When in the early 1970s the monarchy decided that an image revamp was required, the man it turned to for help was Ronald Allison, who became the Queen’s press secretary. Allison, who has died aged 90, was at the time what the BBC still quaintly described as its court correspondent, and what less reverent observers called Gold Microphone in Waiting. But he was at least a working journalist, rather than the retired naval officers or old Etonian courtiers of yore.
Royal press officers were not completely new. The first had been appointed in 1918 and Allison would be the seventh, though the monarchy had done without one for most of the 30s and through the second world war.
