Lord Fellowes, who has died aged 82, was the non-public secretary to Queen Elizabeth II throughout the Nineties, essentially the most turbulent years of her lengthy reign. Appointed in 1990, after greater than a decade as first assistant non-public secretary after which deputy, he was by the Queen’s aspect throughout a sequence of royal mishaps and catastrophes, from the hearth at Windsor Citadel in what she known as the “annus horribilis” of 1992 to the extremely public divorces of three of her 4 kids, Anne, Charles and Andrew, “squidgygate”, toe-sucking and the remainder and, most traumatic of all, the demise of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. This final struck dwelling significantly deeply as he was married to Diana’s older sister Jane.
Though a part of the normal recruitment pathway for senior royal courtiers – household connections, Eton, the Metropolis and the Guards, “fairly a gilded cage,” as he admitted – the tall, bespectacled Fellowes was in no way a stuffed shirt, being each approachable (even to the Guardian), courteous, unassuming and cool-headed. Not solely was he central to steering the Queen by the crises as her closest skilled adviser, however he was additionally gently revolutionary.
He pointed the monarchy in direction of paying tax for the primary time in almost a century and performed an element within the Manner Forward group of senior family officers, which hacked away at among the palace’s extra arcane traditions, not least reducing again among the many hangers-on. He even advocated publication of a biography of George V revealing that he had declined to save lots of his cousin Tsar Nicholas II and his household after the Russian Revolution, an episode some on the palace had wished to maintain secret even 70 years on: the Queen accepted his recommendation and the e-book went forward.
Within the supreme disaster of the reign, the week after Diana’s demise, when widespread criticism of the Queen for not returning to London reached hysterical ranges, incited by the tabloid press, it was Fellowes who persuaded her again to Buckingham Palace early. He drafted her dwell broadcast – “So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my coronary heart” – that did a lot to calm the scenario.
Robert was the son of Sir William – Billy – Fellowes, the land agent of the Sandringham property in Norfolk for almost 30 years and a taking pictures companion of George VI, and his spouse Jane (nee Ferguson), herself the great-aunt of Sarah Ferguson, who married Prince Andrew. Because the Queen identified at Fellowes’ leaving occasion from the palace in 1999, she first met him when as a younger princess she went to see him as a brand new child: “He’s the one certainly one of my non-public secretaries I’ve held in my arms.”
Fellowes was educated at Eton – with no tutorial distinction, however a notable cricketer apparently, who performed a few occasions for Norfolk – after which held a brief service fee within the Scots Guards (1960-63) earlier than becoming a member of the Metropolis low cost brokers and bankers Allen Harvey and Ross, the place he rose to turn out to be a director.
He was first approached to affix the palace in 1974 however turned the chance down as a result of the enterprise was in hassle and he felt it his responsibility to regular it. However three years later he accepted the invitation and ultimately succeeded Sir William Heseltine in 1990, repeatedly biking into work from his flat at Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace. In 1991 he was knighted.
Nearly from the beginning he discovered himself coping with the collapse of the royal marriages, one after one other, saying ruefully later: “I got here into this job for a lot of causes. Not certainly one of them was to be a wedding steerage counsellor.” By far essentially the most personally painful was the gradual breakdown of his sister-in-law Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles. She had been a bridesmaid when Fellowes married her sister in 1978.
When the state of the wedding first turned broadly recognized by the publication of Andrew Morton’s e-book, Diana: Her True Story, in 1992, Fellowes requested her instantly whether or not she had collaborated with Morton and he or she denied it, saying “definitely not”. His subsequent non-public briefing led on to Lord (Oliver) McGregor of Durris, chairman of the Press Complaints Fee, accusing the media of creating the story up – notoriously he complained of “the odious exhibition of journalists dabbling in males’s souls”.
Very quickly it turned clear that Diana had lied to him, and Fellowes provided his resignation to the Queen. It was rejected, however the princess’s unhealthy religion affected their relationship for the remainder of her life. She derided him as one of many palace’s “males in gray fits”, who she claimed made her life a distress.
Fellowes instructed the Day by day Telegraph afterwards: “I used to be deeply keen on her. She was an excellent individual. She discovered it tough in life to seek out happiness.” Removed from masterminding her homicide from beneath cowl on the British embassy in Paris, as Mohamed Fayed later claimed, Fellowes was at dwelling in Norfolk along with his spouse on the time of the deadly accident in August 1997.
Fellowes was made a life peer after his retirement and sat within the Lords as a crossbencher: it suited his temperament to be non-partisan, he stated. He was chairman of Barclays’ non-public financial institution (2000-09) and served on the boards of various organisations, together with the British Library, the Mandela-Rhodes Belief and, most importantly, chaired the Jail Reform Belief (2001-08). In an interview with the Occasions in 2003 he advised that every one politicians ought to have to go to a jail earlier than weighing in on felony justice issues.
He’s survived by his spouse and three kids, Laura, Alexander and Eleanor.
