The royals - Kitty Kelley [305]
* The Royal Protection Unit of Scotland Yard provides full protection to the monarch, her husband, her heir, the Queen Mother, and all the monarch’s children. Partial protection is provided to some of the Queen’s cousins when they are performing public duties, but not to their spouses. “Most of the time, Prince Michael gets security,” said the former head of security, “but not his wife.”
* Behind their backs, Diana referred to the royal family by their Private Eye nicknames: the Queen was Brenda, the Duke of Edinburgh was Keith. Princess Margaret was Yvonne, Charles was Brian; Edward was Cled (Peter Phillips’s abbreviation of Uncle Ed), and Diana herself was Cheryl.
* In her reign, the Queen has had six private secretaries—all men. The first four were Sir Alan Lascelles: 1952–1953; Sir Michael Adeane: 1953–1972; Sir Martin Charteris: 1972–1977; Sir Philip Moore: 1977–1986. All were older than the Queen. The last two were younger: Sir William Heseltine: 1986–1990; Sir Robert Fellowes: 1990–.
By the 1990s the Queen’s preference for men showed in her staffing of executive posts within the royal household. Out of forty-nine positions, only four were held by women, and one woman was forced to resign when she married a divorced man. Although much of the Commonwealth is black, the Queen has only ten blacks on her staff of nine hundred, and they hold menial positions.
* The Duchess of York was not the first member of the royal family to be accused of plagiarism. In 1986 Princess Michael of Kent, who wrote Crowned in a Far Country (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), was accused of copying from the author Daphne Bennett. The Princess was forced to pay Bennett several thousand dollars.
† The Duchess of York did not acknowledge the author’s written requests in 1993, 1994, and 1995 for confirmation of her charitable donations from the royalties of Budgie. Her private secretary said, “She donated a certain percentage for so long, then it just ended.”
* “It [Everglades Club] represents in its policies the old-fashioned, albeit somewhat refined, bigotry which is no different in kind from the gutter-level bigot who wears a hood and sheet,” said Arthur Teitelbaum, southern area director of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors anti-Semitism. “We had alerted the embassy… with the expectation that it would sufficiently value the reputation and sensibilities of the royal family to advise the Duchess not to attend. They chose to turn a blind eye to the character of the club, which we find regrettable.”
† The Palace, which goes along with the Queen’s superstitions, chose March 19 to announce the Yorks’ separation. March 19 had been the date of Princess Margaret’s separation announcement in 1976 and Sarah and Andrew’s engagement announcement was March 19, 1986.
* “The Queen didn’t accept Charles’s resignation,” said Anson’s good friend Maxine Champion, “because the Queen agreed with him. That’s what he told us when he came to Washington, D.C. We had dinner with him one night and he told us all about the Fergie mess.”
* In My Story: The Duchess of York, Her Father and Me (HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), Lesley Player said John Bryan used cocaine. She wrote that Bryan invited her and another woman to his apartment, where he sniffed the drug. Bryan did not comment on the book, but Allan Starkie, his business partner in Oceonics Deutschland, a German construction company, denied Player’s story. “I was there that night in John’s Chelsea flat, and I certainly did not see anyone taking any drugs.” Player indicated only three people were present that evening—she, a woman friend, and Bryan.
Starkie, who accompanied the Duchess of York on her charity trips to Eastern Europe, was later arrested in Germany when Oceonics collapsed. He was held in a German jail for five months, pending a police investigation of the company that left debts of $15 million.
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