What regularly strained their relationship to breaking point was Diana’s feeling that ultimately she could never truly rely on her mother, whose interventions in her life, while ostensibly supportive, were unpredictable and often tactless. It was a pattern first established in the build-up to her wedding, when the princess-to-be complained that her mother was ‘driving her mad’ with her tears and moans about the strain she was under. (‘I tended to think I was the one under pressure because I was the bride,’ she later remarked.) That led to a period of some months during which Diana refused to speak to her mother – although Frances was on hand to offer advice and consolation during her difficult first pregnancy with Prince William. And while Diana appreciated the way her mother fiercely supported her at Prince Harry’s christening, when Prince Charles grumbled that he had wanted a girl and had carped about the baby’s red hair, she was less happy when Frances wrote to her husband criticizing him for going to the opera in 1991 while Prince William was undergoing surgery for a head injury following an accident at school, leaving Diana to cope on her own. The Princess, fortunately, intercepted the letter, which presumably her mother had told her about, and disposed of it before Charles had a chance to read it.
Again, during the fateful summer of 1992, when Diana’s own life was in turmoil, her mother’s erratic and impulsive behaviour gave her real cause for alarm. When Frances called in a state of deep distress, accusing her youngest daughter of abandoning her and threatening to harm herself, Diana was so concerned that she sent a panic-stricken message to James Colthurst, who had to leave a board meeting abruptly to help her deal with the family crisis. His advice to Diana to keep her mother talking for as long as possible until she had calmed down eventually worked.
By another unhappy coincidence, in April 1996, just as the Prince and Princess of Wales were finalizing their divorce, Frances Shand Kydd was arrested for drink-driving and subsequently banned from driving for a year. Diana, who had Old Testament views on crime and punishment and believed that drink-drivers should be disqualified for life, felt that her mother had once again let her down, and, particularly at a time when she herself was under critical stress. Tragically, their tidal relationship ended at the low-water mark after Frances was interviewed for Hello! magazine in May 1997. In the course of the conversation, she remarked that it was ‘wonderful’ that her daughter had relinquished the title of Her Royal Highness: ‘At last she is able to be herself, use her own name and find her own identity.’ Diana considered her remarks, which of themselves seemed blandly supportive of her daughter, hurtful and unnecessary, especially as the Princess had made a vain last-ditch appeal to her brother-in-law, the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, to keep the honorary title. The initial altercation between the two women widened into an unbridgeable rift after, according to Paul Burrell, her mother phoned her at Kensington Palace and launched into a tirade of slurred abuse about the men her daughter was seeing. While Mrs Shand Kydd has disputed Burrell’s account, she acknowledges that the Princess refused to accept her subsequent phone calls and returned, unopened, her mother’s letters. Even the butler’s attempts to act as an unbidden go-between came to naught. They never spoke again.
While the Princess acknowledged her mother’s virtues as well as her faults, and came to realize that she had not willingly left her children when her marriage broke down, in her heart Diana could never escape the childhood trauma of abandonment and loss. ‘Everything in her tormented psyche turned on what had happened to her at the age of six, when her parents separated and left her to a loneliness that nothing could cure,’ wrote her friend, the Australian-born author and television presenter Clive James.
During the Princess’s last meeting with Debbie Frank in July 1997, shortly before her death, she went over the story once again, underlining her almost visceral need for solace, succour and safety, a desire that was manifest in the numerous substitute mothers and surrogate families that she collected during her life.
Distant from her own family and increasingly alienated from the royal family, during the 1990s especially, the Princess increasingly turned to a collection of older women who, while strong independent characters, came from different societies or were only on the fringe of the British Establishment. In the mid-1980s Mara Berni, who, with her husband Lorenzo, was the owner of the famous San Lorenzo restaurant, was the most significant maternal figure in her life; the expansive Italian mother something of a spiritual guide, reading her tarot cards, recommending clairvoyants and interpreting her stars. They fell out for a time when la Signora Berni invited Diana to the opening of a new dress shop and failed to tell her that there would be photographers present. While that friendship waned, as so many did, the Princess formed bonds with others, notably Lucia Flecha de Lima, Annabel Goldsmith, Hayat Palumbo and Elsa Bowker, all of whom nurtured, supported and comforted the Princess during the years following her separation. Sophisticated, worldly-wise and outside conventional circles, they provided a cosmopolitan counterpoint to the life she had hitherto been leading. At the same time, these mature women were conservative, cautious and constraining in their advice – both Lucia Flecha de Lima and Lady Palumbo, for example, were opposed to her collaboration with my 1992 biography.
The oldest of Diana’s substitute mothers was Elsa Bowker. They had first met in 1993 when Lady Bowker was already well into her eighties. She had been a close friend of Diana’s Spencer grandmother, and also of Raine Spencer, and the Princess was immediately attracted by her exotic background. Born in Egypt to a French mother and Lebanese father, Elsa married a British diplomat, James Bowker, and spent much of her life travelling the globe. ‘She liked my way of living, my experience and she could tell me everything,’ Lady Bowker recalled before her own death.
It was in 1990, as her marriage was collapsing, that the Princess met Lucia Flecha de Lima, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to London. They did not fully cement their relationship until Diana made an official visit to Brazil with them the following year. ‘I loved it,’ declared Diana. ‘I was on a high from the day I arrived to the day I left.’ For a woman driven by her emotions, a country of such sensuous sensibilities immediately appealed. The Brazilian Ambassador and his wife represented those values of warm, sensibility family togetherness, an exuberant Latin-American susceptibility as well as a solid Roman Catholic faith, conservative, certain and secure, to which the Princess, in her search for stability and security, was naturally drawn. A mother of five and grandmother, Lucia, who was twenty years Diana’s senior, not only opened up her home to the Princess but on occasion her bedroom. After her husband Paulo Tarso had left the marital bed Diana would jump in and join her just like a little girl. ‘She was one of the family and we came to treat her like our own children,’ Lucia told the Daily Mail in November 2003. ‘I think it gave her a sense of belonging that she did not have elsewhere. I know I was a mother figure to her and she was like a daughter to me. Diana just became another one of the family.’ The Princess even had her own room at their London residence in Mayfair’s Mount Street where she would join them for weekends. ‘At my house Diana was a girl in trouble and I would listen to her and give her advice if she wanted it. Mostly I listened.’
When Paulo was posted to Washington in November 1993 and her surrogate family left her, Diana was bereft. It did not help that their move coincided with the resignations of her detective Ken Wharfe and chauffeur Simon Solari as well as with her decision to withdraw for a time from public life. None the less, the friendship continued to flourish, and the Princess visited them regularly, on one occasion meeting Hillary Clinton with Lucia, another time flying to Washington especially to visit Paulo when he was recuperating from a heart operation. While she enjoyed her holidays with them, it was the fact that Lucia was always there at the end of the telephone to offer support and counsel that Diana most valued.
If the Princess was emotionally simpatico with her Brazilian family, then she adored the bohemian if very well-bred chaos of life w
ith the Goldsmiths. Even though Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a daughter of the eighth Marquess of Londonderry, is from Diana’s social milieu, the fact that her flamboyant husband James, the late food billionaire, lived in England with her and openly in France with his mistress, put the family on the wilder shores of social convention – this spoke to the rebel in Diana, who perhaps felt more at ease with those who lived beyond standard social norms. That their daughter Jemima married Imran Khan, the former Pakistani cricket captain and, latterly, politician, added to the family’s glamour. At least twice a month the Princess joined this larger-than-life family for a chaotic and very rapid Sunday lunch, often bringing Harry and William along to play with the Goldsmith children. On these occasions she was at her most relaxed and giggly, bantering with James, when he let her get a word in edgeways, chatting with staff, helping with the dishes and swimming in the pool. ‘My home was simply the rock or the haven that she could turn to for escape, where she knew she would never be betrayed,’ Lady Annabel wrote after Diana’s death.
While the Goldsmiths offered lunch and safety, Lord Palumbo and his wife Hayat shared the trappings of their fortune, giving her the use of their private jet, entertaining her at their homes in England and France, and inviting her on board their yacht, Drumbeat. They used their considerable connections to assist the Princess; Peter recommending media-relations expert Sir Gordon Reece, a close friend of Margaret Thatcher, to help burnish her image, as well as the venerable lawyer, Lord Mishcon, to advise on her divorce negotiations. It was Hayat, the daughter of a Lebanese newspaper editor, a moderate Shi’ite Muslim, who was assassinated by terrorists, who organized Diana’s first, much treasured trip to Paris, where, with Lucia Flecha de Lima, they spent the weekend shopping and sightseeing. The fact that Lady Palumbo had converted to Roman Catholicism from her Muslim faith gave their friendship an absorbing dimension, given Diana’s own spiritual journey (see Chapter Six). At the same time, the Palumbos’ friendship with Princess Margaret’s former husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, as well as with the Duke and Duchess of York – Peter Palumbo is godfather to their elder daughter, Princess Beatrice – gave Hayat a telling insight and rounded appreciation of the endless intrigues and personalities at court, which someone like Lucia Flecha de Lima could only glimpse from afar. While she disagreed profoundly with Diana’s collaboration with my book – as too did Lucia – she would have understood more clearly than most the demands, constraints and tensions that came with life inside the royal family.
Where the Princess did not find a mother figure was within the royal family itself. Those dreams that she may have cherished, conscious or unconscious, of the Queen Mother or the Queen being some kind of maternal guardian, guiding, nurturing and nourishing her, were quickly dashed. When she raised her concerns about Camilla Parker Bowles before the wedding, the elderly Windsor matriarch suggested that she should not be such a ‘silly girl’, effectively telling her to do her duty. Far from feeling that she could confide in the Queen Mother, Diana was always wary. ‘I don’t really trust her. She comes to ask me about various people’s marriages in this family,’ she said. ‘Can I help and what do I think.’ Years later she ruefully explained to Max Hastings, the historian, author and at the time editor of the Daily Telegraph that the Queen Mother was a much tougher proposition than the public understood.
For an emotional, needy young woman, life in a family whose instinctive response to personal matters is silence or an averted gaze – ‘ostriching’ as they themselves call it – was barely tolerable. She saw herself as an outsider; they saw her as a problem, viewing her eating disorder, manifest by her frequent absences from family dinners, as the cause of her marital problems rather than a symptom. They came to see her as ‘a cracked vessel’ who probably needed professional psychiatric care.
David Puttnam was indignant. While conceding that she was a ‘very, very, very hurt girl’, a ‘nutcase’ she was not, he told me: ‘If my daughter, who is the same age as Diana, had got involved with that dysfunctional family and had the same pressures and lack of support it wouldn’t surprise me if she had cracked. One of the things that drove me to real anger was that if I had been her father I would have gone ballistic at her treatment. They had a duty of care to her that was never fulfilled. If you bring somebody into the family they have enormous responsibility.’
While her separation from Prince Charles in 1992 severed many of the bonds between Diana and the rest of the royal family, she was politically astute enough to maintain close links with the Queen. Invariably it was the boys who were her admission ticket into the corridors of power. When they were young she took them to swim at Buckingham Palace and afterwards for tea with the ‘chief lady’. ‘The Princess also used these opportunities to express loyalty and give assurances about her wish to do no harm either to the institution or to her husband who would inherit it,’ Patrick Jephson wrote. ‘These assurances,’ he added, ‘were not always entirely sincere. To judge from the lack of effective rejoinder, they had also probably been heard too often in the past.’
As far as possible the Princess followed a similar pattern from 1992 onwards, aware of the need to maintain close links with the fountainhead of authority and power, not just for her own sake but for her boys’. Early on she had realized that it would be a one-sided relationship – the Queen very rarely visited her and her children either at Kensington Palace or Highgrove. ‘She never wants to see them [the boys] but they are always there,’ the Princess said in response to a newspaper story claiming that the Queen had complained that Diana had prevented her from seeing her grandchildren. ‘William and Harry go to people who warm to them,’ the Princess said pointedly in one of her interviews with Colthurst. Her overriding aim, as she said frequently, was to do what was best for her boys. ‘The royal family would just like me to disappear into some desert somewhere and leave the children to them. I just won’t do it,’ she told Max Hastings.
Unlike Diana’s chosen mother figures, the Queen exercised genuine control over Diana’s life, from the shape and style of her public duties and decisions about her foreign visits to her relations with the government; and, ultimately, Diana’s eventual title and divorce settlement. While not naturally confrontational, the Queen has long experience in clipping the wings of over-influential subjects, whether politicians or princesses. After the separation, Diana fell to earth on numerous occasions, often after an intervention from Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s behest. According to Vivienne Parry, however, ‘Even though the Queen must have been consulted on many of the things concerning Diana, she [Diana] preferred to believe that it was the Palace grey men who were at fault rather than the Queen herself.’
When two young boys were killed by an IRA bomb planted in Warrington town centre in 1993, for example, the Princess telephoned Wendy Parry, the mother of one of the victims, Tim, and said that she would dearly love to hug and comfort her at the service. Even though she had left her diary clear to attend the memorial service, she explained that the Duke of Edinburgh was representing the family. When news broke of Diana’s call to Mrs Parry, the Palace made it plain that the Duke was the ‘appropriate choice’. ‘I really had my wrists slapped, it was a monumental cock-up,’ she admitted afterwards, accepting that she had a ‘lot of growing up to do’. The withdrawal of an invitation to give the prestigious Dimbleby Lecture and the decision to veto a proposed visit to Dublin to see the Irish President, Mary Robinson, in September 1993 for ‘security reasons’ impressed on the Princess that her life was not in her own hands. It never changed. In March 1997, on the first anniversary of the Dunblane massacre where a crazed gunman had killed sixteen children and a schoolteacher, she complained that the Palace had prevented her from visiting the Scottish town. ‘I just wanted to comfort those families. I still think of them all the time,’ she said.
While the awestruck reverence which characterized Diana’s early, tense dealings with the Queen modified over time to a dutiful if nervous respect, there was, following the sepa
ration, an inevitable wariness on both sides. The confrontation at Windsor Castle over the taped telephone conversation and Prince Philip’s letter-writing campaign following the publication of Diana: Her True Story meant that their relations were never trusting or easy. Diana felt a kind of baffled admiration for the Queen, in awe of her quiet stoicism in the face of the mundane treadmill of monarchy, but she was fearful of, if not a little frustrated by, the extensive influence the Monarch wielded over her life. She was quietly infuriated that the Queen, whom she continued rather naively to see as an omnipotent family referee, had not intervened to end her eldest son’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, and always seemed to take his side. Her complaints were endorsed by courtiers from that period. ‘She was wholly sympathetic towards Charles – in fact rather one-eyed in her approach,’ commented one. Diana, however, also frequently grumbled that all too often the Sovereign sat on the fence, never putting a foot wrong because essentially she never moved her feet. ‘My mother-in-law has been totally supportive but it’s so difficult to get a decision out of her,’ she observed diplomatically. While she could mimic the Queen well, Diana was on less certain ground when it came to assessing her personality. During our interviews the one question Diana stumbled over was about the Queen’s character. ‘Very difficult to answer.’ Over time Diana began to feel ‘pity and sadness’ as she learned to appreciate that the Queen was as much a woman trapped in a gilded cage as she was herself. She articulated that view more clearly in a letter, said to date from October 1996, that she wrote to herself, outlining some of her thoughts about the Queen and the institution she had served for most of her adult life: ‘I just long to hug my mother-in-law, and tell her how deeply I understand what goes on inside her. I understand the isolation, misconception and lies that surround her and feel very strongly her disappointment and confusion.’ While these words revealed part of her thinking, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that this rather patronizing attitude masked her confused feelings of powerlessness and inarticulate affection in the presence of an iconic figure whose influence over her life was continuing and considerable.
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