BY EARLY 1998 the royal household had begun to take concrete steps toward applying some of the lessons from the era of Diana. After support for a republic peaked in the days following her death, it dropped to 12 percent after the Queen’s televised speech, and in the following month it returned to around 19 percent, where it had been for three decades. But the volatility of opinion during that period sent deputy private secretary Robin Janvrin to visit Robert Worcester, the American expatriate professor who had founded the MORI poll.
Since Michael Shea’s appointment as press secretary to the Queen in 1978, her advisers had been periodically meeting with Worcester over lunch in London to pick his brain about trends in public opinion toward the monarchy. Now Janvrin told Worcester that he had a budget for private polling and wanted to hire MORI. In briefings at the Palace, the pollsters assessed support for the monarchy versus a republic by region, gender, age, social class, and other demographic characteristics. Through focus groups they also developed a list of ten attributes (promoting Britain abroad, importance to Britain, highly respected, supporting and promoting charitable institutions, hardworking, in touch with lives of ordinary people, well advised, good value for money, up to date, relevant) and assessed their relative importance to the public.
The two main concerns among the Queen’s senior counselors at the outset were that the monarchy was losing support among the young, and that the royal family was perceived to be “too myopic and inward looking.” In general, the research, which included some focus groups as well as traditional surveys, established that support for the monarchy is a stable and enduring value for the British people, transcending the headline of the moment— knowledge that gave the Palace greater confidence and enabled it to take a long view. The results of the private polling over the first several years also confirmed that while support for a republic among people in their twenties ranged from 28 percent to 35 percent, by the time they reached their mid-thirties, they would “revert to the mean” of 19 percent. “People start thinking about the future, about raising kids, living in a decent country,” said Robert Worcester. “That is why the monarchy is such a deep value and so consistent.” The most conspicuous area of weakness for the royal family was the perception that they were out of touch, which was held by more than a third of the British people when polling began in the late 1990s.
While Palace officials found much of the research reassuring, they began to develop strategies to respond to public opinion and show that the royal family was “in touch.” Surveys helped the Palace choose places the Queen should visit and themes for events she sponsored. They upgraded the press secretary’s job to “communications secretary” and recruited a public relations professional from British Gas, thirty-nine-year-old Simon Lewis, on a two-year secondment, with half his salary paid by his corporate employer. He first met the Queen and Prince Philip on a Friday afternoon at the end of May 1998.
“My abiding impression was how remarkably open they were,” Lewis recalled. “We had a discussion of what I would do and what the challenges were. It was more discursive than I had anticipated.” Lewis was struck “by the interaction between the two of them, how comfortable and easy they were, and how they had both thought about this role together. It was a very balanced discussion.” Philip in particular “had thought carefully about the communications area. The probing discussion was led by him. He was very interested in the nascent website, and he was pushing the idea of direct contact with the public. He had given up on the traditional media, which he thought was unwinnable. In his view, the only way was direct communication. I was impressed by how farsighted he was.”
The royal family began to manage its public duties more closely as well. In late 1994 David Airlie had started the Way Ahead Group to bring together the Queen, Prince Philip, their four children, and senior advisers twice a year to coordinate their plans. Now they focused on shaping the family’s activities to incorporate some of the best of what Diana had done, lessening the formality (instructing people before meeting members of the royal family that the bow and curtsy were optional), and consistently taking a more unassuming approach to public engagements—sitting down for tea in public housing projects, or walking around a classroom rather than peering in the door. “It is not heart on the sleeve or contrived,” explained one courtier. “But showing more empathy.”
The watchword became “imperceptible evolution,” based on an analogy that Robin Janvrin called “the Marmite theory of monarchy.” The salty food spread found in British cupboards for over a century has a distinctive red, yellow, and green label that is comforting in its familiarity. But only by comparing a fifty-year-old Marmite jar with one on contemporary shelves is it possible to see pronounced differences. The jar evolved so gradually and slowly that the changes were imperceptible. By Janvrin’s theory, the monarchy needed to change the same way— incrementally over time, small steps rather than large steps, so people were reassured that the institution was staying the same while adapting.
But Janvrin and his colleagues did make the occasional misstep, such as when they arranged for the Queen to greet people outside a McDonald’s restaurant in a display of populism. Determined to cast the visit in a poor light, the press ran photographs of her Rolls-Royce under the fast-food sign, making the appearance look contrived. Elizabeth II had a word with Robin Janvrin afterward, but she didn’t belabor the matter. “She has incredibly good instincts about how something will be perceived,” said Simon Lewis. “I was struck by her pragmatism and her sense of what would work. She has a finely tuned sense of the moment. On occasion ideas would be put to her and she would say, ‘We can’t do that. It’s far too grand.’ ”
THE FINAL YEARS of the twentieth century brought the Queen a new round of worries, this time about her mother and her sister. The Queen Mother was inevitably growing more fragile as she neared her hundredth birthday, although she still had her doughty spirit, refusing offers of a wheelchair and even balking at using a cane. “Time is not my dictator,” said the Queen Mother. “I dictate to time. I want to meet people.”
She continued her royal rounds even after she had her right hip replaced in November 1995. While visiting the Sandringham Stud in January 1998, she fell and broke her left hip, which required a second replacement surgery. At age ninety-seven, she made another remarkable comeback and appeared at the end of March at St. James’s Palace for her annual Clothing Guild meeting—the first of forty-six public engagements that year.
Margaret’s problems were psychological as well as physical. She had suffered from a range of ailments over the years—migraines, depression, bronchitis, gastroenteritis, and alcoholic hepatitis—resulting mainly from her excessive drinking and smoking. She had surgery in 1985 to remove a small portion of her lung. Although it wasn’t malignant, she had tried—unsuccessfully—to stop smoking, and she had cut back on her Famous Grouse whisky.
The two sisters kept up their daily phone calls, and when Margaret traveled overseas, she would call the Queen first thing on arrival. At Balmoral, Margaret “was almost like a poor relation,” said one courtier. “The Queen felt sorry for her.” “Sometimes Margaret was a very lonely person,” said her longtime friend Jane Rayne. “After Tony, then Roddy, no one else made her happy,” observed a man who was friendly with Margaret. “At dinner parties she would often indicate that I should drive her home. She would ask me in, and offer me a drink, then she would talk about all her personal problems.”
In late February 1998 Margaret suffered a mild stroke at age sixty-seven. She recovered well, although she showed signs of fatigue as well as forgetfulness. Almost exactly a year later, she badly scalded her feet while taking a bath in her house on Mustique. The Queen arranged for her to be flown by Concorde back to England, where she was treated at King Edward VII Hospital. Afterward she had difficulty walking and often relied on a wheelchair. There were other signs of decline as well. Since the early 1980s, Margaret had faithfully corresponded with Nancy Reagan, but in 1999 her lady-in-waiting Annabel Whitehead had to begin writing on her behalf.
As late as May 1999 the Queen was unsure whether her ailing sister could attend the wedding the following month of Prince Edward to thirty-four-year-old Sophie Rhys-Jones, a middle-class career woman who bore a passing resemblance to Diana. The daughter of an auto parts salesman and a homemaker, Sophie had grown up in the Kentish countryside and attended Kent College Pembury, a well-regarded girls school. After working in a variety of public relations jobs, she started her own firm in 1996. She met Edward while promoting a charity tennis tournament in 1993, and after dating for five years, they announced their engagement in January 1999.
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Unlike the other royal siblings, Edward and Sophie had a relatively low-key wedding in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on June 19 that they organized as much as possible on their own. The Queen gave them the titles of Earl and Countess of Wessex and set them up in a fifty-six-room Victorian house in Surrey called Bagshot Park that
