He was a press spokesman for Queen Elizabeth II from 1988 until 2000;[3] in the 1996 Birthday Honours, he was appointed Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO).
[4] Arbiter was born to German Jewish refugee parents during a World War II air raid on London.
[5] After college in London, he was an actor and stage manager in South Africa and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, where he became a television and radio news reporter.
His most famous on-air slip up occurred when he started a radio broadcast with, "I am an oil tanker, Dickie Arbiter is on fire in the Gulf."
[10] His memoir On Duty with the Queen: My Twelve Years as a Buckingham Palace Press Secretary was published in October 2014.