Mired in controversy from the moment the first one-pound coin stuck to the back of a postcard arrived at Kensington Palace, the Fund has been seen as a bastard child by the royal establishment, unwanted and unloved. It has never been visited by a member of the royal family, nor have Diana’s children, William and Harry, ever taken part in any of its work, either in private meetings or public events. This is one of many ticklish challenges facing Diana’s sons.
For in three years’ time, when Prince William is twenty-five, he will be entitled not only to the money she bequeathed him and his brother in her will, but also to take a substantial role at the helm of her charity, at some stage presumably taking over the role of Diana’s sister, Sarah McCorquodale. His brother has already spoken publicly about his desire to follow in her footsteps. On his eighteenth birthday Prince Harry, now destined for a career in the Armed Forces, talked for the first time about his mother and her legacy: ‘She had more guts than anyone else. I want to carry on the things she didn’t quite finish. I’ve always wanted to – but before I was too young. She got close to people and went for the sort of charities and organizations that everybody else was scared to go near, such as landmines.’
Besides the rhetoric, the litmus test of the boys’ determination to carry on her work will be the extent of their involvement with the Memorial Fund. There are many powerful voices, not just inside the Palace, who would like to see the charity wound up, adding to the pressure on Prince William, who is already concerned about finding a role that does not compete with his father. That conflict may be inevitable, as Mark Bolland pointed out: ‘The real worry is for Prince Charles, who can’t seem to get in the papers now without standing next to his son. That was always one of his nightmares. It’s clearly coming true.’ Yet it is the vulnerable and voiceless, like the crippled children waiting patiently for artificial limbs in Parachinar general hospital, who will be the ones who suffer if the young Princes walk on by.
During her lifetime the Princess gambled everything on her boys. They, particularly Prince William, are her living legacy. ‘All my hopes are on William now,’ she told Tina Brown, then editor of the New Yorker, in June 1997. ‘It’s too late for the rest of the family. But I think he has it.’ For the next decade at least, this good-looking prince will be the pin-up of the royal family, the flag bearer of the future, not just of the monarchy but of his mother’s memory. That is important. For while courtiers believe that he is far more of a Mountbatten-Windsor than a Spencer in character, his public image is that he has the same diffident appeal as his late mother. In an age where image is everything his casual good looks and unstudied easy charm guarantees the similar glamorous appeal as Diana. ‘As a modern young royal, William has been fortunate in having much more freedom than any previous member of the family,’ observes his biographer Brian Hoey. ‘He is undoubtedly the star of the future, the one on whom the royal family’s hopes rest.’
The time Diana spent taking her sons to hostels for the homeless and to hospitals so that they could understand real life more clearly seems to have paid off. ‘I was influenced a lot by my visits to hostels with my mother when I was younger,’ said Prince William, during an interview for his twenty-first birthday. ‘I learned a lot from it, more so now than I did at the time.’
In many respects, though, if Queen Victoria came back today, she would be unsurprised by his upbringing. Like many children of the aristocracy he was sent away from home to boarding school, he attended Eton, still seen as the most elitist school in the land, and is now at St Andrew’s university, which has among the highest proportion of privately educated school pupils in the country.
Again, like his forebears, the Prince’s pastimes are predominantly upper class, fox-hunting with fashionable meets near his father’s Gloucestershire home and joining shooting parties at Sandringham and other country houses. ‘I do think I’m a country boy at heart,’ he said unsurprisingly. A country boy who, when he is at his father’s house at Highgrove, will have the services of one of three valets to lay out his clothes in the morning. A country boy who will inherit a £700-million fortune one day, maybe even becoming the first billionaire Prince of Wales.
Yet by royal standards he has led a much more relaxed and informal lifestyle than his father ever enjoyed. The very fact that he appeared barefoot and in a torn sweater at the photocall for his first ever interview is testament to a more casual style. If nothing else, as a result of his mother’s tragic life, William will, as Earl Spencer observed, be able to choose the bride he wants rather than having her chosen for him. That though has not stopped British TV shows trying to pick a bride for him, albeit tongue-in-cheek. The experience of his college friend Kate Middleton, who hit the headlines when she accompanied the Prince and the rest of the royal party on a skiing holiday to Klosters in Switzerland in 2004, shows that the media’s fascination with royal love life will be as intense as during his father’s days.
He will though inherit an organization more in tune with today’s world, modernizing work having been undertaken by Buckingham Palace and now, belatedly, by Prince Charles. As Earl Spencer told Ian Katz, ‘One of Diana’s greater legacies to her sons and their successors is that she has made many more things acceptable in a royal context and showed the old guard at Buckingham Palace that, in fact, a lot of that stuff is wanted by the people as a whole.’ Indeed a YouGov poll said that ‘humanizing the royal family’ was Diana’s greatest achievement, ahead of her landmine campaign.
For all the attempts to diminish and dismiss her, the Princess still looms large in the popular imagination. In a BBC poll in 2002 she ranked third, behind Winston Churchill and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as the greatest Briton, easily outstripping any other member of the royal family, dead or alive. Her death, according to those who responded to a poll for the History Channel, was perceived as the most significant event of the twentieth century – ahead of the beginning of the Second World War.
People responded to her death precisely because her life had so much meaning. As a woman, a mother, a daughter and a public figure, she reflected many of the dilemmas and conflicts of our own lives as she tried to discover who she really was. Her courage in defying a powerful family, her decision to live by her own lights, her haphazard, sometimes foolhardy, search for love, as well as the way she challenged and embraced her past are windows into a complex personality that struggled to face up to and overcome her demons, be they related to her body, her self-belief, her self-esteem or her ambitions. She was never standing still, always looking to assert herself, through her speeches, her humanitarian work or her lifestyle. Diana was a woman who was growing and developing rather than sitting on her laurels.
Yet the prevailing orthodoxy is that she was out of control and pretty well out of her mind. The evidence for that contention centres largely around the paranoia that infected her life at the time of her infamous BBC television interview. In this book I have tried to demonstrate that, given the way her fears were being cleverly fed by reporter Martin Bashir, as well as hearing other alarming information relating to the boys’ nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke and Prince Charles’s orderly George Smith, she had every right to feel physically afraid as indeed would any other person under those pressures at that time. Perhaps this re-evaluation of the facts of her life will lead to a fresh look at who she was and where she was heading, a richer appreciation of a woman striving to make sense of a multifaceted lifestyle, rather than a mournful individual on the fringe of sanity. That she learned so much and travelled so far is testament to her strength of character and indomitable spirit. The truth is, as I have argued, that the Princess was leaving her demons behind and using her great gifts of empathy and communication in a worthwhile, satisfying work.
Perhaps the last word about this extraordinary woman should go to the woman she once reviled and then came to admire, her stepmother Raine, Countess Spencer: ‘She managed to get through very difficult parts of life with enormous courage and turned herself from being a very shy, insecur
e girl, not nearly as pretty as her other two sisters, into a world-class beauty, a world-class fashion model who had a world-class heart. She loved people, and loved helping them. It gave her a tremendous boost, the feeling that she could make a difference. She was a very remarkable, unusual and extraordinary person. Truly an icon of our time.’
TIMELINE
1961
1 July
The Hon. Diana Spencer born at Park House, on the Sandringham Estate, Norfolk.
1978
September
Earl Spencer, Diana’s father, collapses after a massive brain haemorrhage.
1981
6 February
Prince Charles proposes to Lady Diana Spencer.
29 July
Marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana.
1982
21 June
Prince William is born.
1984
15 September
Prince Henry (Harry) is born.
1991
Diana secretly undertakes interviews with Dr James Colthurst for what will eventually become Diana: Her True Story.
1992
29 March
Earl Spencer dies of a heart attack.
7 & 14 June
Serialization of Diana: Her True Story in the Sunday Times.
16 June
Diana: Her True Story published.
25 August
‘Squidgygate’ tapes published.
9 December
Prime Minister John Major announces royal separation.
1993
17 January
‘Camillagate’ tapes published.
3 December
Diana announces her withdrawal from public life.
1994
June
TV documentary, in which Charles admits adultery, broadcast.
August
Diana accused of making nuisance phone calls to Oliver Hoare.
1995
January
Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles announce they are to divorce.
September
Julia and Will Carling announce their separation.
20 November
Panorama interview broadcast.
Diana flies to Argentina.
11 December
Given the ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ award by Henry Kissinger in New York.
December
Diana receives a handwritten request from the Queen to divorce.
Diana makes a comment to Tiggy Legge-Bourke at the Royal Household’s Christmas party.
1996
12 July
Charles and Diana announce agreement to divorce.
July
Diana resigns as patron of a majority of her charities.
28 August
Charles and Diana are officially divorced.
October
Diana collects a humanitarian award in Rimini, Italy.
November
Diana’s romance with Hasnat Khan is publicized.
1997
January
Trip to Angola, where she walks through a minefield.
March
Charles and Diana are together for William’s confirmation.
May
Visit to Pakistan; also sees Hasnat Khan’s family. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announces ban on landmine sales.
June
Charity auction of Diana’s royal wardrobe at Christie’s, New York.
July
Holiday in the South of France with the Fayed family and William and Harry.
31 August
Diana dies in a car crash in the tunnel beneath the Pont de l’Alma in Paris; also killed are Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul.
6 September
Diana’s funeral takes place at Westminster Abbey. Later the same day she is buried at Althorp, the Spencers’ estate in Northamptonshire.
1998
July
William and Harry organize a play to celebrate Charles’s fiftieth birthday. Camilla Parker Bowles is welcomed.
November
Camilla hosts a fiftieth birthday party for Charles.
1999
April
The first building to take Diana’s name, Princess of Wales House, Bournemouth – a centre for those living with AIDS and HIV – is opened by her mother, the Hon. Mrs Frances Shand Kydd.
2000
February
Commemorative walkway through the London parks opened.
July
Diana Memorial Gardens opened.
2001
January
Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, arrested on charges of theft.
2002
November
The case against Paul Burrell at the Old Bailey collapses.
2003
13 March
Publication of the Peat Report.
October
Publication of A Royal Duty by Paul Burrell.
November
Publication of the so-called ‘rape tape’ and its contents.
2004
January
British inquest into the deaths of Diana and Dodi is opened and adjourned.
March
Extracts from the Diana–Morton tapes broadcast in America in a two-part NBC documentary.
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