The lack of pomp was put down to the fact that it was a ‘working’ rather than an ‘official’ visit, yet she was accompanied throughout by a Foreign Office minister, Lynda Chalker (by then elevated to the Lords as Baroness Chalker). They made a formidable diplomatic duo: the bountiful baroness bearing the British foreign aid cheque book, and the Princess bringing prestige and media attention to charities operating in some of the remotest parts of the world. Each learned from the other as they toured the Himalayan foothills by helicopter, Land Rover and on foot.
‘I have a lovely picture of her and me,’ says the Baroness. ‘I am sitting in an old summer dress with a white collar and white sleeves – and the white ends were no longer white! I thought, this is not the dress to wear on a royal tour.’ The minister was accompanied by her then husband, Clive. The Princess had her sister, Lady Sarah, in tow as lady-in-waiting. Yet it was a lean operation, by royal standards.
Lady Chalker was as fond of the Princess as she was of the Prince. ‘You have to be able, in family break-ups, to be able to talk with both sides but, above all, to listen to both sides. So I did that,’ she says. ‘The Princess was finding her feet and it was a very strange period.’ Even so, Lady Chalker’s patience would be tested one night as she and her husband were asleep. ‘We stayed in the house of the military attaché in the compound because there were only a limited number of rooms in the Ambassador’s house,’ she recalls. ‘Suddenly I heard banging on the front door. It was the British Ambassador in a frantic state. He was saying: “Do you know where Her Royal Highness is?” I said: “Have you asked her sister?” ’ The Ambassador had tried that. Lady Chalker could not help any further. ‘I just said: “Well, ask the police!” It was not my job to keep her under lock and key.’
There was an awkward atmosphere at breakfast the following morning when the story unfolded. As Lady Chalker recalls, the Princess was ‘a bit sheepish’ as she explained where she had been. ‘She went off with the Crown Prince. They had gone for a spin in his sports car. He had got the police to close off all the roads and they went through the centre of Kathmandu. I think Clive asked her if she put her seatbelt on at some point. She said the car didn’t have seatbelts.’†
Had this been an official visit and had the Princess been a fully-fledged member of the Royal Family, then she would have been obliged to abide by ministerial advice. But what were the rules regarding a joyriding semi-royal Princess? Did she have to listen to the Baroness? ‘She wouldn’t – not if she didn’t want to,’ says Lady Chalker. ‘But I was having to be more of a diplomat than a minister.’
The following year, Diana was in Zimbabwe, visiting projects involving those suffering from HIV/Aids and leprosy. Nearly 800 wealthy – mainly white – Zimbabweans paid handsomely to attend a glamorous charity reception in Harare and dressed accordingly. They were surprised and a little disappointed to find the Princess in a simple day-dress with no jewellery. As far as she was concerned, this was hardly a trip for dressing up. The local tourist board also expressed irritation that her itinerary focussed almost entirely on poverty and did not include famous landmarks like the Victoria Falls. Well aware of the dangers of ‘compassion fatigue’, she sent a note to her Private Secretary, Patrick Jephson, acknowledging the need to vary the nature of these trips in future. ‘Change of diet is very important!’ she wrote. With that in mind, she would soon be attending a fabulously glamorous fund-raiser in Paris and making her first (and last) trip to Moscow.
The British Ambassador to Russia at the time, Sir Brian Fall, says that the Princess had been wanting to come to Moscow for some time but the Foreign Office had wanted her to wait until after the Queen’s 1994 state visit. ‘Diana was a great problem to them. They’d been trying to stop her coming out, particularly before [the Queen], which was understandable,’ he says. A date was fixed for June 1995, with the focal point being a children’s hospital. The Foreign Office had only proposed a two-day visit, but Sir Brian was keen to offer longer, if that appealed to the Princess. He contacted the Palace and spoke to the Queen’s Private Secretary, Robert Fellowes, who was also the Princess’s brother-in-law, to explain what might be achieved by a slightly lengthier visit. Sir Brian’s boss was furious. If anyone was going to decide where the Princess should go, it was the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. ‘I committed a major crime,’ chuckles Sir Brian. ‘Douglas hit the roof and said he was the person who had the relationship with Diana and foreign policy and all that. What the hell was I doing?’ The visit would be strictly limited to two days.
Sir Brian and his wife, Delmar, found the Princess ‘an amazingly easy house guest’, though she was wary of everyone, including the Embassy staff. ‘You couldn’t go into her room or even empty her waste paper basket,’ says Lady Fall. The Ambassador took to her from the start. ‘She arrived and on the way into the embassy we called in on Luzhkov [Yury Luzhkov, the long-serving Mayor of Moscow] who did his Soviet bit – on and on,’ Sir Brian recalls. ‘And he went on for forty minutes. Finally he drew breath and the Princess said: “Is this when I get to say something?” And I realised: “This is going to be alright as a visit!” Which indeed it was.’
When the Falls asked the Princess if she would make a detour to visit a centre for children with Down’s syndrome, run by the wife of a British journalist, the Princess was delighted to oblige even though it was not on the schedule
Soon after the Princess’s return from Moscow, there was a change of Foreign Secretary. Douglas Hurd was replaced by Malcolm Rifkind, and the Princess wasted no time in making contact. ‘Out of the blue, I got a message saying “The Princess of Wales wonders whether you might possibly be free?” ’ says Sir Malcolm, chuckling at the idea that he might not have been able to find a gap in his diary. ‘I realised I had not been invited for my wit. She was wanting to know what she could do abroad and she was very impressive in the way she handled people.’ The Princess had just received an invitation that she knew was controversial. ‘She’d been invited to Argentina and I explained why it had to be sensitive,’ says Rifkind. A children’s charity in Buenos Aires had asked her to attend a fund-raising event, although the request clearly bore the fingerprints of President Carlos Menem, a self-styled playboy figure. This would be the most high-profile British visit since the UK–Argentine war over the Falkland Islands thirteen years before. ‘I said I could not see any obvious problem but it was a question of whether the Argentinians would try to use it. I was trying to be helpful because I thought she was a good asset,’ says Sir Malcolm.
The Princess wanted to discuss her long-term plans, too. As Sir Malcolm recalls: ‘It was a broad conversation: “What will be the constraints on my travel? I want to use my time and I do get a number of invitations”. My personal view was that the whole world would want to meet her whether she was the Princess of Wales or not. I wrote to thank her and it crossed with a letter from her saying “I was so pleased you took time to see me. I know what a busy programme you have”. I know it was just a pleasant courtesy, but what a way to charm. With all her problems, she had her own area of talent and ability.’
Travelling as ‘K. Stafford’ – an alias that would fool no one at all on her scheduled British Airways flight – the Princess flew to Argentina. There she attended a gala dinner and cabaret in the magnificent old Buenos Aires Post Office building where Eva Perón once had her headquarters. The Princess’s hosts were mildly appalled when the (blind) orchestra decided to round off the cabaret with a jaunty version of ‘I’m getting married in the morning’, but the Princess found it hilarious. She also met – and towered over – the flirtatious President Menem (without discussing the Falklands war), had tea in a remote Patagonian town founded by Welsh migrants and went whale-watching, politely ignoring the directive to put an orange lifejacket over her pale-blue jacket. For all the diplomatic sensitivities, none of it would be anything like as controversial as the event that preceded her tour a few days before – that interview with the BBC’s Panorama. In Britain alone, the audienc
e of nearly twenty-three million set a new record for a factual television programme.
The programme would be the catalyst for divorce proceedings, but it left Diana feeling more confident about setting her own agenda. She accepted an invitation to Chicago to attend a 1996 charity ball for Northwestern University’s Cancer Center, raising more than £1 million for cancer research in the process, and dancing with retired chat-show host Phil Donahue. She was also moved to tears meeting sick children at Cook County Hospital, the location for two of her favourite television shows, Chicago Hope and ER. The visit saturated national and international news media for two days.
There would be a similar trip to Sydney later in the year, again based around a major fund-raising gala evening, with some charity work bolted on. By now her divorce had been finalised and she was no longer HRH The Princess of Wales, but Diana, Princess of Wales. The ‘HRH’ style had been conferred on marrying into the Royal Family, the Palace explained, and it therefore disappeared on her departure from it. Regardless, the world would simply carry on calling her ‘Princess Diana’ – a title that she never had in the first place. It was clear that her star quality was undiminished. The Sydney trip caused anxiety within Buckingham Palace because the Princess set off for Australia midway through the Queen’s state visit to Thailand. Many of the media covering the Queen were diverted from Bangkok to Australia. Although the Queen would never regard herself as being in competition with her ex-daughter-in-law, there was ill-concealed irritation inside both the Royal Household and the Foreign Office that a long-prepared official mission by the head of state should be eclipsed by the Princess’s unofficial four-day trip to one of the Queen’s realms.
Once again, the protocol was a source of endless concern to the Princess’s hosts and of great fascination to the media. Her hosts, the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, circulated a memo to staff explaining the Princess’s new title. ‘Under no circumstances is she to be referred to or called Princess Diana,’ it explained. ‘There is no requirement to curtsy.’ The instructions were promptly ignored by genuflecting Australians, who called her ‘Princess Diana’ wherever she went. They also highlighted the uncertainties surrounding her semi-royal status. There was a motorcade to meet her at the airport, but it had nothing to do with the police or the Governor-General; it had been sponsored by a local Toyota dealer. Given that the Princess had arrived with just a lady-in-waiting and a secretary by way of an entourage, there was no need for a motorcade anyway.
The Australian press were obsessively interested both in the Princess’s every move and in what the British press had to say. At the gala dinner, where 810 people paid A$1,000 a head for seared tuna and after-dinner entertainment from Sting, the Sydney Daily Telegraph had even given one reporter the task of monitoring the Princess’s every move with her knife and fork: ‘She ate one of three pieces of seared tuna, one half of roasted tomato, ignoring the squid ink-black noodles . . .’
Clearly aware that the timing of all this risked annoying the Queen, as the monarch’s tour of Thailand disappeared from the news pages, the Princess went out of her way to include a Commonwealth dimension to her visit. While attending a lunch for Commonwealth charities (the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s royal food correspondent, still hard at work, observed that she had eaten ‘none’ of her smoked-emu carpaccio), the Princess suddenly started scribbling some notes during lunch. She then asked if she might say a few words and praised the Commonwealth for the way it ‘gives a sense of belonging, one to another’.
Her hosts were determined to control every moment of this overtly corporate visit, right down to the exact route and timings of her postprandial walkabout through the Sydney Convention Hall. Not even the Queen had scripted walkabouts. The Princess managed to inject some spontaneity into these sterile proceedings. ‘Can I hug you because I really love everything you do?’ asked Emma Jones, thirteen, who had lost half a leg to cancer. ‘Of course. I love hugs,’ the Princess replied, as Emma threw her arms around her.
From a charitable point of view, the visit had been extremely successful. However, the Princess was determined to be more than a royal (or partly-royal) figurehead and fund-raiser. At the time of her divorce she had shed her patronage of around a hundred charities. She wanted to use her position to do something more substantial. Among her aims was to shift international thinking on a pressing but divisive international issue: landmines. One of her former charities, the British Red Cross, was campaigning for a global ban on these lingering death-traps, left to maim and kill all-comers – especially children – long after wars had ceased. The Princess prepared to set off for Angola, a former war zone with one of the worst rates of landmine casualties in the world. Politically, this was more than sensitive. Her old friend, Baroness Chalker, the Minister for Overseas Aid, was very supportive. ‘I went ahead of her, with the police, to set up the visit as an advance party,’ she says. However, other sections of the British government were cautious, if not obstructive. In the Foreign Office there was plenty of opposition, not least from within the British Embassy in Angola. According to one royal source, the Ambassador was ‘difficult’ in the extreme. He did not want the Princess going anywhere near a minefield and made a complaint to the Foreign Secretary. The Ministry of Defence was unhappy, too. The British government not only had its own stores of landmines, but was reluctant to support a ban until there was international unanimity on the issue. One Defence Minister – later identified as Earl Howe – told The Times: ‘We do not need a loose cannon like her.’ Yet images of the Princess in protective mine-clearance kit, walking through an Angolan minefield, did more to highlight and popularise the issue than any publicity to date. She would make a similar trip to Bosnia that summer – and would create a similar impact. Here was a cause that was off-limits to the Royal Family, and one to which she was clearly making a substantial difference. Amid all the uncertainty in her private life, this appeared to be a solid, life-affirming base from which to develop that long-term modus operandi.
Diana never had the satisfaction of seeing 122 nations sign a new treaty eliminating the production and use of landmines later that same year. Nor did she live to see the International Campaign to Ban Landmines win the Nobel Peace Prize that winter. Her death in a Paris car crash would be met with appalled disbelief, even in countries that never knew her. The grief was global and profound, and the big anniversaries of it still resonate to this day, for her greatest twin legacies are now at the forefront of Britain’s royal story, as formidable ambassadors in their own right.
THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE
Like their father and the Queen, both the Duke of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex have shown a strong affinity for the Commonwealth. After leaving Eton, Prince William spent a ‘gap’ year that spanned army jungle training in Belize, farming in the UK and an Operation Raleigh project in a remote part of southern Chile. A television camera would be admitted to record the Chilean adventure, including the sight of the heir to the Heir to the Throne scrubbing a lavatory. However, it was the Prince’s off-camera experiences in Africa that left the deepest mark. Once again, Kenya would play a central part in a royal rite of passage. For a few epiphanic months of 2001, the Prince worked as a ranch hand at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya. Tom Fletcher, embarking on a Foreign Office career after graduating from Oxford, was working at the British High Commission in Nairobi. As the office junior, and therefore the nearest in age to the teenage Prince, he was deputed to make the visit a success. He found the experience rather more enjoyable than Sir Eric Norris had found the same exercise with the Prince’s father and aunt a generation before.
‘The main thing was just trying to keep the whole thing secret and get him to Lewa,’ says Fletcher. ‘Once he was there, he was fine. Any press would have been shot or eaten. There was just a very small team – Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton [the Prince’s Private Secretary] and the close-protection guys. Their role is always downplayed but they were incredibly involved.’
Fletcher would drop in now and then and tried to keep things as informal as possible – within reason. ‘I think I called him “Your Royal Highness” a couple of times and then avoided it as much as possible. You might call him “William” in the third person in front of him.’ He remembers the Prince as ‘very easygoing, quite shy’ and keen to blend in. ‘He was going off every day and mending fences with one of the Kenyan guys, doing what any other gap-year kid would have been asked to do.’
In this same area of Kenya, Prince William would end up dating the ranch owner’s daughter, proposing to his future wife and spending his honeymoon. What is clearly going to be a lifelong passion for conservation stems from his early trips there. One of the first patronages that the Prince embraced was the wildlife charity, Tusk. Wary of the charge that these are the privileged concerns of an international safari set, the Prince has made African wildlife a central plank of his international work ever since. He has set up a taskforce to tackle both ends of the trade in animal parts and has recruited the former Tory leader, Lord Hague, as its chairman. Much of its work takes place behind closed doors beyond the gaze of the media. As an ex-politician, Hague remains in awe of the reach of royalty, pointing to Prince William’s 2015 broadcast on Chinese television. This was especially sensitive territory, given that China drives the demand for animal parts and its President was about to pay a state visit to Britain. ‘I doubt a British prime minister would get 300 million Chinese people to listen to a broadcast,’ says Hague, ‘and definitely no British Foreign Secretary. Maybe a president of the USA, or some immense Hollywood AAA-grade celebrity could get that. But no one else from this country.’
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 65