by Tim Clayton
Why did the custom of touching last so long when people could plainly see that usually it didn’t work? Bloch’s answer was the enduring power of collective illusion: ‘Public opinion was unanimous in affirming that great numbers of sufferers . . . had been healed by the King. The age of faith . . . did not demand that wonder-workers should always display an unvarying efficiency. As for the numerous cases where the disease resisted the touch of the august hands, they were soon forgotten. Such is the happy optimism of believing souls.’
We no longer believe that touching by a king or princess can heal. Or do we? Most assume without question that a visit from a famous person can make a hospital patient feel better, or that the sound of a favourite pop star’s voice might rouse a child from a coma. The actor-singer David Soul says that when he was a star in the mid-1970s he was frequently asked to appear at the bedsides of dying children, or simply speak to them on the telephone. It is an unsettling request that’s familiar to many celebrities. Unlike Diana, most won’t do it, feeling embarrassed, not knowing what to say. But ever since Darenth Park, ever since she’d held the blind man’s hand against her face, Diana could connect to strangers and, somehow, make a difference.
Nobody in a terminal ward expected to be cured by Diana. Nobody in a battered women’s shelter expected her to find them a new apartment. But most claim to have felt better for her presence and some, like Frances Drayton, say they still feel positively joyous to have spent a few moments in the intimate and understanding stillness she carried around with her. Few, if any, have ever said they wanted her to go away and not bother them.
Some people get it and some people don’t. If royal healing worked at all it did so because a moment’s proximity to greatness lifted the sufferer’s morale. In this respect there is a plausible connection to Diana’s dazzling arrival in the ward or the shelter.
And are we truly as far removed from Bloch’s ‘age of faith’ as we like to suppose? When she died, Diana was taken by many to represent human nature at its caring best. And she did have an instinct for popular spirituality – the way people feel at their children’s carol concerts, the way they support each other at a funeral or a hospital bedside. Her friend Rosa Monckton was convinced she could see God in her actions.
Miracle, manipulation, or both?
10
Secret Squirrel
* * *
For both Charles and Diana, with their busy, peripatetic lifestyles, the mobile phone was a dream accessory. They kept themselves equipped with the latest models. But mobile telecommunication was still a new technology and at this time it had one serious drawback. For a few hundred pounds a portable ‘scanner’, long used by amateur radio enthusiasts to eavesdrop on the police or air traffic control, could be retuned to pick up nearby cellphone signals. People began to amuse themselves by listening in to the conversations of strangers, hoping to hear something illicit, salacious or just plain silly. By the end of 1989 two men had recorded royal conversations with all these qualities.
In January 1990 a radio ham named Cyril Reenan approached the Sun with tapes of a conversation between Diana and an unknown man made the previous New Year’s Eve. Stuart Higgins, one of its royal correspondents, travelled to Oxfordshire to meet him.
We went to Didcot railway station and he came and sat in our car. We put the cassette in and listened to it almost mesmerised for twenty minutes. My gut instinct was that it was absolutely her. The content was explosive and we knew we had a major, major story.
Higgins heard Diana complain that the Queen Mother looked at her with ‘sort of interest and pity mixed all in one’. He heard resentful remarks about all she had done for ‘this fucking family’, also long exchanges of endearments, bits of news and television programme updates. Diana was speaking to someone called ‘James’, who kept referring to her as ‘darling’, ‘honey’ and ‘squidgy’, and looked forward to wrapping her in his protective arms in a couple of days’ time. She even said that she was anxious not to get pregnant. Higgins was aware of rumours about Diana and an army officer called James Hewitt. But this must be a different James, because at one point Diana complained that she had dressed Hewitt from head to foot. The man said that he had been obsessed with her for only three months. Higgins set out to check the tape for fraud and to find out the identity of the mysterious James.
Eventually we managed to pin down the man who called the Princess ‘squidgy’. It was James Gilbey. He lived in Lennox Gardens and we went to his house early one morning and confronted him when he was just about to go to work. We told him face to face, fairly aggressively, because we wanted to be provocative, ‘We have got a tape which we believe contains private conversation between you and the Princess of Wales in which you repeatedly call her “squidgy” and it is a fairly intimate conversation.’ At which point he went completely white, got in his car and drove off. That doesn’t amount to him signing a piece of paper saying, ‘Yes, it is my voice on the tape,’ but clearly we had the right man.
As Higgins expected, the first thing Gilbey did was tell Diana about the danger they faced. All they knew was that a conversation had been recorded. But which one? It’s possible that the couple had exchanged remarks even more embarrassing than those played in Stuart Higgins’s car. It’s easy to imagine their anxiety. By chance, perhaps, the Sun’s sister paper, the News of the World, soon began to receive blackmail-style cut-and-paste notes alleging an affair between Charles and Camilla.
Had it been an incriminating tape of a TV quizmaster or a football star then there would have been no question. Its contents would have been splashed all over the first available front page. But this was the Princess of Wales. At News International’s offices in Wapping the editors and royal correspondents wanted to run the story, the scoop of their careers, but the management was not so sure. After months of discussions, the Sun decided to sit on the tape for the time being. Andrew Knight was Chairman of News, Rupert Murdoch’s man in charge in London.
Everybody knew that all was not right [in the royal marriage] and had known for quite some time, and in fact felt that they were unable to report things which were in general currency among the journalistic community.
The royal institution was important and it [the tape] would have rocked it. It just didn’t seem right or proper to carry it. The feeling of myself, and I’d always been a royalist and remain one, and also of Rupert Murdoch, was simply that these stories were too explosive to carry.
The irony is that by the time these events started coming out Mr Murdoch had come to the belief that the Royal Family, although it was the pinnacle of a system of snobbery that he didn’t relish, nevertheless on balance was a good thing, and he was reluctant to see it undermined. I don’t think that’s ever been believed . . . but it’s true. He knew that Middle Britain, the sort of stalwart core of Britain, is pro-royalist and it wasn’t his job to undermine it.
The Sun paid their source and hid the tape in a safe. From time to time Stuart Higgins would play it at dinner parties to amaze his friends. He grew resigned to having ‘the scoop that got away’.
But Diana knew nothing of the conversations in Wapping. For months she expected the phone to ring at any moment with news of headlines that might destroy her reputation, opening the way for a divorce very much on her husband’s terms.
* * *
Since the start of her affair with James Hewitt, Diana had been following a rigorous regime of clean living and self-improvement. There were exercise classes, morning swims, fancy diets, reflexology and aromatherapy, evening swims, massage, colonic irrigation and speech coaching. A procession of therapists and healers came in and out of Kensington Palace as the diary was cleared for ‘pamper Diana days’. She worked out at least twice a week, toning her body into its best shape for years. Carolan Brown started work as a personal fitness trainer in 1990:
She was always game for a laugh . . . she thought it was very funny to be parading around in a thong leotard, and would sometimes wait for the butler to be
walking by, or to come into the room, and she thought that was all great fun to shock him. And I think it was just to break through the stuffiness. And she was a fun, fun person. We would have some riots on the good days.
But, quite quickly after I’d been training her, I did see a sadness in her. She was a very young and naïve person. I almost felt in some ways she was too young to have children. And there was something in her, a sadness that I could see within her.
For all her new-found vitality, Diana without Hewitt needed frequent reassurance. Peter, Lord Palumbo, who had known her since her marriage, was one who tried to offer it.
Well, she could be in a great deal of distress but then pull herself together and go out to a public function and be absolutely wonderful and receive tremendous applause and affection. And with that ringing in her ears she would go back to Kensington Palace, very often alone and being served dinner on a tray in her room. And watching television. And it was that, I think, that she found disturbing: the adulation on the one hand and the loneliness on the other.
Carolan Brown also tried to help.
I would constantly be telling her, ‘You look great! Go on, get out there, do your thing and feel confident about yourself because you’re doing a really great job.’ And she’d sometimes come back after a hard day and say, ‘Oh, is it all worth it? Do people really appreciate what I do?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, people really, really do appreciate you. You don’t know how much they appreciate it.’
* * *
In December 1989 Vanity Fair had reported on Diana’s latest evolution. First Demure Di, then Disco Di, next Dynasty Di, now Dedicated Di. ‘Some people are even beginning to talk about her as a saint.’ Their article echoed the Sun’s recent appeal:
DID CARING PRINCESS DI RAISE YOUR SPIRITS AND HELP YOU IN YOUR TIME OF NEED? Has any royal made your life a little happier when you needed some support and encouragement? If so, share your experience with fellow readers. Write to ANGEL DI, The Sun, London E1 9XP.
Diana worked with the marriage guidance service, Relate. In a photomessage as blunt as any she ever sent, she sat in on Relate’s sex therapy sessions and publicly said that she would like to work with couples whose marriages had gone wrong. She even let it be known that she kept a copy of the Relate Guide to Marital Problems on her bedside table.
Diana, long seen by the public as the most compassionate member of the Royal Family, now went out of her way to identify herself with groups on the fringes of society and with victims. Her new agenda owed much to another figure from her past who had recently re-entered her life, and would play a decisive role in shaping the rest of it. Dr James Colthurst, a member of Diana’s old Sloane set, had been a high-spirited Old Etonian, the Martin Luther King impersonator on her 1979 skiing holiday. Outside her circle after 1981, Colthurst witnessed Diana’s metamorphosis from the jumper-wearing, snowball-throwing girl he had known into the glamorous but nervous princess of the early 1980s, and then into something more interesting – the Princess of Henry Street.
Colthurst, like Diana, had grown more serious. Having trained as a surgeon, he grew to distrust high-technology medicine and turned towards homoeopathy. As his clinical interests changed, so did his politics. By the late 1980s Colthurst believed that Britain laboured under a suffocating system of class privilege that had little relevance to the lives of most of its people. It was the society he had grown up in, driven by snobbery, inheritance and mediocrity. And he believed that much of what was bad was embodied in the family into which his old friend had married.
When Diana decided to create a stronger role for herself in public life, she no longer trusted the official apparatus around her. It was obvious that it owed its principal allegiance to the Crown. Seeking intelligent but independent sources of advice, she turned to Colthurst and got him to draft some of her more serious public speeches. Felix Lyle was one of Colthurst’s closest friends at the time and soon came to advise Diana too.
I think she hadn’t thought beyond having children and producing heirs, initially. But she felt completely abandoned as far as the Royal Family was concerned. She felt they were stuck up and really self-serving. They were just interested in protecting their own territory, their own rights, protecting them from the advance of the modern age. She had something that she couldn’t really define, but it challenged the authorities, and challenged the established way of doing things in this country. She wanted to show that a royal family can play a participatory role in a democracy, can participate with the people. She showed our existing monarchy up for what it was, a stultified, obfuscated, rotting institution, completely out of touch with the people.
As he grew closer to her, Colthurst found that Diana needed more than political advice, as he explained to Felix.
James is a doctor and he also has a bit of a mission to save the world. He’s very driven to make people better. And I think Diana was irresistible from that point of view. I mean, let’s make it clear, it’s that point of view only. She was a maiden in distress and James offered to help. The intention being for her to win a measure of composure and self-determination – that she could then start to live her life for herself. Because she really had slipped that low, at that stage. He told me at length that he’d been helping her, and that she had deep psychological problems, and that he’d been drawn in quite heavily. It was a lot of counselling. I don’t know if any medicines were involved but there was a lot of hand-holding. And he also wrote speeches of hers and helped her through that.
He put himself at her disposal, pretty much on a twenty-four-hour basis at one stage, and she was phoning up all the time, asking, ‘What can I do? Help me’ basically.
As Diana was growing to depend upon Colthurst’s advice, Patrick Jephson was becoming worried about unofficial rivals and their influence on her public speeches.
Long and sometimes incoherent drafts would appear . . . haphazardly typed on unfamiliar paper. Some seemed to have been written by the current therapist . . . Others, on medical subjects, I guessed came from her close friend . . . Dr James Coldhurst [sic].
Colthurst learned every detail of Diana’s troubled marriage. He came to believe that her international success was perceived as a threat to Charles’s position as future head of the Windsor family. Whether he knew about the Gilbey tape is not clear but, like Diana, Colthurst felt that the Princess’s enemies were determined to discredit her and might move at any moment.
* * *
As Diana worried that her private life was about to become public knowledge, other forces were moving to pull her marriage apart. In late January 1990 Anne Beckwith-Smith was deposed as Diana’s private secretary, although she continued for a while to be her chief lady-in-waiting. Patrick Jephson succeeded her with the title assistant private secretary. Instead of returning to the navy after his two-year secondment, Jephson now became a career courtier with perks that included a small house in fashionable Notting Hill.
Meanwhile, Jephson’s erstwhile friend in the Prince’s office, Richard Aylard, made the same career choice. For some time he had been an assistant private secretary and comptroller of the household. There were two more assistant private secretaries – Peter Westmacott from the Foreign Office and Guy Salter. At the head of this enlarged establishment was Sir Christopher Airy, the Prince’s new private secretary (and the friendly old major-general who had joined in Diana’s early horse-back rides with Hewitt). Increasingly he seemed little more than a figurehead. Aylard was the driving force in Charles’s office. He and Jephson, the two rival assistants, played a full part in the growing animosity between the separate halves of the office.
Beckwith-Smith and the civilised Sir John Riddell, Airy’s predecessor, had been restraining influences on Diana, gently persuading her to do things the Buckingham Palace way. But Jephson was her man, willing to fall in with her way of doing things and determined to support her initiatives, especially if it meant upsetting what he saw as an insensitive and maladroit old guard in the Palace. He found the Prince’s
people particularly unctuous and condescending.
Jephson was determined to complete the job of recasting his Princess as a dynamic modern royal performer, the task begun with the opening of the AIDS ward in 1987 and strengthened with the solo trip to New York in 1989. And Diana was growing into the role. She did particularly well during a visit to a leprosy hospital at Sitanala near Jakarta. Before departure the press warned her not to let the royal hand even brush against a leper. Jephson took care to check that the horrible consequences imagined by the tabloids would not ensue, and once again the world saw his Princess touching the untouchable.
* * *
Diana was now actively planning a future outside the Royal Family and took various secret initiatives with this in mind. One was an escalating series of press briefings. Another was to appoint Joseph Sanders to look after her financial affairs.
I was introduced to Diana in May 1990 by one of my clients who I’d made a lot of money for and done very well for. And she phoned me up and she said, ‘I want you to meet a friend of mine.’ And I said, ‘Who do you want me to meet?’ She said, ‘I can’t say, it’s all secret squirrel.’
So I went and I met this new client and I was absolutely amazed. It was Princess Diana! And she was just so charming and so nice, and she said, ‘Joseph, I’ve heard a lot about you. I’d like you to look after my financial affairs. I’d like to make a break from the Royal Family. I’d like to set up life on my own. I might move abroad. I could get married later on, I could have a couple of children.’ She didn’t really know what she wanted to do but she knew that she wanted to make a break from the Royal Family . . . She was in a difficult situation. I think she needed help. She felt she could trust very few people.