Christopher Geidt: The Queen’s former right hand man is the best pick to tackle Boris Johnson’s flat fiasco

Despite suggestions his new advisory role to the PM is ‘toothless’, the Queen’s former private secretary in no pushover, writes Sean O’Grady. He takes a look at some of Lord Geidt’s career highs and lows, from averting two constitutional crises to power struggles with Prince Charles and Prince Andrew

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At first glance Boris Johnson’s new adviser on ministerial conduct, the right honourable Lord Christopher Geidt, GCB, GCVO, OBE, QSO, PC, FKC, might be thought to look and sound like just the sort of Establishment patsy that can be relied upon to be helpful to a Tory premier, and, even if he is not, to be easily manipulated by the unscrupulous type of character that usually tends to end up being tenant at 10 Downing Street. Or it could simply be that Johnson cares so little for the basically toothless role and what it represents that he doesn’t care who does the job and was happy to accept the suggestion of Geidt, very possibly made by the cabinet secretary, Simon Case. Case held a similar position with the Cambridges, and might have thought Geidt would be a useful ally in the internal struggle for sanity. Either way, it was Johnson’s own decision to appoint Geidt, and he may live to regret it. Geidt, 60 in August, is hardly one of nature’s troublemakers, but he is perhaps more experienced, independent-minded, astute and principled than Johnson would like. Case, a younger, less weathered figure, seems more beholden to the PM, on the basis of his hesitant performance to MPs on the public administration committee last week. Cabinet secretaries used to intimidate their prime ministers, but perhaps no more. Geidt may thus add some much-needed heft to the official contingent in Downing Street: Put it this way, he’s dealt with the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and the Duke of York in his time, so he’s probably ready for Bozza.

For sure, Geidt is a typical product of the British class system, the kind of chap you’d expect to end up serving as the private secretary to the Queen for a decade. His upper-middle-class family have a long history of public service in the army and the British Raj in India, and his father, Mervyn, was a QC and magistrates court chief clerk. Funnily enough a cousin, Jeremy Geidt, formed with John Bird, John Fortune and Eleanor Brown a travelling theatrical company of satirists in the early 1960s called The Establishment, in which the monarchy was gently lampooned. The Establishment can have a sense of humour, evidently.

Cousin Jeremy Geidt (R) with his The Establishment comedy team cohorts (Getty Images)

Geidt’s smooth progress up the escalator of life started conventionally enough at the Dragon prep school in Oxford, then Glenalmond College (public boarding school) in Scotland and thence to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. War studies at King’s College, London followed, with successive spells at Bristol, Harvard, Oxford and Sandhurst (Scots Guards). Somewhere along the line he was inducted into the world of spying and ended up in the army Intelligence Corps, and in “diplomatic” postings in Sarajevo in the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s (where he caught up with the war criminal Radovan Karadzic), Geneva (a sort of Piccadilly Circus for Cold War spies), and Brussels.

Naturally, he married in 1996 into another branch of the establishment - his wife Emma is the daughter of the late Lord (Patrick) Neill, distinguished judge and once Vice Chancellor of Oxford University (they have two daughters, Olivia, 22, and Iona, 18). By happy coincidence, Lord Neill also served as the chair of the independent committee on standards in public life, a parallel role to Geidt’s. Lord Neill had the duty, or pleasure, of advising (effectively ordering) Tony Blair to return two dodgy donations from Bernie Ecclestone made to the Labour Party back in 1997. It would be fun if Geidt was to follow that sort of clear precedent with Johnson’s chaotic refurbishment of his flat in Downing Street, even though Johnson is free to ignore his recommendations (which promoted the resignation of Geidt’s predecessor, Alex Allan in the Priti Patel affair).

Like Lord Geidt, Lord Neill, too, was underestimated in his day. In the words of one of Neill’s obituarists in 2016, “he was the sort of unimpeachable and authoritative figure whom governments consult for comfort. In Neill’s case, he occasionally bit them, as Tony Blair discovered”.

Geidt’s formal role will be to ascertain the facts about the money and the refurb, but it is likely that the facts will speak for themselves, and won’t make for comfortable listening. Johnson may well get bitten.

You’d be startled if it were claimed that Geidt was a Corbynista (he wasn’t), but on the other hand, he is no slavish Tory. He was given his peerage by the Queen as a reward and also so that she could retain his services as an informal adviser (formally he is a Permanent Lord in Waiting), and, given his association with the Palace he has to be a cross-bencher. Yet he is quite active in voting in divisions, and seems perfectly happy to do so with the Opposition parties and against the government when reason and conscience point him in that direction (for example on the Domestic Abuse and Trade bills).

The Duchess of Sussex is greeted by Lord Geidt ahead of an International Women’s Day event in March 2019 (PA)

He is also the man who, according to some accounts, almost saved Meghan Markle for the nation, and thus could be thought of as having certain “woke” sympathies, when required for reasons of state. As a trusted and loyal courtier, having served in the household and as deputy and then private secretary to the Queen for a total of 15 years, Geidt came up with a scheme to make the most of the monarchy’s new arrival when she married Harry, famously the first person of colour to enter the all-white family. With the Queen’s enthusiastic support, Geidt came up with the idea of using them in a wider Commonwealth role, even including having a base in South Africa, something that would also help insulate them from the predatory attentions of the British tabloid press. He, and the Queen, were woke to the possibility that Meghan could help the institution better reflect the multicultural reality of modern Britain and the Commonwealth - it was a modernising move.

It all went wrong, though, when Prince Philip retired from public duties (aged 96). One gossipy and entertaining version of the (temporary) fall of Geidt in a literal palace coup is given by royal biographer Robert Lacey:

“Geidt had infuriated Prince Charles with a speech that he had given in May 2017 to some 500 royal staff — the assembled workforce of The Firm — announcing the retirement of Prince Philip from public life. This would call for more unified work than ever in support of the Queen, the private secretary had said, and the Prince of Wales’s staff who heard him felt that this was both ‘presumptuous’ towards their boss and actually dangerous to his interests. They had envisioned Prince Charles enjoying more power in the aftermath of his father’s departure, not less — and Prince Charles agreed.”

Charles found an ally in Andrew, whom Geidt had forced to step down as UK trade ambassador in 2011 over his friendship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. As private secretary, Geidt had also 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.

Lord Giedt shakes the Queen’s hand at an event in March 2019. He spent a decade as the monarch’s most senior aide (AFP via Getty Images)

The palace was doing far too much operating and interfering for their liking — and Elizabeth II, who had just turned 91, 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.”

However, the episode surely demonstrates how right Geidt actually was, especially about Andrew (long before the interview with Emily Maitlis), and he was soon returned to regal favour. After the passing of Philip, indeed, the whole wider family is taking on a more supportive role, rather than it all devolving to the Prince of Wales, suggesting Geidt’s idea, for what it’s worth, prevailed. His successor as private secretary, Edward Young, so insisted on by Charles and Andrew, is thought to be one of the Palace types that helped push the Sussexes into exile. Young is also said to have given permission to Andrew to use the Palace for the Newsnight interview. By contrast, Lacey describes Geidt as “a fiercely shrewd, reflective and thinking character”. There may be some spin at work, but you get the picture.

Geidt welcomes the outgoing prime minister Gordon Brown to Buckingham Palace after Labour’s defeat in the 2010 general election (AFP via Getty Images)

Politically, Geidt has quietly helped to avert two constitutional crises in the last decade. In 2010, the Palace was faced with only the (then) second hung Parliament in the Queen’s reign and the formation of her first coalition government. The “golden triangle” of Geidt, Jeremy Heywood (as private secretary to the prime minister) and Gus O’Donnell (cabinet secretary) made sure that Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron got on with sorting themselves out and keeping HM out of the imbroglio. It worked well, but not quite as flawlessly as is at times made out. For that useful insight that we have the diaries of Alastair Campbell, factotum at the time for Brown: “The Queen’s private secretary, a big bald man - Sir Christopher Geidt - had said to Jeremy that she didn’t want to see GB and accept his resignation until she knew Cameron could form a government. I said that was ridiculous. It was also humiliating... Fine, said Jeremy, but he said I don’t want your last day to be a big row with the Queen. At least he had a joke or two left in him. Gordon said ‘Why should I worry - I’ll never see her again’”. It was publicly smoothed over, though.

The delicate skills of the worldly-wise courtier were also deployed when the moment came for the Queen to give a nudge to things during the near-disastrous (for the Union) Scottish referendum campaign in 2014. In conjunction with Number 10, Geidt helped come up with the carefully coded words “well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future”, apparently spontaneously volunteered by the Queen to a royal fan hanging around the church at Balmoral. It was just on the right side of propriety, and it probably helped keep Scotland in the UK; David Cameron later let slip that she’d been “purring” when independence was rejected, and no doubt Geidt was feeling pretty content as well. His finest hour, so far.

There is also a more mysterious, spooky episode dating back to Geidt’s time with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) after 1987, given that it has close links to the military. Geidt sued John Pilger and Central Television for making the bizarre accusation that he and another man, Anthony de Normann, were in the SAS and engaged in training the Khmer Rouge, or elements of it. Obviously far-fetched stuff, and wrong, but that still leaves this statement by Labour MP Chris Mullins, made in the Commons under parliamentary privilege, in October 1990:

“When the hon. Member for Broxtowe [Jim Lester] and my hon. Friend the Member for Cynon Valley [Ann Clwyd] visited Cambodia in September last year to witness the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, they were surprised to discover that the official guest list contained the names of two Englishmen—Mr. Christopher Edward Wollaston Mackenzie Geidt, a name one cannot forget in a hurry, who worked for the Royal United Services Institute which is based in Whitehall and partly funded by the Ministry of Defence; and Mr. Anthony Leigh de Normann, who appears to be a member of one of our older families, too. Mr de Normann was until recently, before he departed for Cambodia, a captain in the Royal Hussars.

With the Duchess of Cambridge in 2018 (AFP via Getty Images)

“When I asked the Ministry of Defence in what capacity these gentlemen were visiting Cambodia, I was told...that it was at the invitation of the Hanoi Institute for International Relations. That is not true. According to covering letters and their visa applications Mr Mackenzie Geidt's and Mr de Normann's visit was at their initiative. Once they got to Cambodia their visit may have come under the auspices of the Hanoi institute—that would be fairly common—but the initiative came from them, so let us have no more nonsense on that point.

“What is more, Mr Mackenzie Geidt appears to have been rather economical with the truth in his visa application. In his letter to the Vietnamese embassy dated 11 September last year and written on RUSI notepaper, he says he is travelling as a representative of the Royal United Services Institute". He signs himself, "Assistant Director" and describes Mr de Normann as his personal assistant.”

It is all a long time ago, but like his activities in the Yugoslav civil war, there is evidently more to Geidt than just making the introductions on royal visits and collecting gongs. You get the impression that another “grown up” has been inserted into Number 10, alongside Case and the chief of staff Dan Rosenfeld, both appointed within the last year. It would be silly to think of Geidt as a sort of agent of the deep state, there to snoop on Johnson; but it might well be handy to have someone around with some familiarity about the dark arts of state security, given the prime minister’s sometimes unorthodox “accessible” habits (like giving his phone number to anyone who wants it). Geidt and the palace, after the prorogation fiasco last year are probably not that impressed by Johnson’s personal integrity, but Johnson’s view is no doubt that Geidt will just have to get used to it. He might, but heaven knows what he’ll make of the new wallpaper, flashy and vulgar even by palatial standards.