by Kitty Kelley
Charles was humiliated. “His Royal Highness didn’t want to leave the grounds,” recalled one of his security guards, “but his friends encouraged him not to retreat. ‘Be seen helping people,’ they advised. But he was scared. We saw it in his eyes. Like a rabbit in the clamp of a trap.”
When Charles visited the scene of an oil tanker spill off Scotland’s Shetland Islands, he imposed a “no children” rule. His aide explained: “They tend to ask awkward questions.” The Prince arrived looking drawn and worried. His thinning hair was combed to conceal his bald spot, and he appeared stooped and defeated. He avoided the press as he tramped through oil-soaked fields, and he strained to make small talk with farmers whose fields and crops were buried in gunk. Later, at a midmorning reception, he passed on orange juice and ordered a Scotch whiskey. “We asked HRH [Philip] to visit the oil spill as president of the World Wildlife Fund,” said the WWF’s former communications director, “but Charles’s staff didn’t want him [Philip] there…. They needed the sympathetic coverage for the Prince of Wales. But the WWF is the most prestigious conservation organization in the world, and we, too, needed a presence…. We finally worked it out so both of them would go and pursue separate agendas. Charles said beforehand he would not respond to the press, but Philip agreed to answer questions. After the first one, though, he lost his temper.”
A television reporter had asked Philip whether his visit had been overshadowed by headlines about his son’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
“It’s nothing to do with that,” snapped Philip. Growing angry, he wheeled on the reporter. “I might have guessed someone like you would ask that question. Who do you represent?”
The reporter replied: “ITN [Independent Television News].”
“Figures,” said Philip, storming off.
The Duke of Edinburgh complained to the WWF communications director that the question was rude and boorish. “The ITN reporter wasn’t disrespectful, just straightforward,” said the WWF employee. “But the lack of deference shown in posing the question in the first place was not lost on HRH….”
That lack of knee-bending deference jolted the country in May 1993. More than five hundred people streamed into the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London to listen to a day-long debate by royalists and republicans on the future of the monarchy. The forum mirrored the mood of national anxiety as ninety speakers assembled. They discussed the Crown and why, or even whether, it continues to matter in twentieth-century England.
“Something has died,” said Professor Stephen Haseler, “and that something is the enchantment of the British people for the monarchy.” Historian Elizabeth Longford disagreed: she argued in favor of Prince Charles becoming King. But playwright David Hare recommended abolishing the monarchy because he viewed it as the fountainhead of falseness and snobbery. In between was Lord Rees-Mogg, former editor of the Times, who called himself a royalist but acknowledged the need for constitutional reform. He observed that an institution that had survived since the sixth century could be dislodged only by war or revolution. Because neither option was desirable for the country, he urged his audience to believe in the monarchy’s ability to adapt.
But the Queen moved like moss. Less than three years after agreeing to pay taxes (on her public income, not on her private investments), she decided to fly commercial. By not using one of the eleven jets in the Queen’s Flight, she saved taxpayers about $3 million on one trip. “Her Majesty took over the entire first-class cabin,” said an Air New Zealand flight attendant, “but that’s as it should be. After all, she is the Queen of England, not some bicycle monarchy.”
But the Queen flew commercial only once. For comfort and convenience, she preferred the Queen’s Flight. So instead she decided to economize on household expenses. She received $70 million a year in public funding for her travel expenses, her security costs, and the upkeep of her eight residences. She started trimming costs by eliminating her employees’ traditional benefits: her chauffeurs, who earned $9,000 a year, had to start paying for their own shoe repair. Servants, paid $8,000 a year, no longer received free bars of soap. And the $60,000 a year courtiers who accompanied the Queen on foreign tours could no longer expect to receive a free suit. “They will receive a cash stipend in exchange,” the Palace announced. “We want to make things work better and more efficiently.”
As part of her cost cutting, the Queen reconsidered giving cash bonuses to the two hundred employees at Windsor Castle who had helped save her treasures during the 1992 fire. Instead of money, she offered them a free tour of the castle library. Few accepted.
The royal family remained aloof from the debate about their future. Lord Charteris, the Queen’s former equerry, said the idea of a republic never penetrated the Palace walls. Lady Longford, a friend of the Queen, disagreed. “They have been perfectly open about it,” she said. As far back as 1966, when they toured Canada, they discussed the possibility of Britain’s becoming a republic. If anything, they treated the subject lightheartedly. “We’ll go quietly,” the Queen said. Philip joked that he could be packed in a day, but she would need several weeks. “Too damn many corgis,” he quipped. Walking into her office at Buckingham Palace one afternoon, he looked out the window and asked: “Have they got up the guillotine?”
The Queen, too, used humor in addressing a Commonwealth conference in Cyprus. She had arrived on the island in the fall of 1993 aboard her royal yacht. After dinner she relaxed with her guests. When she said she wouldn’t wager on a similar Commonwealth conference in the next forty years, they knew she had studied the recent polls in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that showed growing support for independence from the Crown. “The only safe bet is that there will be three absentees—Prince Philip, Britannia, and myself,” said the Queen without emotion. “But you never know…. Nowadays, I have enough experience, not least in racing, to restrain me from laying any money down on how many countries will be in the Commonwealth in forty years’ time, who they will be, and where the meeting will be held.”
Within the royal family, the Queen did not need a trackside tip sheet to see who was running best in the mud and who was showing signs of weak knees. She read the opinion polls, which showed that her estranged daughter-in-law was winning the race while her son was still stuck in the paddock.
Charles stumbled along, trying to redeem himself, but even as he tried to make light of his predicament, he sounded more self-pitying than self-deprecating. As he autographed a soccer ball for youngsters at a London recreation center, he told them: “Now you’ve got my name on it. You can kick it all over the place.” He gave up polo entirely; he cut ribbons, laid wreaths, inspected factories, visited troops in Bosnia, toured a former concentration camp in Poland.
But he could not compete with his wife, who radiated in the press like a movie star elevated to sainthood. As one headline put it: “The Princess Bids Halo and Farewell to Her Critics.” She toured hospices and orphanages and Red Cross feeding centers. In India she touched untouchables. In Nepal she hugged lepers. She embraced amputees and ladled soup for starving refugees. People turned out in droves to see her, mesmerized by her warmth, her beauty, her glamour.
Although Charles could not draw crowds like Diana, his equerry said he was well rid of her. He said the Prince had grown more confident because he was no longer saddled with the Princess and subjected to “superficial handshaking tours.” Rather than belittle Diana, the equerry might have been better advised to announce that Charles had lashed himself to the steps of Canterbury Cathedral to do penance for his adultery, as his ancestor did to atone for the murder of Thomas à Becket. The public adored the Princess, and she reveled in the adulation.
She was regularly photographed visiting homeless shelters and talking to battered wives. She seemed especially taken with one woman, who admitted pouring gasoline on her husband and setting him afire as he slept. The woman, who said she had been driven insane by her husband, pleaded not guilty to murder and was freed. The Pri
ncess hugged her and said, “You have been so brave.” Later, as Charles visited an inner-city housing project, he shook hands with a woman in the crowd who said she had met his estranged wife. He grimaced. “You lived to tell the tale, did you?”
Measured in newsprint, there was no contest between Diana and Charles. A media research firm measured the number of column inches allotted to each during the first six days of March 1993: Diana scored 3,603 inches of newsprint, Charles only 275.
One of Britain’s prizewinning feature writers, Lynda Lee-Potter, advised the Prince to ignore the tally and stay out of the fray. “He should not play his wife’s games,” she wrote. “He should remain uncomplaining and dignified.” She said Diana had declared open war on her husband. “She desires to be utterly vindicated. She yearns to diminish Prince Charles. She wants revenge, not merely justice. But the continuing public battle she plans can only take place if her husband and his family retaliate. If they do that, they may be defeated. If they refuse to fight, they will surely win.”
By then the Princess had the Palace on the run. They appeared to support her charity work, but behind the scenes they sabotaged her. They kept her from becoming president of the British Red Cross and would not recommend her as head of UNICEF. They allowed her to make a few speeches but winced when she spoke about bulimia and depression. The courtiers, all middle-aged men, did not see her declarations of victimhood as a plus for a female whose poor self-image once made her feel as if she deserved to be dysfunctional. The courtiers said her speeches about self-esteem were silly and self-indulgent.
They sputtered with indignation when she spoke out on issues, especially AIDS, which they said were not in her domain. Diana paid no attention. She told a national AIDS conference: “It is doubly difficult to deal with AIDS in a country like Britain, where there is still an understandable reluctance to have frank and open discussions on emotional issues. We need to learn how to break through this barrier of inhibition….”
When the Princess was asked to deliver the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC to discuss her views on AIDS, the courtiers finally took action. The invitation was withdrawn.
What they did not take away from her, Charles did. He wanted her removed from public life with no access to the Queen’s Flight, the royal train, the royal yacht, or any other privileged form of royal travel. In fact, he wanted her to be shorn of all royal trappings. But the Queen worried about isolating Diana and the effect it might have on her troubled mind. The monarch dispatched the Prime Minister to visit Kensington Palace to reassure the Princess that she had a continuing part to play. Her Majesty then authorized publication of the Prime Minister’s visit in the Court Circular so the public and Diana would think she was still considered valuable.
The Palace allowed her to make a few goodwill tours, but, instructed by Charles, they cut back the honors she had once been accorded. No more high-level courtiers or official ladies-in-waiting. Her airline seating arrangements were downgraded from first class to business class, and the Palace banned playing the National Anthem upon her arrival in Nepal. The tabloids, which revered her, reported the petty slights and wrote editorials calling for more dignified treatment for the mother of the future King.
But the courtiers were dropping the curtain on the star and inching her off stage. She was no longer invited to appear with the royal family at public celebrations like Trooping the Color. When the Queen did not extend an invitation to Royal Ascot in 1993, Diana took her boys to Planet Hollywood. The next day’s newspapers showed a doting mother in blue jeans romping with her children alongside a stiff picture of the royal family waving from their carriages. One tabloid headline captured the contrast: “The Hugger and the High Hats.”
Nor was Diana invited to the Queen Mother’s birthday party in August of 1993. So she took her children go-carting. Again, her picture frolicking with her sons appeared on the front pages. When the Queen went to Hungary, her first visit to a postcommunist state, Diana went to Paris to shop. The monarch’s visit received minor coverage while Diana’s was given the front pages. An Evening Standard editorial wondered: “Might it not be appropriate to place the Princess under house arrest when visits abroad by her less newsworthy royal superiors are imminent?”
Intent on being seen as an angel of mercy, Diana had wanted to attend the memorial service for two children killed by an IRA bomb in the Cheshire town of Warrington. But the Palace said no and sent Prince Philip instead. Diana let the Palace know that she understood how to play hardball: she phoned the grieving mothers of both bomb victims.
“I want to be there with you and give you a hug,” she told them, “but I can’t because they are sending my father-in-law.”
Even Diana’s critics felt the Palace looked petty and spiteful.
She saw the royal family siding with her husband and arrayed against her. He viewed it differently, saying he received more support from his friends than from his family. His father kept in contact by sending messages through his laptop computer, not all of which were appreciated. “Ah, yes, the Duke and his helpful bulletins,” recalled one of Charles’s aides. His arched eyebrows indicated the communications were unwelcome. The aide said nothing about the Queen, who maintained a cool distance from her heir. Sometimes the courts of mother and son clashed like fighting cocks.
“I nearly went mad trying to accommodate them,” recalled the interior designer Nicholas Haslam. “The competition between the two circles is fierce and strangulating. There is no regard for the bond of mother and son: none whatsoever. It’s a pitched battle: Her Majesty the Queen versus upstart Prince, who is the King-in-waiting….
“I came into Buckingham Palace in 1993 at the bidding of Prince Charles, who wanted me to do the decoration for a dinner he planned for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. I surveyed a few rooms with one of the Queen’s men and asked that the chairs be rearranged for a softer, more hospitable setting.
“ ‘Absolutely not,’ said the Queen’s man. ‘Her Majesty would not approve.’
“I asked another man for assistance with the lighting.
“ ‘Her Majesty likes the lights as they are.’
“I inquired about moving some tables, saying that the Prince was having a dinner for three hundred people and we needed a bit more space.
“ ‘Her Majesty prefers the tables to remain in place.’
“I was nearly around the bend with frustration,” said the decorator. “I couldn’t address the subject of candles because ‘Her Majesty does not approve of dining by candlelight.’
“It was a disaster trying to represent Charles in his mother’s domain, but I finally managed to pull it all together for him, and he was very gracious. He said that Buckingham Palace had never looked lovelier than it did that evening. Of course, I aged fifty years trying to negotiate arrangements with all the Queen’s men….”
That evening, with his mother not in residence, Charles flew the Prince of Wales flag from Buckingham Palace. He endeared himself to his guests with his after-dinner remarks. “I’ve become quite familiar with the works of Shakespeare in the last year,” he said. “I’ve lived through The Merry Wives of Windsor, Love’s Labours Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew.… It’s about time for All’s Well That Ends Well.” He brought down the house.
On occasion, Diana, too, poked fun at her plight. While visiting a London hostel for battered wives, she sat in on a therapy session and listened to the women talk about rebuilding their lives. When she was asked if she wanted to join in, she flapped her blouse and fanned herself: “I have a hot flush coming on.”
Her regular tabloid press pack enjoyed her sly levities, especially when she targeted their counterparts in the upmarket press. “Oh, you’re from the Financial Times?” she said to one man. “We took that at home. Yes, I believe we used to line the budgie’s cage with it.” One of her regular reporters complimented her on how fit she was looking. She startled the group by asking if they remembered her when she was younger and had had a large b
osom.
“Oh, yes, ma’am, and weren’t those the good old days,” joked her favorite photographer, Arthur Edwards. He had covered her since she was nineteen and waiting for the Prince of Wales to propose. During that period she had ventured out the front door of her apartment at Coleherne Court and burst into tears when she found a horde of press men blocking her car. Edwards had barreled through the mob to help her. “Don’t let them see you cry,” he’d advised. “It’s Queen Di for you, and when you finally get the job, it’s Sir Arthur for me!”
After that, Diana rewarded the tabloid photographer with her sweetest smiles. When he fell ill, she took him medicine. “She calls me by my Christian name and has done [so] from the beginning,” he said. “Prince Charles still calls me Mr. Edwards and is very formal. I think in this age it is out of place.”
The Sun photographer did not flatter himself about why the Princess courted him. “The reason is most likely that thirteen million readers will see her at her gorgeous best,” he said. “Funnily enough, it is always the papers with the highest circulation to whom Diana is the most cooperative.”