While Diana was the first to admit that she was no academic, she was using her growing knowledge to change and control the vision she had of herself, to see herself less as a helpless victim and more as a woman empowered and energized. ‘Diana is on a voyage of discovery at the moment – she is discovering who the real Diana is,’ observed Stephen Twigg.
As part of that journey, she acted on the advice of her osteopath Michael Skipwith and made an appointment to see Susie Orbach, whose work on the female psyche, particularly in relation to eating disorders, has gained international repute. It was a brave step, especially as a central feature in the pathology of bulimia is to deny that one has a problem. As Susie Orbach is the first to say, therapy is no easy option. She did not present a professional shoulder to cry on during the hour-long sessions at her clinic in Belsize Park, North London, in the spring of 1993. ‘Therapy makes you look at who you are,’ she says. ‘It’s not about saying, “You are fine” or about reassurance and consolation. It’s about asking who you are and why you act the way you do.’ These are demanding questions, but Diana now felt that she could ask them of herself.
Indeed, the Princess even felt able to articulate and explore these questions on a more public stage when, in April 1993, she agreed to make the opening address at the first London conference on eating disorders. She had done her homework for the speech and had written sections of it herself. As a result, while she was intensely nervous beforehand – ‘I could do with a gin and tonic,’ she told the psychiatrist, Dr Bryan Lask, who had organized the conference – she was for once truly speaking from the heart. ‘I have it on very good authority that the quest for perfection in society can leave the individual gasping for breath at every turn,’ she said, not afraid to own to her problem. She went on to call bulimia a ‘shameful friend’ and described childhood feelings of ‘guilt, self-revulsion and low personal esteem creating . . . a compulsion to dissolve like a Disprin and disappear.’ Her speech, personal, perceptive and revealing, was a startling departure for a member of the royal family. Most important for Diana, she was the one who was in charge of her thoughts, her words and her voice.
‘Not bad for a whore!’ yelled a voice as she left the conference, still flushed with adrenalin and nerves.
For a moment the Palace officials accompanying the Princess were aghast, but Diana explained through ecstatic giggles that it was her speech trainer, the actor Peter Settelen, who in his work with her, had used role play, which included impersonating people from all walks of life. Indeed, his influence was typical of the informal, rather haphazard way people came into the Princess’s life. Just before Christmas 1992 Diana had asked her fitness trainer for her verdict on how she had delivered a recent speech that had been broadcast on BBC Radio Four. ‘Rubbish,’ came Carolan’s unvarnished reply. ‘You sounded like a ten-year-old with a little-girl feel-sorry-for-me voice. If you want to make a powerful speech it has to sound like you mean it.’ Carolan lost no time in recommending her friend Peter Settelen as coach, and while he was taken on to train the Princess in the art of speech delivery it was not long before – much to Patrick Jephson’s irritation – he added speech writing to his royal duties. By mid-1993 he, Stephen Twigg and James Colthurst were involved in her speeches, sometimes in competition.
There were other ways in which the Princess sought to present her new self to the world – a new hairstyle and a new wardrobe of sophisticated business suits made their appearance, while she chose to release portraits of herself by her favourite photographer, Patrick Demarchelier, that would display the fresh face of a determined, self-confident young woman who was eager to address serious issues and move on with her life.
But these were only images; the real-life Princess was still prone to doubt, depression and anxiety as she faced an uncertain future. She was, as one friend noted, ‘very tidal’. For every business suit she wore, she also appeared in public in severe black outfits, as if in mourning. In a woman who was acutely aware of her public image – ‘They [the public] don’t want to see me looking dowdy; they want to see me out there doing my thing,’ she told Ken Wharfe – the plain and sombre garments gave an indication of the continuing struggle in her heart and mind. It was not long before the tabloids were criticizing her dress sense, censure that hit a raw nerve. ‘Dowdy, am I?’ she snapped at one hapless tabloid royal correspondent after a spate of stories were published, caustically commenting on her gloomy wardrobe.
It was left to James Colthurst to broach this thorny subject over lunch at Kensington Palace. Diplomatically, Diana’s old friend told her what, deep in her heart, she already knew – that the public wanted to see a bright and colourful princess. Surprisingly, she accepted his comments, and for a period there was the amusing situation of the world’s most famous fashion plate asking a man who thought that ‘haute couture’ was a brand of up-market porridge for suggestions on her wardrobe. In reality what really changed her mind was the argument that a new, brighter look would also confuse ‘the enemy’ – Prince Charles’s camp – who were silently cheering her public difficulties at that time. Indeed, the Prince would throw a fit of petulant anger every time he saw a prominently displayed newspaper photograph of Diana. ‘He’s simply got to learn to grow up some time,’ commented one courtier.
In the intense atmosphere before the separation Diana was fully aware of the hostility she faced not just from her husband and his supporters but from Buckingham Palace itself. Much as the Queen and Prince Philip tried to remain above the fray, it was clear that ultimately they would side with their son and heir. Blood ties mattered most. She had seen the way the wind was blowing at the royal showdown at Windsor Castle in June 1992 when Prince Philip stated that they had a tape recording of her telephone conversation with an unnamed man about the newspaper serialization of Diana: Her True Story.
While that came to nothing, it was extremely unnerving; then, in late June, Diana received a letter, the first of a series, from her father-in-law about the marital breakdown and her perceived involvement with the book. She was outraged and upset. Much has been written about these letters, most recently by her former butler Paul Burrell, who was working for Prince Charles at Highgrove at the time. His benign interpretation of Prince Philip’s letters – citing the fact that they were signed ‘With fondest love – Pa’ – as proof of Philip’s concern about her well-being, does not sit easily with Diana’s initial reaction. She was so alarmed when the first letter was delivered that she telephoned a friend and asked him to recommend a solicitor to help draft a suitable reply. He in turn contacted me, but in the time that it took me to produce a couple of names, the Princess had already found her own lawyer. Such an agitated response was hardly the behaviour of someone who considered Prince Philip’s intervention as friendly. Lucia Flecha de Lima on the other hand – who, with Rosa Monckton, the wife of Dominic Lawson, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, helped the Princess draft several replies – found his notes ‘warm and helpful’, ‘like a father writing to a daughter’. But Diana had never been enamoured of her father-in-law. When, later, she was chatting to Sir Max Hastings, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, she spoke in gleeful tones about the forthcoming publication of a biography by Kitty Kelley, the American gossip writer, of the Duke of Edinburgh (which never came about; instead she published The Royals in September 1997). ‘He’s got away with murder for years,’ she told Hastings, a frequent refrain in her litany of complaints about the royal family. Whatever her personal feelings towards him, Prince Philip did, in subsequent letters to Diana, express the universally held belief about his son’s liaison with Camilla. ‘I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla. Such a prospect never entered our heads,’ he wrote.
While these letters have now assumed dramatic importance in the cataclysm of the Queen’s annus horribilis, then they were just one cloudburst in a season of storms. Diana was at the time the object of a great deal of criticism, disapproval, rumours and allegations. She was criticized for m
aking a speech on drug abuse on a ‘Balmoral Day’ in August, when the royal family should be on holiday. Not long after, she heard that the Queen had said during her summer cruise on board the royal yacht Britannia that the book had confirmed her view that Diana was ‘unstable’; and that, according to the royal writer Brian Hoey, no one in the Queen’s household had a ‘good word to say about her’. Thus the myth of the ‘loose cannon’ was born, and the whispering campaign, with its claims that she needed psychiatric help and suffered from Borderline Personality Syndrome, gathered pace.
In August 1992, not long after the ‘second honeymoon’ fiasco on board Latsis’s yacht, and while the press had been revelling in disclosures about the Duchess of York and her so-called financial adviser, John Bryan, came another bombshell – the publication in the Sun newspaper of illicitly taped telephone conversations between the Princess and a man identified as James Gilbey.
Just days before the extracts of the now notorious Squidgygate tapes were published we heard that one of Prince Charles’s closest supporters had been encouraging nervous newspaper executives at the Sun, who had had the tapes in a safe for many months, to publish the damning late-night chat of three years before. Ironically, the editors at the normally brash tabloid were so fearful of publishing the contents of the tapes, which graphically revealed Diana’s sense of isolation and unhappiness inside her marriage and within the royal family, that they would have held fire if they had been contacted by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes. He never called. The Sun’s executives, having overcome their scruples, even set up a phone line for people to listen to excerpts from the tapes.
Diana, who was staying at Balmoral, was so distressed that she was on the point of packing her bags and leaving even before her lawyers and those representing the Prince had started work on a suitable separation settlement. While she put on a brave face in front of the royal family, The Princess was, according to Colthurst, ‘at the lowest ebb for years’. But he and other friends managed to convince her that it was best to stay and fight it out rather than leave.
In spite of the pleasant smiles and polite tone, the negotiations were, as far as Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson was concerned, motivated by ‘spite, hypocrisy and injustice’. ‘I wondered if her opponents really understood the bloody-minded determination of the woman they were seeking to banish to the backwaters of royal life,’ he wrote in his memoirs. There were many who wished to see her pay a high price for her independence.
Perversely, those attempts to downgrade her status by limiting her use of the Queen’s flight and royal train, and access to the Palace machine merely served to shine a light more clearly on the true direction Diana wanted to take. For years she had railed against the flummery and protocol surrounding royal life; now she had a chance to demonstrate an approach to duty that differed in style and substance from the prevailing Windsor orthodoxy. So when in March she flew to Nepal in the company of Lynda Chalker, the then Minister of Overseas Development, on her first solo trip as a ‘semi-detached member of the royal family’, the media sharks were circling in the water, sensing blood. A secret media briefing by Prince Charles’s aides, which pointed out Diana’s reduced status, served to define the news agenda for the visit. ‘We may be witnessing early signs that Diana is no longer a royal of the first order,’ announced a headline. That she had travelled by scheduled airline with her sister Sarah McCorquodale as her lady-in-waiting for the five-day visit was seen as merely underlining her inferior status.
In fact, Diana was only too glad to have the chance to shape an important overseas visit to fit in with her vision of how it should be, shorn of protocol and formality, with an emphasis on meeting ordinary people. It was a style she had been working towards for some time; at the height of the furore over the royal separation, for example, Diana was making secret visits to see London’s homeless at the Passage Day Centre in Victoria, run by the Catholic Church, to which she had been first taken by the late Cardinal Basil Hume in September 1989, and to hospices in London’s East End, Blackpool and Hull.
These visits were part of her healing process. In the world she lived in, everyone’s motives were suspect, everyone had an agenda, either to influence her judgements or further their own careers and lives. On the other hand, the people she was visiting lived in a different world – one which had no hold over her. As her friend Debbie Frank observed, ‘She was used to never having a relationship that was pure and clean. They all wanted something. It’s one reason why she got on so well with children and the dying. They didn’t want anything from her. Sad, really.’
The Princess’s day-to-day life was filled with rumour and hearsay of plots and counterplots. Rarely a day went by at Kensington Palace without there being some excursion and alarm.
In this uneasy atmosphere loyalty and trust were highly valued, and any perceived transgression assumed an importance out of all proportion to the event. Family, friends, staff, courtiers and police: they all came under her gimlet eye.
An incident involving a new full-time member of staff, Paul Burrell, her junior butler, represented everything about life at Kensington Palace which the Princess found constraining, invasive and alienating. When the royal couple parted, in December 1992, Diana had only agreed to take on Burrell and his wife Maria after representations from her private secretary and her butler, Harold Brown. Her first thought was that Burrell, like anyone who had worked for her husband, might turn out to be an enemy spy. While he was personable and flattering, her initial doubts seemed to bear fruit when one day in 1993 the Princess arrived back from the gym to find him rifling through her private letters on the desk in her sitting room. She was furious and sent him from the room, but minutes later, fearing the humiliation of dismissal, he returned to her, threw himself on the floor in tears and started kissing her feet. The astonished Ken Wharfe came by just in time to witness this bizarre spectacle and in an appropriately policemanly manner rebuked the butler for his ‘unforgivably disloyal’ and ‘deeply unprofessional’ behaviour. Unable to explain himself, Burrell scuttled from the room.
Shortly after, as Diana was leaving the apartment for a public engagement, Princess Margaret’s chauffeur Dave Griffin, who usually engaged her in cheery banter, commented to her that she did not look too happy. ‘He [Burrell] will have to go,’ she said firmly as she outlined the story. ‘She had caught him spinning the bins, going through her letters,’ recalled Griffin. While the Princess did see the funny side of the unseemly performance (in fact at the time had difficulty stifling her giggles), Burrell was for several weeks out in the cold and was fortunate to retain his position.
If this had been an isolated incident, the Princess would have probably been happy to laugh it off, but she was uncomfortably aware that nothing of hers was truly private.
Then, when Ken Wharfe made a few unguarded, and rather chauvinist, remarks about Diana to the Sun’s royal photographer, Arthur Edwards, the rumour mill quickly went into high gear. Edwards passed the comments on to his boss, the paper’s deputy editor, Stuart Higgins, who in turn told a royal contact he was cultivating, the Duchess of York. She wasted no time in relaying the news to her royal friend in order to ingratiate herself. Everyone had their own agenda but the end result was that Diana, already feeling restricted by the police presence, was angry and annoyed that Wharfe had, to her mind, been disloyal. That initial spat sowed the seeds for a summer of growing distance between the Princess and her minder. He was angry when she had her rooms swept for listening devices by a private firm without telling him – ‘It’s my home and I’ll do what I want,’ she told him defiantly – and had briefed journalists about her plans without informing him. Eventually, with a degree of acrimony on both sides, the Inspector and Diana parted company in November 1993. For some time Diana went without official police protection – although she later employed Princess Anne’s former bodyguard, Colin Tebbutt, as her security driver. It was an arrangement that worked well – she had protection yet was
in complete command, a situation she had craved for years.
Indeed, it was a deep-seated feeling of being out of control that lay at the heart of the Princess’s continuing dissatisfaction with Kensington Palace. While Prince Charles had now left, she still did not feel truly comfortable in her apartment. It was not just the obvious signs of being in a prison – the patrolling police and CCTV cameras – that contributed to her perpetual sense of anxiety and unease. Even after the formal separation she felt that she was still being watched and manipulated, albeit remotely. While she might have been mistress of her household, she neither employed nor held the purse strings for her courtiers, police and staff. Ken Wharfe, for example, was employed by the Metropolitan Police and reported directly to Colin Trimming, Prince Charles’s protection officer. Whether or not it was the case, to her mind this meant that her estranged husband knew her plans and movements. Every time she wanted to go on holiday, especially with her boys, others seemed to stand in financial and strategic judgement.
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