Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition

by Andrew Morton

  While her words may have fallen on deaf ears inside the government and the Palace, others were listening. During her earlier divorce negotiations Diana inevitably spent much time with her lawyers, building a strong bond with Maggie Rae. By coincidence, Maggie was a great friend of fellow lawyer Cherie Blair and her politician husband, Tony. Encouraged by Diana, Rae agreed to act as an informal conduit between the Princess and the Labour Party politician. Tony Blair instinctively realized that Diana had outstanding potential as someone to represent Britain on the world stage. ‘She was the face of the youthful New Britain he wanted to build,’ recalls a Blair aide. However, great care had to be exercised in arranging face-to-face contacts as any leak would have been politically embarrassing both for Tony Blair and Diana. Several meetings were arranged, Blair impressed more and more by her humanitarian instincts and her international appeal.

  On becoming Prime Minister in May 1997, Blair had the opportunity to employ Diana’s obvious talents officially, organizing a weekend summit at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country retreat, in the summer. While Prince William played football with the Blair boys on the lawn, the Princess and the Prime Minister talked through the details of her informal ambassadorial role. Diana was delighted, remarking afterwards: ‘I think at last I will have someone who will know how to use me. He’s told me he wants me to go on some missions. I’d really like to go to China. I’m very good at sorting people’s heads out.’

  Indeed, what impressed the youthful Prime Minister more than anything was her uncanny gift for going to the heart of a difficult issue without unduly raising political hackles. As he commented after her death: ‘She had a tremendous ability, as we saw over the landmines issue, to enter into an area that could have been one of controversy and suddenly just clarify for people what was the right thing to do. That in itself was an extraordinary attribute and I felt there were all sorts of ways that could have been harnessed and used for the good of people.’

  More than anything in the last few weeks of her life, the Prime Minister’s ardent approval and encouragement of her work as well as the success of her campaign against the evil of landmines gave her a renewed sense of self-worth, as well as a more sharply focused direction in her public life. Her staff were the first to notice the change of mood. ‘Her enthusiasm was permanent and contagious,’ recalled her secretary Louise Reid-Carr.

  As with her contact with Blair, her involvement with the landmine issue was a case of the right pitch at the right time. By happy coincidence her friend, the film director Lord Attenborough, invited Diana to a charity première of his film In Love and War, a moving documentary about the havoc wreaked by landmines on civilians, particularly women and children, at the same time as Mike Whitlam, then Director-General of the British Red Cross, was visiting Kensington Palace to try to secure a renewed commitment to the charity.

  The film, which focused on the work of the Red Cross, captured Diana’s imagination and she agreed with alacrity to help raise funds in the campaign to rid the world of landmines. Furthermore she decided to accompany Red Cross officials and a BBC film crew to publicize the work of the charity in war-torn Angola. It was, as Diana would have put it, a ‘very grown-up’ assignment.

  At a meeting at Kensington Palace before she flew to Africa the Princess expressed her concern that her actions could be seen as political. Lord Attenborough recalled: ‘She was aware that there were possible political pitfalls but decided to take the risk on the grounds that the suffering caused by landmines should be brought to the public’s attention.’ Inevitably, by championing the fight to ban landmines, Diana did raise political hackles – one junior minister in the then Conservative government described her as a ‘loose cannon’, while the objections of Tory MPs prevented her from attending a meeting of the all-party landmines eradication group in the House of Commons. Typically the Princess remained quizzically aloof from her accusers. ‘I’m a humanitarian. I always have been, and I always will be,’ she said simply.

  More than that, by adding her weight to the campaign she clearly was making a difference. Pictures of her walking through a minefield in Angola forced the world to sit up and take notice – ‘The impact she had was absolutely phenomenal,’ said the British Red Cross. It became one of the most iconic photographs of her career.

  Enthused by this initial success – the new British government responded by banning the export and use of landmines while the Clinton administration was pressurized into a similar policy rethink – the Princess discussed visits to other countries, notably Cambodia, Thailand, Afghanistan, northern Iraq and Bosnia. In the end, after advice from the Foreign Office, she decided to make a three-day visit to Bosnia, still slowly recovering from civil war, in the company of the distinguished journalist Lord Deedes. He recalled not only her gentle sense of humour but her ability to listen and to communicate the uncommunicable. When she walked around Sarajevo’s largest cemetery she encountered a mother tending her son’s grave. ‘There was no language barrier,’ he wrote. ‘The two women gently embraced. Watching this scene from a distance, I sought in my mind who else could have done this. Nobody.’

  However, the 40-odd cameramen and journalists who trailed around the ruins of a once-proud nation were not so much concerned with the sober issues surrounding landmines as with the explosion of interest in the new man in Diana’s life, Dodi Fayed, the playboy son of the controversial owner of Harrods department store, Mohamed al-Fayed. It was a telling reminder to Diana, if she needed one, that while she might have escaped the suffocating embrace of the royal family and managed to reinvent her public persona, she could never free herself of her enduring and overarching image as a beautiful, single and available young woman. Whether she liked it or not, who she was going to marry was a question of more abiding fascination than what she was going to say.

  More than that, since her separation in December 1992, the Princess had had to learn to deal with a society uneasy with strong, determined women. More than one commentator observed that Charles’s and Diana’s separation released ‘a backlash of misogynistic indignation that was truly shocking’. She knew that if she were caught in a careless caress or innocent embrace with another man, the whispering campaign would begin. This was no exaggeration, as was illustrated by the quasi-ritual humiliation faced by the separated Duchess of York when pictures of her having her toes sucked by her financial adviser John Bryan were released.

  Until the divorce was finalized and the terms of settlement clarified, it was Diana’s greatest concern that her children would be taken away from her by the most influential and feared family in Britain. So she was forced to exercise extreme caution, for example, never having dinner parties at Kensington Palace because they would be misconstrued, any unattached men present becoming fair game for an ever-watchful media. Indeed, when she wanted to see a male visitor at Kensington Palace, like as not she would insist that they travel in the trunk of her car to avoid the waiting paparazzi. As she frequently complained: ‘Who would take me on? I have so much baggage. Anyone who takes me out to dinner has to accept the fact that their business will be raked over in the papers. I think I am safer alone.’

  She was acutely and often angrily aware that her tracks were dogged by paparazzi photographers hungry for that jackpot first picture of the Princess with the new man in her life. Her caution was therefore understandable. However innocent her friendships, she knew from bitter experience that male companions experienced lengthy, if not eternal, misery through the attentions of the media. She had almost lost count of the number of men – and often their wives – who had found themselves front-page news because they had spent a casual evening with her at a cinema, theatre or restaurant.

  It was an unhealthy situation compounded by her emotional nature. The Princess was a tactile, affectionate and needy woman who craved the warmth and companionship that a loving relationship could bring but which she had been so long denied. Locked into a cool and distant marriage for most of her adult life, she was
forced to channel her affections elsewhere, buying generous presents for friends and surrounding herself with material possessions to cushion her isolation. So she was fiercely protective of her boys, overly familiar with her staff because she was lonely, and unnervingly open with total strangers in her charity work. As a friend observed: ‘She is always doing everything for everybody else; she needs to start doing things for herself. She wants the praise and adulation for being a martyr because of her great insecurity.’

  Her image of sophisticated glamour and unapproachable sexuality merely masked her innermost need for a man to cherish her, to nurture her and to love her. Unwanted as a baby, unloved as a wife, she simply desired a man whom she could rely on, a companion she could trust. Yet all Diana had known was a romantic life of betrayal, either through circumstance or design, and disloyalty. When she had trusted, she had been let down, when she had loved, she had been cruelly exposed. She was rejected by Prince Charles for another woman; her former bodyguard Barry Mannakee, whom she adored, was tragically killed; her relationship with James Gilbey was viciously and publicly exposed in the Squidgygate tapes, while her lover, Captain James Hewitt, sold his story. Her friendship with former England rugby captain Will Carling ended when his wife Julia, a TV personality, blamed her for the break-up of their marriage, while her relationship with art dealer Oliver Hoare ended abruptly after a police investigation into a series of nuisance telephone calls to his home. Her subsequent love affair with heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan ended because he was not comfortable in the public spotlight.

  For in spite of the hurt and betrayal, the Princess, who was at heart a guileless, rather naïve young woman, retained a romantic vision of her future, dreaming of a knight in shining armour who would whisk her away to a new life. ‘Her head tells her that she would like to be the ambassador to the world, her heart tells her that she would like to be wooed by an adoring billionaire,’ commented a friend presciently. For a time billionaire Teddy Forstmann as well as reality TV personality, property mogul and now President of the United States, Donald Trump attempted, unsuccessfully to woo her. She was all too aware of the turbulence a fresh union would create, both inside the royal family and with her two boys. As she once told her husband: ‘If I fall in love with somebody else the sparks will fly and God help us.’ Uppermost in her mind was her consideration for her sons. Any future suitor for her hand had to earn their approval before he could truly win her heart. Indeed, one of the attractions of James Hewitt was that he got on so well with William and Harry. While she wanted two more children, preferably girls – she was excited when her astrologer predicted that she would have another baby in 1995 – her desires were balanced by her sensitivity to the impact this would have on her existing family.

  Thus her eternal hope that she could find a man to share her life was steadied by a caution born out of her experience, her position and her existing family. ‘I haven’t taken such a long time to get out of one poor marriage to get into another,’ she told Taki Theodoracopulos, a gossip writer. This tension in her heart manifested itself in her frequent consultations with astrologers, seeking some kind of sign, some sense of where her future lay. She constantly asked them to predict the kind of man she would one day marry. ‘Whoever you are, come here,’ she used to say lightheartedly. While many prophecies were wildly off the mark, the central predictions, those she truly believed, now have an eerie, cock-eyed accuracy. A consistent theme among these prophecies was that she would marry a foreigner or at least a man of foreign blood. France appeared time and again in her private astrological prophecies both as a future home and as the birthplace of the new man in her life. Indeed, one of the reasons why she considered living in France, South Africa or America was not just unwelcome media attention at home, but also because her astrologers descried a beckoning vista of new love, new happiness and hope away from her home shores.

  Her ruminations about the future were matched by her brooding on the past. With her friends she endlessly discussed the questions that vexed her; whether Charles and Camilla would ever find happiness together or if he would ever have the courage to give up the throne for the woman he loves. Her moods of obsessional curiosity were matched by a sympathy for their plight. ‘He won’t give her up and I wish him well,’ she once told a friend. ‘I would like to say that to his face one day.’ As the years passed she became reconciled to Camilla as the châtelaine at Highgrove and began to appreciate that her loyalty and discretion should be rewarded by the Prince’s public acknowledgement of their relationship. Yet that mood all too easily turned to reproach or self-pity as she mourned a lost youth and innocence. So when the Prince made it known that he was to host Camilla’s 50th-birthday party at Highgrove in July 1997, Diana decided to make herself scarce. While she put a brave face on the event – ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I suddenly came out of the birthday cake?’ she joked – she knew that the media coverage would only reopen old wounds and reawaken old pains.

  It was in this mood that she decided to accept a standing invitation from Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods department store, for her and the boys to join him, his wife Heini and their four children at his holiday villa in St-Tropez in the South of France. Even though Fayed, a controversial figure whose payments to certain Members of Parliament had helped topple the Conservative administration, had known the Spencer family for years, several of her friends, including Rosa Monckton, wife of the then editor of the Sunday Telegraph, advised against accepting. The Egyptian multi-millionaire, who has been denied British citizenship, despite frequent protestations at what he regards as the unfairness of this exclusion, employed Diana’s stepmother, the Countess de Chambrun, in his store and had become so close to the late Earl, Diana’s father, that he would boast that they were like brothers. While he is ruthless and dictatorial in his business life, as those who have tangled with him will attest, Diana only saw the warm, generous and affectionate side of his character. She was happy to be photographed with his arm around her when they stood on the deck of one of his yachts near St-Tropez. For once Diana seemed relaxed and carefree, seemingly oblivious to the watching press as she jet-skied or swam off the beach in front of Fayed’s villa.

  However, media censure that the Princess had chosen a dubious and inappropriate holiday host needled her. She motored over to a boatload of British journalists and complained that they had been cruel to Fayed, whom she considered a long-standing family friend, and unfair to her and the boys, asking if they could leave them all in peace. In a parting shot she said: ‘Expect a big surprise in the next two weeks.’ Given subsequent tragic events, there has been much speculation about what she meant. It seems that she was going to announce the launch of a campaign to establish a chain of hospices around the world.

  At the time it was interpreted as something more sensational. It was an incident that seemed to symbolize her unworldly innocence as well as her constant vulnerability. She was naïve to expect anonymity in the company of a man who was a thorn in the flesh of the British Establishment, at the most fashionable resort in southern France, and at the height of summer. At the same time, she was always on the lookout for a safe haven, particularly during school holidays, where she and her boys could enjoy some time together before the Princes journeyed back to their father at Balmoral. Perhaps if she had bought her own country seat – for a time she hunted for properties in Berkshire near William’s public school, Eton – or achieved her dream of living on the Althorp estate she would have treated holiday invitations from well-meaning friends more cautiously. The ultimate irony was that, before the Fayed offer, she had already been invited to stay at a holiday home at Southampton in the Hamptons on the east coast of America by her billionaire friend Teddy Forstmann. However, for some unknown reason, the security services did not feel that the place offered sufficient security for the Princess and her boys, and the offer was declined.

  Four days into that fateful July holiday, the party was joined by Fayed’s eldest son, Emad, known as Dodi, who ha
d first met the Princess ten years before when he played alongside Prince Charles in a polo match. There was little sign of their later intimacy when he was introduced to Diana. Crew members noted that he bowed and called her ‘Ma’am’, treating her with the deference due her station. Indeed, Dodi had his own yacht moored near Jonikal, his father’s boat, and it was on that vessel that he was staying with his then fiancée, the Californian model Kelly Fisher.

  At first sight the 41-year-old playboy, a Hollywood film producer, was an unlikely suitor for the hand of a princess, a woman who had spent her life stripping away the bogus glamour of royalty so that she could spend time with and truly understand people on the margins of existence. Born into unashamed luxury, Dodi, the only son of Mohamed al-Fayed and his first wife, the late Samira Khashoggi, whose brother Adnan is the billionaire arms dealer, was given his own Rolls-Royce complete with chauffeur and bodyguard when he was just 15. Educated at a series of exclusive schools in Switzerland, France and Egypt, his training was rounded off by a period at the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy, to ‘toughen him up’ before he joined the United Arab Emirates Air Force.

  As a young man with a predilection for fast cars and beautiful women, it was inevitable that he should be drawn to the shiny glamour of Hollywood where he became a film producer involved most notably with the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire. Following the failure of his eight-month marriage to the model Suzanne Gregard, he was linked to a series of glittering girlfriends including Brooke Shields, Joanne Whalley, Cathy Lee Crosby and Julia Roberts. His holiday companion, Kelly Fisher, was the latest in a long line of loves. Though he once said that his first marriage had put him off the institution for life, it seemed he was ready to settle down with the Californian model. Kelly Fisher later claimed that they were engaged at the time; he had bought her a $200,000 ring, presented her with a cheque for the same amount – it subsequently bounced – and picked out a seafront property in Malibu where he and Kelly would live after their marriage.