by Tim Clayton
She was very funny, very smart, very good company. OK, she wasn’t going to win the Nobel prize, she was not an intellectual, but she was very savvy about people, which I liked. Very candid, surprisingly candid – particularly about other members of the Royal Family to somebody that might quote this stuff in books or journalism. And there was an unspoken thing – she never said once, ‘For God’s sake don’t print that!’ She called Buckingham Palace the ‘leper colony’, and if you want to know what she thought about the Queen Mother, she called her the ‘chief leper’.
If I was being manipulated, well, it was a very nice way to be manipulated, and so long as I was aware of it, I didn’t see the harm.
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Diana assiduously courted other influential writers and journalists. And so did friends of Prince Charles, including Camilla Parker Bowles, who maintained her own discreet line of communication with Stuart Higgins’s Sun.
We had a very civilised relationship over the phone. We met a couple of times. And that was it, but she was a very good sounding-board for what was going on.
Camilla Parker Bowles never badmouthed the Princess. She was never openly critical of the Princess until very, very late on, and then not to me but to other people, and then it got fed back through a route that was obviously part of the damage limitation process for the Prince.
She really became almost like an unofficial adviser if you like, or an unofficial shield to all the gossip. But I would ask her about her own marriage, and I would talk to Andrew Parker Bowles about it. I’d say, ‘Can you put the record straight about this?’ – you know – ‘We’ve heard rumours that you’re going to break up.’ ‘Absolutely untrue, we will never divorce.’
But now I look back on it, everything that I said to Camilla must have gone back to the Palace or gone back to the Prince. I think she got more out of me than I ever got out of her.
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Anthony Holden never got close enough to Diana to experience the drawbacks of friendship with her. Vivienne Parry, a friend for twelve years, recalls a pattern of difficulties that did not change with the separation:
There wasn’t one friend that she hadn’t fallen out with at one time or another and I think part of it was that she felt rather difficult in the company of people who were very close to her, particularly if they started to criticise. And what she didn’t understand was that sometimes people criticise you because they love you, not because they don’t.
For a time there would be a friend that was there all the time that she would ring at all hours of the day and night, and then suddenly that person would be dropped. And it would usually be because they had been truthful, or because Diana had tested their loyalty in some way and she felt that they had not lived up to her test. I don’t know why she felt the need to do that, but she did do it and it harmed her. I saw her doing it and it broke my heart. There were countless people I knew who were friends of both Diana and myself, who would come weeping to me because Diana had dumped them.
Some of Diana’s busier friends, like financial adviser Joseph Sanders, grew wary of getting too close:
She thought I was looking after her, making her money, and she respected my opinions. So from time to time she asked me about things that were troubling her. But I didn’t take it upon myself to ask her if there was anything troubling her, she would’ve been on the phone twenty-four hours a day. And she did have a lot of other people that she asked about things.
James Colthurst’s wife complained at the number of late-night phone calls and Colthurst became irritated with Diana’s angry reactions to constructive criticism, as he told Felix Lyle:
It became too much for him. In the end there was a parting of the ways and a painful one. She turned on him. She had a little bit of a problem with loyalty. If you weren’t a hundred per cent with her, you must be against her. She had that black-and-white way of looking at friendship and so James became ostracised, he became a sort of pariah. He said that she used to refer to him as ‘that shit’, which I think is a great shame and the end to a rather sad story.
Colthurst still counts himself one of Diana’s strongest admirers, is proud of his role in her life and remains an angry critic of the Royal Family’s behaviour towards her.
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Meanwhile, Diana expanded her small army of alternative counsellors: psychic Rita Rogers, therapist Susie Orbach, colonic irrigator Chryssie Fitzgerald, acupuncturists Oonagh Toffolo and Lily Hua Yu, energy healer Simone Simmons, and fitness trainer Jenny Rivett to accompany Carolan Brown. On Brown’s advice, she also engaged the actor Peter Setterlen to give her voice coaching and help write her speeches. Joseph Sanders, with some exaggeration, recalls that:
I once went to a large drinks party she gave at Kensington Palace and there were seven hundred of us there and she was very good, she knew everybody on their first-name terms. She spoke to every single person there, and there were six hundred therapists out of the seven hundred.
I don’t think the therapists did her any good at all, except they took her mind off things. She used to keep one for two or three years and then fall out with them and get another one. And she had so many of them she couldn’t have possibly seen them all, even once a year.
Diana’s therapists and healers have similar stories to tell: Diana presented herself as a damaged and unhappy woman, there was an intense period during which she was highly dependent, then she said she was making progress (and there must be a dozen people in London who claim to have cured Diana’s bulimia), then she lost interest. The next therapist down the line was greeted with the opening line of misery again.
Diana’s bulimia came and went, triggered by arguments and stress. It’s likely that she succumbed to it intermittently right up to her death, although she sought advice about it from many experts on eating disorders. Patrick Jephson was alarmed by the confusing variety of physical and emotional stimuli coming into Kensington Palace, and the contents of Diana’s medicine cabinet, where Prozac and sleeping pills figured large.
There is even a question about how severe Diana’s bulimia really was. Her personal beautician, Janet Filderman, accepts that Diana made herself sick at moments of stress, or after occasional ‘comfort food’ binges, but says that
I don’t think she had bulimia as I know it. I have two or three clients who really have been like that, and are like that, and believe me there is no comparison because Diana had a super figure, wonderful teeth, good-quality hair, skin was good, eyes were bright. I don’t think you can have any of those outward signs if you have bulimia badly.
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If Diana’s private life remained troubled, her public performances in 1993 were triumphant. One powerful new ally was the Minister for Overseas Development, Lynda Chalker. In March 1993, they went together to Nepal, where Diana was no longer greeted with the National Anthem but met the King and visited British aid projects.
She was trying to expand her schedule and further build up her international interests. Jephson recommended an increased involvement with the International Red Cross. Lynda Chalker was well placed to encourage this and to maintain a line of communication with the Prime Minister. In a series of private meetings, John Major was able to make his own judgment as to Diana’s capabilities, and to decide whether, in Jephson’s words, ‘the anxious young woman he met. . . was the demonised inadequate portrayed by certain establishment sources’. She clearly was not.
The Prime Minister and his representatives in numerous foreign outposts had many reasons to thank the Princess for the goodwill she generated during these trips, on which she behaved with grace and intelligence throughout. Jephson, who cheerfully admitted his own fondness for first-class air travel, was frequently taken to one side by Britain’s ambassadors and consuls and told that Diana’s visit had swung a crucial contract or soothed a niggling dispute. All wanted her to come back in a hurry and several compared her favourably to other royals who had passed their way, news that Diana was always happy to receive. This was a
princess in her prime, a gala princess fully meriting the ‘R’ word again, radiating empathy and goodwill and looking a thousand times healthier and happier than during her last tours with Charles.
Although 1993 was turning into a good year, back in London the court’s response to the royal separation was predictably petty, driven by protocol and precedent. According to Vivienne Parry:
The most ridiculous, demeaning and diminishing things were done to her. And silly things, like she was taken out of the Court Circular and her public engagements were not mentioned in an attempt to make people believe that she was less royal.
Diana planned a visit to British peace-keeping troops in Bosnia. The Palace blocked it because Charles was due to make a similar trip. She was told that an Irish visit was also out of the question. At times the two competed to play the part of national figurehead. Charles represented the Queen at the memorial service for the two children who died in the IRA’s Warrington bomb attack. Diana was instructed not to go. But she made a typically personal contribution by calling and then visiting the grieving parents at their homes.
There may have been no more national anthems in Kathmandu, but Diana was far and away the most popular member of the Royal Family. There was a trip to the ballet in a minibus, an economy flight to the Caribbean, a visit to London’s Trocadero Centre to play video games with her sons. Invariably the press attended – sometimes summoned by an image-conscious Princess, sometimes as the inevitable consequence of her own celebrity.
Royal Ascot brought Diana no invitation and so she drove the boys to Planet Hollywood and blew the Windsors off the front page. As her estranged relatives waved stiffly from a carriage, Diana looked royal in blue jeans. In August the Queen Mother’s birthday party took place without the next Queen. With no invite to Clarence House, Diana went go-karting instead. ‘First we cauterise, then we heal’ had been the Windsors’ approach to Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, who were ruthlessly frozen out in the years after he left the Royal Family. It had worked in the 1940s and 1950s, but it wasn’t working now.
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Richard Aylard wanted to relaunch his Prince. He offered Jonathan Dimbleby eighteen months of what television producers like to call ‘unprecedented access’ to the royal household, to the royal archives and to Charles and his closest friends. The plan was to make a feature-length documentary accompanied by a heavyweight book, a truly authorised biography. The project was not, it was repeatedly stressed, a rejoinder to Andrew Morton. Instead it was presented as a serious and respectable celebration of Charles’s twenty-fifth anniversary as Prince of Wales, due in 1994. Throughout 1993, as Diana stole headlines and bathed in the light of foreign flashbulbs, Dimbleby and his production team went about their work.
From the start, Dimbleby says, he had a royal injunction ringing in his ears.
The one thing that the Prince implored me to do, the only thing, was that I should do nothing to hurt the Princess, whatever I might hear from those of his friends who might be indiscreet enough, despite his injunctions to them that they would cease to be friends if they spoke poorly of the Princess.
This can be taken at face value or with a pinch of scepticism. If Charles, or perhaps Charles’s office, felt a need to counterattack but did not wish to be seen to be doing so, this would have been a convenient disclaimer. Like Diana with Morton, Charles would need ‘deniability’, some distance between the intention and the act, so that later he could tell the world that he was not responsible for what was being said and written about the Princess.
What was written, in the opinion of its author, was fairly harmless.
My book and my film contain not a single word of criticism by the Prince of the Princess. No single word of criticism from any of the friends. Everything about the Princess that I have published was recorded – as we now know – with her approval, by others, beforehand.
We know that Dimbleby cut out a lot of very damaging material, and dropped his Borderline Personality Disorder chapter altogether. And yet his book did contain hurtful stories – like her alleged resentment of the public interest in the Falklands War at her expense – that had not appeared in Morton.
Penny Junor was familiar with the background to Dimbleby’s book because, for a while, she was going to write it. She was set aside because St James’s Palace thought she was tainted by her previous public support for the Prince. Despite her irritation at this, Junor believes that when the project started Charles genuinely did not want to hurt his wife.
It was the friends and I think they went rather farther than the Prince might have liked. When he [Dimbleby] was first told about the way Diana behaved I think he did think, I’m being told this by friends of the Prince. This marriage has broken down and is just one lot slagging off the other side. . . . But he did, I think, eventually come to believe what he was hearing.
It’s possible that naivety was the problem. That’s what Max Hastings believes.
I remember when I was first told about the Dimbleby project, right back in the beginning, and I was asked what I thought about it privately by one or two of the Palace people, and I said, ‘This is absolute madness. There’s only one thing anybody’s going to want to hear about and that’s the marriage. And the consequences will be disastrous.’
And I remember one of the Prince of Wales’s closest aides saying, ‘But we’ve got to do something.’ And I said, ‘But this is the fundamental huge mistake at the heart of your thinking – that this is a sort of public war which can be waged by public relations means.’
Just before Dimbleby finished his book, Patrick Jephson arranged for the author to meet Diana.
My intention . . . was to confront him with the reality of what she was like so that he could compare it dispassionately with what he had been told by sources close to the Prince. This, I mischievously hoped, might at least pull a brick from the foundations of the edifice created for his benefit.
Diana was on top form: informal, considerate and friendly – although the author did look uncomfortable for a second when she said, ‘Oh well, I suppose it’s your turn to be his guardian angel now.’ As they left Kensington Palace, Jephson artlessly asked Dimbleby whether his views had changed. To Jephson, the distinguished broadcaster, veteran of a hundred bruising political interviews, appeared dazed. Jephson alleges that Dimbleby said to him, ‘If I can’t believe what I have been told about her . . . then I can’t believe any of it.’
Jonathan Dimbleby will not respond to Jephson’s story about the lunch ‘as – unlike him, apparently – I propose to honour the terms which he set for my conversation with the Princess – that it should be conducted on a confidential basis’.
* * *
While Dimbleby continued to write, Jephson successfully managed Diana through more of the best moments of her career. In July 1993 she visited Zimbabwe and was extremely professional during a demanding and stressful trip. She charmed the notoriously anti-British President Robert Mugabe and she met five-year-old AIDS sufferers with only months to live. She attended other African projects run by Help the Aged and the Leprosy Mission. On this tour Jephson was delighted to find that Diana was now getting favourable coverage from Max Hastings’s traditionally royalist Daily Telegraph. Hastings’s high-minded boycott of royal marriage stories had softened when he heard that Dimbleby’s book, like Morton’s, was being offered to his great rival the Sunday Times.
When one found that both the Prince and Princess of Wales were willing to flog enormously valuable commercial properties to the Murdoch press then you feel ‘What’s the point?’ [of helping them out] . . . if it’s a commercial game now, then everyone’s out for themselves.
Diana took the boys to Disney World, Florida for a summer holiday. She was almost invited to present the BBC’s prestigious Dimbleby Lecture, named after Jonathan’s father Richard. She attended the Hollingsworth Dinner at Spencer House, where for the first time she met Henry Kissinger. She visited Luxembourg and met Jacques Santer, soon to be President of the
European Union. She had tea with Queen Fabiola of Belgium. She opened the new library at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. On 14 November she attended the Remembrance Day service at Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, where, in 1987, an IRA bomb had killed eleven people. Jephson and his solo Princess roadshow were successfully infiltrating the diplomatic and establishment worlds in which he felt she could make the most positive contributions, despite her separation from the Prince and in spite of St James’s Palace.
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Then, just when everything was going so well, Diana’s equilibrium was disturbed by a nasty privacy scandal. In November 1993 the Daily Mirror published candid photographs of the Princess exercising wearing a leotard. She was still seeing Carolan Brown, and now used the LA Fitness Centre in Isleworth, where the fitness trainer worked.
We never dreamed that he [gym owner Bryce Taylor] would plant a camera in the ceiling. And I felt a little bit responsible because I was the one that had suggested that we trained there. The picture really upset her, she was disgusted. She said to me, ‘I feel as if he’s raped me through a camera.’
* * *
The photographs were sold for over £100,000 to a Mirror no longer edited by Richard Stott. The paper published them, claiming as a thin excuse that they exposed a terrible lapse in royal security. Diana’s long-serving, loyal and supportive detective, Ken Wharfe, James Hewitt’s old poker-playing chum, had already left her service. No one detected a cunningly concealed camera that was put in place after the initial security sweep.
Every other tabloid paper poured scorn on the Mirror, and the Press Complaints Commission thundered its condemnation. Diana decided to take the paper to court. More immediately she decided she had had enough of this sort of thing and was going to withdraw from public life. Let the tabloids see how they managed without her. ‘For some months,’ Jephson writes, ‘the Princess had been musing aloud about her wish to find a quieter life.’ He had evidently been struggling to keep this wish suppressed. Now he had to explain to the allies he had gathered around him that the Princess needed a break. For Mike Whitlam from the Red Cross: