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‘In terms of the role that we had at the centre, it was essentially coordinating lots of other partners, and I felt that the most important thing for us was to be really clear on our objectives and what we were asking other people to do.’

Those four objectives were to support a fitting commemoration of the life and legacy of Her Majesty, celebrate the accession of the new King, bring the country together, and to enhance the reputation of the UK overseas. ‘I thought if people had those as their focus, they would make the right decisions,’ he adds.

An earlier major review of London Bridge had also led to a slight change in the communications strategy. The original plan had called for volunteers across Government Communication to offer their assistance once the Queen had died, but real-life experience in crisis situations had since revealed that strategy to be untenable.

‘Although you get lots of volunteers, you need people in place that already know what they are doing,’ explains Baugh. ‘You need people who have had some training before you get to that point, because you’ve got ten days and you need to hit the ground running.’

Another issue that arose from the review was the brand. While it would have been distasteful to develop a brand around the death of the Queen, it was important that there was an image that could be used on government channels and on social media mastheads. Ironically, senior brand officer Ethan Carlin had only completed the black and white signage, featuring approved images of the Queen and her Cypher, the morning of her death.

As the Queen had become increasingly frail, there had been more regular testing of the plan, most recently over the summer. And the defined volunteers had been through training although, inevitably, as Baugh says: ‘We still had a bit more that we wanted to do.’

But the key point, though, was that everybody who needed to be was familiar with London Bridge. ‘We had a very detailed plan for about the first 24 hours of communications, but we deliberately hadn’t got everything down to an enormous amount of detail because the funeral itself would be very much led by the Royal Household and, ultimately, there would be decisions taken at the time about exactly how this was going to work,’ he explains.

Baugh was first alerted that something was afoot, when Shaun Jepson, head of news and external affairs at the Cabinet Office, pointed out that Liz Truss, who was then Prime Minister, had been passed a note during the debate over her energy statement. It was out of kilter with normal Parliamentary procedures.

‘I asked Shaun to check with the Cabinet Secretary’s Office, and they said it looked like we might be operating this plan. And then the statement about Her Majesty’s health came out, at which point we started operating on the basis that this was likely to be when rather than if,’ he explains.

As luck would have it, Baugh was scheduled to host a weekly directors of communication meeting, which involved about 20 people, including every ministerial department and several non-ministerial ones, such as HMRC and the Office of National Statistics. ‘We just changed the agenda, and had an hour running through the plans and what would happen and how we would alert people. I think the critical thing, particularly around the actual announcement, is not doing things rather than doing things.

‘It was important that this was an announcement that was made by the Royal Family, and that we then followed in the right order, with the Prime Minister making a statement first, followed by the other departments.

‘Even though you have trained when it happens it still takes a moment. So having that period to read through it all in a relatively calm environment really made quite a big difference. Also, I think people were perhaps surprised at their own reaction to the news, because it felt like an enormous moment. One of the things I felt I needed to do was to be visible to the whole of the Government Communications Services team.

‘Many people come into government communications because of that sense of wanting to do something that matters, a sense of public service. I wanted to reflect that sense of pride of us actually being Crown servants and public servants and that meaning something, and also to say The eyes of the country and the world are on us over the next ten days, let’s make Her Majesty proud because we all want to live up to those values she embodied.’

After the initial messages of condolence, the next step was to turn off all government communications campaigns and to change all the gov.uk content. But the next morning, things got off to a somewhat inauspicious start.

The Bridges Plan had designated 10 Victoria Street as the news and communications centre, but on arrival the team found a basement room with no natural light and a sketchy mobile signal. By 9.30am, the decision was taken to base the operations out of the Cabinet Office, which also was closer to the then new communications team at Number Ten, who had been in place for less than a week.

As the Queen died at Balmoral, the first 48 hours afforded breathing space for Baugh’s team. London Bridge had contained appendices, such as Operation Unicorn, a plan that would be enacted if the Queen died whilst at her Scottish palace, which was focused on the Scottish government and Police Scotland. However, this had also been amended post Covid: the coffin would be flown to London on day five rather than conveyed by the Royal Train.

The media landscape has dramatically changed since the death of George VI, and the Bridges’ team was aware that 12 days is a long time in a 24-hours news cycle. ‘In the best communications plans, you are proactively setting the agenda every day. The moment when you have a day where nothing is happening is the one where the story that is a bit awkward starts to blow up,’ says Baugh.

‘With the proclamations and the King’s visits to Northern Ireland and Wales [within the first four days after Her Majesty’s death], the Palace tried to make sure that there was sufficient news each day that would satisfy the needs of news organisations, who were running 60-minute specials and other programmes,’ he explains.

Ultimately, Government Communication was at the epicentre of a massive communications network, which encompassed government communications in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, many local authorities, almost every government department, some ‘arms-length bodies’, and operational partners, such as the police, Transport for London, and Westminster Council.

‘Our role really was to coordinate all of that, to make sure that everybody knows what communications is happening when and what the plan for the day is so that we don’t have conflicting information going out at the same time, and that we are appropriately making space for the right things,’ Baugh explains.

‘It was also about providing information to ministers and to the Palace. We brought together all the media and social media sentiment from the UK and internationally so that we understood how events were being perceived and whether the tone was right, whether there were issues starting to appear on social media that we needed to be proactive about. We were trying to look round corners so that we could adapt our response if needed. We were trying to be proactive, spotting problems before they occurred, and then being solution-focused as well.’

Baugh’s office at the Cabinet Office on Whitehall became the Gold Office, with the four objectives spelled out clearly on a white board alongside three strategic pillars: coordination, information capability and things that needed doing. ‘We had immediate action, which we agreed would be done within the next three hours, and a parking lot, of things that we needed to tackle but weren’t immediate,’ he explains.

Baugh was Gold Lead, alongside Alex Aiken, executive director for Government Communication, Lisa Hunter, deputy chief executive, and Gem Walsh, chief operating officer for the department. Aiken was also the senior responsible officer, having worked on the London Bridge plan for some time. The quartet operated in shifts, although two were always in the office. The Silver Lead ran the news and communications centre.

‘As always with crises, a lot ends up being conference calls. The daily rhythm was we used to get in at 7.30am, have an 8am Gold and Silver meeting about what was in the papers and the latest social media insights. What we thought we needed to do then fed into the Gold 8.30am call. Then there was a 9am comms Silver call involving all the different organisations, agencies, and departments,’ explains Baugh.

‘I also did daily calls with directors of comms from all the departments. We did daily calls with directors of comms at arms-length bodies and with the Scottish and Welsh governments and the Northern Ireland Executives,’ he explains. And every day, at 3pm, an hour-long Gold and Silver meeting took place, which allowed people to take a step back and ask How are things going? What are we getting right? What are we concerned about? What might be an issue in three days’ time, that somebody could tackle today?

At 7pm, another Gold call was scheduled, which included communications but also the gold leads from every involved agency, such as Royal Palaces, Metropolitan Police and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. ‘These calls probably involved about 30 people, but often, because things were going smoothly, they were quite quick. A lot of issues, because of their nature, were dealt with at Silver or Bronze level,’ says Baugh. ‘In the main, it was stuff that was pretty tactical.’

An issue in Scotland involving Republican protesters and the police, for example, had raised questions about how such an issue should be tackled if it occurred in London. ‘Police operations in Scotland had fairly or unfairly been criticised for the way that Republican protestors had been treated. [There was a feeling] that the police had arrested people exercising their right to freedom of speech, when I think the police were actually acting to prevent a situation that could lead to a breakdown of public order,’ explains Baugh.

‘We spoke to the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police to see if there was something that we had learned from Police Scotland that we could apply in London. Did we need to think in advance about communications, so that if something similar happened we could clarify the situation quickly?’

A deputy assistant commissioner with the Metropolitan Police subsequently filmed a video explaining how they would support people’s right to freedom of speech, but why such action had been necessary. In the event, it was not needed, and so never aired.

‘There were other examples, such as early on the number of people outside Buckingham Palace was slightly greater than we had expected and the queue marshalling wasn’t quite as polished as it should be, but we learned from that for the Lying-in-State later on,’ says Baugh. ‘I was at Heathrow when the London 2012 Olympics were on and in that time, people really came together because they wanted to make it work. This reminded me a lot of that time; there was a genuine willingness to engage and work together.’

For example, Transport for London has a policy not to use Twitter for operational updates. But when a request was made to use its Twitter account, which has 2.4 million followers, to ensure people understood what to expect if they came to London for the funeral, such as the challenge of getting home, it was enacted within 15 minutes. ‘Every government department could then amplify those tweets,’ explains Baugh.

Similarly, media owners were offered imagery of the Queen but were not obliged to use them. ‘We phoned them up on the Thursday night and Friday morning to say we had these images, which we could provide in any format and had been approved by the Palace. The scope and breadth with which they were used was quite extraordinary.’

A former boss of Baugh used to work at Toyota, which follows the Japanese principle of Genchi Genbutsu. ‘It basically means Go to the shop floor and see for yourself what is going on. The Royal Parks are obviously just over there [he gestures to the window], so I went and had a walk around. I found it really confusing and a little chaotic. It wasn’t clear where people needed to go or where they could leave flowers, so we flagged that up quite early on,’ he says.

‘We were quite proactive in seeing how things were working. It wasn’t one for us to sort, but we were worried about the reputational impact. The data we had was about putting stewards in place and the barricades, but Toyota is also about how you can look at the data and sometimes it is misleading. It wasn’t dangerous, but it was a poor experience if you were there [at that point].’

But Baugh was clear that, while his team might flag potential issues, it was not for them to then try to rectify them. ‘It would be unhelpful if we got in the way. We were proactively thinking about where there were issues that might be reputational risks or meant we might not be able to achieve our objectives, and then how could we flag these in the right way,’ he explains.

‘If we have that mindset of We’re not here to order everybody around, we’re here to make everybody’s lives easier. We were deliberately trying to say We want to empower all of you to take decisions at the right level, and we will coordinate and draw things together so that it works in the right way.’

However, his experience at the Royal Parks prompted Baugh to ask to see the Lying-in-State plans envisaged by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, which was responsible for the ceremonial aspects of Operation London Bridge.

‘We said on Sunday that it would be good to see them, but it was clear when the DCMS team presented their plans on Monday that the level of thought and planning and preparation that had gone into those was extraordinary. And some of the innovation, such as the queue tracker, was all put in place last minute.’

In fact, the queue tracker was developed in-house within days, confounding even Google. ‘I think sometimes people look at government comms and think Oh, it’s a bit slow. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. Our digital team are doing innovative, cutting-edge stuff. This was a brilliant example of government comms at its best, a real clear public service outcome – delivering a high-quality product that really makes a difference to people,’ says Baugh.

‘I was a bit worried that we would get more criticism for [the Lying-in-State] not being ticketed. We could have done a ticketed event, but I thought part of the purpose really is you wanted people there who really wanted to pay their respects. We knew that we could only get a very small proportion of people through in the time that the Lying-in-State would be happening, and I don’t think a ticketed event would have felt right.’

There were also a handful of open-to-all calls for the departments over the ten days, to offer colleagues the opportunity to ask questions. ‘Most of the questions were Can I do this? Can I do that? Our advice would be You're all professionals, think carefully about whether this could be interpreted in the wrong way, whether the public would think it's the appropriate thing to do, whether the media could choose to misinterpret it and make a judgment based on that. We're here to support but you don't need to get it signed off.’

Similarly, there were calls with local authorities, who were seeking advice on the most appropriate way to commemorate the Queen and how they could support their residents. ‘It’s often a convening role rather than a directing one, it’s about giving people confidence. They were nervous about getting it wrong.’

The Queen’s body arrived in London on Tuesday 13 September, and the ceremonial procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall took place the following day. ‘On paper, it felt like there was going to be quite a lot of time between Wednesday and the State Funeral on the Monday, but we had the King going to Cardiff on the Friday. We had the Queen’s children doing their vigil, and then her grandchildren.

‘We had the National Moment of Reflection, which the team here was responsible for, on the Sunday. And from Saturday, the Palace was releasing information about the arrangements for the funeral. And foreign dignitaries started to arrive,’ he adds. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office had responsibility for the simultaneous state visits, and media around that.

Baugh and his team finally breathed a sigh of relief on the morning of the State Funeral when, upon arriving at the Gold Office, realisation dawned that, from that point on, if anything went wrong, it was for the operational comms leads to sort. The role of the coordination and strategic teams was complete. ‘Everybody was in but with not very much to do, so I opened the windows to watch the Procession from the balcony,’ he adds. ‘And once the coffin went into the grounds of Windsor Castle, after the Long Mile, the government’s role was complete.’

While they hope the Bridges plan will not be needed for some time, Baugh is keen to reflect on any lessons learned and what insights might be carried through for the Coronation in 2023. He has asked head of strategic communications Shamima Yasmine, who has responsibility for the department’s crisis planning, to work with the Bridges’ team to produce a quick reference handbook for use in any crisis. ‘We’re not looking for a 100-page ‘lessons that were learned’ manual,’ adds Baugh.

He believes that having clarity around objectives, clarity around the mindset that was needed, and the operational structure were vital. Similarly, being able to draw on a pool of senior, experienced people who had been through previous crises proved invaluable. ‘I’ve done quite a lot of crisis comms, and when you are the only people leading, it can be difficult to provide the direction and leadership for the team. Having other Gold communications leads of the calibre of Alex, Lisa and Gem made a real difference. There were always two of us in the office, which meant you could divide things up but also it meant we could challenge each other, in a positive and supportive way.’

He adds: ‘Government crises tend to last for a significant period of time. In the main, we managed to avoid people being heroes, working 12 days straight. Instead, we had people who were capable, refreshed, focused and working really hard as a team. I’d like to make sure that we keep that; it’s definitely something we can learn from in the future.’

Sadly, one of the most valuable aspects is also one of the hardest to capture, concedes Baugh, and ‘is that sense that we had during London Bridge of the goodwill and willingness for people to work together’.