by Penny Junor
The press didn’t see it that way, and Charles was roundly condemned as an uncaring father, while Diana was the saintly mother. To make matters worse, her friend James Gilbey, of whom more anon, let it be known that Diana thought Charles was a bad and selfish father who would give up nothing for his children.
A VERY PUBLIC WAR
The golf club incident was not the only occasion when William found himself in the middle of a marital game of one-upmanship. And it was no coincidence that the public were firmly of the view that Diana was a model mother and Charles a cold and absent father, out of touch with the modern world.
When the boys were with their mother, they were photographed having fun, hurtling down water shoots at funfairs, laughing and looking like ordinary little boys. When their father was in the picture, they were more likely to be looking immaculate in suits and ties at family gatherings, with the Queen and Queen Mother, attending church services or the traditional New Year pheasant shoots. Diana was also seen as the one introducing the boys to the thrill of skiing, knowing when she booked the holiday and alerted the press that Charles would be otherwise engaged.
Both Charles and Diana were avid skiers and he had promised the boys he would take them. He was looking forward to watching them put on their skis for the first time and discover the excitement of the mountains. But there was a disagreement about where to take them. Charles wanted them all to go to Klosters in Switzerland. It was his favourite resort, but it had been the scene of a tragic accident three years earlier when his friend Major Hugh Lindsay was killed by an avalanche that narrowly missed the Prince and badly injured Patti Palmer-Tomkinson. Diana, understandably, didn’t want to go back to a place filled with such terrible memories. Without resolving the impasse, she quietly booked a holiday for herself and the boys, with a few other friends, in the pretty Austrian resort of Lech during William’s half-term in March 1991. The dates clashed with a large shooting party Charles had arranged at Sandringham and he couldn’t let down his friends at short notice.
This was not the only time she made plans for the children or changed pre-existing plans. As Patrick Jephson, her Private Secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir, Shadows of a Princess, William and Harry’s ‘theoretical potential as pawns in the Waleses’ game of rivalry was loudly decried on all sides, but it did not stop it happening. The Prince was perhaps slow to recognise the value of being seen to be introducing the boys onto the public stage – or, more likely, he jealously guarded their privacy. His wife, on the other hand, suffered few such inhibitions …’
William’s first official public appearance was a prime example. There had been no discussion in advance and no agreement that William would be taken out of school on St David’s Day, 1 March 1991, and flown to Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, to attend a service in Llandaff Cathedral. Indeed, the agreement between them was that the children would not be made to undertake public engagements until they were older. But without telling anyone in the Prince’s office, Diana quietly organised it.
It would have been a political and public relations disaster for the Prince of Wales’s eldest son (and in all probability, the future Prince of Wales) to make his first visit to the principality without his father, yet it was by sheer chance that his Private Secretary discovered the Princess’s arrangement. Luckily he was able to reschedule the Prince’s day so that it looked like a family outing.
A far greater disaster was looming, which was to upset William more than anything so far and was the beginning of a series of acutely difficult years. During the summer of 1991, when he turned nine, Diana embarked on her life story. Speaking into a tape recorder at Kensington Palace – which found its way, via an intermediary, to the journalist Andrew Morton – she described her marriage. After ten years she wanted the world to know just how unhappy she was, and she wanted the world to know why. The result was an explosive book which took the Prince and his staff completely by surprise and was as damaging to him, the Queen and the institution of monarchy, as it was hurtful and humiliating.
In the weeks before publication in June 1992, Diana: Her True Story was serialised in the Sunday Times. The first instalment appeared under the headline, ‘Diana driven to five suicide bids by “uncaring” Charles.’ It went on to talk about her bulimia, her husband’s indifference towards her, his obsession with his mistress, his shortcomings as a father, and the loneliness and isolation she had felt for so many years, trapped in a loveless marriage within a hostile court and a cold and disapproving Royal Family. The book had a compelling authority and many of the Princess’s closest friends and family members were openly quoted and thanked in the acknowledgements. For example:‘James Gilbey explains: “She thinks he is a bad father, a selfish father, the children have to tie in with what he’s doing. He will never delay, cancel or change anything which he has sorted out for their benefit. It’s a reflection of the way he was brought up and it is history repeating itself. That’s why she gets so sad when he is photographed riding with the children at Sandringham. When I spoke to her about it she was literally having to contain her anger because she thought the picture would represent the fact that he was a good father whereas she has the real story.”’
Diana swore she had not been involved, leading Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s Private Secretary (also married to Diana’s sister, Jane), to appeal to Lord McGregor, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, who issued a tough statement condemning the serialisation as an ‘odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls in a manner which adds nothing to the legitimate public interest in the situation of the heir to the throne’.
Diana’s response was to visit Carolyn Bartholomew, one of the most quoted sources in the book, after first ensuring the press cameras would be there, and put on a very public display of affection for her old flatmate. Robert Fellowes immediately offered his resignation but the Queen refused it.
Several people already suspected Diana was the principal source. Patrick Jephson, for one, had been puzzled by a conversation just before publication when she had asked him whether the charity Turning Point might be able to cope with a sudden donation of some tens of thousands of pounds (her share of the spoils), but he didn’t know for sure and his loyalty was to his boss. Also, some obviously well-sourced stories had been appearing in the Sunday Times, such as the dismissal of Sir Christopher Airy as Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. Airy had been selected to take over from Sir John Riddell in 1990 but had not been a success. His end came at Highgrove one afternoon when Diana was at the house, and she was one of a handful of people who could have known what happened. When the story ran, the Prince’s office was a very unhappy place, with no one knowing who they could trust as various leaked stories appeared in other newspapers.
What puzzled them most was that much of the book was accurate in many respects. There were stories that only Diana and very few others could have known about, and memos leaked that nobody else could have seen. But most of the stories had a spin, which made them not quite as anyone else present remembered.
For example, there was a memo which, according to Morton, Richard Aylard (who took over as Private Secretary when Airy left) had written to the Prince of Wales following the public condemnation of his behaviour when William cracked his skull, encouraging him to be seen in public more frequently with his children. ‘At the conclusion of his missive,’ said Morton, ‘he [Aylard] heavily underlined in red ink and printed in bold capitals a single word: “TRY”.’
What really happened was that the Prince had sent Aylard a memo saying William and Harry wanted to do a few things with their father and could Aylard please look in the diary and pick out a few engagements that would be suitable for the boys. Aylard wrote back with three or four suggestions, including a trip to a naval ship, and said that the next step was to speak to the Princess to make sure she was happy with the plans. It would be best, wrote Aylard, if the Prince could speak to her about it himself. Failing that,
he would speak to Patrick Jephson. Charles sent the memo back, annotated in red pen – and he was the only person in the office allowed to use red ink. Against the suggestion that he should speak to his wife, he wrote ‘I will TRY!’
Charles kept a dignified silence, even when he knew for certain that Diana had been involved in the book. He didn’t attempt to defend himself or correct the facts. Despite all the years of provocation, he has never publicly criticised Diana. His friends were itching to weigh in on his behalf but he was adamant he wanted none of them to get involved. Some did as he asked, others couldn’t bear the sense of injustice. The War of the Waleses was under way and the newspapers delighted in it as their circulations rose, particularly those Diana was personally briefing. She was a master tactician, oblivious, or so it seemed, to the effect it had on her children, particularly on William, who was old enough to take in what was going on.
There was only so much the Barbers could shield William and Harry from, but the boys at Ludgrove did what they do best when their friends were in trouble: they formed a loyal and protective ring around them and kept their minds on other things.
ONE TAPE AFTER ANOTHER
No one imagined that things could get any worse after Morton’s book but in just a matter of months the Sun newspaper published the transcript of a flirtatious thirty-minute telephone conversation between Diana and James Gilbey. It was rapidly picked up by every other newspaper and media outlet, and the particularly prurient could dial a Sun telephone hotline and for 36p a minute, hear the tape for themselves. He called her ‘Darling’ fourteen times, and ‘Squidgy’ or ‘Squidge’ fifty-three times, which led to the scandal being dubbed ‘Squidgygate’. Amongst the endearments Diana talked about how her husband made her life ‘real, real torture’, and described a lunch at which the Queen Mother had given her a strange look. ‘It’s not hatred, it’s sort of interest and pity … I was very bad at lunch and I nearly started blubbing. I just felt really sad and empty and thought, Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family.’
After her sense of triumph with the book (although she did later say she regretted having done it), this was less welcome. However, according to her PPO, Ken Wharf, ‘Diana raised the subject with me in a fairly light-hearted way – the fact that it had reached the front page of a national tabloid newspaper.’ She had even listened to the tapes on the Sun’s hotline. ‘When I asked if it was her, she said, of course it was.’ Charles, the boys and the Queen were less amused, and the institution was again brought into disrepute. The recording had been made late at night on New Year’s Eve in 1989 when Diana was on a landline at Sandringham and Gilbey in a car parked in Oxfordshire. A radio ham in Oxford picked it up, but it was always thought the recording might initially have come from GCHQ, MI5’s listening post in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
The foreign tour to Korea three months later was always going to have been tricky. At first Diana tried to duck out of it, but the Queen intervened and persuaded her she must go, so go she did, but it proved to be the final straw. The press were only interested in the marriage, and since neither the Prince nor Princess could exchange a civil look let alone a civil word, the media were hovering like vultures just waiting for the final death throe.
It came soon enough, when Diana yet again used the boys to outmanoeuvre her husband. There had been a long-standing arrangement to host a private shooting party at Sandringham together on the weekend of 20 and 21 November, which was the Ludgrove exeat. The weekend had become something of a tradition and Charles had invited the usual sixteen friends with their children for what should have been a relaxing and jolly time for everyone. Harry was now at Ludgrove too, and both he and William were looking forward to a trip to Sandringham, which was a boys’ paradise, and to seeing their friends. Both of them loved shooting.
Less than a week beforehand, the Prince discovered that Diana had decided not to come to Sandringham and was planning to take the children to stay with the Queen at Windsor instead. According to Jephson, she had looked forward to the weekend with a mixture of anger and dread. ‘They’re all his friends,’ she complained. ‘I’m going to be completely outnumbered.’
Her instincts were probably right; most of his friends took his side in the marital war, and now that they had Morton and Squidgygate in their armoury, it could have been a very uncomfortable weekend. Charles spoke to his mother who spoke to Diana who swiftly said that if she couldn’t go to Windsor then she would take the boys to Highgrove instead. She refused a plea from the Prince who asked, if she was determined to stay away, that she should let the boys go to Sandringham by themselves. On the advice of her lawyer, she wrote a careful letter of explanation in which she said that she felt the atmosphere at Sandringham would not be conducive to a happy weekend for the children. Nor could she be sure that he would not expose them to guests whose presence would be unwelcome to her (by whom she meant Camilla). Charles finally lost it. The farce had to end.
Thus on the afternoon of 9 December 1992, John Major, then Prime Minister, stood at the dispatch box in the House of Commons before a packed but silent House and read aloud the following statement: ‘It is announced from Buckingham Palace that, with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate. Their Royal Highnesses have no plans to divorce and their constitutional positions are unaffected. This decision has been reached amicably and they will both continue to participate fully in the upbringing of their children.’
Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, who had worked closely with the Prince of Wales for ten years and was with him in Holyhead that day, first knew of it when reporters shouted, ‘Give us a statement, Charlie.’ Later, he told her about the separation, and she says that in all the years she’d known him, she had never seen him look so miserable.
Coincidentally, 20 November was the date of a devastating fire at Windsor Castle, while the Queen, who spent much of her childhood there, was in residence. The fire started accidentally when a curtain that had been touching a spotlight burst into flames in the Private Chapel. Fortunately no one was hurt but it raged for fifteen hours and caused millions of pounds’ worth of damage to what is the oldest of royal residences and the only one that has been in constant use since William the Conqueror selected the site for a fortress after his conquest of England in 1066. These events and more were what led the Queen to declare 1992 an ‘annus horribilis’.
William and Harry had been told about the separation in advance. Charles and Diana had gone to Ludgrove – where Harry had joined William in 1992 – and first explained the situation to the Barbers, so that they were prepared to support and reassure the boys in the days and weeks that followed. Then, in the homely surroundings of the headmaster’s sitting room, they broke the news to William and Harry. William’s rather grown-up response was to hope that they would both be happier now. He let more of his feelings be known, perhaps, in a letter to his trusted nanny Olga Powell. She wrote him a very personal letter back consoling him about the impending separation.
The Households were swiftly divided. Diana took sole possession of Kensington Palace and kept the two senior butlers, Paul Burrell (who was later prosecuted for stealing her belongings after her death) and Harold Brown. Charles took butler number three, Bernie Flannery. The Prince and Princess were careful to keep photographs of each other in their homes for the sake of the boys. The office at St James’s Palace, which they continued to share, remained much the same. There was talk of warring factions, but the two teams were surprisingly united and continued to work together to co-ordinate diaries, particularly over arrangements for the children.
But as is the way with wars, when one side loses ground another side surges forward. After Diana’s embarrassment it was the Prince’s turn. For a man jealous of his privacy, the publication in the Daily Mirror in January 1993 of his own intimate late-night telephone ramblings with Camilla was the ultimate humiliation. Even Diana, while enjoying a little Schadenfreude, was embarrassed on h
is behalf. The tape was eleven minutes that could be distilled into one: the heir to the throne’s wish that he could always be with the woman he adored and musing on the possibility of turning into a tampon to achieve it.
The puritanical outburst that followed, what was immediately dubbed ‘Camillagate’, verged on hysteria and was out of all proportion. An alien would have concluded Britain was a nation in crisis. There were lurid headlines and cartoons, wide condemnation of the Prince, questions about his fitness to be King and, in the mounting fever, demands from Cabinet ministers that the Prince give up Mrs Parker Bowles.
How this ridiculous rambling demonstrated that Charles was not fit to be King was a mystery. It was the sort of idiotic conversation with crude jokes that many lovers might have when entirely alone at the dead of night. All it demonstrated was that the Prince had found in Camilla what he had so much hoped for with Diana. They clearly had a loving, friendly, familiar relationship with no suspicion or tension or jealousy. She was fun, she was sexy and giggly and pulled his leg when he was angry or sounding pompous, but she didn’t criticise him or put him down. She was interested in him: she boosted his ego, bolstered his confidence and made no demands on him. She wanted to hear about his work, read his speeches and listen to his plans and ideas. She was happy when they could be together but understanding when that wasn’t possible. It was clear she was a friend as well as a lover and shared many of his enthusiasms.
No one has ever determined who made the recordings but Charles and Camilla worked out that it was a compilation of several conversations held over several months around Christmas 1989 – shortly before Diana was being listened into – but, curiously, like Diana’s, they weren’t published until much later.