by Tim Clayton
At that time the satirical magazine Private Eye had a reputation for printing what even the tabloids dared not. The Eye’s staff endeavoured not to reveal whether its columns were a conduit for journalistic speculation, leaks from friends, or sheer fantasy – the mystery of what was truth or fiction was part of the joke. But Private Eye’s contributors, and especially its editor, Richard Ingrams, were intelligent and well connected. It reported early in 1980:
No sooner had Lord Soames been appointed Governor of Rhodesia than the subject of jobs for the boys arose. Among the lucky ones: Major Andrew Parker Bowles, now a colonel and in charge of British liaison with the guerrilla forces. Andrew, 39, is married to a former (?) Prince Charles fancy, Camilla Shand, and if I should find the royal Aston Martin Volante outside the Parker Bowles mansion while the gallant colonel is on duty overseas, my duty will be clear.
In the early summer of 1980 Charles attended the Cirencester Polo Club ball. Andrew and Camilla were there too. Charles and Camilla danced together and were seen to be kissing enthusiastically. Camilla’s husband, when told of this, is reported to have said: ‘HRH is very fond of my wife, and she appears to be very fond of him.’
Camilla was not the only friend of Prince Charles upon whose name society gossip lingered. Dale Tryon, known as ‘Kanga’, the Australian wife of Anthony, Lord Tryon, was also rumoured to be a current mistress, and appeared frequently in that guise in Private Eye. Innuendo about Dale Tryon had started in 1978:
What a sport Lord Tryon is!!
A loyal subject whose late father was Treasurer to the Queen, Anthony Tryon, 38, seems only too happy to let his Australian-born wife Dale act as hostess to Prince Charles when he is on holiday . . . Now the threesome are in Iceland where Brian [the Eye’s name for Charles] has taken a salmon river to indulge in his favourite sport, and Dale looks after the house.
These two women were very much part of Charles’s circle during his courtship of Diana. Camilla and ‘Kanga’ were said to be mistresses in the classic court tradition, open and friendly with each other about their position in the Prince’s life, even to the extent of discussing whom he might eventually marry. Charles evidently liked to remain friends with ex-girlfriends and was determined not to exclude them from his warm, supportive circle. As Louis Mountbatten might have put it, ‘a man of the world’ should not feel uncomfortable in situations like this.
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PENNY JUNOR: He used these friends and he and Diana went and spent weekends with . . . with these people. I don’t find anything particularly strange . . . particularly strange about that. Charles at that time was not having a relationship with Camilla – he had been certainly, but when he . . . when he began his . . . his pursuit of Diana that finished. I am abs . . . I am in no doubt about that.
AUTHOR: Seems a little bit convenient and, er, clean, clean and simple and . . . um, relationships often aren’t any of those things.
PENNY JUNOR: What seems clean? That he stopped his relationship with . . . with Camilla? I think that would have been very, very two-faced and I don’t think that the Prince of Wales is that kind of man. I think he . . . I think he’s honourable and I think he would have regarded that as pretty dishonourable – to have an affair, to carry on an affair with an old mistress while courting a new . . . a new woman. On top of which don’t forget . . . I mean, I believe that Charles at that time was head over heels in love with Diana. I think he was. When I say head over heels in love, I don’t know whether love was the right word . . . He doesn’t know whether love was the right word . . .
She [Diana] looked back years later on that early period with the Prince of Wales . . . and said that she had been a sacrificial lamb and how ghastly life had been and all his horrible friends and all his horrible family. I don’t believe that at the time . . . I think she rewrote history.
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During the week in London, away from Charles’s safe houses, Diana was at the mercy of the press. Not that her pursuers were hostile. On the contrary, the royal journalists took an instant liking to Diana. They did their best to court her and she courted them right back. There were smiles and winks, but nothing too intimate or indiscreet and no repeat of Sarah’s faux pas. Lennox, like other press photographers, took to sleeping in his car outside her flat.
She was good fun. I mean, she invited me up for a cup of cocoa one night, as they were going to bed and she knew I was bedding down in the car outside. And I got up to the landing of the flat, the girls were standing in their jim-jams. And I just laughed, and she said, ‘Are you laughing’ cos it’s funny seeing us all in our pyjamas?’ And I said, ‘No, I thought you were gonna invite me in.’ She said, ‘What, and have a detailed description of the flat in the paper tomorrow? Do you think I’m stupid, Mr Lennox?’
Although most of the attention was friendly, royal staff were anxious to protect Diana.
She was young, insecure, shy, not like the others. His previous playmates were all hard, capable of looking after themselves. But she was very different, she was kept out of the way until it leaked out, then all hell let loose.
Privately, they gave her advice on how to handle the media, what to say to them, how to hide her face when she did not wish to be photographed. Her combination of shyness and flirtatiousness won yet more hardened Fleet Street hearts, though they were frustrated by her habit of walking around with her head down.
Jayne Fincher was a young freelance photographer and, in 1980, one of the few women on the royal beat. She had been in America when the Sun exposed Diana and had missed the excitement about the new girl in Charles’s life. Her first impression came in November:
I went to the Ritz Hotel to photograph Princess Margaret’s fiftieth birthday party, and I was standing outside and this girl came up behind us, a very quiet sort of young girl, and said, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, can I get through?’ And one of the other photographers said, ‘I’m sure that’s that girl, you know, what’s her name? Diana Spencer.’
So we all camped outside the Ritz and there were about three of us left, I suppose, and it was about two o’clock in the morning on a very cold freezing night. And suddenly she came out and she was all huddled up in this really unattractive green woolly coat that really looked very sort of dull and dowdy – not the sort of thing an eighteen-year-old girl would wear at all. And I looked at her and I thought, No, I’m sure these stories can’t be true, because all the other girls that I’d photographed with Prince Charles at the polo matches had all been quite sophisticated women of the world.
And Diana looked so young and she was so embarrassed and shy and looked like a little scared mouse coming out. And she scurried down the road and we followed her down and she, you know, she just wanted to die really.
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Ken Lennox remembers that one of the things that was fun about staking out Diana was their informal exchanges about the progress of the courtship:
If we put the cameras down, she would laugh and giggle with us – ask us what we thought was going on. She’d even sit in the front seat of my car and read Private Eye because they had twigged to it and the ‘Sylvie Krin’ column was full of all sorts of nonsense. And Diana would hoot with laughter when she read some of that, about Prince Philip kicking corgis up and down the corridor and stuff.
If it is true that Diana read Private Eye, this is possibly more significant than it might first appear. From early December, Private Eye ran a spoof romance about the royal courtship called ‘Born to be Queen’ by ‘Sylvie Krin’. It was full of jokes at the expense of Prince Philip, Raine Spencer and Barbara Cartland, but, to Diana, it could also have been rather disturbing. Prince Charles was portrayed as having a great deal of red-blooded fun, and distinctly ambivalent about the idea of marriage. While his parents were determined that he should marry the sweet-natured but naïve Lady Diana, the heir to the throne was constantly on the phone to a character called Venetia Barkworth-Smythe, a married woman of the world.
Some of the dailies were producing innue
ndo of a similar nature. Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail’s gossip columnist, reported that Diana’s romance with Charles had been approved by the Prince’s two married ‘friends’, Camilla Parker Bowles and Lady Dale ‘Kanga’ Tryon. If Diana did not already know what was being said about the nature of Charles’s past friendship with these two women, she learned about it now, for she admitted that she read this column.
At the beginning of November a much more dangerous story broke, a story far worse than that which had sunk Sarah’s chances with the Prince. The Sunday Mirror published a piece headlined ‘Love in the Sidings’, written by reporter Wensley Clarkson. It claimed that Diana had spent the nights of 5 and 6 November with the Prince on the royal train while it was parked in a siding at Holt in Wiltshire. When the Sunday Mirror rang her the night before they printed the story, Diana swore that she had not been on the train, but the paper was so confident that they failed even to mention her denial. In a most unusual intervention, Buckingham Palace, rather than maintaining its habitual dignified silence, demanded an apology. Michael Shea, the Queen’s press secretary, announced that the only true fact in the story was that the Prince of Wales had used the train on the nights in question. The Sunday Mirror’s editor, Bob Edwards, believed his secret source – almost certainly a royal policeman – to be utterly dependable and refused to retract the story. In the end the Palace backed away from confrontation, but their intervention on behalf of Diana sent out a signal that she really was a potential bride.
Meanwhile every royal journalist wondered who the mystery blonde might have been if it was not Diana.
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In the early 1980s the British tabloid press was changing character. Its new face had sharper fangs and a more derisive smirk. Rupert Murdoch had bought the Sun, previously a title owned by the Mirror group, and turned it into a garish rival to the Daily Mirror. The Mirror itself was acquired by Robert Maxwell and competed with the Sun in the search for sensation. A fierce circulation war ensued. Hyperbole was one weapon, and a newly intemperate tone crept into the newspapers’ comments on those they liked and those they didn’t. The ‘build ’em up one week, knock ’em down the next’ treatment became a salient feature. England football managers, soap opera stars, television quizmasters, all came in for the treatment. Private Eye invented a caricature tabloid columnist called Glenda Slagg. Within the same column Slagg would sing someone’s praises and tear them apart.
Murdoch, at that time an outspoken republican, had no intention of bowing and scraping to British royalty. Royal stories sold newspapers and an imaginatively embellished story was better than no story at all. The new breed of editors had much less respect for the Royal Family too. Kelvin Mackenzie, who would take over the Sun in June 1981, positively enjoyed annoying the royals. Wearing a contrite expression at the morning conference, he would announce, ‘I’m afraid we’ve upset the Palace yesterday.’ Then his expression would change, as he demanded, ‘How can we do it today?’ Spurred on by their editors, reporters began to take what the Palace old guard considered to be an impertinent tone.
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After the train story, the papers rallied round Diana again, the Sun to the fore. They implored Charles not to let a catch like this slip through his fingers. At the kindergarten, Diana continued to play cat-and-mouse with the press, and, according to Kay Seth-Smith, seemed to relish it:
Diana was on a high, I would say, through all of this, there was an element of excitement, it was rather like the chase. At lunch-time, she would often be the one to say, ‘Well, I’ll go out and get it’ – I mean, never a question of ‘would you mind?’ Because we all knew what she was going to come up against. But I think she quite enjoyed belting out of the school – and in fact one of my favourite photographs is of her running flat out with something for lunch under her arm.
One of Diana’s friends also remembers her excitement.
She rang up one day and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go around Westminster Abbey. You can teach me about architecture.’ We went around and I was banging on about architecture, the Gothic arches, features, et cetera, and she wasn’t listening to a word I was saying. She was walking up the aisle very slowly. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And she said, ‘Just practising.’
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In late November and December Charles visited India and Nepal with more than the regular complement of royal reporters in tow. As usual the tour began with a cocktail party for the press, on this occasion at the British High Commission in New Delhi. Prince Charles seized the opportunity to sound out journalists on their view of Diana Spencer. One was Harry Arnold:
There we were sipping drinks on the lawns of the British High Commission and Charles came over and terribly embarrassed me by saying, ‘I hear you’ve been ringing up my friend Nicky asking when I’m going to get married,’ meaning Nicky Soames. And I was very flustered and said something like, ‘Well, you’ve given away my best contact now.’ And he then said, ‘Why do you think Lady Diana Spencer is the one?’
And I think we all misunderstood the question because we didn’t know what was going on in his mind. I thought he meant ‘How did you detect that she was the one I have chosen?’ And he then said, ‘You mustn’t rush me.’ He said, ‘It’s all right for you chaps, you can live with a girl before you marry her, but if I get it wrong you’ll be the first to criticise me in a few years’ time.’
And now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight, one looks back and thinks, well, what he really meant was, why do you think she’s the one I should marry? It was as though he was seeking our approval. And now I think that we all rushed him into it, we urged it along and no one could stop the runaway train.
* * *
As a child Prince Charles had been diffident and sensitive. He admired his bold and confident sister Anne in much the same way that Diana admired her clever brother Charles. His childhood had often been lonely and his experience of school had, for the most part, been unhappy.
The Queen was distanced from her son by a busy schedule, a requirement to travel and the ritual formality of her job. Relations with Prince Philip were strained and, according to his authorised biographer, Charles had the impression that he had never been able to live up to his father’s expectations. From an early age a sense of the importance of duty and self-control had been drilled into him. In a famous photograph that later moved his wife to tears, Charles stood looking lost in a little boy’s suit, waiting in a queue to greet the mother he had not seen for several months. He got a handshake.
Charles redoubled his efforts to please, trying to adapt to a childhood rhythm that seemed calculated to create confusion. In the palaces and the castles, he was the centre of attention, fawned upon by courtiers and nannies, taught to command with confidence and grace, cooed over by thousands of strangers whenever he accompanied his parents on royal duty. For the rest of the time he was a desperately miserable boarding schoolboy, picked on and isolated by the boys at Gordonstoun, the tough Scottish school that his father insisted he attend and from which he wrote a series of upsetting letters home about his loneliness and mistreatment.
The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness they are horrid, I don’t know how anyone could be so foul. They throw slippers all night long or hit me with pillows or rush across the room and hit me as hard as they can . . . I still wish I could come home. It’s such a HOLE this place!
Beyond being a prince with big ears, his crime had been to snore.
The bewildered sadness and introspection of the Gordonstoun letters stayed with Charles, emerging later at moments of stress. The biographer Penny Junor, who has spent a lot of time with Charles’s circle, says that ‘he is one of the saddest people I have ever encountered. He has a pitifully low opinion of himself and a debilitating lack of confidence in his own worth.’ She puts the blame squarely on his father: ‘Prince Philip is bluff, outspoken, hearty, tough and something of a bully, and he has no patience with his eldest son’s soul-searching. Sensitivity is not one of
the qualities he expects in a man, and although he undoubtedly has great affection for Prince Charles, he has spent a lifetime criticising him and quietly undermining his self-esteem.’
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Charles returned from India in time for Christmas at Windsor. He had spent some time trekking in the mountains where the solitude had helped clear his mind. It needed to be clear because, by the time he got back home, not only Diana but the entire Royal Family were showing signs of strain. The Duke of Edinburgh wrote to his son, advising him that Diana’s honour was at stake and that he could not leave her in doubt for much longer. Charles interpreted this as an ultimatum with an implied instruction to marry. At a dinner party soon after, Charles’s friend Nicholas Soames upbraided the Duke’s private secretary, Rupert Neville, for allowing the Duke to impose a match on his son. The Prince, who described himself as being in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’, confided to a friend, ‘I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family – but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’
For Diana the excitement of having the press permanently camped outside her door and following her down the street whenever she left her house was beginning to wear off. At times she cracked under the strain, as a royal official recalls: