by Tim Clayton
Diana believed that Tiggy had recently had an abortion. The identity of the supposed father did not take much guesswork. There was not a scrap of truth in it. But Diana, who was proud of having confronted her enemy in this way, told a shocked Jephson that she simply knew Tiggy had been carrying her husband’s child. Through her lawyers, Legge-Bourke demanded an apology. Diana refused.
Diana saw conspiracies everywhere. She left disturbing messages on her staff’s answering machines, and then one arrived on Patrick Jephson’s pager: ‘The Boss knows about your disloyalty and your affair.’ After Panorama and Tiggy, this was the last straw. Jephson decided he had better leave before he was pushed.
But just before he went, Jephson headhunted a replacement for Diana’s press secretary, Geoff Crawford, who had resigned because she had not consulted him about Panorama. Jane Atkinson, a public relations executive with heavyweight media experience, was only told who her prospective client was when she was placed on the short list. Atkinson would not work directly for Diana but would keep her own independent company going and deal with the Princess from a relatively safe distance:
She asked me what I thought of the Panorama interview, she asked me a few personal questions. It was more whether the chemistry was right. Clearly it was. I felt that we would be able to work together. I liked her. I actually hadn’t thought that the Panorama interview was a very good idea. But I did tell her that she had got some of her points across very well.
Jephson told Atkinson that she would be expected to read the newspapers very early each morning and then ring Diana to discuss what was in them. Diana then made her new press officer a promise that had Jephson looking at his shoes.
If she was doing some private visits, then she would tell me what she was doing so that I wouldn’t be surprised if the media rang me to say they had seen her in various places. She was going through a divorce and she obviously wanted to have as clean and good a reputation as possible.
Jephson left in late January 1996. Atkinson’s job was not too difficult at first. One early task was looking after a trip to Centrepoint, a charity devoted to helping homeless young people. Diana had visited a Centrepoint project in 1991 and, impressed by what she saw, had become Patron in 1992. Her patronage had raised Centrepoint’s profile enormously, and she introduced new donors to them. Victor Adebowale, young and not at all posh, had been appointed Chief Executive of Centrepoint in the autumn of 1995 and had visited Diana at Kensington Palace in an attempt to get her to resume an active involvement with his charity. In the immediate aftermath of Panorama, on 7 December, she had made an emotional and effective speech for him about the plight of homeless young people. Now another project visit was arranged. Berwick Street, Soho, is the site of the only emergency accommodation project for sixteen- to twenty-one-year-olds in central London. Diana told Adebowale that she wanted to make a private visit because she wanted Harry and William to see what she had seen. He said ‘fine’. And then private turned public again, as Adebowale remembers:
I remember being absolutely petrified. The street was awash with reporters and flashlights. There were metal barriers all the way down it. Reporters were hanging from windows, up lampposts, up ladders, there were flashbulbs going off and she wasn’t even due to arrive for another hour. It was a siege.
The press were excited because this was the first time Diana had brought her sons to such a gritty, and politically loaded, location.
The police were looking worried. The car door opened, she got out of the car with her sons and we got them into the building as quickly as we could. We had to push people back, and the door was barricaded to stop reporters coming in. Lights were flashing through the windows; it was unbelievable.
* * *
Diana was ever conscientious with her post, but she had refused to respond to the Queen’s divorce instruction for several weeks. Then, in late February 1996, she suggested to Charles that they meet in private at St James’s Palace. She told him she would agree to a divorce by mutual consent, but she wished to keep living at Kensington Palace, to retain an office at St James’s, to share custody of the children, and to keep her title Princess of Wales. Once back at Kensington Palace she immediately issued a press statement, saying she had agreed to Prince Charles’s request for a divorce. She added the sentence ‘The Princess of Wales will retain the title and will be known as Diana, Princess of Wales’, even though at this stage the Palace had agreed to no such thing. The Queen responded with a rare and immediate public rebuttal.
During Morton, Panorama and the public unravelling of her marriage, Diana had frequently told her friends and supporters that it was all being done to break free, to get a good settlement and a bright new life. She and Sarah Ferguson had joked together about their ‘Great Escape’. In her positive ‘sisters are doing it for themselves’ moods, that is doubtless how she felt. But she still mourned her lost love, the summit of all her teenage hopes, and still speculated about a reconciliation. ‘Divorce was the very last thing that Diana wanted,’ says Vivienne Parry, ‘and she was devastated by it. I remember she was sobbing her heart out. She was utterly desperate about it, because she felt that she had failed. She continued to have the silliest hopes of getting back together with her husband.’ Soon she was complaining to friends like Vivienne Parry and Elsa Bowker that her life was ruined.
* * *
The stories about Diana that really hit home – the Tiggy slander, the nuisance phone calls, the messages on the pagers – cannot be dismissed as smears from her estranged husband’s camp. These are real stories about how Diana was capable of behaving in these last years of her life. The way she treated Victoria Mendham was another example.
Mendham, a junior secretary at Kensington Palace for seven years, became a favoured confidante. Diana invited her to go on holiday with her to America and the Caribbean and paid for them both. Then, at Easter 1996, Diana again invited Victoria to go with her to the Caribbean. They had a great time. Halfway through the holiday, Diana told Victoria that she would be getting a bill for her share of the cost. It would be for about £5,000. Quietly, Prince Charles paid the bill. They went on holiday again at the beginning of 1997 and Diana presented Mendham with an even larger bill. When she found out that Charles had paid for the previous holiday she was furious. Diana, who frequently complained that others freeloaded at her expense, pursued the secretary remorselessly over the money. Eventually Prince Charles had to step in again, but Mendham left in distress.
Diana told Joseph Sanders all about the incident.
Diana shouted at her so she started crying, and in the end she got the sack, and Diana thought it was terrible. That’s just an illustration of somebody who was very close to her, went on holiday with her and the next minute, she’s discarded.
Other friends attempted to intervene on Mendham’s behalf. But it was no good. Diana, so gracious, so thoughtful, so full of compassion for so much of the time, was playing the role of household tyrant.
* * *
Diana and Hasnat Khan visited clubs and restaurants together, she disguised in dark wigs, scarves and sunglasses. Khan insisted that their relationship remain private. They spent weekends at the Stratford-upon-Avon home of his British relatives. Other nights were spent in the doctor’s on-call flat at the Brompton Hospital.
She was drawn to his calmness and dedication to the sick; also to his large, warm family. She happily told friends that she had learned to cook pasta, and had stood unrecognised in a supermarket queue buying the ingredients for a microwave feast. She said that she teased Khan about his spreading waistline, lack of exercise and fondness for the high-cholesterol pleasures of Fulham Road takeaways.
Diana wanted to live openly with Khan, but he remained wary. She wrote to the famous heart surgeon Christian Barnard in South Africa, enquiring about a job for Khan. Her brother already had a house in Cape Town, so perhaps she could move there too. But none of the plans came to anything. Khan was committed to his work and his research – and, for the m
oment, that meant London.
For all the love she shared with Khan, Diana was never consistently happy. Or rather, as Vivienne Parry realised, she was never consistently self-confident.
One day she rang me up at home. I was in my dressing gown, at half past eight in the morning, and Diana said, ‘Don’t ever stop sending me your notes, Vivienne, they mean so much.’ And I just thought, My God, this poor girl, just a little note from somebody of no consequence telling her that she’s valued is so important.
The Khan relationship led to Jane Atkinson’s first big PR problem. In April 1996, Khan was performing a heart operation with surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, and Diana came to watch with a Sky News crew in tow. The film showed her wearing make-up and jewellery in the operating theatre. Jane Atkinson recalls the setting up of the session:
The Princess had asked me whether I thought that she should go and observe the operation. I talked to a few people and generally we all thought that it wasn’t a very good idea. And she said that she would decide at the last minute. I was on my way to Chicago to do a recce trip for her subsequent visit when she rang me in the departure lounge to say, ‘I’ve decided to do it, and I’m at the hospital.’ I held my breath and got on the plane. And then at four o’clock the next morning, I was woken up by the media because it was all over the press.
The Princess wasn’t happy about the coverage. She thought she had been misunderstood. I don’t think she had done herself any favours in the way she handled it.
The press – still unaware of Hasnat Khan’s role in her life – accused her of tasteless self-promotion. Anthony Holden asked her why she had done it:
I said, ‘My God! How can you watch that stuff, don’t you feel faint or keel over, why do you do that?’ And she said, ‘No, no, if I’m going to comfort the suffering, I have to understand what they’ve been through.’ Now that’s a classic example of something where cynics will sneer, but if you knew her at all you believed it.
Atkinson believes that Diana understood how to manipulate the media, but not how to manage them. There’s a big difference, she says – the difference between short-term thinking and long-term.
I was told by the journalists themselves that most of them didn’t believe what she was saying because she had tried to manipulate them too often in the past.
* * *
If being Diana’s press officer could be taxing, so could being her friend. Diana was spending so much of her time in America now that Lucia Flecha da Lima decided she needed some more social and emotional support there. And so she decided to search for a woman of Diana’s age who could be a reliable and trustworthy companion.
Lana Marks is an expatriate South African running a successful accessory design and retail business from Palm Beach, Florida. She was delighted to be approached.
Over a period of nine months Lucia and some of Diana’s people spoke to me very extensively about my views on various things, and after that Lucia called me up and said would I consent to being the friend of the Princess of Wales? And I was deeply, deeply honoured and said that I would never let her down and that I would be a loyal and terrific friend. And she said, ‘Lana, we know, and Diana will be so delighted.’
It was an unusual way to begin a relationship, but Flecha da Lima had chosen well. Marks had two children the same ages as William and Harry. She had studied to be a ballet teacher at the South African Royal Academy of Ballet. She was a regular on the American fashion and charity scenes. And she’d enjoyed twenty years of stable marriage to a distinguished psychiatrist. After a brief introduction in Washington, Diana invited Marks to lunch at Kensington Palace.
I called Lucia and said, ‘Lucia, I’m going to be a nervous wreck.’ And Lucia said to me, ‘Lana, just be yourself, Diana has a way of making people feel comfortable.’
I arrived at Kensington Palace. Her butler opened the door and said, ‘Mrs Marks, welcome to Kensington Palace. The Princess of Wales is waiting for you.’ I felt, Oh my goodness, this is really quite something. It was fantastic. Diana came bouncing down. So I curtsied and she said, ‘Oh, that’s not necessary at all, but how lovely of you.’ And she threw her arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘Welcome to my home.’
Lucia was right. Diana put me at ease completely, and we chatted so intensely for three hours, it was quite lovely.
Marks would stay at the Lanesborough Hotel, on the southern fringe of Hyde Park. Discreet lunch parties were a speciality.
The first time she came in a little Ford Escort. When the car arrived I said, ‘Oh my goodness, she’s cancelled.’ And of course she was crouched down in the back, and she sat up and there were no reporters, she looked round and she was so surprised and I said, ‘See, it can be done.’
The two subsequently saw a lot of each other on the American dinner circuit.
She would call me after the various galas in the United States, and we would dissect everything that had gone on. We would laugh so hard about who was wearing what. She was just like somebody who had gone to a party and afterwards wanted to discuss it with one of their friends.
Soon Diana was sharing everything with Lana Marks – including her continued ill feeling towards Camilla Parker Bowles, who was now being subtly rehabilitated in the British press with the help of Charles’s press officers.
Diana’s way of dealing with it was putting an unflattering cartoon of Camilla in her bathroom. She did the same later on with Elton John when she had the disagreement with him. She said, ‘Oh, he’s in the bathroom with Camilla.’
* * *
Jane Atkinson was less interested in becoming Diana’s friend.
I could see that there was a temptation to get sucked into the whole personal vortex that surrounded the Princess. She was very informal and very amiable and very charming. But I rationalised to myself that I really wanted this to be a professional relationship only. I really didn’t want to become a confidante.
But Anthony Holden did not see the darker side of life at Kensington Palace.
Diana’s apartments in Kensington Palace were immensely relaxed and the atmosphere was almost festive. She had a great succession of people there, very informal.
I arrived in my battered blue Mondeo and she skipped out, it was the school holidays, the children skipped past the car too. I made a feeble attempt to lock it and she said, ‘I don’t think that’ll be necessary around here. There are policemen in every bush.’ The relaxed naturalness of it was something I’d never encountered in any other royal residence.
I asked her at my last lunch if she ever thought she would remarry and she said, ‘Yes, if I can find somebody who understands what I’m about,’ so that gave me the chance to say, ‘Well, what are you about?’ And she said, ‘I’m about caring. I thought I’d married a man first time around who cared about caring but I was wrong.’ Put like that it sounds like the quintessential Di – stage Di, as it were – but two-thirds of her meant it.
* * *
Diana and her sons went to stay at Lord Palumbo’s house in Paris. They flew by private jet and for two days were completely unrecognised. They wandered around and did ordinary tourist things – went up the Eiffel Tower, ate ice cream in the Bois de Boulogne. On the third and final day of her long weekend she was spotted, inside the Louvre, looking at a Matisse exhibition. From then on she was shadowed everywhere.
We ate in a café, and the best table was in the window and she wanted to sit there. The problem with sitting in the window was that you overlooked the street and somebody could see you. So she got over that by pulling the curtain across her.
The press by that time were outside on their motor scooters, but the curtain was drawn and they couldn’t be quite sure that she was there. But at the end she just pulled the curtain back and they knew very well that she was there. Then when we left the café, the whole horde of photographers were waiting. It was a sort of little cat-and-mouse game she was playing – a tease really, I think.
We went to Notre Dame and she arrived
in a really grumpy mood. Of course, as soon as she went into it, somebody spotted her and immediately there were fifty or sixty people around her, some of them trying to kiss her hand and so on. And the grumpiness left, it was as though the spotlight had gone on and she became animated and full of laughter.
* * *
One day Jane Atkinson was telephoned by a contrite photographer.
He rang me to apologise. He had followed her to and from a private lunch, and had driven his scooter very close to the car and shouted at her through the car window in the hope of getting a picture of her crying or a picture of her snarling at him, and he was very upset by her reaction and he rang me, and asked me to apologise for him.
Jayne Fincher had become so sickened by the behaviour of the paparazzi that she decided to do something about it. She recruited a group of photographers into an unofficial corps, like the press corps at the White House in Washington, with the aim of producing its own code of conduct and penalties for those who stepped out of line.
We asked the Palace if they could assist us, so if people did paparazzi pictures they would be excluded from official jobs, trips and photo calls on royal property. It seems logical to me: if somebody abuses you, you don’t invite them in for a cup of coffee the next day.
Fincher is convinced that if a handful of photographers had been refused accreditation for a big royal trip – their ‘bread-and-butter work’ – then it would have made them and their colleagues think twice before chasing Diana down the street again. But Buckingham Palace staff said that they couldn’t help.
I don’t really know why they couldn’t, I never really got to the bottom of that. So nothing was done. They said we had to police it ourselves. Of course, we couldn’t police other photographers, it wasn’t for us to do that. So the whole thing fell apart.