Philip loved my Aussie accent, and the Queen was an incredible boss
Samantha Cohen, who was first entranced by the royals when they visited Brisbane in 1977, became one of the most trusted royal aides.
It was a hot summer’s day in 1977 when Samantha Cohen, a schoolgirl in Brisbane, first saw Queen Elizabeth. Waving her ruler, with a handmade flag stuck on to it, Cohen remembers the buzz around the queen’s Silver Jubilee visit.
“I was nine. We’d spent weeks learning about her, colouring in our flags, and I thought it was the most extraordinary thing I’d ever seen,” says Cohen, now 56. “I was beyond excited.”
Almost 25 years later, she answered an advertisement in PR Week to join the queen’s press office in Buckingham Palace. She won the job – and stayed for another 18 years, rising through the ranks to become the queen’s communications secretary, and later her assistant private secretary.
Cohen, who had worked in Australia before fancying the move to London, was one of Elizabeth’s most trusted aides and closest confidantes. She agreed to a rare interview about her former boss, before King Charles and Queen Camilla’s tour to Australia, which begins in Sydney this week. It will be followed by a state visit to Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting next week.
The tour is Charles’s first trip to another realm as its monarch, his first to CHOGM as the head of the Commonwealth, and his first overseas visit after his cancer diagnosis in February.
Cohen, known as Sam to friends, who did three Australian tours with Queen Elizabeth in 2002, 2006 and 2011, saw the monarch most days, but is modest about their close relationship, described by a former courtier as a “unique” bond.
“It was very respectful,” Cohen says. “There were no favourites. I felt my job was to make her life as easy as possible.” In return, she says, “the queen was an incredible boss” who went out of her way to accommodate her employee’s young family.
She and her husband, Richard Halle, have three teenagers, aged 13, 16 and 19. During Cohen’s time at the palace, the family often relocated to wherever the monarch was in residence, spending Christmas at Sandringham, Norfolk; summers in Balmoral, Scotland; and Easter at Windsor, like the queen.
Cohen had lunch and dinner daily with the queen and Prince Philip when she was on duty at either Sandringham, Balmoral or Windsor, and remembers her Australian accent delighted Philip.
“He always used to say to me, ‘Say “no”,’ and I’d say ‘no’ and he’d laugh, ‘say it again’. He just couldn’t get over it. Sandringham was lovely because we were given a cottage, so we’d bring the dog. They made us feel so welcome, very much a part of their lives. The queen was remarkably kind and would give us all Christmas presents, handwriting the tags.”
When the royal family – and Cohen – decamped to Balmoral, the queen gave her the run of Craigowan Lodge, a house near the castle where the queen and Philip stayed when they were not hosting the whole family there.
She recalls: “Some mornings I’d be getting the cereal for breakfast, and the kids would go, ‘Mum! The queen just rode past on her horse’. Other times they’d bump into her on their bicycles. The kids loved swimming in the rock pools. The queen loved families having a nice time and hearing what everyone was doing.”
In 2016, Cohen’s son, Thomas Halle, then 11, served as one of the queen’s pages at the state opening of parliament.
Cohen says the queen was “a shy person” who cherished the privacy and sanctuary of Balmoral. “She wanted to be a family woman. It was important to her,” she says. “She loved hosting everybody for summer, allocating the rooms and checking them herself.”
Cohen also remembers the queen’s love of speed behind the wheel, leaving her passengers white-knuckled. “She was gutsy. She would drive her cars fast around Balmoral.”
More than anything, Cohen says, the queen had “no ego”. “The queen was the antithesis of celebrity,” she says. “She was the maestro. She understood this was her role. She took it very seriously and performed it to perfection. But she knew it was separate to her as a person. She was never intoxicated by the allure, never showed off, was never tempted to preen. I loved that so much about her, because she had no ego.”
She saw the queen at her happiest off-duty, but says Elizabeth relished the Australian tours. “She loved it, she loved them, it was palpable” even as “the relationship evolved” and the republican movement grew. “I think it was quite relaxing for her to be in Australia, because there was less protocol,” says Cohen. “At the (2006) Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, someone just came up and gave her a hug. She liked our straightness. We laughed a lot.”
In November 1999, Australians narrowly voted in a referendum to retain the monarch as head of state. The queen made her 13th visit the following year – she made 16 in all – and in a speech in Sydney said: “I have always made it clear that the future of the monarchy in Australia is an issue for you, the Australian people, and you alone to decide by democratic and constitutional means. It should not be otherwise.” Cohen believes Australians “respected that she maintained this position”. She was “very careful to know her place, to not be interventionist in how a nation was evolving”.
In 2011, aged 85, Elizabeth made her final trip to Australia. Though it was unspoken at the time, many felt it would be their last chance to see her and turned out in their thousands. “She was overwhelmed by the number of people who came out,” says Cohen, who witnessed her boss both razor-sharp on politics and able to bring the common touch to the Australians she met. “She was a countrywoman, so she could talk to people about cattle, horses and dogs, and was equally comfortable speaking in parliament. She tapped into all walks of life and she listened, she really listened. That was her superpower.”
Cohen thinks the transition from the Elizabethan to the Carolean era has been “seamless”. “I think it has been a masterpiece in taking all the traditions of monarchy, carrying them on, respecting the constitutional principles, tenets and structure of monarchy and continuing in his own style. He’s inclusive and modern. I think he’s evolved it, kept it relevant. I think the queen would be looking down now, pleased with the way the King has managed to seamlessly transition into the role.”
Soon after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex married in May 2018, the queen asked Cohen to lend them her years of experience. She served as their private secretary until October 2019 when she left the royal family after 18 years.
Cohen has remained tight-lipped about her time with the Sussexes, but confirmed to Melbourne’s Herald Sun earlier this year she was one of 10 people interviewed as part of a Buckingham Palace review into allegations Meghan bullied some of her staff. The duchess denies the allegations.
Cohen remained a trusted sounding board. In January 2020, though no longer working for the household, she was asked to join the “Sandringham summit”, where Harry and the royal family negotiated the terms of the Sussexes’ departure from royal life.
Since leaving the palace, Cohen worked as Boris Johnson’s “gatekeeper” for six months in 2022 and as chief of staff to the global chief executive of mining company Rio Tinto, a role she left last month to spend more time with her family.
Her years with Queen Elizabeth remain her favourite role. In 2016, Cohen, who lives in London, was made a commander of the Royal Victorian Order, recognising distinguished personal service to the monarch. Last year, she received an OBE.
Though Elizabeth reduced her overseas travel in her final years, Cohen remembers the monarch’s delight at a day trip to Italy in 2014, aged 88, after a lunch invitation from president Giorgio Napolitano.
Cohen says: “She said, ‘I don’t really want to travel very much anymore, but I think I’d like to have lunch, do you think we can go for a day?’. She had never done a day trip to Europe before. It was a completely new thing. Then she realised she hadn’t met the new Pope (Francis). So we … had lunch in the (president’s residence) Quirinale, whipped over to see the Pope at the Vatican, and got back on the plane around 6pm.”
Cohen recalls a beaming Elizabeth coming to the back of the plane: “She said, ‘Well, there you go, we did it’. She thought the day trip was fun, to see a president and a pope.” By coincidence, Cohen was visiting Rome in September 2022 when she received the call that the queen had died.
Elizabeth’s Scottish home holds Cohen’s fondest memory of her time with the queen. She was on duty in 2017, and went to see her boss in the drawing room. “She’d buzz you in with your basket. She was always sitting at her desk beside the window, and you would go through the basket, what had come in that morning.
“This day, she said, ‘Oh, hold on a minute, there’s a butterfly, we must get it out’. There was this beautiful butterfly on a book. She got up, picked it up and it flew away. Then I caught it and it flew out of my hands. Then she caught it. It was hilarious, she was laughing, I was laughing, eventually she caught it, we opened the window, freed the butterfly, and she said, ‘Right, where were we?’. She was so playful. We just had fun.”
THE SUNDAY TIMES
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