Referring to her affectionately as ‘Squidgy’ (although he also called her ‘darling’ fifty-three times), Gilbey indulged in what can best be described as an intimate conversation with his princess, although it did not match the Charles and Camilla tawdry love chat. However, it made interesting listening for radio enthusiast Jane Norgrove, a 25-year-old typist who tuned in using a £95 second-hand scanner in her bedroom, recorded it and made it public, as did a second member of the public who picked it up on a further occasion – perhaps indicating a broadcast by an official source. Some suggest GCHQ might have had a hand, having already leaked the news that Fergie and her daughters had taken a ‘secret’ holiday to Morocco with Steve Wyatt.
Diana was staying at Balmoral with William and Harry when she was told that the following morning’s papers would contain extracts – albeit censored ones – of what became known as the Squidgy tapes. In an effort to escape the inevitable storm breaking around her, Diana took her sons swimming at the Craigendarroch Hotel near the village of Ballater. As she tucked Harry into bed that night she told him that she would be all over the papers and on the television the next morning because someone had leaked the details of a ‘silly’ conversation she had had with the man she encouraged them to call ‘Uncle James’ – the name by which they also referred to Hewitt – at a time when she was cross with his father (Buckingham Palace initially tried to claim the tape was a hoax). No one will say how he and William took the news when they eventually were shown an article in The Sun headlined MY LIFE IS TORTURE and read her miserable disclosure to Gilbey about their father: ‘He makes my life real, real torture.’
Despite the Gilbey affair, Diana continued to exchange intimate correspondence with the distant Hewitt and, overlooking Harry’s protests, took her sons on trips to the Devon home of Hewitt’s mother Shirley – where they would have their most intimate letters sent. William remained tight-lipped but Harry said the visits were boring and he couldn’t understand why they had to go all that way with their policeman in tow just to pick up some letters. After all, Auntie Shirley was no fun at all.
Harry’s first experience of the death of a close relative elicited a strange response in the seven-year-old. Harry was on holiday with his parents and brother in the Austrian ski resort of Lech when news reached Ken Wharfe that Diana’s father, the 8th Earl Spencer, had died. Charles had reluctantly agreed to switch their skiing holiday to Lech because she was still traumatised over the death in an avalanche of their friend Hugh Lindsay while skiing near Klosters – Charles’s favourite. It had caused another row but Charles eventually gave in because, no matter where Diana would go, he wanted to be with his sons when they learned to ski. He would take them out on to the slopes early, leaving his wife to breakfast and gossip with her friends Kate Menzies and Catherine Soames in the restaurant of the five-star Hotel Arlberg.
Although he had been unwell for some time, Earl Spencer’s death from a heart attack at the Brompton Hospital in South Kensington on 28 March 1992 was unexpected. Rumours the previous day that he had died were dismissed as nonsense by the family but proved to be startlingly prophetic. Who was going to tell Diana? Charles had received the news but was adamant that he was not the man to break it to her so the task was delegated to Wharfe. ‘She was calm at first,’ records Wharfe in his memoirs Closely Guarded Secret. ‘She had not expected it, nobody ever does, however much they may have readied themselves for bad news. But before long her eyes filled and tears began to stream down her face.’
Charles did break the news to his sons, who had both been extremely fond of their maternal grandfather, but after some minutes of silent contemplation, always relaxed Harry was to ask, ‘Does this mean we can’t go skiing today?’ The seven-year-old was focused – as he remains to this day – on what was to happen in the hours ahead. Grandpa Spencer had passed away yesterday.
In some ways it was a relief that Earl Spencer was no longer around to witness the painful scandals involving his daughter and son-in-law which were about to explode via the worldwide media. His grandchildren, however, were and it was never going to be easy for them. In September 1992, Harry was sent away to Ludgrove, an independent preparatory boarding school for 200 boys aged from seven to thirteen situated in the quaintly named parish of Wokingham Without, near the Berkshire town of Wokingham and close enough for Diana to collect him should he become the subject of too much ridicule as a result of the headlines she was now making daily. The headmasters Gerald Barber and Nichol Marston, as well as Barber’s wife Janet found it necessary to assure Diana they would do all in their power to maintain his happiness ‘in these difficult times’; but it was going to be no easy task.
It was on his first day at Ludgrove that Harry met the boy who would become his very best friend, Henry van Straubenzee. The two (along with William and Henry’s elder brother Thomas) forged a close bond, often spending weekends at each other’s houses and holidays together at a cliff-top house near Polzeath in north Cornwall. Thomas taught Harry and Henry to surfboard and they played French cricket on the nearby sandy beach. The Vans, as they were known, also stayed at Highgrove and Kensington Palace with their royal pals and even joined them on Mediterranean cruises when Prince Charles had the use of John Latsis’s super-yacht, the Alexander. Apart from William, Harry had never had a friend as close as Henry van Straubenzee and, although he missed his mother’s bedtime tales and his father reading him stories, the friendship made life a lot easier.
By this time, Harry had become a keen lover of fiction, in particular horror stories. One of his favourite books was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he later starred in a student stage production of the tale. It soon became apparent that Harry’s enjoyment of an audience was the start of an attention-seeking lifestyle. Unlike his brother he showed a liking for public adulation and a desire for fame. No wonder Harry was destined to become the life and soul of every party he went to.
Although he struggled in many of his academic classes at Ludgrove, he excelled at sport, not surprisingly because the school had an excellent sporting reputation having been founded exactly 100 years earlier by Arthur Dunn, the noted footballer of his day, who was then succeeded by two England international football captains: G. O. Smith and William Oakley. The well-known cricketer Alan Barber had been headmaster in the years preceding Harry’s arrival.
Although by now he was enjoying his schooldays, Harry looked forward to short breaks with his father and was particularly pleased when he and William were invited to join a shooting party with Charles and the children of sixteen of his friends at Sandringham for a few days in November 1992. Diana, however, had other ideas: she made it clear that she didn’t want to go and had her own plans: she was going to take her sons to spend those days with the Queen at Windsor. The argument went backwards and forwards through private secretaries until Diana took her lawyer’s advice and wrote a letter saying that she did not feel the atmosphere at Sandringham would be conducive to a happy weekend for her sons. What she meant was that she did not wish them to spend time in the company of Camilla who would almost certainly be there.
That was it, Charles decided. He’d had enough of her game-playing and it was time to call it quits publicly. He informed his mother but, at the time, she was distraught by the millions of pounds’ worth of damage caused by the fire that had devastated large sections of Windsor Castle. Its most ancient parts built by William the Conqueror in 1066, it was the favourite of her residences and had been in constant use throughout the ages. Diana and her tantrums would have to wait.
But not for long.
5
GETTING THE NEWS
In 1992, Harry Wales was already at his desk for the morning’s school work at Ludgrove when he was told his mother was on her way to see him. Fellow boarder William had already been informed. This was serious. Diana never paid them surprise visits. Both boys were already waiting in a private study room when the Princess arrived. She was nervous and constantly stroked her hand
bag arm as she waited for the master who had conducted her to the room to excuse himself and leave, firmly closing the door behind him.
She began by telling her sons that there was to be an announcement the following day, a very sad announcement. The Prime Minister was to inform Parliament and thereby the nation that she and their father were going their separate ways. The dream marriage was over.
Though it did not come altogether as a surprise, William took the news badly. He cried and promised her his undying support and Diana cried too, assuring him that despite their differences she and her father still loved each other. Always the more soft-hearted of the two, in a way William became her partner in sadness, and it has to be said that she unloaded her troubles on him somewhat, which surely did the boy no favours. When she told him that she expected to be stripped of the ‘Her Royal Highness’ tag once the marriage was officially ended, more tears poured down his cheeks as he told her, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy, I’ll get it back for you when I am king.’ Harry didn’t care too much about such things. He recalls his mother saying that when the Duke of Edinburgh once told her that if she didn’t behave they would remove her title, she had replied, ‘My title is a lot older than yours, Philip.’
As a measure of his love for a woman he called his ‘second Mum’, Harry went to his room, sat down at his desk and wrote a heart-breaking letter to the nanny he called Granny Nanny – Olga Powell – explaining to her in the straightforward manner that was becoming his style, what was going on. Not a woman known to shed tears easily, Mrs Powell said she wept for a day when she received the letter and never failed to cry when she read it again and again.
Despite his tender age, Harry was far more philosophical about the situation than his brother. As Paul Burrell puts it, ‘he was far more outgoing and pragmatic’. Diana wasted no opportunity to tell her friends at the height of her troubles that Harry would see no problem in ‘taking on the job’ and that she considered her younger son was far more suitable to be king than the elder one. Having named him Good King Harry, in order to placate a young boy envious of his brother’s ultimate destiny, she was now suggesting that he actually should become monarch. He was strong enough, she felt, to cope with the traumatic episode that was about to affect all of their lives. William, she feared, would be damaged by it, perhaps for life: ‘[William] doesn’t want to be king and I worry about that. He doesn’t want his every move watched,’ she said. During a flight home from visiting soldiers in Germany, one seated close to them says he clearly heard Diana ask Harry how he would feel if he had to take William’s place and be the next king. After a few moments of uncharacteristic deep thinking, the young Prince replied, ‘I shall be King Harry. I shall do all the work.’
Proving the stronger of the two in many respects, Harry asked Charles repeatedly if there was anything he could do to ‘make Mummy and Daddy happy again’ even though Diana had told him as well as others that there were times when she could not even bear to be in the same room as his father.
So that they could see the confirmation of the end of their parents’ relationship for themselves, Harry and William were asked to join their headmaster Gerald Barber in his study to watch the then Prime Minister John Major announce the couple’s official separation to a hushed House of Commons on 9 December 1992. Diana, who remained indoors at Kensington Palace that day, smiled when she heard Major deny there was any plan for them to divorce since she and Charles had already decided dissolution was inevitable once the public had accepted that they were no longer living together. Diana was furious, however, when she learned that Charles had gone alone to see the Prime Minister to discuss the divorce; he was in fact following protocol to resolve constitutional issues which did not affect his wife. (Diana later complained that Major offered her ambassadorships by way of consolation, but always failed to deliver; she had been inspired by the good works being done by then President Clinton’s wife Hillary, with whom she lunched at the Washington home of Katharine Graham in 1994.)
In truth, both boys had come to realise that the end was near when Charles and Diana whisked them off for what turned out to be a disastrous cruise on a yacht belonging to the self-made (and generous) Greek shipping billionaire John Latsis, a man who had befriended Charles many years earlier. It was far from a happy holiday. Diana had gone only under duress, having given in to a plea from the Queen to give the marriage one last try. But such was the depth of her anguish that after one blazing row with her husband she went missing, sparking fears she might have jumped overboard. It was Ken Wharfe who found her hiding under the tarpaulin cover of one of the ship’s lifeboats. She was weeping uncontrollably and it took Wharfe some time and many consoling words to persuade her that Harry and William needed her even if her husband didn’t. Suicide was not an option. Made aware of what had happened, William took himself to an area of the ship where he could be alone; it was Harry who gave her strong comfort and did his best to assure her that he hoped they could still be a family.
Harry telephoned his mother three days after the parliamentary announcement and asked her if she would come back to Ludgrove to have tea with him and William. To his delight she agreed and took the opportunity to meet with their teachers to talk about something other than separation and divorce – their educational performance. To her disappointment she learned that, despite his brilliant start at the school, Harry had begun to slip back, showing little interest in several of the subjects he was being taught. She took her son to one side and told him that they still had more, much more, than most people. Determined to prove her point she subsequently took them to a shelter in Westminster to which she was in the habit of paying unpublicised visits. Sister Bridie Dowd took them through to meet a number of the homeless men who took refuge there. The boys stayed for almost two hours talking to their new ‘friends’ – one of whom showed them some card tricks – and they promised to call again. Diana’s experiment to show her sons that the rich and famous they mixed with were only a small proportion of the world’s population had worked and they never forgot it.
Harry, more than William, quickly grew to accept his family’s situation and in many ways maintained an even closer relationship with his mother than he had prior to the break-up of her marriage. During the Christmas of 1993, he and William had a party at Bill Wyman’s Sticky Fingers restaurant on Kensington High Street. Using his mobile phone Harry called Diana to say what fun they were having. She was attending with Charles (although neither spoke to the other) the annual Kensington Palace staff Christmas dinner at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand. Before Harry was halfway through telling her what he had phoned to say, she said, ‘Stay there, I’ll be right over,’ and immediately left the grand restaurant to be where she knew she would be more welcome and wanted – the former Rolling Stone’s burger bar on the other side of the West End.
She fought hard to have Harry and William stay with her at Kensington Palace for Christmas but her in-laws would not hear of it. The young princes had to join the traditional royal celebrations at Sandringham but although William knew the Queen had to be obeyed, Harry tried to defy the royal decree and urged his mother to go ahead with her yuletide plans – she had already bought tickets for the three of them to go to the pantomime at the London Palladium. By now under severe pressure, she agreed to go to Sandringham but stayed just twenty-four hours before flying to New York where, she said, the people were more friendly. Harry was desperate to go with her but she was obliged to leave him with his father for the rest of the holiday. Two days after Christmas he went missing and was eventually found in a wood on the Sandringham estate. Between sobs he told the estate worker who found him that he was missing his mother.
One of the more controversial developments of the split was that Charles hired, at a salary of £18,000 a year, a new nanny for the boys while they were in his care – 27-year-old Alexandra Legge-Bourke (known as Tiggy), the daughter of a former Royal Guards officer turned merchant banker, William Legge-Bourke. Her mother, the Hon. Shân Legge-Bourke, was
, along with her sister Victoria, lady-in-waiting to Princess Anne. This was no motherly Cockney professional child minder who liked a tipple, but an aristocrat in her own right who could and would stand up to Diana – they had both learned the rules of life at the same Swiss finishing school (Institut Alpin Videmanette). In turn Diana insisted on retaining Olga Powell for when the boys were with her. The Princess was never fond of Tiggy and found every opportunity to criticise her – not least when she learned that the new helper had allowed Harry puffs on the cigarettes she constantly smoked in his presence. When she saw a photograph taken on the ski slopes of Klosters of Charles giving Miss Legge-Bourke (whom he had known for many years) an affectionate kiss, she told a friend: ‘Huh, he’s never been known to kiss Olga.’ That single kiss led to a rancorous feud between the two women. It began with gentle mocking. Diana told Harry: ‘You know why she’s called Tiggy, don’t you? It’s after the Mrs Tiggy-Winkle character invented by Beatrix Potter. Isn’t that funny?’
It got worse, much worse. Coming from a rich land-owning family, Legge-Bourke was reported as saying she gave them, ‘What they need at this stage – fresh air, a rifle and a horse. She [Diana] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’ According to Diana, the nanny her husband had hired against her wishes took the princes on a two-day visit to her parents’ home in Wales. During the trip she took them to the Grwyne Fawr reservoir in Monmouthshire, allowing Harry to abseil without protective headgear, any advanced training or even the necessary permit, headfirst down the 160-foot dam wall that was holding back 400 million gallons of water. The incident was photographed by a passer-by and his picture ended up on the front page of the News of the World under the headline madness! Another photograph circulating at the time showed Harry on the Queen’s Balmoral estate shooting rabbits through the open roof of a moving car with Tiggy at the wheel, a cigarette dangling from her lips. One report Diana received suggested that Harry had been seen driving down the lanes of Balmoral with Tiggy smoking in the back seat, but the Princess could not prove this. Furthermore, she was speechless when she learned from Ken Wharfe – who severely admonished the boy for the offence – that during a scheduled flight Harry had placed his hand down Tiggy’s top to touch her breasts. It didn’t help matters when Diana was assured that Tiggy had laughed it off, saying: ‘Boys will be boys; I suppose he’s got to learn.’
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