As private secretary, Geidt had controlled Andrew’s expenditure and he had blocked one too many helicopter and private jet excursions for the prince’s fancy. Andrew wasted no time joining Charles in his complaints to the Queen – ‘Geidt has got to go’ was their combined message to their mother. The palace COO was doing far too much operating and interfering for their liking – and Elizabeth II, just ninety-one that April 2017, meekly surrendered.
At that age, commented one courtier, ‘you don’t want the hassle of having a big fight, do you? Isn’t it better that everything calms down?’
‘It was one of the most shameful and, frankly, shabby decisions that the Queen has made in her entire reign,’ says one extremely senior and distinguished court correspondent. ‘All Geidt wanted was to have everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, but that is not Charles’s agenda any more.’
If Christopher Geidt had been private secretary when the question of Harry and Meghan’s new role in the family had landed on the royal desk at the end of 2017, he would have applied his customary vision and analysis to a task that was actually weightier than the technicalities of how Charles should succeed his mother.
Here was the great step forward, to integrate a mixed-race recruit – the first ever – into the all-white royal family which needed to maintain its position in a society that was becoming more racially diverse by the day. It was a profound challenge, with massive implications for the long-term identity and relevance – and even perhaps the survival – of the crown in a changing world. But it was also an immense opportunity, since the interracial union of these two popular headliners, Harry and Meghan, ‘the royal rock stars’, represented a unique chance to knit the monarchy closer to the people – the bulk of the lowly and ‘ordinary’, less-than-privileged people.
‘Geidt would have put on his thinking cap,’ says one veteran royal analyst. ‘He would have reflected on the big picture – what it meant to the monarchy and Britain as a whole. He would have talked to the couple themselves to ask them what they wanted to do, then come up with some defined strategy. He would have looked at our multiracial country and got them committed to some exciting new initiative, either local or possibly on a national basis. This would have got both of the couple personally invested in the project – Meghan as a newcomer and Harry as a wavering team-member – so they felt pledged to the way ahead and could see how its success required them to stick at the job.’
But Geidt’s successor, Sir Edward Young, did not do the vision thing. Young had been Geidt’s deputy for many years and that was his character – to serve as sober clerk and pen-pusher to the visionary postmaster general. Until he became private secretary, Young’s principal claim to fame had been helping to facilitate filmmaker Danny Boyle’s memorable stunt by which the Queen and James Bond/Daniel Craig appeared to parachute together into the opening ceremony of London’s 2012 Olympic Games.
This, however, had been a rare flash of colour in an otherwise grey career. Young was a jobsworth and a functionary, not a man to make waves or to stand up to the blood family – and that suited Charles and Andrew just beautifully. It was Young who sanctioned Andrew’s use of Buckingham Palace for his disastrous Newsnight interview in November 2019 – though he had to clear up the mess that followed.
‘He hasn’t got the strength of character of Geidt,’ one insider told Camilla Tominey of the Telegraph.
‘Central authority weakened, the rest of the family increasingly doing their own thing’ was how news anchor Tom Bradby described the palace post-Geidt. William and Harry’s pal identified the crucial issue of character too.
‘The atmosphere has been fractious within the family,’ Bradby told People magazine, ‘ever since those close to Prince Charles pushed out the Queen’s longstanding and well-regarded private secretary.’
Princess Anne and Prince Edward were said to share the widespread unhappiness with the new chief ‘non’-operating officer and his subservience to their two wilful brothers. Young owed his job to Andrew and Charles, so even if he had the imagination and the willpower to ‘do a Geidt’, he lacked the centralised power and purpose that had previously gone with the private secretary’s role in Buckingham Palace. Now it was the pen-pusher’s function to step back and let things happen.
March 2011: Prince Andrew’s ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein lead to calls for his resignation as UK trade envoy
‘There’s no discipline,’ complained one courtier to Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times. ‘Everything leaks and then everyone engages in swearing and shouting and blames each other.’
Young failed particularly when it came to Meghan. ‘As things started to go wrong,’ says someone who watched the new duchess’s relationship deteriorate with the private secretary, ‘Meghan came to perceive Young as the inflexible, bureaucratic figure who summed up what was at fault with the BP mentality, and the feeling was mutual. Young really came to dislike Meghan’s style.’
Trooping the Colour; attending the opening of the Mersey Gateway Bridge; Ascot races; the hundredth anniversary fly-past of the RAF; a visit to Dublin; some tennis at Wimbledon; an evening at Hamilton; an official visit to Sussex; a tour of Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand … Meghan’s post-marriage schedule of engagements – sometimes with Harry and sometimes on her own – was as safe, predictable and mildly boring as Young himself.
The only dates in her calendar that gave a nod towards the imaginative crusade that might have been were a July visit to the Nelson Mandela Centenary Exhibition in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the September 2018 celebration of Together: Our Community Cookbook, which was the product of Meghan’s hands-on involvement with the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire – and this had been a project entirely of her own
