I HAD QUEEN’S EAR … AND SHE HAD MY HEART
Four years ago, the King and the Princess of Wales’s cancer battles and Meghan’s public statements would have been Brisbane-raised Samantha Cohen’s business, as the top adviser to the Queen
Samantha Cohen’s eyes well up when she recalls the Christmases and summers she and her family shared with the late Queen Elizabeth II. The 54-year-old spent 18 years with The Firm, much of that time as the assistant private secretary to the longest reigning monarch in British history.
Their relationship was close – they saw each other almost daily – and for nearly a decade, she had her own bedroom at Windsor Castle.
“I was away working a lot with a young family but the Queen made it easy, if there was an evening function I’d stay over and sleep in my bedroom at Windsor so I didn’t have to drive back to London at night,” she said.
“When we were on duty at Balmoral we could bring our families, my children had summer holidays there and, when I was on duty every two years at Sandringham, they came there for Christmas. The Queen and I used to talk a lot. I miss her, she was a special woman.”
SAMANTHA PANTHER
The Queen dubbed her “Samantha Panther” for her no-nonsense work attitude, so when she suggested the royal family modernise by launching Youtube and social media accounts, they conformed. “I suppose I did move the royal family onto social media,” she says of working as deputy communications secretary for HM in 2007.
“We needed to modernise the way the family had done things, things had been done in a certain way for a long time so we proposed a royal channel on Youtube.
“We did a mock up and showed The Queen what Youtube was. She said: ‘Fantastic’, she was up for it.
“The first Christmas broadcast on Youtube in 2007 was a little scary because we didn’t really know what we were doing, setting up a royal channel for the first time. The broadcast got a million hits in not very long. As part of that package we put them on Instagram and then Twitter.”
Soon afterwards Ms Cohen, who now works as chief of staff for mining giant Rio Tinto, received calls from The Vatican and White House saying: “The Queen had a channel on Youtube before we did”.
So successful was the launch, Ms Cohen was subsequently invited to the headquarters of the Catholic Church in Vatican City to help Pope Benedict XVI start his own channel.
THE WRITE STUFF
Born to a general surgeon father and university academic mother in England, Ms Cohen, who was raised in Brisbane, began her career as a
journalist at the Sunshine Coast Daily. She then dabbled in politics, notably as media adviser for Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Liberal Senator John Herron, before moving to England for a public relation position.
But it was an innocuous advert in PR Week for a two-year position as media officer to the royal household that would change her life.
She landed the role, then went on to become head of royal communications and, eventually,