‘My Bill’: Sir William Heseltine, private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II who helped to modernise the monarchy, dies

Sir William Heseltine, who has died aged 96, was Queen Elizabeth II’s fifth private secretary. Although he served in that capacity for only five years (1986-90) he had hitherto been working in the palace for two decades in increasingly senior roles – press secretary, assistant private secretary and deputy private secretary – honing his skills in close proximity to his predecessors and his sovereign for more than a third of the Queen’s long reign, and most of his working life.

The private secretary is responsible for supporting the monarch in their duties as head of state in the United Kingdom. He is also the channel of communication between the head of state and the governments of their 14 other realms. He also liaises with the armed forces, the church and their patronages.

Although the position was not made official until 1867, the first private secretary was Colonel Herbert Taylor, who took the office in 1805 for George III (and again for William IV in 1830).

Harold Laski described the role as one of “dignified slavery” – alternating between statesman and lackey. Valentine Low, in his 2022 study Courtiers, wrote that a good private secretary must both be able to give the monarch good and serious advice, and be able to make them laugh. A rapport and good chemistry are essential.

The Queen’s favourite private secretary – her third, the exuberant, aristocratic Martin Charteris – had humour in spades and would be seen slapping his knee with delight as the Queen delivered one of his jokes. Heseltine considered Charteris the most outstanding of all the Queen’s men – and his model – and although Heseltine’s disposition and humour were more contained, his equanimity, directness and wit appealed to the Queen, who came to call him “my Bill”.

In 1986 Heseltine succeeded the slightly ponderous and loquacious Sir Philip Moore as private secretary. Moore was something of a departure from the blue-blooded scions, nephews and cousins of courtiers who had previously filled the role; but Heseltine was from a completely different mould.

A distinctly “untweedy” figure, as the Queen’s biographer Ben Pimlott put it, Heseltine brought with him considerable experience of dealing with politicians, more so than with newspaper journalists.

He was tested very quickly when The Sunday Times published an article in July 1986 from “an unimpeachable source” claiming that the Queen was dismayed by her uncaring, confrontational and socially divisive prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. It eventually became clear that the royal press secretary Michael Shea had briefed the authors of the article, but Heseltine managed to reassure the public that it did not reflect her views. The Queen had been scrupulously impartial for 34 years and would not have shared her opinions with her press secretary.

Another challenge came in May 1987 when Timoci Bavadra, ousted as Fijian prime minister in a military coup, came to London to seek the Queen’s support. Heseltine demurred on the sovereign’s behalf and did so again five months later when Fiji’s pre-eminent statesman Sir Kamisese Mara sought a royal audience as a privy counsellor. Both departed without meeting their monarch.

Heseltine resolved to retire when he was 60, leaving before the Queen’s annus horribilis of 1992. Dealing with the crises of that year fell to his successor, Robert Fellowes, who had the misfortune to be both Princess Diana’s brother-in-law and Sarah Ferguson’s cousin.

At Heseltine’s last meeting with the Princess of Wales, in 1990 at Balmoral, Diana spoke of her marital difficulties but assured Heseltine that she was determined “to stick it out and make a go of it”.

Heseltine said that had he known what was to come he might have delayed his departure. It was only at the end of that grim year and the fire at Windsor Castle that the Queen agreed to pay income tax, something Heseltine had long argued for.

William Frederick Payne Heseltine was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, on July 17, 1930, the elder son of Henry John Heseltine and his wife Louise Mary Gwythyr, nee Payne, both school teachers. His father (from a line of ship builders, captains and merchants) had migrated alone from Hull at 17.

Louise’s family was more established; her grandfathers had been a prison teacher and a warder when the state was still a convict colony. She was something of a bluestocking and one of Australia’s first female graduates.

It suited the media narrative to say Heseltine was “the boy from Wyalkatchem”, a small town in the West Australian wheat belt where his father was the sole teacher; but in fact young Bill spent only a year there when he was five – the family was otherwise based in East Fremantle.

He attended one of Perth’s leading Anglican boys’ schools, Christ Church Grammar, and proved a brilliant student. After graduating with first-class honours from the University of Western Australia he hoped to join the Department of External Affairs. But this was limited to ex-servicemen, and in 1951 he was persuaded to apply to the Prime Minister’s Department.

By 1955 he was, at 25, private secretary to prime minister Robert Menzies, the double-breasted, pin-striped, silver-tongued KC and founder of the Australian Liberal Party – and a friend of the royal family. Menzies insisted on calling him “Heselteen”, to which he replied: “Actually I call it Heseltine.” When the prime minister countered, “Oh, lad, you don’t know how to pronounce your name,” his young secretary exploded: “Well, this comes very well from somebody whose name is Mingies and goes masquerading around the countryside as Menzies.”

Heseltine had earned newfound respect. “Ah, well,” Menzies relented. “I suppose it’s about time I called you Bill.” From then on Heseltine was treated like a member of the family.

Reacting, in part, to Lord Altrincham’s attack on the stuffiness of the court, the palace sought to recruit suitable candidates from the Commonwealth. Heseltine was approached, in 1959, to be assistant information officer. When he remonstrated that he knew very little about the press, he was told that might be an advantage.

On his first meeting with the Queen she shared her reading habits at breakfast: “Philip and I sit at opposite ends of the table. He, reading through all the tabloids, getting crosser and crosser and snorting and throwing them down on the floor … I never read anything at that time except the Sporting Life. It makes for a much calmer breakfast.”

Heseltine, it seems, had his work cut out for him. The Queen’s press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, in service since the coronation, had protected the Queen from the press so assiduously that he had earned the nickname “The Abominable No Man”. Heseltine believed the Palace needed to be more active and less defensive, and yet managed to earn the respect of the commander.

He clearly impressed: after his two-year secondment ended and he returned to Australia – as acting official secretary to the governor-general – and while he was contemplating contesting a parliamentary seat for the Liberal Party, he was recalled by the Palace with the prospect of succeeding Colville.

Heseltine possessed a romantic vision; it was this that led him to suggest that the Queen should knight the yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester in public at Greenwich with the sword that Queen Elizabeth I had used to knight Sir Francis Drake, creating a memorable neo-Elizabethan image.

His first major feat, however, was the BBC’s Royal Family documentary – an attempt to bridge the gap between the court circular and the gossip columns. As Charteris put it, there “was a feeling that the royal family was dull, and one ought to lift the curtain of obscurity”.

Lord Brabourne had been inspired by the ultimate vanity project of his father-in-law Lord Mountbatten, a 12-part television series on his life and times. Yet the success of this ground-breaking film of the Windsors, not just on parade but at home and at play, was chiefly due to Heseltine and the BBC’s Richard Cawston. Sixty-eight per cent of the UK’s population watched the two showings.

Some traditionalists – and perhaps the Queen herself – later felt that Bagehot’s warning “we must not let in daylight upon magic” had been breached; but most observers considered it well-timed and salutary. It proved a primer for Prince Charles’ popular investiture as Prince of Wales.

Although it raised £1 million for charity, when Prince Edward’s lamentable slapstick It’s a Royal Knockout was shown in 1987, Pimlott called it “the reductio ad absurdum of a process begun with royal family”. But this was hyperbole. It really threw light on chinks in the armour, not cracks in the crown. In any case, Heseltine had vigorously opposed the pantomime but, as he put it, the Queen couldn’t say no to her children.

Another innovation, in 1970 – devised by Heseltine with his colleague Philip Moore and the official responsible for the New Zealand tour that year – was the “walkabout”, which literally brought the royal family to the people and became a common feature of almost every engagement.

Another achievement (coinciding with the country’s bicentenary) of which he was proud was that after 20 years of calling his country “Orstralia”, the Queen, without prompting, finally referred to it as “Australia”.

All previous private secretaries had been ennobled on retirement – except Alan Lascelles, who regarded his Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) as a greater honour than membership of the Lords. Although himself appointed GCB in 1990, as well as GCVO (Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order) in 1988, Heseltine was proudest of being a Companion of the Order of Australia. He also declined a seat in the House of Lords, electing to return to his homeland.

He was briefly mooted as the 35th governor of New South Wales but the state premier preferred another rear admiral to succeed Sir David Martin, and Heseltine returned to Western Australia. He regularly visited the Queen and they continued to correspond until her death.

In working with the Queen he had, he said, never “quite lost the sense of dealing with somebody very special … but I certainly wasn’t afraid of her”.

His first wife Ann, nee Turner, was killed in a car accident in 1957. He and his second wife Audrey, nee Nolan, who died in 2013, had a son and daughter who survive him, as does his third wife Diana, nee Loftus, whom he married in 2016.

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