On 29 November 1995, just nine days after Diana’s appearance on television, she and Patrick Jephson drove into Buckingham Palace to face the fallout from her fireworks display. The consequences of her actions were not long in coming. At a meeting with the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, and the Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, the Princess nominally agreed to accept the smothering bear hug of Buckingham Palace – an arrangement Jephson had wanted for some time – and allow them to organize her life, both financially and administratively. The grudging umbrella currently offered by her husband, who still paid for all her household and office expenses, would be withdrawn. Buckingham Palace was, however, only lukewarm about the scheme and Jephson, who was behind the plan, soon realized why. The Queen’s private secretary and other senior royal officials were busily pursuing a very different agenda.
Even as they discussed her future role, soundings were being taken at the highest level about a royal divorce. Nicholas Soames, the Armed Forces Minister and a close friend of Prince Charles, had already contacted Downing Street and asked the Prime Minister, John Major, to speak to the Queen about the matter. The Archbishop of Canterbury was also quietly canvassed. Soames, who, after watching the Panorama interview accused Diana of displaying the ‘advanced stages of paranoia’, publicly urged the couple to divorce ‘promptly’. ‘It is plain that the marriage has broken down irrevocably . . . and that divorce is inevitable,’ he said bluntly. The historian Lord Blake, who advised Buckingham Palace on constitutional issues, lent his authority to moves to prepare the nation for the sad ending to the fairy-tale marriage. ‘The present situation in which they seem to be giving a sort of tit-for-tat, running each other down, really has become almost intolerable,’ he said.
The moment arrived sooner than Diana expected. While the Princess was in New York, where she received a humanitarian award on 12 December, the Queen had taken matters into her own hands and informed the Prime Minister that she would write to the couple and ask them to agree to ‘an early divorce . . . in the best interests of the country’. It was a sign of just how intractable and how damaging the continued dispute was to the fabric of the monarchy that the Queen, whose natural instinct is to avoid confrontation and not to interfere in the lives of her children, had, however reluctantly, become involved. The marital dispute was the talk of polite and impolite society not just in Britain but beyond our shores. As the former American Ambassador to Britain, Raymond Seitz, remarked of those days in his memoir, Over Here, ‘There was the party of the Prince and the party of the Princess, one demanding loyalty and the other sympathy, one describing the Princess as cunning, manipulative and publicity-hungry, and the other calling the Prince naive, whimsical and self-pitying.’
Diplomats and historians agree that the fallout went way beyond the personal breakdown between the Prince and Princess of Wales. The timing of the Queen’s historic letter, just days before the traditional royal family’s Christmas gathering at Sandringham, as well as her decision to become personally involved (admittedly encouraged and supported in this by the Prime Minister), reflected the genuine sense of crisis and exasperation felt by senior courtiers inside the beleaguered institution.
That frustration was directed not only at the Princess but also at her vacillating husband and the BBC, courtiers feeling pained by the lack of trust the public broadcaster had shown in the Palace. As the Queen’s biographer, Sarah Bradford, told me, ‘The Wales divorce was undoubtedly the most damaging event since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936. It brought into question the reality of the monarchy and the Queen’s personal attributes as a mother and as a monarch.’
Diana, however, did not see it that way when, on 18 December, the handwritten note from the Queen – the first letter, the Princess observed ruefully, she had ever received from the Sovereign – was delivered by uniformed courier to Kensington Palace from Windsor Castle. She was shocked, angry, tearful and indignant. Three weeks earlier, the Princess, presenting an image of strength and self-possession, had told the world that it was ‘not her wish’ to divorce; now she was being asked, nay ordered, by her mother-in-law to end her marriage. To add insult to injury the Queen had discussed the matter with the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others, without conferring personally with her daughter-in-law. Once she had calmed down, Diana realized that the Queen, whom she well knew preferred to put her head in the sand during domestic disputes – what the royal family call ‘ostriching’ – truly meant business.
What is more, the Queen had the law on her side. As Diana had been aware since the separation, she herself had fewer rights under law, particularly with regard to her children, than any other woman in the land. The Queen has under common law absolute right and authority for the care and education of her two grandsons, in particular Prince William, the heir presumptive. This right was last recognized in 1772 and the law has not been altered since. In theory, indeed, the Queen could at any time have overridden the wishes of their parents with regard to the boys’ education and how and with whom they were to be brought up.
No sooner had Diana digested the contents of the Queen’s note than she received another letter, this time from Prince Charles, personally requesting a divorce. In the letter, which began ‘Dearest Diana’, the Prince described the failure of their relationship as a ‘national and personal tragedy’. However, he used the same phrasing as the Queen in referring to the ‘sad and complicated situation’ of the royal marriage, which led Diana to suspect that the Windsors were acting in concert against her. In typical fashion – Diana always prided herself on replying promptly – she sent the Queen and her husband handwritten letters almost by return, after first consulting one of her divorce lawyers, Anthony Julius. In her responses she was non-committal, saying that she would need time to reflect and that she would ‘consider her options’.
Even though the Princess was shocked and wrong-footed by the Queen’s intervention, tactically it had inadvertently played into Diana’s hands. Ever since the separation she had had a fear, verging on the pathological, that she would be blamed for the divorce and had always played the waiting game. Now that that threat was lifted, the Princess had a genuine opportunity to make good her great escape. At the same time the Queen’s pre-emptive strike had neatly let Prince Charles off the hook as the apportionment of blame would be more limited. The Queen’s letter, which was leaked to the mass media within days – ‘For once they can’t blame me,’ said Diana – meant that the public perceived that it was the Sovereign who was, quite unusually but properly, taking the initiative in order to protect the institution of monarchy.
There were immediate practical issues to be attended to, most notably whether the Princess should accept or decline the Queen’s invitation to join the royal family at Sandringham. Before the separation she had found family gatherings difficult. In the last few years she had avoided them as far as possible. While her Panorama interview may have, in her mind, ended the chance of any real threat to her, that did not mean that the hostility felt by ‘the enemy’ had abated. In her mind, Sandringham was enemy territory, a feeling underscored by Prince Margaret’s hostile letter and by the almost tangible antipathy of other members of the royal family. An off-the-cuff comment made by Princess Margaret to a titled lady friend at the time seemed to encapsulate the family’s attitude: ‘Poor Lilibet and Charles have done everything they can to get rid of the wretched girl, but she just won’t go.’
Diana was already anxious and uncertain about spending Christmas with ‘the leper colony’ as she disparagingly called the royal family. The divorce letter from the Queen finally decided her – even though it meant leaving the boys, she would not go to Sandringham. ‘I would have gone up there in my BMW and come out in a coffin,’ she remarked afterwards. Instead she spent Christmas Day on her own at Kensington Palace before flying off for a Caribbean holiday. In the days before her holiday she twice visited her therapist Susie Orbach and had time to phone her friend, the magazine
editor Liz Tilberis, who had been her honorary lady-in-waiting in New York, to encourage her in her fight against cancer, as well as contacting a family in Lancashire whom she had befriended, who had lost their daughter to the disease.
The Princess’s decision to decline the Sovereign’s invitation, normally viewed as a command, to spend Christmas at Sandringham proved to be a momentous judgement, marking the nadir of her relationship with the Queen. For the first time in her royal career Diana had placed herself in direct conflict with the head of state. Since the separation Diana, who sincerely believed in the monarchy, had carefully maintained their relationship and remained somewhat in awe of a woman who, while not beyond reproach, commanded her complete respect. So, however compelling her reasons, this was, as far as the Queen was concerned, an affront too many. From now on Diana found that the Queen was not available to take her telephone calls and that meetings with Her Majesty’s courtiers were cool, brisk and formal. While the Queen ensured that the door to her daughter-in-law remained open, the Princess discovered that the hinges were much stiffer and she had to push much harder to get what she wanted. As she later remarked, ‘The only thing we had in common was Charles, and now I didn’t have Charles any more.’
Diana’s problems were coming not as single spies but as a platoon. Not only was she now fast-tracked on a divorce, but she found her staunchest allies were deserting her. At a crucial moment in the divorce negotiations, in early January 1996 her private secretary Patrick Jephson resigned, ostensibly because of the Panorama interview and the Tiggy Legge-Bourke incident. While Jephson’s departure left her bereft for a time, in truth it was remarkable that he had tarried for six years given that his long-term agenda for Diana – as some kind of saintly dowager princess doing good works from inside Buckingham Palace – fundamentally conflicted with her emerging vision of herself as an independent princess for the world. In fact, he had first considered resignation in 1993, following Diana’s Time and Space speech, and later sounded out David Puttnam about a job in the film industry. When Diana heard of these plans, she refused to speak to Puttnam for several months because of his perceived ‘disloyalty’ and never fully regained her trust in her private secretary. ‘It was the most ridiculous thing,’ commented Puttnam.
It seemed to Diana that the circle of people she could trust was ever decreasing. At this critical time she felt that even her own family were deserting her. In early April, when divorce negotiations were delicately poised, she received a coruscating letter from her brother, accusing her of ‘manipulation and deceit’, adding that he hoped she was getting ‘appropriate and sympathetic treatment’ for her mental problems. While the origins of the row are unknown – it coincided with the revelation in a Sunday newspaper that month that Martin Bashir, the man Spencer had introduced to his sister, had forged documents – it added further pressures on the Princess. (In typical Spencer style, they healed the rift later in the year, the Princess visiting her brother in South Africa when he had his own marital difficulties.)
The question of whom she could trust was always on her mind and in this deteriorating atmosphere of acrimony and mutual suspicion she was at pains to exert more day-to-day direction of her affairs. Her links with her managerial staff became looser and more distant, as she sought to hire outsiders who were untainted by the Palace culture. The downside of this was that they lacked the experience to find a way through the labyrinthine maze that was Palace politics at this critical moment in her life. Additionally, they were hired very much on the Princess’s own terms. For example, when she appointed a media adviser, Jane Atkinson, a few days after Jephson’s departure, it was as a consultant rather than as a member of staff, a signal that the appointment did not carry much weight. Atkinson soon found that the Princess, who relied on her instincts more and more, worked to her own agenda whether it was right or wrong. Often Atkinson’s advice was ignored, and while she was ostensibly Diana’s official mouthpiece, the Princess, having taken spoonfuls of medicine from the media, was determined to be her own spin doctor, using her secretary, Victoria Mendham, and butler, Paul Burrell, to place stories anonymously in the newspapers.
Since the success of her television interview, Martin Bashir had also joined Diana’s circle, helping to draft her speeches, much to the chagrin of the journalist Richard Kay who had acted as her unofficial mouthpiece for several years. Even when, in April 1996, the Mail on Sunday revealed that the bank statements Bashir had shown her were forgeries, the Princess kept faith in him. At the same time, she was regularly in contact with various Fleet Street editors, notably tabloid rivals Stuart Higgins (editor of the Sun) and Piers Morgan (editor of the Daily Mirror) as she attempted to ride the media bronco.
While this ad-hoc approach inevitably met with mixed results with the media, in other respects a more flexible arrangement served her well. Trust, loyalty and control were her watchwords. In 1995 she personally contacted Princess Anne’s former closeprotection officer, Colin Tebbutt, who had retired from the Metropolitan Police, and asked him if he wanted to work as her bodyguard-cum-driver. ‘Are you still a rebel?’ she asked gaily. ‘Come and join the rebels.’ Their relationship meant that she employed him or a member of his freelance team of drivers as and when she wanted, not because she was obliged to. (Contrary to public belief, when she was out and about in London and elsewhere she was often accompanied by a driver who was also trained in close-protection work.) The retired bodyguard became so close to the Princess that he and her butler Paul Burrell were the only mourners outside her immediate family to be invited to attend her burial on the Althorp estate.
With a small and inexperienced crew Diana entered the fray of divorce negotiations, relying on her own instincts and resources. She now understood that the Queen was, uniquely, as much a party to the divorce negotiations as Prince Charles. Indeed, the game plan of the Princess’s lawyers, Lord Mishcon and Anthony Julius, was to resolve what they called ‘the Queen problem’, namely Diana’s future title, her continued residence at Kensington Palace and the custody of the children, before negotiating the financial settlement with Prince Charles. A satisfactory outcome of discussions with the Queen would have a considerable impact on ‘the Charles problem’. At a meeting at Buckingham Palace in February 1996 the Queen assured Diana about the custody and care of her boys and indicated that it was ‘unlikely’ that Charles would marry Camilla Parker Bowles. On the vexed issue of her future title, one report says that the Queen suggested that she should be known as ‘Diana, Princess of Wales’, while the Princess herself later told friends that she offered to give up her title because she assumed that that was the wish of the Sovereign.
The issue remained uncertain until the Princess had met with her estranged husband a couple of weeks later. In a note to Diana before the meeting on 28 February, the Prince said that they should let bygones be bygones. ‘Let’s move forward and not look back, and stop upsetting one another,’ he urged. While that may have been the spirit at the start, by the end of their forty-five-minute meeting alone together, the old suspicions crowded in. Diana was determined to issue her own statement before, as she saw it, her husband’s side beat her to it.
She made it clear in her statement in February that it was Prince Charles who had requested the divorce. Not only had she agreed to his demand, but she had decided to give up her HRH title and be known as Diana, Princess of Wales. The Queen and Prince Charles were dismayed at her unilateral action, the Palace making it clear that the Princess’s ‘decisions’ were as yet no more than requests. It seemed that Diana and Charles even disagreed about reaching a final agreement. This was perhaps a suitable epitaph for their marriage.
Irritation turned to anger when it appeared that Diana was briefing the media to the effect that she had been pressured into relinquishing her title. In response the Queen authorized her spokesman to state publicly and categorically that the decision was made by the Princess alone. ‘It is wrong that the Queen or the Prince asked her,’ said Her Majesty’s spokesma
n. Now everyone knew. It was the Princess that did away with her title, stabbing herself in the back with her own knife. In many respects, the mixed messages she conveyed about the loss of her title symbolized her ambivalence about saying farewell to her old life, an understandable mixture of disappointment, resignation, sadness and regret for missed opportunities.
While Diana’s title was within the purview of the Queen, discussions about the financial settlement were with the Prince and his lawyers. In the cut-and-thrust of offer and counter-offer, Diana was doubtless eager to explore every avenue to gain the upper hand. Her unsettling conversation with the former orderly George Smith and his allegations of male rape had preyed on her mind. In the spring of 1996, with negotiations delicately poised she decided to see him once more and this time tape his shocking story. While her attempts at being her own private eye were not entirely successful – she had to visit his home in Twickenham for a second meeting when she discovered that her tape machine had not worked – she now had the evidence that she could conceivably use as a bargaining chip if the divorce discussions turned nasty. Whether she was seeing Smith for his or for her benefit is open to debate. Indeed, it is worth noting that it was not until the autumn of 1996, after the divorce had been finalized in late August, that Diana first informed her ex-husband of Smith’s allegations. If she had been truly alarmed she would have alerted him months earlier.
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