Diana: Story of a Princess
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Contents
PICTURE CREDITS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
1. Look at Me
2. I’m a Lady
3. Eminently Suitable
4. New Billing
5. The Queen’s Ship
6. Mood Swings
7. Radiant
8. Julia from Low Wood
9. Miracle on Henry Street
10. Secret Squirrel
11. A Malign Planet
12. Her True Story?
13. What Men Are Like
14. Not Easy Being Me
15. Decree Absolute
16. Miracle in Huambo
17. Last Summer
18. Paris
19. Funeral
AFTERWORD
PHOTOGRAPHS
ABOUT TIM CLAYTON AND PHIL CRAIG
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES ON SOURCES
INDEX
Picture Credits
SECTION I
Look at me! (Penny Walker); What Diana wrote in a cupboard at West Heath school (Brook Lapping); Outside the Young England kindergarten, Pimlico, September 1980, Arthur Edwards (The Sun); Jayne Fincher’s first photograph of Diana, November 1980; Diana enters St Paul’s Cathedral with Earl Spencer, July 1981; On honeymoon at the Braemar Highland Games, September 1981 (Photographers International); Diana in Brecon, November 1981 (April Games); Ken Lennox’s long-lens shots of Charles and Diana in the Bahamas, February 1982 (Ken Lennox); Australia’s new princess at Sydney Opera House, spring 1983 (Photographers International); With John Travolta at the White House, November 1985 (Ronald Reagan Library); The puppet from the television series Spitting Image, November 1985 (Ken Lennox); A family day out at the Guards Polo Club, Windsor, May 1987 (Photographers International); Diana presents the Captains and Subalterns Cup, summer 1988 (News International); Her favourite photograph: autumn 1991, Diana greets the children on Britannia in Canada, and Charles hugging them too; The Six Acres Day Centre, Taunton, Somerset, April 1991; RAF Cranwell, June 1991; The winner’s kiss, Valentine’s Eve, February 1992 (Photographers International)
SECTION 2
Lech, Austria, March 1994 (PA Photos); Diana shows her anger towards photographers, March 1994 (Big Pictures); Avoiding photographers, July 1994 (London Features); Diana passes Glenn Harvey, Mark Saunders makes way as Glenn Harvey ‘whacks’ her; then Diana breaks down as Mark Saunders waits for her to turn (Mark Saunders; Mark Saunders; Big Pictures); The People newspaper, 1993, and His Highness in Fitz (The People, Andrew Edmunds, London); Lord Palumbo meets Diana outside the Serpentine Gallery, 29 June 1994, (Photographers International); Following Diana’s Panorama interview, Private Eye devoted an entire issue to the royal marriage (Private Eye); Diana leaves the English National Ballet 28 August 1996 (Photographers International); Diana at Huambo, Angola, January 1997 (Christina Lamb); Floral tributes outside Kensington Palace, September 1997 (Photographers International); The cover of Private Eye that led to the magazine attracting a record number of complaints (Private Eye)
Acknowledgments
The narrative in this book is based principally on research and filming undertaken for the television series Diana: Story of a Princess. We would first of all like to express our deep gratitude to the gifted producers responsible for these programmes: Sally Brindle, Janice Sutherland and Nick Ward. We also want to thank the ever-resourceful and hard-working production team of Sarah Gowers, Valerie Hetherington, Susan Horth, Delphine Jaudeau, Melody Lander, Beth Serota and Steve Thomas. Our executive producer, Brian Lapping, was at his judicious best throughout.
We are especially grateful to all those who gave interviews: Victor Adebowale; Mike Adler; Ronald Allison; Harry Arnold; Jane Atkinson; Jacques Azagury; Elsa Bowker; Carolan Brown; J. Carter Brown; Graydon Carter; David Chipp; Mary Clarke; Annick Cojean; Derek Draper; Frances Drayton; Arthur Edwards; Gwanwyn Evans; Janet Filderman; Jayne Fincher; Valerie Harris; James Hewitt; Shirley Hewitt; Stuart Higgins; Christopher Hitchens; Anthony Holden; Margaret Jay; Penny Junor; Andrew Knight; Christina Lamb; Ken Lennox; Felix Lyle; Jean-Louis Macault; Frederic Mailliez; Lana Marks; Neville Marks; Ed Mathews; Thierry Meresse; Verona Middleton-Jeter; Sami Naïr; Nick Owen; Peter Palumbo; Vivienne Parry; Anne Rachlin; Shirley Reese; Jenny Rivett; Joseph Sanders; Mark Saunders; Muriel Stevens; Kay Seth-Smith; Jon Snow; Robert Spencer; Richard Stott; Stephen Twigg; Judy Wade; Penny Walker; Mike Whitlam; Dean and Jane Woodward.
A number of others asked that their contributions should remain non-attributable, in particular those who have worked, or still work, for the Royal Family. We hope they know how much we appreciate their help.
We were kindly granted access by Blakeway Productions to material filmed for their excellent television series Royals and Reptiles. Our thanks go to Leonie Jameson and Kate Macky there. Brook Lapping opened up its own archives to give us access to material filmed for its previous royal series The Windsors.
A number of writers and photographers have been especially helpful. We thank Jayne Fincher, Martyn Gregory, Christopher Hitchens, Anthony Holden, Penny Junor, Sally Bedell Smith, Kate Snell and Judy Wade, all of whom have been generous with time and advice, even if their interpretations do not always dovetail with our own.
Ian Paten copy-edited the book in record time; Diana LeCore did the index likewise; Sarah Byrt, Catherine Bristow and Jane Phillips gave us legal advice; Frances Craig helped us collate and edit the material; hoteliers supreme, James and Sue Murray at the Lewtrenchard Manor, provided an ideal Devonian hideaway for some of our more sensitive meetings; Valerie Hetherington took time away from her TV work to help us find the right photographs, and Susan Horth did likewise with newspaper cuttings; Christine Craig provided a Mediterranean backdrop for writing our first drafts and Peter and Avice Clayton a Norfolk one for the second; the Private Eye office dug enthusiastically through its dustier filing cabinets; and the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund was sympathetic and accommodating – we thank Victoria Rae and Andrew Purkis there. The Fund exists as a memorial to Diana. For more information about the Fund, visit their website www.theworkcontinues.com or write to them at The County Hall, Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7PB.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge the ownership of copyright material included in this book. Any errors that may have occurred are inadvertent and will be corrected in subsequent editions provided notification is sent to the authors.
Lastly our thanks to Rupert, Roland, Briar, Elizabeth and all at Hodder & Stoughton for another fine job under pressure.
Preface
This book has an ambitious objective: to evaluate the story of Diana, Princess of Wales, fairly.
Divorce provokes twisted stories. It is clear that, in the destructive phase of their marriage, Princess Diana and Prince Charles allowed, and in some cases caused, prejudicial accounts to be published. Because Diana became a figure of almost universal impact – with more power to win supporters and donors to a cause worldwide than all the rest of the royals put together – an attempt to weigh and get behind the rival versions of her story is long overdue.
It is hard to judge the right moment for a biography. If this book and the television series it accompanies are too early, the fault is mine.
Brook Lapping is not the obvious television production company to make programmes – and gen
erate an associated book – about Princess Diana. Britain’s independent television network asked Brook Lapping to do it, curiously, because our reputation lies in a quite different area. We have specialised in recent history: Gorbachev’s Soviet Union in eight hours, Nixon’s Watergate in five, the death of Yugoslavia in six, the Beirut hostage crisis in four, Israel and the Arabs in six. The techniques we have developed in such productions led ITV in Britain, the Learning Channel in the US, Canal Plus in France and a number of other broadcasters around the world to decide that we could bring to the biography of Princess Diana something previous coverage of her life has lacked. Perhaps judiciousness was what they were after. It is certainly what we have attempted.
Some people argue that royalty is not a fit subject for serious writers or programme-makers. In general we reject that view as pompous – in Princess Diana’s case, vehemently so. With simple acts she effected significant changes. When many believed AIDS could be passed on by the slightest casual contact, she touched a patient in front of cameras and made people around the world realise that they had no need to shun AIDS sufferers. When the British government hesitated about the sale of anti-personnel mines, she strode across the world to campaign for a ban. Her walk through a minefield in Angola caused apoplexy among ministers in London. It also won the cause, for the first time, the attention of the world.
Whatever she did, Diana made an impact; but in no area more powerfully than in destabilising her husband’s family. Effortlessly she outshone Guy Fawkes.
When Queen Elizabeth II called 1992 an annus horribilis, she was referring partly to the fire at Windsor Castle. But above all she was upset by a Princess who had declared open war on her in-laws. When, in her Panorama interview in 1995, Diana said, ‘It’s a very demanding role being King and would be a little suffocating, and I would think that the top job would bring enormous limitations to him and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that’, she was seeking to deny Prince Charles the office for which his whole life had been a preparation. When, after Diana’s death, the police warned the Queen that if members of the Royal Family returned to London they risked being booed or worse, they were demonstrating how far Diana had undermined the monarchy’s popularity. Then, at Diana’s funeral, her brother Earl Spencer promised to ensure ‘that their [William’s and Harry’s] souls are not immersed by duty and tradition’. The sound of applause from the crowd outside startled the invited mourners in Westminster Abbey, suggesting that Spencer and the popular mood were united against the Palace.
To the Royal family, Diana, alive or dead, was dangerous. The threat she represented arose largely from one of her great virtues: she seemed able to be genuinely sympathetic to ordinary people who were suffering. From lepers to drug addicts to the homeless, from crippled children to pensioners incapacitated by dementia, her capacity for kindly interest seemed endless. Clever people scoffed. But Diana had something they lacked. It resembled the ‘king’s touch’, the power monarchs were once held to possess to cure the sick. She just made people feel cared about – and feel better. Such a remarkable power could surely have been an asset to the Royal Family, winning them enhanced public enthusiasm. But her magic with those in need, like her magic in front of the camera, repeatedly upstaged her husband and in-laws.
The process by which Diana’s story reached the public is also a legitimate subject for further exploration. Diana secretly briefed journalists and lied to the Queen’s private secretary (her own sister’s husband) about the extensive help she gave Andrew Morton with his biography of her. Prince Charles’s friends also briefed the press unattributably. And his closest friend, Camilla Parker Bowles, surprised some senior people in Fleet Street with regular off-the-record chats. All these whisperings, the War of the Waleses, lay behind the two incompatible versions of the Diana story that became current, his and hers.
Generally Diana was the more successful at winning public sympathy, establishing herself as the victim. But some of Prince Charles’s friends and advisers put about reports that the Princess was mentally unstable. As a result several writers have diagnosed Diana as suffering from a mental illness called Borderline Personality Disorder. This piece of amateur psychiatry is now widely believed, leading to the conclusion that Diana’s husband was the stoical victim of her erratic behaviour.
The mechanism by which such dynamite was stacked by both sides beneath their royal rivals, possibly threatening the succession and even the Constitution, seemed worth uncovering while memories are fresh, since, by their nature, off-the-record chats leave no reliable written record.
An argument against undertaking the series and book was that researching fresh data about Princess Diana and her problems risked becoming prurient. I hope viewers and readers will judge that we have shown restraint.
Brian Lapping
Executive Producer, Diana: Story of a Princess
1
Look at Me
* * *
With a light knock on the door, Lady Diana Spencer came into the office. She looked first at her feet, then towards the royal official who was now standing before her. It was obvious she had been crying. Would he mind if she asked him a delicate question? Of course not.
She hesitated for a moment and then asked whether he knew someone called Camilla Parker Bowles. He said yes immediately. He knew her as a friend of Prince Charles who was married to an officer in the Household Cavalry. He had met her several times; all the senior staff had.
Then Diana said in a quiet but serious voice that she had just asked the Prince of Wales whether he was in love with Camilla Parker Bowles. He had not said no. As the tears returned, but still looking him full in the face, she asked another question: ‘What am I going to do?’ The courtier had no idea what to say. In his years of royal service, no one had ever spoken to him like this. He wasn’t alone. Within hours one of his closest colleagues, another senior member of the royal household, was asked exactly the same question.
The wedding was only ten days away. What were they all going to do? After urgent consultations in a corridor, the courtiers suggested to Diana that she should talk it over with Camilla face to face. One of them arranged a lunch at her favourite restaurant. It was called Ménage-à-trois.
So we had lunch. Very tricky indeed. She said: ‘You are not going to hunt are you?’ I said: ‘On what?’ She said: ‘Horse. You are not going to hunt when you go and live at Highgrove are you?’ I said: ‘No.’ She said: ‘I just wanted to know.’
Inside Buckingham Palace they awaited the outcome apprehensively. When Diana came back she said, ‘It was brilliant. We all understand each other.’ One of the courtiers told us:
We all heaved a sigh of relief. I do think Camilla and Charles backed off in the early years. But an atmosphere soon developed. Some of us put it down to Diana being spoilt. I put it down to different backgrounds.
* * *
Diana Spencer’s background was different to Prince Charles’s, but not that different. She was born into one of the grandest families in England, a family that for two hundred years had been intimate with the court and its slowly ossifying traditions.
‘The Lord Chamberlain ventures most respectfully to hope that the heart-stirring though silent sympathy of the vast crowds of Your Majesty’s subjects may have somehow helped Your Majesty in his crushing sorrow,’ wrote Diana’s great-grandfather to George V. Edward VII had just died and Earl Spencer was looking forward to arranging the new King’s coronation. He made urgent notes regarding the forthcoming ceremonials: ‘Queen’s robes – Are they safeguarded from moth in the Tower?’
Diana’s grandfather was the first of his family for several generations not to take a place at court. But this was chiefly owing to his devotion to a more urgent duty: to preserve his own decaying heritage. In 1922, as a young officer in the Life Guards, Albert Edward John, 7th Earl Spencer, inherited the palace and estates of Althorp in Northamptonshire and the urban palazzo called Spencer House in St James’s Place, overlooking Green Park. Bot
h were packed with priceless fittings, furniture and paintings, all of which needed care and restoration. There were debts, mortgages, death duties and the buildings were in disrepair. He raised £300,000 by selling six masterpieces by Reynolds, Gainsborough, van Dyck and Frans Hals to the United States. This solved the immediate problem. During the war, ‘Jack’, as the seventh earl was known, emptied Spencer House, to save its fabulous contents from Hitler’s bombers, and he crowded more evidence of the affluence of his ancestors between the fading silk wall hangings of his country home. As time went by Althorp became increasingly museum-like. In 1957 he opened it to the public, the condition for receiving government grants to save the fabric of the house from dry rot and death-watch beetle. But even though Jack Spencer was preoccupied with the conservation of one of the largest fortunes made in the days when Britannia truly ruled the trade routes, his wife, Lady Cynthia, kept up tradition. In 1936 she was made a Woman of the Bedchamber and she later became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. She was still a courtier when her granddaughter Diana was born.
* * *
Diana’s first home, Park House, is in the grounds of Sandringham House, the Royal Family’s country seat in Norfolk. To Prince Charles, Diana was the girl next door – the youngest of three Spencer sisters, along with Sarah and Jane, who were all spoken of from the nursery as possible brides for Britain’s three young princes.
This privileged proximity to the royal home was owed to Diana’s maternal grandparents. In the 1930s Diana’s grandfather, the Irish-American Maurice Roche, Lord Fermoy, had settled in King’s Lynn and had befriended the shy, stammering Duke of York, later King George VI. Fermoy’s wife, Ruth, was even closer to the Duchess, later Queen Elizabeth (now the Queen Mother). When the Fermoys had children, the King and Queen invited them to take the lease of Park House. Later it passed to their daughter, Frances Roche, Diana’s mother.