THE MAN WHO TOOK THE BULLETS

Peter °borne on Robert Fellowes, now

retiring after eight years as the most public of royal private secretaries

SIR ROBERT Fellowes retires next month as Private Secretary to the Queen after eight years in the job and in all a full 20 years of service at Buckingham Palace. Those years have been momentous for the monarchy. Sir Robert set aside his City career to become Assistant Private Secre- tary to the Queen in 1977, the year of the Silver Jubilee. The popularity of the monarchy stood at an all-time high; public criticism of the institution was unthink- able. A subservient media never dared tar- nish and still less question the 'mystic reverence' which, according to Walter Bagehot, links the British nation to the person of the monarch.

That is hardly the case today. Sir Robert replaced Sir William Heseltine as Private Secretary in 1990, just as the royal family tilted on the edge of a precipice. It crashed over it within months of Sir Robert taking over the job. The last eight years have been cataclysmic. Sir Robert has been under siege throughout. The public defer- ence and respect on which the royal family could once automatically rely have van- ished for good. Only one previous occu- pant of the job has had to cope with anything like the pressure that has borne down upon Sir Robert Fellowes. He was Sir Alexander Hardinge, Private Secretary to King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis.

Hardinge saved the institution of monar- chy by dumping the monarch. Fellowes has faced no such tragic conflict of interest. What he had to cope with was very much Worse: constant attrition and the novel dif- ficulty of being in the public eye. Sir Robert is the first Private Secretary to become a public figure. His time in office has coincided with three divorces, the Windsor Castle fire and the death of Princess Diana. One courtier who went through it all with him says, 'There are times in life when events just sweep over You. All you can do is batten down the hatches. Next morning you go up on deck and assess what damage has been done. That is what it must have been like for Robert.'

For the last 20 years, and above all the last eight, Sir Robert has been one of the major actors in the biggest soap opera the world has known.

Throughout it all, he has been level- headed, calm and composed in his judg- ments. Though born into a firm tradition of royal service — he is the son of Sir William 'Billy' Fellowes, who was King George VI's land-agent at Sandringham — nothing in his highly conventional, upper-middle-class background prepared him for the trauma. He was a brilliant schoolboy cricketer at Eton, good enough to play at minor county level for Norfolk. As a dashing young officer he was, in the words of one old friend, 'a menace to traf- fic bollards'. After national service, Sir Robert shuffled off to the well-established but stultifyingly respectable discount house of Allen, Harvey & Ross (he will return to the City as deputy chairman of Barclays Private Banking after leaving the Palace). He had been a director of the firm for five years when the call came from the Palace to join the staff as Assis- tant Private Secretary to the Queen. He turned it down, on the grounds that it would be improper to leave his company while it was in financial difficulties (few firms survived the financial crash of the early 1970s unscathed.) Two years later the request came again and, with Allen, Harvey & Ross back in the pink, Sir Robert felt unable to resist the call of duty.

Duty is what Sir Robert is all about. That, and the associated virtues of loyalty, discretion, decency and private kindness. There is nothing flashy or meretricious about him. Five years ago the then Ameri- can ambassador Ray Seitz went to join him for a golfing weekend in Cornwall. He was surprised to discover Sir Robert holed up not in the plush links hotel, but the cheap and cheerful bed and breakfast down the road.

He is wholly devoted to the Queen, with all of the passion and fervour of an Islamic mullah, though none of the excess. He understands that one of his tasks, in the words of a senior politician, is to 'throw himself in front of the bullets before they hit the monarch'. He is sometimes painted as a half-witted hooray Henry. This is absurd. Business is effected from his ground-floor offices in Buckingham Palace with quiet despatch. 'His feel for the way the constitution works and his ability to hold his own with the cream of Whitehall is remarkable,' says a senior civil servant. In truth Sir Robert shares few of the Queen's sporting enthusiasms and his presence at Buckingham Palace over the past 20 years has done something to leaven the prevailing philistinism of the place. He is notably well-read and, according to one supporter, 'brings something which is not metropolitan, not international, not neces- sarily intellectual, but which is quite defi- nitely civilising.

`Look at some of the honours which have been doled out at quite a high level and you will find that his influence has most certainly been felt.' Some claim, for instance, that but for Fellowes, Isaiah Berlin would not have received his OM. He is not the hidebound reactionary that some, particularly those connected with the Prince of Wales's office, claim him to be. At times, though certainly no revolu- tionary, he has been an advocate of change. During his term of office the Queen has started to pay income tax, the civil list has been slashed, Buckingham Palace has been opened to the public, the monarchy has taken on a new modern tone. The 'Way Ahead Group', made up of members of the royal family and oth- ers, has been set up to assess the future of the monarchy. Sir Robert was involved in making all of this happen. As one senior Whitehall figure who observed it all from the centre says, 'Robert was someone who would ease into change at a pace that is sustainable rather than dra- matic.'

Private Secretary to the monarch has become, in the words of the constitution- al expert Vernon Bogdanor, 'one of the most important posts in the British sys- tem of government and a mainstay in the institution of constitutional monarchy'. At times it is pivotal. In 1922 Lord Stam- fordham was heavily involved in the deci- sion to appoint Baldwin rather than Curzon to replace Bonar Law as prime minister. Lord Knollys played an impor- tant, though disreputable, part in the Par- liament Bill crisis of 1910. It is still conceivable — especially if Britain moves towards PR — that a Private Secretary could play such a role again. According to Bogdanor, the Private Secretary must `guard the constitutional position of the sovereign'. That means that (in the words of the Labour politician Harold Laski) `he must know all that is going on; he must be ready to advise upon all. But he must never so advise that he seems to influence the decision taken by the Queen in terms of the premises of his own thought. He is the confidant of all ministers, but he must never leave the impression that he is anybody's man. He must intrude without ever seeming to intrude. He must learn how to deflect the lightning from others. He must be able to carry the burden of her mistakes. He must not know the meaning of fatigue. Receiving a thousand secrets, he must discriminate between what may emerge and what shall remain obscure ...It is a life passed amid circumstances in which the most trifling incident may lead to a major disaster.'

Fellowes has been an outstanding suc- cess, judged by any of these criteria. Trips abroad — it is sometimes forgotten that the Private Secretary to the British Queen is also Private Secretary to the Queen of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and a dozen Commonwealth countries — have gone well. Not once, on the dozens of state visits she has made, has the Queen blun- dered. Other members of her entourage have spoken out of turn, but not the Queen, a testament to the quiet compe- tence with which Sir Robert has carried out his job.

He has always commanded the affection and respect of Whitehall. Relations with John Major, and now Tony Blair, have been excellent. He coped with the difficult transition from Tory to Labour, the first change in government in 18 years, with accomplished skill. Around the time of the last election a small group of Conservative peers attempted to draw Sir Robert into the dispute over House of Lords reform. He received a number of letters arguing that the hereditary principle was under threat and that the Queen should inter- vene to defend it. They were given short shrift.

The most intractable problems of his term of office have not come on the offi- cial front but from the Queen's children. `I came into this job for many reasons,' he once complained. 'Not one of them was to be a marriage guidance counsellor.' But inevitably he was dragged into the marital difficulties of Prince Charles and, to a lesser extent, Prince Andrew. These in any case delicate matters were made very much more complicated by the fact that he was related to both Diana Spencer and Sarah Ferguson. Not only was Diana his sister-in-law but Fergie was his second cousin (his mother, the former Jane Ferguson, is aunt of Major Ronald). Relations with Diana never recovered after she lied to Fellowes over her involvement in the Andrew Morton blockbuster. Perhaps naively, Fellowes passed on her denial to Lord McGregor at the Press Complaints' Commission, who used it as the basis for his famous assault on the press for 'dabbling in peo- ple's souls'. When Diana's true involve- ment came to light very shortly afterwards, Sir Robert felt compelled to offer his resignation to the Queen.

The second point of difficulty has been the Prince of Wales. Relations between Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace are fraught. It is perhaps unfair to detect a trace of the enmity and hatred between the Hanoverian kings of the 18th century and their immediate heirs (the courtier Hervey records how King George II made no attempt to conceal his 'joy at this great change' when informed of the death of his father by Sir Robert Walpole). But a more telling comparison is the open hos- tility between the Brownites and Blairites in the current administration. The princi- pals, to all appearances, sustain amicable relations. The poison is to be found among the hangers-on. In this respect Penny Junor's deeply regrettable and par- tisan biography of Prince Charles, which gave every appearance of benefiting from heavy St James's Palace briefing, has much in common with Paul Routledge's equally regrettable hagiography of Gor- don Brown. It is important to the long- term survival of the British monarchy, just as it is crucial to the success of the New Labour government, for the feuds to be sorted out.

Only critics of exceptional severity would seek to hold Sir Robert Fellowes to account for these problems. He has been an exceptional servant to the Queen. It is worth pausing to ask how the past eight years might have gone without his cool head, unflustered good sense and utter integrity. Despite the tragedies of the 1990s, the monarch herself has come through it all unscathed, as respected and as popular as ever.The Queen herself deserves the great bulk of the credit for that. But Sir Robert, in his quiet and self- deprecating way, has done much to keep the show on the road. And that, given the circumstances, is a solid achievement, a noble life's work. Sir Robert has more than earned the peerage that will surely come his way.

The author is political columnist of the Express.