Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition

by Andrew Morton

  His decision to put duty before family may have come as a shock to the general public but it was no surprise to his wife. Indeed she accepted his decision to go to the opera as nothing out of the ordinary. For her it was another example in a continuing pattern rather than an aberration. One friend who spoke to her minutes after William came out of the operating theatre commented: ‘Had this been an isolated incident it would have been unbelievable. She wasn’t surprised. It merely confirmed everything she thought about him and reinforced the feeling that he found it difficult to relate to the children. She got no support at all, no cuddles, no affection, nothing.’

  James Gilbey reinforced this view: ‘Her reaction to William’s accident was horror and disbelief. By all accounts it was a narrow escape. She can’t understand her husband’s behaviour so, as a result, she just blocks it out. Diana thinks: “I know where my loyalties lie: with my son.”’

  When the Prince was made aware of the public’s wrath, once again his reaction came as no surprise to his wife: he blamed her. Charles accused her of making an ‘awful nonsense’ about the severity of the injury and affected innocence about the possibility that the future heir to the throne could have suffered brain damage. The Queen, who had been briefed by Prince Charles, was surprised and rather shocked when Diana informed her that while her grandson was on the mend it had not been a cut and dried operation.

  Several days after the accident, William was recovering sufficiently well to allow the Princess to fulfil a commitment to visit Marlow Community Hospital. As she was leaving, an old man in the crowd collapsed with an attack of angina. Diana rushed over to help rather than leaving it to others. When the Prince saw the media coverage of her sympathetic actions, he accused Diana of behaving like a martyr. His sour response typified the yawning gulf between them and gave substance to Diana’s observations on the media interest in their 10th wedding anniversary the following month. She asked in her matter-of-fact way: ‘What is there to celebrate?’

  The dramatically different manner in which the couple responded to William’s injury publicly underlined what those within their immediate circle had known for some time: the fairytale marriage between the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer was over in all but name. The breakdown of their marriage and the virtual collapse of their professional relationship was a source of sadness to many of their friends. This much-discussed union which began with such high hopes had now reached an impasse of mutual recrimination and chilling indifference. The Princess had told friends that spiritually their marriage ended the day Prince Harry was born in 1984. The couple, who had had separate bedrooms at their homes for years, stopped sharing the same sleeping quarters during an official visit to Portugal in 1987. Little wonder then that she found an article in the Tatler magazine which posed the question: ‘Is Prince Charles too sexy for his own good?’ absolutely hilarious because of its unintentional irony.

  Such was their mutual antipathy at this time that friends observed that Diana found her husband’s very presence upsetting and disturbing. He in turn viewed his wife with indifference tinged with dislike. When a Sunday newspaper reported how the Prince had pointedly ignored her at a concert at Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday, she remarked to friends that she found their surprise rather odd. ‘He ignores me everywhere and has done for a long time. He just dismisses me.’ She would, for example, never contemplate making any input into any of his special interests such as architecture, the environment or agriculture. Painful experience told her that any suggestions would be treated with ill-disguised contempt. ‘He makes her feel intellectually insecure and inferior and constantly reinforces that message,’ noted a close friend. When Charles took his wife to see the Oscar Wilde play A Woman of No Importance, to celebrate his 43rd birthday, the irony was not lost on her friends.

  A man of considerable charm and humour, Prince Charles also has the unerring ability to freeze out those who disagree with him. That ability was extended to a trio of private secretaries who contradicted him once too often and numerous other courtiers and staff as well as his wife. Diana’s mother experienced his ruthless streak as well as his obdurate nature at Prince Harry’s christening. When he complained to her that her daughter had delivered a boy with red hair, Mrs Shand Kydd, a woman of fierce integrity, told him firmly that he should be thankful that his second son was born healthy. From that moment the Prince of Wales effectively excluded his mother-in-law from his life. The experience made her much more sympathetic to her daughter’s plight.

  This divide between the royal couple became too wide to paper over for the sake of their public image. Before Christmas 1991 the Princess of Wales was due to travel to Plymouth to fulfil a rare joint public engagement. She had been with Prince Edward until midnight at a Mozart concert but the following morning she cancelled the visit saying that she had influenza. Although she did feel ill following the concert the thought of spending the day with her husband made her even more inclined to spend the day in bed.

  The constant tightrope that courtiers had to walk between the royal couple’s public and private life was illustrated when the Princess of Wales was told about her father’s death on 29 March 1992 while she was on a skiing holiday in Lech, Austria. She was prepared to fly home on her own, leaving Prince Charles to stay with their children. When he insisted on returning with her, she made the point that it was a bit late for him to start acting the caring husband. In her grief she did not wish to be part of a palace public relations scheme. For once she dug her heels in. She sat in their hotel room with her husband, his private secretary and press secretary ranged against her. They insisted he return with her for the sake of his public image. She refused. Finally, a telephone call was made to the Queen who was staying at Windsor Castle to arbitrate on this increasingly bitter matter. The Princess bowed to her ruling that they should fly home together. At the airport, they were duly met by the assembled media who reported the fact that the Prince was lending his support at Diana’s hour of need. The reality was that as soon as the royal couple arrived at Kensington Palace, Prince Charles immediately went to Highgrove, leaving Diana to grieve alone. Two days later Diana drove to the funeral while Charles flew in by helicopter. The friend to whom Diana related this story commented: ‘He only flew home with her for the sake of his public image. She felt that at a time when she was grieving the death of her father she could at least be given the opportunity to behave in the way she wanted rather than go through this masquerade.’

  As a close friend commented: ‘She seems to dread Charles’s appearance. The days when she is happiest is when he is in Scotland. When he is at Kensington Palace she feels absolutely at a loss and like a child again. She loses all the ground she has built up when she is on her own.’

  The changes in her at such times were physical ones. Her speech, normally rapid, energetic, coloured and strong, degenerated instantly when he was with her. Diana’s voice became monosyllabic and flat, suffused with an ineffable weariness. It was the same tone that infected her speech when she talked about her parents’ divorce and what she calls ‘the dark ages’, the period in her royal life until the late 1980s during which time she was emotionally crushed by the royal system.

  In his presence she reverted to the girl she had been a decade before. She giggled over nothing, started biting her nails – a habit she had given up some time ago – and took on the hunted look of a nervous fawn. The strain in their home when they were together was palpable. As Oonagh Toffolo observed: ‘It is a different atmosphere at Kensington Palace when he is there. It is tense and she is tense. She doesn’t have the freedom she would like when he’s around. It is quite sad to see the stagnation there.’ Another frequent guest simply called it ‘The Mad House’.

  When Prince Charles arrived home from a private visit to France she found his presence so oppressive that she literally ran out of Kensington Palace. Diana telephoned a friend who was grieving over the death of a loved one. She could sense that her chum w
as crying and said: ‘Right, I’m coming over now.’ As her friend recalled: ‘She came instantly for me but when she arrived she was visibly unsettled. Diana told me: “I’m here for you but I’m also here for me. My husband appeared and I just had to fly out and escape.” She was all of a dither.’

  As far as was practicable they led separate lives, joining forces only to maintain a façade of unity. These reunions merely gave the public a glimpse into their isolated existences. At the soccer Cup Final at Wembley in 1991 they sat next to each other but never exchanged a word or glance during the 90-minute game. Not long afterwards, Prince Charles missed his wife’s cheek and ended up kissing her neck at the end of a polo match during their tour of India. Even their writing paper which used to have a distinctive entwined ‘C’ and ‘D’ had been discarded in favour of individual letterheadings.

  When she was at Kensington Palace he would be at Highgrove or Birkhall on the Balmoral estate. At Highgrove she had the large four-poster in the master bedroom; he slept in a brass bed which he borrowed from his son Prince William, because he found its extra width more comfortable after breaking his right arm during a polo match. Even these distant sleeping arrangements led to marital discord. When Prince William asked for his bed back, his father refused. ‘Sometimes I don’t know who the baby is in this family,’ commented Diana caustically. The days when she affectionately called him ‘Hubcap’ had long gone. As James Gilbey noted: ‘Their lives are spent in total isolation. It’s not as though they ring each other and have sweet chats each evening and say: “Darling, what have you been doing?” It simply doesn’t happen.’

  During lunch with a close friend who was also the mother of three young children, Diana told of an incident which underlined not only the state of her relationship with her husband at that time but also the protective nature of her son William. She told her friend that the week that Buckingham Palace decided to announce the separation of the Duke and Duchess of York was understandably a trying time for her. She had lost an amicable companion and was acutely aware that the public spotlight would once again fall on her marriage. Yet her husband seemed unmoved by the furore surrounding the separation.

  He had spent a week touring various stately homes, gathering material for a book he was writing on gardening. When he returned to Kensington Palace he failed to see why his wife should feel strained and rather depressed. He airily dismissed the departure of the Duchess of York and launched, as usual, into a disapproving appraisal of Diana’s public works, especially her visit to see Mother Teresa in Rome. Even their staff, by now used to these altercations, were dismayed by this attitude and felt some sympathy when Diana told her husband that unless he changed his attitude towards her and the job she was doing she would have to reconsider her position. In tears, she went upstairs for a bath. While she was regaining her composure, Prince William pushed a handful of paper tissues underneath the bathroom door. ‘I hate to see you sad,’ he said.

  She was tormented every day and in every way by the dilemma of her position, continually torn between her sense of duty to the Queen and nation and her desire to find the happiness she craved. Yet in order to find happiness she felt she had to divorce; if she divorced she worried she would inevitably lose the children she lived for and who gave her such joy. At the same time she faced rejection by the public who were unaware of the lonely reality of her life and accepted her smiling image at face value. It was a cruelly circular argument with endless variations and permutations which she discussed regularly with her friends and counsellors.

  Her friends saw their marriage deteriorate to a point where it was a war in which no quarter was expected or given. At home the battlegrounds were their children and Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Officially this skirmishing spilt over into their public roles as the Prince and Princess of Wales. She gave him nothing, he offered less. Diana reserved one phrase for their most acerbic confrontations. ‘Remember I am the mother of your children,’ she said. That particular shell exploded during their set-piece confrontations about Camilla Parker Bowles.

  Courtiers were regularly caught in the crossfire. When Prince Charles was licking his wounds following the public condemnation of his behaviour when Prince William cracked his skull, his private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, attempted to make amends. In a handwritten memo he implored his royal principal to be seen in public with his children more frequently so that he could at least be seen to be behaving as a responsible father. At the conclusion of his missive he heavily underlined in red ink and printed in bold capitals a single word: ‘TRY’.

  The ploy worked for a while. Prince Charles was seen taking Prince Harry to Wetherby School and was photographed riding and cycling with his sons on the Sandringham estate. But Richard Aylard’s modest public relations success was seen as cynical hypocrisy by the Princess of Wales who knew the daily reality of his involvement with his children.

  James Gilbey explained: ‘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.’

  Over-protective in the way that single-parent families are, she lavished William and Harry with love, cuddles and affection. They were a point of stability and sanity in her topsy-turvy world. She loved them unconditionally and absolutely, working with a singleness of purpose to ensure that they did not suffer the same kind of childhood that she did.

  It was Diana who chose their schools, their clothes and planned their outings. She negotiated her public duties around their timetables. A glance through the pages of her official diary signified as much: the dates of their school plays, term times and outings were all highlighted in green ink. They came first and foremost in her life. So while Charles would send a servant to Ludgrove School to give William a tray of plums from the Highgrove estate, Diana would make time to cheer him from the touchline when he played left back for his school soccer team. While Charles’s absences were accepted by the boys, there were times naturally when they were keen to see their father. During his convalescence after he had broken his right arm, Charles spent a great deal of time in Scotland, much to the dismay of Prince William. Diana communicated his hurt to her husband which resulted in the Prince sending his son handwritten faxes about his activities.

  Diana’s friendship with Captain James Hewitt, which caused some comment in the gossip columns at the time, blossomed precisely because he was a popular ‘uncle’ figure to her boys. Hewitt, a keen polo player with the laconic sense of humour and reserve reminiscent of a 1930s matinée idol, taught William and Harry the finer points of horsemanship during his visits to Highgrove and helped Diana overcome her reluctance to renew her equine skills. He is a man of great charm who provided Diana with amusing and sympathetic companionship at a time when she needed a shoulder to lean on because of her husband’s neglect. During their friendship which, as she later admitted, developed into a full-blown love affair, she helped choose some of his clothes and bought him tasteful presents. She visited his family home in Devon on several occasions where she was entertained by his parents while her boys went riding with Captain Hewitt. The Princess found these weekend breaks a relaxing interlude in a hectic life.

  For some time Hewitt was an important figure in Diana’s life. The distance which then separated the royal couple was demonstrated by the fact that they marshalled rival battalions of friends in their support. Thus Diana aired her grievances about her husband to a tightly knit phalanx of friends who included her former flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew, Angela Serota, Catherine Soames, the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the the
n Brazilian ambassador, her sister Jane, who lived at the time a few yards from Diana’s apartment, and Lorenzo and Mara Berni. There were other friends such as Julia Samuel, Julia Dodd-Noble, David Waterhouse and the well-known actor Terence Stamp, whom she would see for lunch at his London apartment, who were social friends as opposed to the confidantes she sounded out for advice on her eternal dilemma.

  On his side Prince Charles counted on Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles, Camilla’s sister, Annabel, and her husband, Simon Elliot, skiing friends Charles and Patti Palmer-Tomkinson, Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, author Laurens van der Post, Lady Susan Hussey, a long-serving lady-in-waiting to the Queen, Lord and Lady Tryon as well as the Dutch couple Emilie and Hugh van Cutsem.

  Diana referred to them dismissively as ‘the Highgrove Set’. They paid court to her husband and lip-service to her, allying themselves completely with his perspective on his marriage, his children and his royal life. As a result, friendships foundered as relations between the Prince and Princess degenerated. Diana once described Emilie van Cutsem, a former champion golfer, as her best friend. Inevitably suspicion was rife. When the van Cutsems hosted a dinner for Prince Charles and his circle at a Covent Garden restaurant just before Christmas 1991 the Princess strongly suspected that the date had been chosen because she had a long-standing previous engagement and would be unable to attend.

  The week of the Princess of Wales’s 30th birthday in 1991 provided graphic evidence of the way their friends had become involved in the rivalry between the royal couple. On the day that a national opinion poll revealed that Diana was the most popular member of the royal family, she received a public slap in the face when a front-page story in the Daily Mail revealed that the Princess had turned down her husband’s offer of a birthday party at Highgrove. The clear implication, illustrated by quotes from the Prince’s friends, was that Diana was behaving in an unreasonable manner. When Prince Charles first suggested the idea of a party, the Gulf War was raging. Diana believed strongly that planning such a party would be frivolous at a time when British troops were involved in the fighting. Also, as her friends were aware, a party at Highgrove comprising many of Charles’s cronies was hardly her idea of fun.