by Andrew Marr
The Prince may have been chastened but he was not deflected. He continued to push the cause of small business and regeneration, particularly in some of the more deprived black areas, and badgered Mrs Thatcher to meet minority community leaders, which she eventually did, though no major initiative followed. During these years, his office was growing in size, he had established his own country base at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, and he was beginning to take a closer interest in the running of the huge farming estates owned by the Duchy of Cornwall. More and more time was spent at the private meetings between Buckingham Palace staff and Downing Street discussing and divining the thinking of the Prince of Wales. The Queen, however, kept herself well away from the controversies of the high noon of Thatcherism. To this day we have no knowledge about whether she sympathized with ‘the Lady’ or her critics in the European Union; and whether she had real qualms about the loss of British – that is, her – sovereignty to a Brussels-led super-state. She may have persuaded many leftish and liberal observers that, deep down, the monarch was no Thatcherite. The latex-puppet satirists of Spitting Image showed her with a Socialist Workers Party badge and a bust of Lenin, which was a good joke. The poor state of the Opposition led many to believe that, in some obscure way, the Crown was a buffer to the Crown’s ministers, yet there was no hard evidence for this at all. The drama and sadness when Mrs Thatcher lost her job, in a giant public humiliation, evoked the Queen’s strong sympathy.
The Storm Breaks
When a young diplomat called Robin Janvrin joined the Palace press office in the spring of 1987, after helping organize the Queen’s 1983 visit to India, he could have expected a relatively easy time ahead. There were overseas problems inside the Commonwealth, but in Britain these seemed golden years for the royal family. The press was still entranced as well as obsessed by the spectacle of Charles and Diana. Princes William and Harry were toddlers and their mother no longer looked so gaunt or unhappy as she once had. The royal couple had performed brilliantly as a pair during a tour of the Arabian Gulf the previous autumn and would dazzle the media again during their visit to Australia the following January, for the country’s two hundredth anniversary. Prince Andrew had married an old acquaintance of Diana’s, Sarah Ferguson, who, with a polo connection to the Royals through her father, seemed eminently suitable. She was almost instantly written into the newspapers’ Windsor soap opera as the cheerful, unstuffy royal recruit, known as ‘Fergie’, a ‘pal’ for Diana and a breath of fresh air. When he married in July 1986, Andrew became Duke of York, a title with special meaning for the Queen and Queen Mother since it had been George VI’s, and his father’s too. Some of those close to the family believe that Prince Andrew, despite his occasional scrapes, has always been the Queen’s favourite. Watching the two of them together joking and gossiping, one can easily believe it.
This seemed a time of Windsor renewal and optimism. The mood of self-confidence was summed up by the decision to make a television show for 1987 under the direction of Prince Edward, the youngest of the Queen’s children and an enthusiast about the world of broadcasting. It’s a Royal Knockout would reveal the younger generation romping and cavorting with celebrities – Rowan Atkinson, Meat Loaf, Barbara Windsor – for charity. That was the idea. Senior courtiers, including the Queen’s private secretary William Heseltine, objected but were overruled. The press declared that the resulting television show was awful. Princess Anne was particularly embarrassed and Prince Edward, confronted by derisive newspapermen, walked angrily out of the subsequent press conference. This ought to have been a warning sign of the dangers of playing a media game, of letting the floodlights in upon magic, without very careful preparation. It ought to have alarmed courtiers about changed generational attitudes more than it did. ‘There was a general feeling that if it’s for charity, it’s OK. Frankly, we had got cocky,’ says one of those involved.
Behind the scenes, as the world now knows, a very different story had been unfolding, which would embroil the House of Windsor in its worst time since the abdication crisis and turn these years at Buckingham Palace into a time when desperate fire-fighting almost overwhelmed reform. The Queen had been puzzled by Diana’s moodiness and odd behaviour but she and Prince Philip had done their best to welcome her into the family. This was not working. Charles and Diana were deeply unhappy, going through the long misery of a marriage that was failing. Both were having affairs. Charles was deeply involved with his original love, Camilla Parker Bowles, using aristocratic retreats and discreet friends to fix their trysts. Diana had employed James Hewitt, a soldier, and later James Gilbey, a car salesman, as solace for her loneliness. Terrible rows between Prince and Princess went on, sometimes in the comparative privacy of Highgrove, the Prince of Wales’s Gloucestershire retreat, sometimes in front of gossipy outsiders. There were rumours and echoes of the trouble but it remained sufficiently vague for the Queen and Duke to be able to ignore what was happening.
According to Jonathan Dimbleby, author of Charles’s biography, neither of his parents raised the marital problems, or Diana’s behaviour, with him. A book by the journalist Anthony Holden, which told some of the story in 1988, had been brushed aside. There was at the Palace a not unreasonable feeling that many marriages went through difficult times and that it would probably all blow over. ‘I don’t think one could overestimate the drama of the relationship between the Prince and Princess of Wales; everybody knew there were problems but no one believed that it was going to end as it did,’ says one senior figure. Another adds that soon the Palace officials were ‘shell-shocked’ by the media fall-out and barely able to look ahead, never mind plan.
Everything finally spilled into the open during 1992. The year began in January with old but embarrassing pictures being published showing the Duchess of York on holiday with a Texan friend, Steve Wyatt. They were not explicit but laid bare how distant her marriage to Prince Andrew, who was endlessly away on his naval duties, had become. Prince Andrew soon told his mother that his marriage was over. The worse story to come was prefigured with more press photos, this time of Diana alone and lonely during a visit to India, famously in front of the Taj Mahal, that monument to married love. She had a keen eye for an image and had effectively used the press photographers to send a public message about her inner feelings. In March came the formal announcement that the Yorks were to separate and the following month the announcement that Princess Anne, the most private and hard-working of the Queen’s children, and her husband Mark Phillips were to divorce. All this was very bad. But the real disasters for the family began with the publication of Andrew Morton’s book Diana, Her True Story. This started with a serialization in the Sunday Times, which created a media firestorm. The book changed everything. Because Diana had collaborated with the writer, not simply with photographers, she had smashed all the old codes of privacy.
Had the Prince and Princess of Wales experienced their marital troubles twenty years earlier, it is possible they would have been ignored by the media and been given time to try to sort them out in the deep quiet of their own home. By the 1980s that reticence was impossible to imagine, particularly given the readiness of the Princess to spill the beans. She had grown up in the new celebrity-driven media climate, in which public voyeurism and the exhibitionism of the famous were lolling on the same sofa, two kissing cousins. The deadly urge to be ‘understood’ was one she found irresistible. Later even Prince Charles, needled and jabbed all his life by a half-amused, half-censorious press, would decide he wanted his side of the story told. The tale of their marital crisis broke at a time when the press and public wanted a diversion. Britain was in the teeth of a recession, governed by a prime minister in trouble. Though John Major had confounded the pundits and won a clear mandate on a big national vote, by April 1992 he was working with a slim Commons majority and a divided party. It was all rather grey and depressing.
There are some periods in the Queen’s story so momentous that they have to be given special treatment. 1992 i
s remembered by Palace officials as the worst time in the history of the modern monarchy; worse even than the ominous-seeming days after the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Twenty years on, it is possible to see more clearly what she wryly described at the time as her ‘annus horribilis’. The sequence of family break-ups; an increasingly intrusive and unforgiving press; the bad luck of the Windsor Castle fire which fuelled public debate about the royal finances; and a government that was too weak and unpopular to offer much help to a Queen in difficulty – this was very bad luck. One or two of these events could have been managed easily enough but, like the famous ‘perfect storm’, each amplified the rest. And this multiple crisis seemed to have fallen upon the Queen, if not quite out of a clear blue sky, at least out of a typically English one of light clouds and sunny spells. In fact it was the culmination of problems reaching back through the previous two decades.
One was the self-written mission statement of the Windsor dynasty. Marriage had been at the cornerstone of the Queen’s Christian mission since she addressed the Mothers’ Union rally of young wives at Westminster in 1949. It is worth recalling her words at the time: ‘We can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today.’ She followed them with a trenchant attack on materialism and selfishness. These days, it takes a stretch of the imagination to see that post-war, austerity-shadowed Britain as a place of self-indulgence or conspicuous greed, but emphasizing the sanctity of marriage probably seemed a safe enough message in 1949. As we saw earlier, it formed an important subtext to the Coronation four years later. In the early years of her marriage the Queen had been a ‘fairy-tale princess’ in her own right and, as she bore children, she continued to be portrayed as the ideal of young British motherhood. Presenting the royal family as an emblem of personal moral rectitude had built on the close ‘we four’ unity of George VI’s time. It made the royal family a social example as well as a constitutional mechanism – its political role has never been enough for true monarchism to thrive. In the early years of the Queen’s reign, all this was easy to explain. Divorcees were kept well away from the royal enclosure at Ascot or royal garden parties. Even Princess Margaret had been barred from marrying her first love on straightforwardly traditionalist grounds.
Yet within a few years of that stern decision standards were visibly slipping and more than forty years later the Windsors had been as afflicted by changed attitudes to fidelity as many other British families. The Queen’s wide-eyed, serious-looking children had grown into adults struggling with old human dilemmas about how to be happy. Sexual frankness, the pill, society scandals and relaxations of the divorce law were pushing Britain away from the Christian certainties of the Mothers’ Union and towards a world in which a good sex life was being treated as virtually a human right. Once, the moneyed and aristocratic world had tended to view lovers and adultery as a price worth paying when appearances needed to be kept up. Something of those blasé male attitudes persisted among older Royals such as Lord Mountbatten, who is said to have helped Prince Charles with early trysts. Now, what had seemed to their parents wise discretion looked to a new generation mere hypocrisy. Let it all hang out. The post-1960s morality of authenticity, openness and ‘being true to yourself’ were pushing aside tact, restraint and discretion.
Alongside this had come that utterly changed mood in the press. Buckingham Palace people have tended to blame the ‘Republican and vulgarian’ Rupert Murdoch for this. Not quite so: it is true that his Sun and Sunday Times newspapers were the most aggressive tormentors of monarchy in this period, closely followed by his News of the World (R.I.P.), but mockery and intrusive reporting only sold newspapers because public taste had grown coarser, or at least less deferential. The Sun’s Kelvin Mackenzie might make menacing jokes about ‘whacking the Germans’ (by which he meant the Windsors) but other editors were also combining fawningly obsequious leader columns and savagely destructive news attacks. The Queen herself was almost always kept above the fray, occasionally lampooned for not paying taxes, gently mocked by cartoonists, but in general seen as beyond reach. Her children, however, had been demoted to the level of celebrities, meaning they took their place in the endless ‘set ’em up, knock ’em down’ game which also chewed up and spat out rock musicians, actresses and television stars. They have developed their own responses. One reads attentively through stories about himself, noting error after error – but then admits to turning the page and reading about someone else with cheerful credulity – ‘No! they didn’t?’ Another says briskly: ‘Just never read it. Life’s too short.’
However persecuted members of the royal family feel, the British press had reverted to its oldest traditions, which are robustly scurrilous. The comparatively self-censoring and high-minded newspapers of the 1930s through to the late 1950s, which the Queen and Duke had grown up reading, were the product of an abnormally serious geopolitical time. Now once more politicians were being splattered with dirt, cackled at and abused – and so with anyone else who caught an editor’s eye. Murdoch had only changed the economics, by breaking the print unions, and returning an invigorated press to its pungent origins. What followed in the twenty-first century was a Murdoch press – and other newspapers too – swollen by power and riding for a fall, which duly came with the phone-hacking scandal.
Meanwhile, as Andrew Morton’s book came out, Murdoch ensured maximum publicity and maximum damage. Morton, an urbane former tabloid reporter, had written an account of serial attempted suicides by the Princess, including when she was pregnant with the heir to the throne, and of self-mutilation, wrist-slashing and bulimic vomiting. He portrayed a marriage dying because of Charles’s infidelity, a collapse hastened by the coldness and mental cruelty of the Windsors. In that, it was a brutal, passionate, full-frontal (and unfair) attack on the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, portraying them as dysfunctional to the point of inhumanity. Pacily written and detailed, its most sensational claims were filleted and repeated (they hardly needed to be hyped) by the Sunday Times. Millions of people, and many other journalists, simply did not believe them. They were ‘too much’. They could not be true. But before the newspaper published, on 7 June 1992, its editor Andrew Neil had been convinced by Morton that not only was his book based on a series of reliable, and sworn, statements by friends of the Princess, but that she had directly authorized their passing on to the writer.
The final decision to publish had been agreed by Andrew Knight, the News International boss in Britain, and by the company’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, himself. It was seen at the time, and has been since, as a plot directed at the institution of the monarchy. Again, no. Murdoch may be no friend of the royal family nor indeed of other British institutions, but this was finally a decision for his editor. Andrew Neil published because this was a huge story, which would sell a lot of newspapers. He was an experienced man, who had been editor for nearly a decade and was fully aware of the storm he was sailing into.
To start with, the Prince decided not to hit back. He wanted to believe that his wife was not involved, or at least that she had been betrayed by blabbermouthed friends. As the storm howled, the Palace had no plan to respond with. There was nothing to say. Its first move was to downplay and in part deny what Morton was saying, encouraging Lord McGregor, the then chairman of the toothless Press Complaints Commission, to protest at the ‘odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls in a manner that adds nothing to legitimate public interest in the heir to the throne’. Fine-sounding words. McGregor had uttered them after checking with the Queen’s private secretary Sir Robert Fellowes, who was also the Princess’s brother-in-law. Diana had not been the source for the book, had she? Diana assured Fellowes that she had not been involved. But she had deceived this upstanding and old-fashioned royal servant. She had passed the key material to Morton. Later, she barely tried to deny it. She staged a public meeting with a former flatmate who was one of M
orton’s key witnesses – like the Taj Mahal photograph by Arthur Edwards, this was a blatant hand-signal to the public about what was really going on. Then, when asked by the Queen’s press secretary to sign a statement repudiating the book, she refused to do so. Fellowes, whom the Queen had known since he was a small boy, had been put in an impossible position. He apologized to McGregor and honourably offered to resign. Wisely, the Queen turned him down.
As other editors attacked Andrew Neil for irresponsibility, intrusion and almost everything else running up to high treason, the Princess of Wales had to face the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and her husband in private. She was fixated by what had gone wrong in her marriage, ‘the star in her own private movie’ as one observer put it, and had not perhaps realized how deep her treachery seemed to the older Royals. Prince Philip, by the accounts of those close to the family at the time, worked very hard to help the errant Princess and find ways to mend the marriage. He wrote her long and kind, perceptive letters, which she then showed to friends and complained about. The Duke’s letters were later stolen and published.
Diana was also involved in a detailed correspondence with the Queen Mother, who had many reasons to understand her plight, having been brought into the royal family as a titled commoner herself, and who had suffered setbacks in her early years. Sadly, the whole correspondence has been destroyed. Princess Margaret spent an entire week burning letters and other papers in an effort, she told friends, to clear out the chaotic and ‘hopeless’ state of her mother’s writing room. It was filled with attaché cases overflowing with letters. Princess Margaret had asked the Queen Mother: ‘Do you really want to keep these old things?’ and, getting a non-committal response, had set to with the help of rubber gloves, plastic bin bags, and a pinafore, collecting a treasure-trove of royal history and burning it in Kensington Palace’s private gardens. Among the items thought to have been destroyed was the manuscript of an ode to the Queen Mother by Benjamin Britten. One writer asked Princess Margaret if by any chance she had found any letters from him? Oh yes, she replied. And had she burned them? Oh yes.