the speech she had to read.

Valentine Low: Yes, this is an issue and people still argue about it, but what the Cabinet Manual makes clear is it's not so much on the advice of the outgoing Prime Minister, as the political parties should reach a consensus between them on who should be Prime Minister and what will be the challenge later on is if they are unable to reach that consensus. Famously in the 2010 election Gordon Brown was sitting there in Number 10 trying to negotiate with the Liberal Democrats, who were clearly stringing him along, their serious negotiations were with the Conservative Party, and eventually Gordon Brown loses his patience with Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, and wants to resign. And he says to Clegg: Go on Nick, I can't keep the Queen waiting. But [00:48:00] meanwhile, the Queen's Private Secretary, Christopher Geidt at the time, was telling Brown he has to hang on. He can't go until it's all sorted out, until we know who the Prime Minister is going to be. And yes, in the next election, it might be very, very tricky, and it's not clear exactly what might happen.

Mark D'Arcy: It could be a whole new set of precedents having to be set by somebody, but I was very struck how your description of that particular crisis in 2010 where Christopher Geidt was lurking around outside the Coalition negotiations, waiting to advise people on the constitutional proprieties that they might run afoul of.

Valentine Low: Yes. I mean, he was a very visible presence. He always wanted briefings from meetings immediately after they were over, but significantly the Queen was in Windsor, and this was a deliberate move to keep her physically away, obviously in constant contact by telephone with Geidt but physically out of London until it had all been agreed.

Mark D'Arcy: So some interesting precedents there for [00:49:00] the Palace to follow in 2028 or whenever the next general election is. I'm sure they must be doing a bit of thinking about it even now.

Valentine Low: Yes, exactly. And what will King Charles - if it is still King Charles - think about summoning Nigel Farage and asking him to form a government?

Mark D'Arcy: Well, it'll be an interesting moment. Well, Valentine Low, thanks very much indeed for joining Ruth and me on the pod. The book is Power and the Palace, as I said. It's published by Headline Press, available at all good bookshops. Thank you very much.

Ruth Fox: Thanks, Valentine.

Mark D'Arcy: Bye-bye.

We are taking a festive break, but we've got plenty of podcast presence over the holiday.

Ruth Fox: The account for our conversation with historian Robert Saunders about whether the job of Prime Minister has now become impossible. And Ellie Chowns, the Westminster leader of the Greens, talks about life as a new MP, having Zack Polanski as their leader outside Parliament, and what it's like to be soaring high in the opinion polls.

Mark D'Arcy: And John Pullinger, chair of the Electoral Commission, talks to us about why Britain's electoral [00:50:00] system should be treated and protected as if it was critical national infrastructure.

Ruth Fox: And we'll be back to our normal parliamentary podding on Friday 16 January. Meanwhile, if you're in the holiday spirit, perhaps you might give us a five star rating on your podcast app. It helps us grow the Parliament Matters audience, and helps other potential listeners find us. And if it's not a five star rating, oh, don't bother! See you in the New Year

Mark D'Arcy: Bye for now.

Ruth Fox: Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at @HansardSociety.

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