by Tim Clayton
In February 1995 the case was settled out of court. The Mirror apologised, Diana declared victory. In reality she had backed down. Lord Palumbo, who had also advised Diana to settle, was delighted. ‘There was a great sigh of relief all round when she didn’t have to go through that experience.’
* * *
After the battering she had received in 1994, Diana tried during the following year to charm a few of the papers back to her cause. An early opportunity came when she received an invitation from Rupert Murdoch. Could she do him a favour with a New York charity that he supported?
It was the United Cerebral Palsy Fund, and they were looking for someone to honour at their gala dinner later that year. Finding someone to accept honours like this was a major problem in New York. Ed Mathews was the charity’s chief executive.
Getting a high-profile ‘honouree’ is very important. About ten per cent of our annual budget comes from donations, which is a little over seven million dollars a year, a lot of money in this town. To raise that kind of money you’ve got to be in the public eye. Being high profile gets us people at the dinner, it gets us corporate sponsorship and gets us in the media.
It’s very difficult to get somebody to accept an honour. When I first started in this business about eleven years ago I thought it must be quite easy, everyone would want to be one of their ‘awardees’. Far from the case. The most high-profile people get thousands of requests from charities like this. It takes individual relationships to even get them to entertain the notion.
Princess Diana was a unique figure from the American point of view. So we set out to get her, using the relationship that we have with our own board member, Rupert Murdoch. He simply wrote her a note. It said: ‘I would be most personally appreciative if you would consider this. Love, Rupert.’
The news about the Princess and her extramarital affair, the break-up of her marriage, was prevalent at the time. We thought, She just won’t do it. We were working on the back-up honouree when I got a call saying that Mr Murdoch was on the line. And he said, ‘She’s all set.’
We knew that we had lightning in a bottle when she accepted.
* * *
As Ed Mathews began to market bottled lightning, Diana continued her love affair with America on a holiday with her sons in the Wild West. They rode horses in Colorado and whitewater-rafted through the canyons of Utah. Lucia Flecha da Lima arranged for them to spend some time on actress Goldie Hawn’s ranch in Aspen. It was summer, and things were turning good again.
Then came a short but disastrous relationship with Will Carling, the England rugby captain. ‘Another married one,’ Diana’s friends groaned. Carling met her at the Chelsea Harbour Club gym and visited her at Kensington Palace. The press reported that Carling was ‘advising her on her workout’.
Julia Carling had known nothing about her husband’s friendship with Diana until she read about it in the News of the World on 6 August. When Carling said that he barely knew the Princess, his wife defended him vigorously, declaring in the next weekend’s News of the World that Diana ‘had picked the wrong couple to do it with this time’. ‘An affair could not have been further from her mind,’ said a friend of Diana’s. Unfortunately Carling was spotted entering Kensington Palace, and on 24 September the paper returned to its theme, ‘Will and Di at it again’. The Mail ran two parallel articles with Paul Johnson arguing the case for sympathy and Rhoda Koenig accusing Diana of childishness. Julia Carling asked for a divorce; Diana blamed the press.
* * *
Diana’s friends agreed about one thing. She needed a decent man in her life: stable, discreet and unmarried. Diana thought so too, but as she asked Joseph Sanders, ‘Who will have me now?’
Diana was desperate to meet the right man, to have the right relationship, and she never completely found it. She used to see men and she was continuously disappointed. Or if she got on particularly well with somebody the press would ruin it because they’d publish the relationship and the man would say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, Diana, I can’t see you any more. I can’t be in the papers every day. I can’t face all this publicity.’ If she went away somewhere she could have a hundred and ten photographers following her, all with zoom lenses. And it was a lot for anybody to take on. She said to me one morning when she was feeling particularly down about all this that she thought she’d never find a man. And I showed her her horoscope and said she actually would find somebody.
Then finally, in September 1995, Diana found her ‘Mr Wonderful’.
Diana first met Dr Hasnat Khan when visiting Joseph Toffolo, husband of her acupuncturist Oonagh Toffolo, in London’s Royal Brompton Hospital. Khan was one of a team of specialists who performed a triple heart bypass operation on him. Diana fell deeply in love, visited Toffolo practically every day and later would slip in to see Khan on the pretext of visiting other patients in the wards.
A lot of convalescing heart patients never realised why the Princess of Wales was spending so much time at their bedside. One night at the beginning of December, when leaving the hospital, Diana was cornered by a photographer from the News of the World. Instead of running for it, she paused for photographs and then phoned the newspaper’s royal reporter to explain that she regularly visited the hospital at midnight. ‘I try to be there for them,’ she told him. ‘I seem to draw strength from them.’ What she said was intended to deceive the News of the World, but it was only partly untrue. Nevertheless, she would never have been able to get away with it if she had not just scored a massive propaganda coup of her own to claim the sympathy of the News of the World’s readers.
* * *
Diana had been approached, originally through her brother, by a television reporter named Martin Bashir, who worked for Panorama, the BBC’s top current affairs series. Bashir impressed Diana, and eventually proposed to her that she might put her own point of view across effectively by giving him a long television interview.
She asked various friends for their opinion, but not Patrick Jephson, from whom she was slowly becoming estranged. Jephson wanted her to leave the bitterness of the past behind and move under the protection of the Queen and her household. He had a vision, which turned out to be unrealistic in the extreme, of keeping his Princess ‘in the fold’ and out of the divorce court.
Film producer David Puttnam and broadcaster Clive James counselled against the interview. She appeared to take their advice, but she didn’t. Joseph Sanders believes that Diana knew that divorce was inevitable and decided to go on Panorama with that in mind.
She was trying to put herself in a better position vis-à-vis the divorce and getting a good settlement . . . She felt a bit like a rat in a trap. She wanted to get away from the Royal Family – she wasn’t getting anywhere negotiating with them. She just felt that she had to do something really serious and really outrageous and that’s why she did the Panorama interview.
Max Hastings had just been invited for lunch:
I said, as I always do on these occasions – ‘Ma’am, I should just let the other side make the mistakes. Just stick with the principles: “say nothing, say nothing”. You still have tremendous public support but you are not going to serve your interests by saying a lot publicly.’
Now nothing is more unflattering than finding your advice not taken. And I’ve never had my advice so resoundingly not taken.
Vivienne Parry thinks the moment was going to come sooner or later.
When the Prince of Wales admitted to adultery with Mrs Parker Bowles in the Jonathan Dimbleby interview, it was like setting a fuse which would lead to an enormous great explosion. That explosion was Panorama. It was inevitable.
Of the people that she did talk to, those that had media experience said very firmly, ‘Don’t do it.’ But she ignored them.
Diana demanded total secrecy, stipulating that the BBC Chairman, Sir Marmaduke Hussey, must not be told in advance of transmission. He was married to Lady Susan Hussey, still a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. On the evening of 5 November, Dian
a gave her Kensington Palace staff some unexpected time off and ushered Bashir and his crew through a rear entrance. As soon as they saw the result, BBC executives realised that they too had lightning in a bottle. The programme was broadcast on 20 November to twenty-three million viewers in Britain alone.
‘All I want to be,’ Diana said, ‘is queen of people’s hearts.’ It was a bravura performance. Diana talked through her eating disorders, her attempts to hurt herself, and her miserable marriage. She turned on Camilla, explaining that her marriage had always been crowded since there had been three people in it, and she turned on James Hewitt, who, she said, she had loved and adored but who had let her down. She raised the possibility that Charles did not want to be King – indeed, might not be suitable for the ‘top job’ at all – and that William might be a more suitable heir. Of her own future she said, with some menace, she would not ‘go quietly, I will fight to the end’.
Newsnight, the BBC’s late-night news magazine, had rapidly planned a discussion programme to follow. Anthony Holden and Nicholas Soames had agreed to appear. As Panorama began, these representatives of the rival royal factions watched in growing amazement.
It was a weird and quite funny experience, because the show followed straight on, and we were all thinking, Well, she’s not going to say anything very interesting. I think I’d even written that she might trash Charles a bit but I don’t think she’ll be admitting adultery.
We were just chatting among ourselves. I’m quite friendly with Nicholas Soames, we can rise above our disagreements. But then: ‘Wait a minute, did she just admit adultery with Hewitt? My God!’ And suddenly this moved into a different stratosphere. Then when she came out with ‘I want to be queen of people’s hearts’, Soames, who was by this time getting very indignant, turned to me and said, ‘I bet you wrote that, Holden!’
By the time Newsnight started, Soames was shaking with rage. He tore into Diana, accusing her of being ‘in the advanced stages of paranoia’. The British public finally got a sense of the angry partisanship that had lain behind the royal marriage.
He let rip, which I thought was a rather dangerous thing for a government minister to say, about a woman who was still at the time the Princess of Wales, wife of the next King and mother of the future King. And I thought that this was really the endgame now.
Lord Palumbo watched Soames’s outburst and thought the same.
I’m sure that those people who were advising the Prince of Wales said, ‘I told you so, that’s what she’s all about.’ It gave ammunition to those people who opposed her, unnecessarily. It had a pretty devastating effect. It made the situation irretrievable . . .
Patrick Jephson arranged to watch Panorama with Anne Beckwith-Smith. Diana had told him of the interview less than a week before transmission. He had tried to smooth things over with the Queen’s office, while privately blaming Diana’s ‘inner child’ for stamping its feet and demanding yet more attention be paid to its tale of injustice. Continuing with his spoilt-child analogy, Jephson describes waiting for the programme to start:
it was the kind of foreboding that parents experience when returning home after a dinner party in the knowledge that the nursery will have been left in a bit of a shambles.
The current private secretary and the former lady-in-waiting both felt it was ghastly. Both knew that it meant the end of Jephson’s strategy of reconciliation with the Queen. Both sensed he would have to resign.
James Hewitt watched apprehensively and with mixed feelings:
It was a complete shock. I didn’t think that she would speak about me. Golly. A whole load of thoughts flashed through my mind. I think that the overwhelming thought was that she’s admitted [it] . . . that’s good, and I think that’s wonderful and thank you very much. People might be less sceptical about this ‘Lothario playboy’, ‘woman hater’, ‘woman user’, or whatever had been written up until that point. She went on to say ‘He let me down’ but she didn’t explain why, it wasn’t asked of her: ‘Why?’
But I think she came across completely differently to the person I knew. I’m thinking that she was natural and carefree and generous in spirit. And the person on the Panorama interview was calculated and not any of those things.
But at Wapping Ken Lennox couldn’t believe his luck.
By that stage I was picture editor on the Sun, and it was probably the most exciting night I’ve ever had on the picture desk of a national newspaper. We could not change our editions quickly enough. We were changing them on the phrases that were coming out. When it got to the marriage – ‘there were three in the marrriage, it was a bit crowded’ – we were ripping our front pages and improving on them. We were giving more and more pages over to it.
The next day the tabloids took up the ‘I Loved James Hewitt’ theme while the broadsheets were concerned with the ‘I will not go quietly’ threat. In The Times, William Rees-Mogg admired what he took to be ‘a dazzling display of sheer political skill’. Ken Lennox’s Sun eventually gave the first nine pages to the interview and page twenty to Hewitt. On page nine the Sun established its people’s paper status with an account of readers’ reactions. The vast majority were positive: ‘You were magnificent Di: Thousands call the Sun to praise brave Princess.’ The paper quoted twenty-five readers, of whom twenty-two were women. Only three readers were critical, and two of them were men.
Some viewers watched a piece of ham acting by a vindictive woman bent on revenge. But it was immediately apparent that they were a small minority. Panorama, more than anything else, formulated the image of Diana the defiant victim, the brave survivor. From now on she had an army.
15
Decree Absolute
* * *
In December 1995 Diana flew to New York to fulfil her promise to Rupert Murdoch. There, in the Hilton grand ballroom, before 1,500 thousand-dollars-a-plate guests, she received the United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) Humanitarian of the Year Award from Henry Kissinger.
A press baron calls in a favour, a princess has a PR problem and Henry Kissinger presents a humanitarian award.
It’s easy to cry ‘fake’, but simplistic too. This is how good deeds get done in Gotham City. UCP had worked hard to solve its ‘honouree shortage’ and the evening would make a huge contribution to its funds, especially as Panorama had just brought Diana right back into the spotlight.
We [UCP] had requests from all over the world. It was simply overwhelming. We hadn’t had anything like that before. Any number of celebrities in this town offered to up their donations. There was one gentleman who used to buy a ten-thousand-dollar table; he offered fifty thousand if he could sit next to the Princess.
To minimise possible criticism for raising money for an American cause, we thought we’d cut the British in on the deal. We offered a small sum of the proceeds to a cerebral palsy organisation in the UK and that was gratefully accepted.
Henry Kissinger got to sit next to her, and there are lots of famous pictures of that because Diana was very tall and our former Secretary isn’t. So he came up to about bosom level.
Kissinger spoke about Diana’s ‘luminous personality’ and praised her for identifying herself with ‘the sick, the disadvantaged and the suffering’. Ed Mathews had heard many such speeches, but he had never met anyone like Diana:
The rest of the Royal Family are cold fish, frankly. Diana was a more interesting person because she seemed to have a feeling for people’s plights. And she wanted to use her fame and title to do something about it. And she seemed to be trying to fit in to some place that she no longer could.
She was very warm with the children but she appeared sad to me. I’m a psychologist by training and by trade, so maybe I’m just reading too much in, but that was how she came across, and she stayed that way for the entire dinner. Regal, but sort of uncomfortable and sad.
She spoke not about the organisation, but about what it meant to be a volunteer. She spoke very seriously about commitment, what it meant to her and what it should mean to pe
ople to do things outside of themselves.
Diana spoke about her children. One of the dinner guests stood up, walked to the back of the room and yelled out, ‘Where are your children, Diana?’ A hush fell over the crowd. Diana looked to the back of the room, coolly replied, ‘At school,’ and proceeded with her speech. Security came over and escorted the heckler out. Diana got a standing ovation when she finished.
The dinner made all the local news shows. I was grateful for the effort that Diana was putting in sincerely to benefit others. I never thought, Is she doing this for some other motive that I don’t understand? It didn’t really matter to me. Two point two million dollars that night is what mattered, and all the free publicity, and we’ve never come close to it since, nor do I ever expect to.
* * *
Soon after she returned from New York, Diana received a letter from the Queen urging a rapid divorce. Panorama had been one provocation too many. Diana’s mother-in-law had consulted John Major and George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, before writing to her and Charles. Diana made a tearful phone call to Patrick Jephson. She told him she had never wanted this to happen. He shook his head. She had just made it happen.
She had been fine in New York, but in London she was soon in a bad way, convinced that her rooms were bugged, believing that someone had taken a pot shot at her in the park and telling Jephson that the brake wires had been cut on her car.
Tiggy Legge-Bourke had been hired as a nanny by Prince Charles in 1993 to help look after the children when they were in his custody. She had long been an object of suspicion in Kensington Palace. Jephson had drafted several letters asking for clarification of Tiggy’s duties and demanding, on Diana’s behalf, to be involved in all decisions relating to the boys’ care. At the 1995 staff Christmas party on 14 December, Diana snapped. She crept up behind Legge-Bourke and whispered, ‘So sorry about the baby.’ The nanny had to be helped out of the room in tears.