by Penny Junor
The pleasures of William aside, it was a long and gruelling tour, and Charles was worried about Diana. She found the crowds terrifying and was exhausted much of the time. In another letter home he wrote, ‘I do feel desperate for Diana. There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly, and I’m quite convinced mindless people photographing it … What has got into them all? Can’t they see further than the end of their noses and to what it is doing to her? How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazy attention unscathed?’
Everyone was worried about what the media obsession with Diana was doing to her. There were photographs of her in newspapers almost every day – and often she hadn’t even seen the photographer. In one picture she was inside the house at Highgrove, evidently taken with a powerful lens from across the park. Her face had become a money-spinner for them all. An exclusive picture on the front page for any one of them, no matter what the caption, meant a huge hike in circulation for that newspaper. Inside, any story, however trivial, however true, excited comment, but after the initial honeymoon period when Diana could do no wrong, she began to wobble on her pedestal. The columnists that would heap praise on her one day were just as likely to hurl brickbats the next. She read every last word of it obsessively, and was as buoyed up by the praise as she was depressed by the criticism.
Before William’s birth, the Queen had taken the unusual step of inviting the newspaper editors to Buckingham Palace, where Michael Shea, her Press Secretary, appealed to them to stop harassing her daughter-in-law and to allow her private life to be private. Diana couldn’t go anywhere without being photographed; she couldn’t even go to the village shop to buy some wine gums. After the briefing, the editors were ushered into an adjoining room for drinks with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The editor of the News of the World, who had obviously been pondering on the matter of the wine gums, asked why Diana hadn’t simply sent out a servant to buy them for her. ‘That,’ said the Queen, ‘is the most pompous suggestion I’ve ever heard.’
For a while most of the editors did stop buying the photos that came from the paparazzi, but it didn’t stop the commentary and speculation, and it didn’t help with Diana’s fragile and at times volatile condition.
As William was to discover more than twenty years later, to achieve any kind of real privacy, you had to do more than appeal to the better nature of the press.
A NEW ARRIVAL
Within weeks of returning home from the Antipodes, the Wales family was off again to conquer Canada, this time using the royal yacht Britannia as a base. The ‘Lady Di’ mania was every bit as alarming as it had been in Australia and New Zealand. While Charles looked ever more dispensable by her side – and collected tributes on her behalf from disappointed fans – she took the country by storm.
Her outfits were more dazzling, she attended more ceremonies, concerts and parades, planted more trees, held more hands and won more hearts. What people seemed to go crazy about, in Canada as much as everywhere else she went, was that she seemed so approachable. No one would have dreamed of lunging forward to touch, far less kiss, the Queen or even Princess Anne, but Diana looked sweetly vulnerable and waif-like and her friendly style struck a chord with the crowds. She did common-sense things, like squatting on her heels to talk to children or to people in wheelchairs so as to be at their level, and if someone dropped something in front of her, she would bend down to retrieve it for them. She had youth, beauty, glamour and a lightness of touch, which had never been seen in the Royal Family before.
It was a winning combination that was rapidly turning her into a superstar that no one in the Royal Household had any idea how to handle. Diana was becoming intoxicated by the adulation. Wherever she went, she was the centre of attention and she could see that with no more than a coquettish tilt of the head or a teasing laugh, men, and women too, fell like ninepins in her thrall. The adoration of strangers in some curious way made up for the vacuum she felt in real life and in her marriage.
Away from the cameras and the cheering she struggled with feelings of emptiness and depression and her moods continued to swing violently. Having tried everything in his power to help, Charles had run out of ideas and of sympathy. As he felt the chill of being outside the spotlight, the old feelings of insecurity and inadequacy that had haunted his youth came back with a vengeance. He didn’t understand what went on inside her head, or what he had done to incite such vitriol. The more he retreated into himself, the more she raged against his absences and lack of concern and the more she convinced herself that his friends were conspiring behind her back.
Her suspicions were completely unfounded, and Charles had spoken to no one about their difficulties, but her obsession ate away at her and corroded what little was left of their relationship. He became uncharacteristically moody and prone to violent outbursts of temper that he unleashed on his most loyal and trusted staff; people like Michael Colborne, who had been with him in the Navy and who had tried so hard to help Diana, were being lambasted for spending too much time with her. Gone was the man Colborne had known in his bachelor years, a man thirsty for life, who was ready to have a go at anything and everything, who worked hard and drove himself hard, but who was fun to be with. The joy seemed to have gone out of his life and the serious side to his nature, which had always been there, appeared to have taken over.
Early the next year Diana became pregnant again, ‘as if by a miracle’, she would later say – and on 15 September Prince Harry was born. Charles was again with her throughout, and the next morning brought William to see his new brother. Diana would later say that for six weeks before his birth she and the Prince were closer than they had ever been, or ever would be. ‘Then suddenly as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain.’ She claimed it was because Charles was disappointed the baby was another boy, and a redhead. ‘Something inside me closed off.’
Those around them at the time say that if Charles was disappointed he showed not the slightest trace of it. He appeared to be thrilled to have another son, saying, ‘We almost have a full polo team,’ and was again overwhelmed by the miracle of childbirth.
But there was going to be no miracle cure for the marriage. Diana was spared the chronic postnatal depression she had suffered after William’s birth, but the bulimia was bad, as were her mood swings, and her demands were increasingly unrealistic. She insisted that Charles spend more time with the children and sent a note to Edward Adeane, their Private Secretary, saying that in future her husband would not be available for meetings in the early mornings or evenings because he would be upstairs in the nursery with William. Adeane, a bachelor with no children, and a courtier of the old school, was dumbfounded. Mornings and evenings were the two moments in their normally hectic day when they had time to go through vital briefings.
As his relationship with Diana deteriorated, the Prince became temperamental and depressed and hugely demanding of everyone around him. He cut back on his engagements and spent many a contemplative hour digging the garden at Highgrove or riding hard, pushing himself physically to the limits. And having cut his closest and oldest friends out of his life, he became isolated in his misery.
The press was quick to notice that he was slowing down. They had calculated that in the same three-month period, Prince Charles had carried out fifteen engagements while Princess Anne had done fifty-six, Prince Philip forty-five and the Queen twenty-eight. Meanwhile he seemed to have plenty of time for polo. They were calling him work-shy and lazy. His father told him to pull his socks up. Prince Philip had no time for the soul-searching his son seemed engaged in and less time for men minding the babies.
Charles, who had been plagued ever since he came out of the Navy by the feeling that he had no real role in life, was becoming more spiritual and philosophical by the day and his interests were turning towards the alternative and controversial.
This wasn’t the first time that he’d stepped ou
tside the royal mould – or found his father unsympathetic. Back in 1972, he had been moved by a radio interview, which opened his eyes to what life was like for young people in deprived areas; many of them turned to crime in the absence of families or other support. Some scribbled thoughts on the back of an envelope about how he might help, and his severance pay from the Navy, formed the basis of the Prince’s Trust, which is now the UK’s leading youth charity and as mainstream as it is possible to be. It has given a leg-up in life to well over half a million eighteen- to thirty-year-olds, and spawned many other initiatives, but social deprivation is a highly political topic and one, therefore, which is highly controversial for the heir to the throne to be involved in.
By the early 1980s, he was straying into ever more dangerous waters. He was invited to convene a conference at Windsor for leaders in the business community to meet leaders of the black community. It was one of the most significant advances in race relations ever made, but it could have gone terribly wrong. At the same time, he was sending shock waves through the hallowed corridors of the Royal Institute of British Architecture and the British Medical Association with speeches that were sharply critical and in turn brought an avalanche of criticism on the Prince’s head.
Edward Adeane did not approve and thought the Prince should curb his words and confine his activities to safer, more traditional areas. Colborne supported Charles every inch of the way, telling him to forget what previous Princes of Wales had done: these were the 1980s. There was a social revolution going on outside the Palace gates, a whole generation of young people who needed his leadership and he should stop feeling sorry for himself and go out and do it.
It was a fractured and unhappy Household and that July, Colborne, who had been a Chief Petty Officer with Charles in the Navy and who was one of the few people who dared tell him what he thought, handed in his notice. He had been with the Prince for ten years and would have walked over red-hot coals for him. He had also grown very fond of Diana and felt sorry for her, but he’d had enough of being caught in the crossfire between the two of them and being the one on whom his boss took out his anger and frustration.
The Prince of Wales has many strengths, but he has never happily put up with people around him who disagree with him; Colborne was an exception, and because their relationship went back to the Navy, he could get away with it. His relationship with his Private Secretary was another matter, and with such divergent ideas on what he should be doing with his life, it was only a matter of time before the Prince and Edward Adeane came to grief. The day after Colborne left, the two men had a blazing row and Adeane resigned.
It was an opportunity for Charles to look for a successor beyond the military and the diplomatic service, whence most royal courtiers came. He instructed a head-hunter, and the man chosen to take Adeane’s place was a 13th Baronet from the City, who was as surprised as he was flattered to have been selected. Sir John Riddell, from an old Northumberland family, had no experience of the Royal Family and therefore no preconceptions about how things should be done. A successful investment banker of fifty-one, he was delightfully gentle, humorous and unassuming. He was married with a young family, of much the same age as William and Harry – therefore deeply sympathetic to the draw of the nursery.
HIS ROYAL NAUGHTINESS
When the time came to choose a first school for William, Charles and Diana opted for Mrs Mynor’s in Chepstow Villas, Notting Hill, where Sir John Riddell’s youngest son was a pupil.
Dressed in clothes he had chosen himself (essential for a good mood) – a checked shirt, red shorts and a striped jumper – and accompanied by both parents, William arrived for his first day in September 1985. He was three years and three months old and went into the lowest year group, which was called Cygnets. No heir to the throne had ever been to school at such a young age. Charles had a governess until shortly before his eighth birthday, and when he went to school he became the first heir ever to have done so. But Diana wanted William to mix with ordinary children from the earliest age and be treated like a normal child.
The only difference between him and his classmates that day was that a bank of photographers, reporters and TV cameras were waiting on the pavement outside the school to record this historic moment in the life of the nation’s favourite three-year-old. It was to be their one and only chance. Charles and Diana had written to the editors of every national newspaper asking that William be allowed to come and go in peace thereafter. The exception was the Christmas play.
As a friend told Diana’s biographer Sarah Bradford, ‘William was in the school play. He was very little, probably three and a half … all dressed up in a little nativity outfit. And there was this huge bank of photographers all on ladders. And everyone was shouting out “William, William, William!” It must have been terrifically difficult for a child that age to understand.
‘I asked her once, what do you do about that? And she said she had had to say to him: “You are going to go to school today and there’s going to be all these people who want to take your picture and if you are a good boy and you let them … then I’ll take you to Thorpe Park next week.”’
Charles and Diana had already done some groundwork with the media. They had held a series of lunches at Kensington Palace and invited the editors one by one. My father, Sir John Junor, then editor of the Sunday Express, was one of them and was duly flattered to have been asked to advise them on public relations. Over plums from the garden at Highgrove, the conversation turned to the catalogue of untrue and hurtful stories that had appeared in the press. As he later wrote in his memoirs, ‘Looking slightly tremulous … she poured out to me her resentment about the way in which it was suggested in newspapers that she was influencing her husband and turning him against shooting and hunting. Prince Charles broke in. “I’m angry about that too. Because my wife is doing nothing of the kind. My wife actually likes hunting and shooting. It is I who have turned against it.”’
My father left profoundly smitten by the Princess, who kept in touch over the years, recognising she had a powerful ally. He was not the only man to become putty in her hands.
By all accounts, William was quite a handful. Until Harry’s arrival he had been the centre of his parents’ universe, and like most first children who are indulged – as only first children can be – he was not best pleased to be supplanted by a demanding baby who was picked up and fussed over every time he cried. His mother nicknamed him ‘Your Royal Naughtiness’ but was mostly amused by his cheekiness. At Mrs Mynor’s he quickly became ‘Basher Wills’ or ‘Billy the Basher’. His father had been rather cowed and insecure as a small boy and found it hard to make friends. William was the opposite. He was a confident and happy child, not to say irrepressible, and was more than capable of standing up for himself. Staff remembered him being very popular with the other children and for ‘his kindness, sense of fun and quality of thoughtfulness’.
On a snowy January day in 1987, at the age of four and a half, he moved on to Wetherby School, also in Notting Hill, where he spent the next three years in preparation for boarding. His first day – this time dressed in a grey and red uniform, with short trousers, long socks and a cap – was again marked by a melee of media in the street and dozens of clicking cameras. Although not a daily occurrence, they were becoming a familiar part of life and William, eager to race up the steps to be with his schoolfriends, was frequently tethered by his mother and made to wave or to smile.
She always tried to take him to school before her day’s engagements, and often stopped off at her local Sainsbury’s to buy him and his little brother Twiglets or some other treat on her way home afterwards – ‘I know they’re not good for them,’ she’d say, ‘but they do love them.’
However, most of the childcare fell to Barbara Barnes. She was the constant and consistent figure in their lives and inevitably a very close bond formed between them. Although the apartment at Kensington Palace was far less formal than any of the other royal residences, the childr
en lived in the nursery and, according to the Princess’s Private Secretary, Patrick Jephson, their domain under the eaves on the top floor was almost a court in its own right. There were bedrooms, bathrooms, playrooms, a kitchen and a dining room. In addition to Barbara, there were part-time nannies, policemen and a shared driver, all of whom operated a routine of school runs, parties, shopping and trips to the cinema. The children didn’t always have the run of the house, but usually came downstairs before bedtime.
The house was an office as well as a home. Both the Prince and Princess had meetings and lunches with staff or advisers or charity executives, and it was not unusual for the Prince in particular to hold meetings in the evenings. Stephen O’Brien, then chief executive of Business in the Community, and his colleague Cathy Ashton were sitting in the Prince’s study waiting for him to arrive one evening when Diana burst through the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m looking for William. It’s bedtime so he’s vanished. Will you give me a shout if you see him?’ They were left wondering how one might give the Princess of Wales a shout, when squeals of laughter from above solved the problem.
Roger Singleton, then director of Barnardo’s, arrived for lunch one day, bearing a large green plaster frog. It was a gift from a group of physically handicapped children at a school in Taunton that Diana had visited the previous week in her capacity as president. As Singleton was ushered through the front door, William and Harry came bounding down the stairs and instantly began clamouring for the frog. It was too heavy for either of them to carry alone, so William went racing off up the stairs, excitedly yelling to his mother that a frog was coming, while Harry, who refused to be parted from it, staggered up the stairs with one small hand resolutely on the frog’s bottom and the other tightly clutching Singleton’s free hand.