Lord Fellowes obituary

Lord Fellowes, who has died aged 82, was the private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II during the 1990s, the most turbulent years of her long reign. Appointed in 1990, after more than a decade as first assistant private secretary and then deputy, he was by the Queen’s side during a series of royal mishaps and catastrophes, from the fire at Windsor Castle in what she referred to as the “ annus horribilis ” of 1992 to the highly public divorces of three of her four children, Anne, Charles and Andrew, “squidgygate,” toe-sucking and the rest and, most traumatic of all, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. This last struck home particularly deeply as he was married to Diana’s older sister, Jane.

Although part of the traditional recruitment pathway for senior royal courtiers – family connections, Eton, the City and the Guards, “quite a gilded cage,” as he admitted – the tall, bespectacled Fellowes was by no means a stuffed shirt, being both approachable (even to the Guardian), courteous, unassuming and cool-headed. Not only was he central to steering the Queen through the crises as her closest professional adviser, but he was also gently innovative.

He pointed the monarchy towards paying tax for the first time in nearly a century and played a part in the Way Ahead group of senior household officials which hacked away at some of the palace’s more arcane traditions, not least cutting back some of the many hangers-on. He even advocated publication of a biography of George V revealing that he had declined to save his cousin Tsar Nicholas II and his family after the Russian Revolution, an episode some at the palace had wanted to keep secret even 70 years on: the Queen accepted his advice and the book went ahead.

In the supreme crisis of the reign, the week after Diana’s death, when popular criticism of the Queen for not returning to London reached hysterical levels, incited by the tabloid press, it was Fellowes who persuaded her back to Buckingham Palace early. He drafted her live broadcast – “ So what I say to you now , as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart” – that did much to calm the situation.

Robert was the son of Sir William – Billy – Fellowes, the land agent of the Sandringham estate in Norfolk for nearly 30 years and a shooting companion of George VI, and his wife Jane (nee Ferguson), herself the great-aunt of Sarah Ferguson, who married Prince Andrew. As the Queen pointed out at Fellowes’ leaving party from the palace in 1999, she first met him when as a young princess she went to see him as a new baby: “He is the only one of my private secretaries I have held in my arms.”

Fellowes was educated at Eton – with no academic distinction, but a notable cricketer apparently, who played a couple of times for Norfolk – and then held a short service commission in the Scots Guards (1960-63) before joining the City discount brokers and bankers Allen Harvey and Ross, where he rose to become a director.

He was first approached to join the palace in 1974 but turned the opportunity down because the business was in trouble and he felt it his duty to steady it. But three years later he accepted the invitation and eventually succeeded Sir William Heseltine in 1990, regularly cycling into work from his flat at Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace. In 1991 he was knighted.

Almost from the start he found himself dealing with the collapse of the royal marriages, one after another, saying ruefully later: “I came into this job for many reasons. Not one of them was to be a marriage guidance counsellor.” By far the most personally painful was the slow 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 marriage first became widely known through the publication of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, in 1992, Fellowes asked her directly whether she had collaborated with Morton and she denied it, saying “certainly not”. His subsequent private briefing led directly to Lord (Oliver) McGregor of Durris , chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, accusing the media of making the story up – notoriously he complained of “the odious exhibition of journalists dabbling in men’s souls.”

Very soon it became clear that Diana had lied to him, and Fellowes offered his resignation to the Queen. It was rejected, but the princess’s bad faith affected their relationship for the rest of her life. She derided him as one of the palace’s “men in grey suits”, who she claimed made her life a misery.

Fellowes told the Daily Telegraph afterwards: “I was deeply fond of her. She was a very good person. She found it difficult in life to find happiness.” Far from masterminding her murder from under cover at the British embassy in Paris, as Mohamed Fayed later claimed, Fellowes was at home in Norfolk with his wife at the time of the fatal accident in August 1997.

Fellowes was made a life peer after his retirement and sat in the Lords as a crossbencher: it suited his temperament to be non-partisan, he said. He was chairman of Barclays’ private bank (2000-09) and served on the boards of a number of organisations, including the British Library, the Mandela-Rhodes Trust and, most significantly, chaired the Prison Reform Trust (2001-08). In an interview with the Times in 2003 he suggested that all politicians should have to visit a prison before weighing in on criminal justice matters.

He is survived by his wife and three children, Laura, Alexander and Eleanor.

• Robert Fellowes, Lord Fellowes of Shotesham, royal adviser, born 11 December 1941; died 29 July 2024