For years her low intellectual self-esteem manifested itself in instinctive deference towards the judgements of her husband and senior courtiers. Now that she was clearer herself about her direction, she was prepared to argue about policy in a way that would have been unthinkable several years earlier. The results were tangible. Foreign Office diplomats, notoriously hidebound in their perceptions, were beginning to realize her true worth. They were impressed by the way she handled her first solo visit to Pakistan and subsequently discussed trips to Egypt and Iran. That was, as she would have said, a ‘very grown-up’ part of her royal life.
The speeches she was making with almost weekly regularity at this stage were a further satisfying feature of her royal life. Some she wrote herself, others were written by a small coterie of advisers, including her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, a firm ally in the royal camp as she personally appointed him in November 1991. It was a flexible, informal group who discussed with the Princess the points she wanted to make, researched the statistics and then constructed the speech.
The contrast between her real interests and the role assigned for her by her Palace ‘minders’ was amply demonstrated in March 1992 when, on the same day, she was guest of honour at the Ideal Home Exhibition and then in the evening, made a passionate and revelatory speech about Aids. There was an interesting symbolism to these engagements, separated only by a matter of hours but by a generation in personal philosophy. Her exhibition visit was organized by the Palace bureaucracy. They arranged everything from photo opportunities to guests lists while the subsequent media coverage concentrated on an off-the-cuff remark the Princess made about how she couldn’t comment on her plans for National Bed Week because this was ‘a family show’. It was light, bright and trite, the usual offering served up by the Palace to the media day in day out. The Princess performed her role impeccably, chatting to the various organizers and smiling for the cameras. However, her performance was just that, a role which the Palace, the media and public had come to expect.
A glimpse of the real Diana was on show later that evening when in the company of Professor Michael Adler and Margaret Jay, both Aids experts, she spoke to an audience of media executives at a dinner held at Claridge’s. Her speech clearly came from the heart and her own experience. Afterwards she answered several rather long-winded questions from the floor, the first occasion in her royal life where she had subjected herself to this particular ordeal. This episode passed without a murmur in the media even though it represented a significant milestone in her life. It illustrated the considerable difficulties she faced in shifting perceptions of her job as a Princess, both inside and outside the Palace walls.
Her family, particularly her sisters, Jane and Sarah, and brother Charles, were aware of the appalling problems she was enduring. Jane had always given sensible advice and Sarah, from being dubious of her kid sister’s success, was now very protective. ‘You never criticize Diana in front of her,’ noted a friend. Her relations with her mother and her father, when he was alive, were patchier. While Diana enjoyed a sporadic but affectionate relationship with her mother, she was robust in her reaction to news that her second husband, Peter Shand Kydd, had left her for another woman. In the summer of 1991 her bond with her father went through a difficult period following publicity surrounding the secret sale of treasures from Althorp House. The children, including the Princess, had written to their father objecting to the trade in family heirlooms. There were bitter exchanges, subsequently regretted, which deeply hurt the Princess of Wales. Even the Prince of Wales intervened, voicing his concern to Raine Spencer, who was typically forceful in her response. In the autumn a reconciliation between father and daughter was effected. During a leisurely tour around the world the late Earl Spencer was deeply touched by the affection shown towards his youngest daughter by so many strangers. He telephoned from America to tell her just how proud of her that made him feel.
The support of her family was matched by the encouragement of the small group of friends and counsellors who saw the real Diana, not the glowing image presented for public consumption. They were under no illusions that, while the Princess was a woman of considerable virtues, her character was prone to pessimism and despair, qualities which increased the likelihood of her leaving the system. The departure of the Duchess of York from the royal scene had exacerbated that defeatist side of her personality.
As she admitted to friends: ‘Everyone said I was the Marilyn Monroe of the 1980s and I was adoring every minute of it. Actually I’ve never sat down and said: “Hooray, how wonderful.” Never. The day I do we’re in trouble. I am performing a duty as the Princess of Wales as long as my time is allocated but I don’t see it being any longer than 15 years.’
While she had the right to feel sorry for herself, all too often this spilled over into self-imposed martyrdom. As James Gilbey said: ‘When she is confident she extends herself and pushes out the barriers. As soon as there is a chink in the armour she immediately retreats away from the fray.’ At times it was almost as though she wanted to engineer a hurt or a rejection before she was deserted by those she trusted and loved. This resulted in her blocking out her allies at crucial periods in her royal life when she most needed support.
As the Princess performed the impossible balancing act which her life required at this stage, she drifted inexorably into obsession, continually discussing her problems. Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew argued that it was difficult not to be self-absorbed while the world was watching everything she did. ‘How can you not be self-obsessed when half the world is watching everything you do; the high-pitched laugh when someone is talking to somebody famous must make you very, very cynical.’ She endlessly debated the problems she faced in dealing with her husband, the royal family and their system. James Gilbey summed up Diana’s dilemma: ‘She can never be happy unless she breaks away but she won’t break away unless Prince Charles does it. He won’t do it because of his mother so they are never going to be happy. They will continue under the farcical umbrella of the royal family yet they will both lead completely separate lives.’
Her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, a sensible sounding-board throughout Diana’s adult life, saw how that fundamental issue had clouded her character. ‘She is kind, generous, sad and, in some ways, rather desperate. Yet she has maintained her self-deprecating sense of humour. A very shrewd but immensely sorrowful lady.’
Her royal future was by no means well defined. If she could have written her own script the Princess would have liked to have seen her husband go off with Camilla and attempt to discover the happiness he had not found with her, leaving Diana free to groom Prince William for his eventual destiny as the Sovereign. She even idly pondered the possibility of remarrying, intriguingly, to a foreigner. It was an idle pipe dream, at the time, as impossible as Prince Charles’s wish to relinquish his regal position and run a farm in Italy. She had other more modest ambitions: to spend a weekend in Paris, take a course in psychology, learn the piano to concert grade and start painting again. The pace of her life made even these hopes seem grandiose, never mind her oft-repeated vision of the future where she saw herself one day settling abroad, probably in Italy or France. A more likely avenue was the unfolding vista of charity, community and social work which gave her a sense of self-worth and fulfilment. As her brother said: ‘She has got a strong character. She does know what she wants and I think that after ten years she has got to a plateau now which she will continue to occupy for many years.’
As a child she sensed her special destiny, as an adult she remained true to her instincts. Diana continued to carry the burden of public expectations while enduring considerable personal problems. Her achievement was to find her true self in the face of overwhelming odds. She continued to tread a different path from her husband, the royal family and their system and yet still conformed to their traditions. As she said: ‘When I go home and turn my light off at night, I know I did my best.’
DIANA: HER TRUE STORY - THE AFTERMATH
9
‘We’d Run Out of Steam’
During the rush to deify Diana, Princess of Wales, following her tragic death on 31 August 1997, it could be difficult to remember that she was not always regarded as the epitome of everything a modern princess should be. After the initial, brutal, shock at her death and the demonstrations of love and regret, not just across Britain, but throughout the world, it was conveniently forgotten that she was for a time widely seen as a destructive influence upon the whole fabric of the British monarchy, and spoken of in terms a good deal less kind than the cliché ‘loose cannon’. Even before her official separation from Prince Charles in December 1992, the Establishment, and her husband’s supporters, swung into action. If there was much that was both self-interested and misogynistic about the pronouncements that filtered out, they nevertheless had the effect of inducing in the public a cynical view of her actions and intentions, and in the media something generally rather less than benevolent.
The starting gun for the full-scale ‘War of the Waleses’ was fired following the publication of my book Diana: Her True Story in June 1992. As far as the beleaguered Princess was concerned it was both a lifeboat and a passport. The book, written with her secret co-operation and complicity, was her testament, the evidence of her determination that she was no longer prepared to live a lie, to put up with the misery of her life within the royal family. Here was the chance both to escape from the prison of her marriage and to give her own version. While she dreaded its publication, it was nevertheless something she also badly wanted: a chance to put her case, to speak to the people over the heads of the Palace.
In the event, however, the effect of the book’s appearance was even more shattering than anyone had predicted. The Palace were horrified, the media outraged and the public profoundly shocked. What followed was not always edifying, let alone fair.
The Sunday Times began serializing the original edition of Diana: Her True Story on 7 June 1992, under the front-page headline ‘Diana driven to five suicide bids by “uncaring” Charles’. The extracts the paper printed made three sensational assertions: that the Princess of Wales had suffered from an eating disorder, bulimia nervosa; that she had several times, albeit half-heartedly, attempted suicide; and that her husband, Prince Charles, had enjoyed a secret relationship with another woman, Camilla Parker Bowles, throughout his marriage to Diana.
On the following day, the royal couple met at Kensington Palace to discuss the future of that marriage. If their mood was sombre, at least the Prince and Princess were for once able to sit down together and talk through the repercussions of a separation coolly and calmly. It was then that they took the decision to end the charade by formally separating. Diana said later that she felt ‘deep, deep, profound sadness. Because we had struggled to keep it going, but obviously we’d both run out of steam.’
But with the first hurdle – her confrontation with Prince Charles – successfully cleared, she also felt a deep inner peace. That night, for the first time in many, many months, she slept soundly. There was, too, a sense of relief among her circle of friends, knowing that she had finally embarked on a difficult journey, but one which at least brought her the hope of a happy ending. However, there was also anxiety that Diana would not have the stamina to stand up to the intense pressure to come, both from inside and outside the royal family.
Unknown to the Princess, her husband had already made the first move. The previous day he had seen the Queen at Windsor Castle and had discussed with her the consequences of a divorce. The Queen had long been aware of the breakdown of her son’s relationship with his wife, but was above all things concerned about the impact of a divorce upon her grandchildren, Prince Charles’s public image and the monarchy.
As the public absorbed the twists and turns of the marriage crisis, events moved inexorably to a climax within Palace circles. On the day the Sunday Times serialization began, the Queen was the guest of honour at Windsor Great Park for a polo match in which Prince Charles was playing. Her gesture in inviting Camilla Parker Bowles and her husband, Andrew, to join her in the Royal Enclosure on the very day when the nation was digesting the implications of the Waleses’ unhappy marriage was seen by Diana’s circle as a graphic remonstration against the Princess.
At the same time, the Establishment and their media allies were in full cry. Lord McGregor, then Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, issued a statement condemning the hysteria that the book immediately generated as ‘An odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.’ In fact, this criticism was never made of the book itself; indeed, Lord McGregor later told me that the issue had been the ‘most difficult’ of his tenure. The Archbishop of Canterbury worried publicly about the effects of the publicity on Princes William and Harry; Lord St John of Fawsley condemned the book’s publication, while a potpourri of MPs were keen to see me locked away in the Tower; it was, too, a torrid time for Diana’s supporters.
As loyalists rallied to the flag, ignoring the message while deriding the messenger, the public gradually began to accept the book’s veracity through statements by Diana’s friends, further confirmed when she visited her old friend Carolyn Bartholomew, who had spoken about the Princess’s bulimia. While the visit helped establish the dawning realization that Diana: Her True Story was what it said in the title, senior courtiers, including the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, pointed accusing fingers at Diana when they saw the front-page coverage of the visit.
Hours after that confrontation the Princess flew by helicopter to Merseyside for a visit to a hospice, her first official engagement since Diana: Her True Story hit the headlines. It proved to be an emotional meeting between Diana and her public. She was so touched by the show of affection from waiting well-wishers that she burst into tears, overcome by the distressing echoes of her morning meeting with Palace officials, and by the underlying strain of the decision she and Prince Charles had taken. As she later told a friend: ‘An old lady in the crowd stroked my face and that triggered something inside me. I simply couldn’t stop myself crying.’ The public tears did not surprise her close friends, who knew only too well the private anguish of her lonely position, the strain she had borne for 18 months. As one remarked: ‘She is a brilliant actress who has disguised her private sorrow.’
But although Diana was buoyed by public sympathy for her plight, she realized that she alone must face the royal family at a traditional series of summer engagements, beginning with Trooping the Colour. If that most formal of engagements proved to be a day of tension and anxiety, she approached with far greater trepidation the week-long stay at Windsor Castle for the Royal Ascot race meeting. She and Prince Charles had arranged, while there, to discuss the marriage situation with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Diana’s anxiety about this meeting was shared by her corps of loyal friends, who had known for years of the difficulties she had faced within the royal family, and who were well aware of the pressure that would be brought to bear upon her in the coming days and weeks. They knew, too, that she was neither as streetwise nor as manipulative as some of her detractors claimed, and that she would need all her fighting spirit and all her inner strength for the many battles that lay ahead.
That confrontation with the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles in the private apartments at Windsor Castle gave Diana a vivid glimpse of the prospect before her. She was greeted with a flat refusal to countenance even the idea of separation, in any form, before she and her husband had at least tried for a period – thought to be around three months – to resolve their differences. In the meantime, the façade of normality – or of what passes for normality in a royal marriage – was to be maintained.
But if the rift between the Prince and Princess of Wales had now been made only too apparent to press and public alike, signs of the division within the royal family itself now spilled over into the traditional Ascot ceremonial. In a faintly ridiculous, if not demeaning, tableau, th
e Duchess of York, now separated from Prince Andrew, stood with her two daughters and other spectators to watch the procession of royal carriages from the sidelines. Twice the Prince and Princess of Wales left the racecourse together in his Aston Martin, only to part a few miles down the road where Diana’s own car was waiting for her. More obviously, the Duke of Edinburgh was seen pointedly to ignore her when she walked past him in the royal box at Ascot. For once the imperturbable mask of monarchy was allowed to slip in public, a measure of the confusion and conflict within the royal family as it struggled to cope with the crisis.
As the royal system absorbed the gravity of the situation, the views of the Queen and her immediate family gradually filtered through the Palace hierarchy and spread like ripples to the outer ring of royalty. The chill towards the Princess of Wales and those loyal to her was now all too apparent. Although she was not actually greeted with silence by courtiers, there could be no mistaking their lack of warmth or approval.
For her father-in-law, however, a withering silence at Ascot was not, it seems, sufficient mark of his disapproval. Over the next few weeks Diana received four stinging letters from the Duke of Edinburgh, by turns angry, reproachful, conciliatory and ultimately gruffly affectionate. These missives, which were initially accusatory, left her shocked and numb, but where once she would have been reduced to tears and shrunk back into her shell, she was no longer prepared to accept such an onslaught from the royal family. For once she was determined to argue her case. Through a friend, she contacted a lawyer; then, with the help of her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, one of her few trusted allies, she dispatched formal replies to Prince Philip, effectively spelling out the way she felt she had been treated by her husband, his family, and their courtiers, and including her demand that, as a condition of her staying within the royal family, Prince Charles should quit Kensington Palace.
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