by Tim Clayton
Diana planned to get a divorce in 1990. Um . . . it took her a few years to get there. But she planned it. She wanted to look as if she was the goody and the Royal Family were the baddies.
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On 28 June 1990 the Prince broke his arm playing polo. In severe pain, he was taken to hospital at Cirencester, where doctors decided to reset the double fracture without pinning it. On leaving hospital he posed for pictures with Diana before she drove him back to Highgrove. Minutes after she dropped him off, she left again for Kensington Palace. Camilla Parker Bowles then arrived to care for him. Janet Filderman was still very close to Diana. She says that the broken-arm incident was an insult too far.
She said to me that she wanted to go down to Highgrove to nurse him. Prince Charles didn’t want to be nursed and after then I saw a change in Diana. I don’t think she was prepared to work at the marriage any more.
Housekeeper Wendy Berry saw a lot of Camilla around Highgrove at this time. The passionately anti-smoking Prince even allowed her to light up in the drawing rooms.
It is possible that Diana wanted to look after Charles. Certainly she wanted to be seen to want to. Charles, his temper worsened by continuous pain throughout July and August, was not at his most accommodating. His friends gave their advice. Patti Palmer-Tomkinson recommended the doctor who had helped her recover from the skiing accident. The new doctor insisted that Charles’s arm was not healing properly and that surgery was imperative. His opinion eventually prevailed, and the Prince was booked into the Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham, for early September.
While waiting for his operation, Charles joined his friends the Romseys in Majorca. Diana and the children arrived a little after the ratpack. The tabloids were seizing every opportunity to make him look unpleasant. It was bad enough when they put two and two together and made four, but it was worse when they made forty. 16 August was not one of the Sun’s most inspired days: 16 August 1990 – ‘Charles hugs his old flame’, with a picture of a ‘lingering, warm embrace’ between Charles and ‘former escort’ Penny Romsey; 17 August 1990 – ‘Tragic Secret behind Charles’s Embrace: Lady Romsey told him her girl, 4, had cancer’.
After the Sun had grovelled for a day, the long-suffering heir carried his painful arm from Majorca to Balmoral and from Balmoral to Nottingham. There, to his wife’s disgust, his courtiers took up residence too, fussing over him in what the Princess’s rebel band saw as an obsequious pantomime.
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Rumours that Diana’s touch could heal were soon emanating from the very hospital in which her husband’s arm was posing such an obstinate problem for conventional medicine. As Diana left Charles’s room after one of her visits, she came across a woman crying in the corridor. It was Ivy Woodward. On 30 August 1990 her son Dean had been involved in a serious road accident and was in intensive care. He was in a coma and his chances of recovery were not thought to be good. Dean’s wife, Jane, was by his bedside.
Diana said, ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ And Dean’s mum says, ‘No, not at all.’ And I was in a state of shock anyway, myself. When she walked in I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ It’s just total disbelief and it’s not until after that – you’ve gone away and thought about it – that, you know, you think back, and think, God, yeah, she was actually there.
Dean later heard Diana’s side of the story:
And then Princess Diana said, ‘He’ll pull through. I know he’ll pull through.’ And then she went away – and this is the exact words she’s told me, Princess Diana – that bells was ringing, go back and see that lady. So she came to see me mum again and said, ‘Can I come and see your son?’ And then from that day, every time she visited Charles, she came in to visit me.
The Sun quickly took up the story, reporting the day after Charles’s operation, 3 September 1990: ‘Di Weeps at Bedside of Coma Dad Dean’. The Sun quoted Dean’s Uncle Terry: ‘She had been sent by God as far as I’m concerned. She is an angel.’ Terry told reporters that Ivy thought her son’s grip had tightened when Diana touched his leg. ‘We’re all praying for a miracle,’ he said.
The miracle arrived. By late autumn Dean Woodward had come out of his coma and was convalescing:
I was having my dinner in Glendon Lodge, in the grounds of the City Hospital, and the receptionist came out and she said, ‘Dean, there’s a phone call for you.’ I said, ‘Who is it?’ She said, ‘It’s Diane.’ And I’ve got a sister Diane. And I said, ‘Oh, tell her I’m having me dinner, to call back later.’ She went away, she came back and she said, ‘Oh, she can’t call back.’ So I went in – finished, stopped my dinner – went and spoke on the phone and then I said, ‘Oh, hello my duck’ – I’d had a tracheotomy so I could talk then. And she said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Diane.’ And she said, ‘No, you’re talking to Princess Diana from Kensington Palace.’ Unbelievable.
And then she said, ‘Are you OK, is the family OK?’ And before she went she said, ‘Is there anything you need?’ I said, ‘Yeah, there is. When you visited me I was unconscious, but now I’m conscious can you come and visit me?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come and visit you but I don’t want no reporters or nothing, just a casual visit.’
She said she would come and visit at New Year.
* * *
James Hewitt had been trying to forget Diana and had not spoken to her for more than a year. He was still based in Germany when the decision was made to send British troops to the Gulf, part of a force intended to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Hewitt was told that his tank squadron would be travelling to the desert soon.
She suddenly rang me out of the blue. She was wondering whether I was going. So I said yes I was and she said she’d like to see me before I went out there, so I said, fine, I’m coming back for my sister’s wedding, to which she had got an invitation but she didn’t go. I saw her after the wedding, before I flew back out to Germany to get things moving in readiness for going to the Middle East.
Then from Germany I went out to Canada to watch some army manoeuvres because it’s very open and apart from it being a prairie it’s quite like the desert and they were using the latest tactics. But there was a stopover in England and I stayed the night at Highgrove.
So after quite a lengthy period of being out of touch we took up really where we left off without an ‘if’ or a ‘but’. Again, you know, I didn’t want to be questioning. And then this amazing affair was rekindled really.
Diana had invited Hewitt’s mother and his sister, so that they could all see him before he left for the Gulf. Not for the first time Mrs Hewitt felt a sense of unreality descend upon her, as a servant parked her car and she was ushered into the Prince of Wales’s house. She felt as if she was someone else. But Diana resumed family life with the Hewitts as if there had been no interruption.
During the weekend James Hewitt discovered that Diana was now determined to leave the Royal Family.
I know that Diana did not want to be Queen of England. ‘I will never be Queen’ – she was quite determined. She wanted to get out of the marriage, so for that reason alone she had no desire to be Queen.
Hewitt flew out to Saudi Arabia on Boxing Day, 1990.
She wrote to me every day I was out there, sometimes twice a day. And very occasionally I was able to speak to her. But on the satellite phone. At that stage we didn’t know how ‘the mother of all wars’ was going to turn out. So we were worried that it could have been a fairly bloody and nasty situation.
She said, ‘I know you’ll be fantastic.’ She was trying to be supportive in everything she said and she was obviously concerned that I might die. But we didn’t speak about that – at great length, anyway. She was terribly interested in what morale was like and what was happening – what life was like being stuck in the desert. She wanted to know what I needed – not necessarily needed but what would make life a little more comfortable and bearable out there. So she immediately sent me bottles of whisky and hampers from Fortnum and Mason, which were well rece
ived and shared among my men. And little things like a jumper to keep warm at night because it could get very cold out there.
She went down and saw my sisters and my mother, and stayed down there on one occasion. I suppose it was a time when my mother was sort of worried and she thought I might not come back, so she was being supportive. She liked to reciprocate that kind of thing.
The letters kept me going. It’s amazing until you’ve been in that situation, you don’t realise the importance of correspondence and hearing from people at home and getting their support.
Diana also remained in constant touch with Hewitt’s family, usually by telephone but Shirley Hewitt remembers that:
sometimes if she couldn’t stand the stress any more she would leap into a car, sometimes accompanied by her sons, or one of them, and she would drive down just for the day. Whether anybody knew that she had taken it upon herself to do that I don’t know, but it was good to feel that she felt she could, that she had somewhere to come and discuss what was going on.
I wasn’t always there and she would come down and perhaps spend the day with James’s two sisters. They used to do the usual girly things, jokes and things, and pull each other’s legs and they got on frightfully well. Obviously it helped with the anguish of James being away and being in the situation that he was – it helped, it lightened it a little bit, and yes it was always a breath of fresh air when she came down, it was good to see her.
Hewitt used to send his letters to Diana via his mother in Devon.
And on one occasion there’d probably been a hold up with the mail – she probably hadn’t heard for a couple of days, and she rang me and I said, ‘Yes, the letters came this morning.’ ‘Oh, oh can you please read it to me? Will you read them to me?’ I said, ‘I can’t do that! I can’t! They’re your letters.’ ‘Oh please, please, please!’ She pleaded with me to read these letters. And so I had to – I duly opened them and read them to her. I mean I thought that was a bit much really, to read those sort of, well, endearing letters between two people and me being the outsider really. But I did and she was happy and she said, ‘Now please, please will you post them today.’ I said, ‘Of course I will.’ Which I did.
Letters were not all that Diana sent to the Gulf in return:
She sent out a parcel of Playboy magazines, which was amazing actually. I mean, occasionally we got a newspaper out there and if there was a picture of a woman in a skirt it would have been blacked out by the Arab authorities. So it was quite a coup getting Playboy and Mayfair and Penthouse sent out uncensored. I just gave them to the chaps and said, ‘I have contacts in high places.’
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On 2 January 1991 Diana left Sandringham, where the day before she had been pictured walking unhappily alone on Snettisham beach, and drove the hundred miles to Dean Woodward’s parents’ home. Jane Woodward couldn’t believe it.
JANE: In the morning, Dean’s uncle picked us up and I thought, No, this is a wind-up. I thought, This is a Jeremy Beadle thing. We got to the house, and I thought, No, it’s still no. And we must’ve been at the house ten minutes and a car pulled up and that’s when it hit me – I thought, God, she’s really coming to the house!
DEAN: I looked out the window and I could see her get out of the Jaguar and she came down the drive and came in, with her arms open, gave my mum a hug and ‘Hello, Ivy’ – first-name terms. And ‘Hello, John’ to me dad. And then she said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I’m late.’ And then she said, ‘Where is he I’ve come to see?’ And she looked across the room, she said, ‘Oh, hello, Dean,’ arms open, kissed me on the cheek.
JANE: And she says to Dean, ‘Oh, it’s nice to see you now you’ve got your clothes on!’ So we all had a laugh about that. She broke the ice, she didn’t make you feel uncomfortable or anything.
DEAN: Me dad was addressing her as ‘Your Highness’ and she said, ‘No, no – I’m Diana, you’re John, we’re friends now.’ Once she sat next to me, talking to me, I said, ‘Well, why’ve you come to visit me?’ And she said, ‘It could’ve been anybody, but it was your mum that was in intensive care.’ And then to have the future Queen sitting next to me, having my children on her lap – I couldn’t believe it.
She told me, when she rang me, she said, ‘No reporters.’ But there was people over the road, Joe Public, waving flags, and I thought, Hang on a minute! And she was shocked to see that, because she didn’t come for that, she came for me – me and my family. Not papers, not cameras, not public – she came for me and my family.
The following day the Sun reported Diana’s hundred-mile mercy dash and set it against pictures of Charles riding at Sandringham. As the newspaper printed more and more anti-Charles material, the Gilbey tape continued to lie unpublished in Stuart Higgins’s safe.
* * *
The War of the Waleses had commenced. Diana was out to get Charles and Camilla, and stories written with her help appeared, naming her rival more and more openly as the ‘friend’ that Charles preferred to spend his time with. Discreet briefings on behalf of the Prince were starting too. Stuart Higgins received several.
In public terms there was supposed to be a dignified silence. But quite clearly the friends that the Prince had were very influential, had good contacts with the media across a wide range, and they set about – not with any kind of great strategy – but when they were asked, they took the opportunity to say that this was the Princess’s fault. I was told one day that the Princess was clinically mad and needed treatment.
Harry Arnold had the same experience.
One extreme story being planted at the time, by Charles’s friends, is that Diana was mentally unbalanced, that she ought to be locked up in a lunatic asylum – which was certainly going over the top.
And so did Ken Lennox.
There were not open briefings, not big briefings, two hundred people sitting down, and them saying that the Princess of Wales is mad. It doesn’t work like that, it’s one to one – ‘Whisper, whisper, and of course you can’t quote that, old boy, but we’re just setting the record straight.’
Max Hastings was the editor of the Daily Telegraph, staunch defender of the establishment.
Once there started to be leaks from the Princess’s side about troubles in the marriage, some of the Prince of Wales’s friends did start to suggest to me that we might carry ‘his side of the story’. Privately I told them that this was madness.
Dating these anti-Diana briefings is difficult because the papers did not print stories saying that the Princess was mad – editors were just being warned not to believe everything that they heard from her camp. We have spoken separately to six journalists and editors who say that the serious briefing began around this time, or perhaps even earlier. But it is possible that some of them may be recalling later attacks on Diana.
There’s no question that by 1992 the gloves were off, but were they in 1990? Diana and James Colthurst thought they were, and saw their own actions as a reaction to a determined assault on her character. Jonathan Dimbleby swears, literally hand on heart, that Charles told everybody close to him at this time not to get involved in a war of words with his wife. But it is entirely possible that some of Charles’s friends may, quite early on, have begun to speak in his defence without his specific approval.
With her acute concern for what high society thought, it’s likely that Diana was just as worried about the accounts of dinner-party conversations that were reaching her ears. She was told that some of her husband’s friends had been overheard calling her ‘the mad cow’ (after the newly discovered cattle disease). Vivienne Parry, another friend on the charity circuit, heard such stories and talked to Diana about them. She says that the Princess was convinced a whispering campaign was questioning both her sanity and her fitness to remain in public life.
Whoever started it, the pace was quickening. In February 1991 Nigel Dempster wrote that Diana had cause for concern because her friend James Hewitt was serving in the Gulf, where the ground war threatened to start at any mom
ent.
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As preparations for the assault began, Diana was increasingly anxious for her friends in the front line. Hewitt was leading a squadron of tanks, and Diana knew several of his men. She was glued to the television, and tried repeatedly to get out to the Gulf but was refused permission. Instead she talked to the wives of the other soldiers. One of the senior courtiers was asked to ‘have a word’ with Diana about the large number of letters and packages leaving Kensington Palace. He told us:
She was very concerned that there would be a lot of bloodshed. I said to her that it wasn’t a good idea to write letters to James Hewitt. She got upset and cross.
Richard Kay, a reporter on the Daily Mail, went out to write about Hewitt’s squadron. He was there when the news came through that the ground war was imminent and offered Hewitt the use of his satellite link to phone home. Hewitt phoned his mother and then Diana. Then, on 24 February 1991, the attack began. Diana refused to go on the regularly scheduled family holiday to Klosters because there was a war on (‘Grumpy Charles Mopes on the Slopes,’ reported the Sun on 28 February). But later that week Saddam Hussein withdrew from Kuwait.
In early March a former girlfriend of Hewitt provided the excuse for the News of the World to break the story of Diana and James. It stopped just short of saying they were lovers, and the following day the Sun produced a disarmingly innocent account of ‘How flirty Di captures all the fellas’ hearts’ alongside a photograph of Diana handing Hewitt the Captains and Subalterns polo cup. It was clear that from now on Hewitt would be watched.
It was after the war had finished, but we were still stuck out in the desert. I came back into regimental headquarters and there were some English papers, Sunday papers. And the news was there. I can’t remember exactly what it said but words to the effect that Diana’s hero in the desert was more than just her riding instructor. Previous to that there had been little snippets in gossip columns, but this was basically saying we know about it.