Part Three: An Insider’s View of the Royal Family

With parties at Dudley House, quiet dinners with close friends, and celebrations for her 80th and 90th birthdays, everything was going happily for the Queen--until Harry met Meghan

Lady Elizabeth Anson, legendary party planner, in her home on Ladbroke Grove, London, where she frequently entertained Queen Elizabeth II

In Case You Missed Parts One and Two of this Three-Part Series:

An Insider’s View of the Royal Family

Part Two: An Insider’s View of the Royal Family

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Lady Elizabeth Anson, who died five years ago at age seventy-nine, was for sixty years Britain’s premiere party planner, counting as clients nearly everyone in the royal family starting with Queen Elizabeth II. From 1998 until her death in November 2020, I was lucky to have her as a friend—early on, she asked that I call her Liza—and we had many conversations over the years that informed my books about the royal family: Diana In Search of Herself, Elizabeth the Queen, Prince Charles, and George VI and Elizabeth. While keeping her most sensitive observations confidential, I am sharing additional details with my Royals Extra subscribers that help illuminate the lives of the royal family members Liza knew well. She was a great-niece of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a goddaughter of King George VI, and a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. Liza was the Queen’s confidante from the time of the monarch’s Golden Jubilee in 2002.

Among the private parties Liza Anson planned for Queen Elizabeth II was an elegant dinner for her 80^th birthday at the Ritz Hotel in December 2006—the culmination of a series of celebrations following her April birthdate. In addition to the immediate royal family, the guest list featured European royals as well as longtime friends and senior members of her household. It would have been logical for Liza to arrange a 90^th birthday gathering, but Prince Charles put Michael Fawcett, his party planner and former valet, in charge.

Liza viewed Fawcett as a sinister character who had stirred controversy by bullying staff, plotting vendettas, and selling presents given to the prince, earning him the nickname “Fawcett the Fence.” But he had made himself indispensable, and Liza suspected that the rivalrous Fawcett had turned Charles against her. Liza admitted to me that she felt wounded when Fawcett oversaw the Queen’s dinner at Windsor Castle on April 21, 2016. “It was a Prince Charles party,” she said a week later. “I was on the Queen’s list but I was taken off because of Fawcett. The Queen’s friends were there, but not my generation of cousins. I talked to the Queen before and after. She skirted around it.”

“He is mad about the royal family”

By 2013 Liza’s focus had turned primarily toward one billionaire client—His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani, a member of Qatar’s royal family and a first cousin of the ruling emir. “He is thirty-one, wants to live like Downton Abbey, and he has restored Dudley House on Park Lane to Edwardian magnificence,” Liza told me. “He is mad about the royal family.”

Queen Elizabeth II with Lady Elizabeth Anson and Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani

Dudley House is one of the few grand private residences still standing in London. After it sustained bombing damage during the Second World War, it was converted into nondescript offices. Hamad snapped up the building in 2006 and spent six years on its refurbishment, filling its fourteen reception rooms with an eye-popping collection of art and antiques. The senior members of the royal family were most eager to see the interiors.