by Andrew Marr
Meanwhile, confronted by her heir’s broken marriage, the Queen counselled a six-month hiatus. Yet it seemed to her son that separation was inevitable. The final break came over a comparatively minor row over which parent should have the two young princes during rival weekend breaks at Sandringham and Highgrove. It would be unkind to enumerate every twist and tear-stained turn in the months that followed, in what one senior Palace official called ‘an unfolding human tragedy’, but almost nobody was able to cope. The Palace press officers and officials at the time remember feeling exhausted, beaten down and almost disorientated by the volume of criticism. ‘It was a complete feeling of being in the bunker, the original bunker mentality,’ says one. A senior official adds: ‘It was a wretched business . . . It went on and on. It was worse than 1997. People got a bit punch-drunk and it stopped one thinking positively.’ How could things get worse?
On 20 November 1992, fire broke out in a chapel at Windsor Castle and tore through much of the most historic part of the structure, badly damaging the state dining room and three other key rooms. Paintings and other valuables were saved but beautiful and ancient furnishings and fabrics went up in smoke. ‘A horrible November afternoon, dull and drizzly and the fire roaring across, heading for the Queen’s apartments,’ remembers one senior official. ‘The next week was ghastly,’ says another. ‘The Queen was very bruised by the fire. It was her home. It was very close to her, very intimate. I remember going across the Rose Garden carrying Prince Philip’s sock drawer.’ This was the place where the Queen had grown up as a teenager and where throughout her life she had spent family weekends, entertained friends and received world leaders; it meant much more to her than Buckingham Palace, which has always been ‘the office’. She was caught by the television cameras, looking stricken. Prince Philip, who was on a visit to Argentina, did what he could to comfort her by phone. Prince Andrew helped ferry as much of the priceless collection of paintings and furniture out as he could. The fire took 250 firemen fifteen hours to control and eventually damaged a hundred rooms.
After the fire there was an immediate wave of sympathy, but soon the question was being asked, ‘Who will pay?’ The affable Heritage Secretary, Peter Brooke, prematurely announced that the taxpayer would pick up the bill for the Windsor Castle restoration, since the building had not been insured. The bill would be up to £40 million. As we have seen, both Brooke and Buckingham Palace were taken aback by the hostile public reaction. The problem was not simply a one-off decision to help out the Queen but, yet again, the longer-running issue of her wealth. The public mood was so angry that the cabinet minister Douglas Hurd felt the need to make a speech warning that the British were in danger of treating their constitutional monarchy as ‘some trifling toy’ that could be tossed about in public debate without causing it harm. The combination had become toxic. ‘Sex and money; money and sex,’ says one senior figure, ‘as in life it always is.’ Had the Morton revelations never happened, it is likely public sympathy for the Queen’s financial position would have been greater.
What had really rocked the Palace was the Princess’s decision to tell all, a tearing-up of habits of royal discretion that had lasted, with the solitary exceptions of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, for centuries. Throughout the Queen’s reign she had struggled to negotiate the boundary between public and private. We have seen how deep she felt Marion Crawford’s betrayal had been, upending her childhood in public, and how sensitive the Palace has been to the dangers of eavesdropping staff or bribe-taking footmen. To live under this degree of public curiosity must be a special kind of torment. Yet the monarchy was also in the popularity business, at a time when crowns and sceptres had lost their lustre and human stories were replacing them. So, on the one side she had been pushed by relatives, including everyone from Lord Mountbatten to Prince Edward, for more openness about ‘the real Queen’, with television companies, authors and journalists demanding to know ever more. Yet, on the other hand, ringing in her ears must have been the words of the great Victorian constitutionalist Walter Bagehot, whom she had studied as a girl and who had warned against letting too much sunlight shine on the magic.
Fewer than four weeks after the fire, on 9 December 1992, the separation of Charles and Diana was announced and John Major blandly told the House of Commons that there would be ‘no constitutional implications’. ‘The succession to the Throne is unaffected by it . . . and there is no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned Queen in due course. The Prince of Wales’s succession as head of the Church of England is also unaffected.’ Even his own staff were unimpressed. One says: ‘They were making statements such as, “She can be Queen,” which looking back was complete nonsense. In everyone’s mind there was this image of a future Coronation, with Charles and Diana arriving separately.’ At a time when the Prince was being blamed particularly for the breakdown, with Camilla Parker Bowles in the background, some MPs were deeply sceptical about his future role as head of the church. Major had worked hard, personally, on trying to bridge the rift sufficiently to ensure that the Prince and Princess still carried out some official duties together. But there was not the automatic and full-hearted support for the battered House of Windsor that would have been expected from previous governments.
This was hardly surprising. On 16 September 1992, ‘Black Wednesday’, the pound had fallen out of the European exchange rate mechanism and Major had lost his economic policy and foreign policy in one fell swoop, not to mention much of his personal authority. He had seriously considered resigning as prime minister. The Tory Party was at war with itself over the European Maastricht Treaty. As recently as 4 November Major had been contemplating resignation again before winning a Commons division on the treaty by just three votes. A Downing Street observer at the time says,
You were torn two ways. There was to some extent a normal sympathy in a Conservative government for the monarchy . . . but it was a government so battered and knocked about politically that there wasn’t spare energy, and a will to go over the top; and there was considerable fear, too much fear, of the media. So because it was a media-driven ‘annus horribilis’, Downing Street, in my view, pulled its punches and was more responsive to media criticism, for instance on tax, than another government would have been.
There is a crucial point here about the relationship between a constitutional monarch and her prime ministers. From time to time, the monarchy needs cover and support from the government of the day, just as the government of the day needs the authority of the Crown. To a large extent, they hang together. In Britain, their authorities are rarely inseparable. British monarchy is weakened by weak British governments and is given confidence by successful ones. When each week the Queen greets her prime minister, she has a vested interest in that individual doing well. Labour or Tory, it doesn’t matter. The politics and the individual policies matter less than the authority of the elected leader and thus the authority of the state which the Queen heads. It was an important piece of bad luck for the Queen that the breakdown of her heir’s marriage occurred at the same time that her government, riven by disagreements over Europe and recession, was also unpopular. And the year ended badly too. The Queen’s Christmas message was leaked and printed early in the Sun. It was indeed her ‘annus horribilis’.
This period also showed, however, that the Queen and her advisers had not lost their capacity to learn and change in response to bad times. In 1993 it was announced that to help cover the restoration costs of the Windsor fire – a massive programme supervised by Prince Philip involving rebuilding and improving parts of the ancient building, as well as straightforward restoration – Buckingham Palace would be opened regularly to the public. Tickets were priced at £8 to start with and the scheme was originally meant to last for just four years. It proved a huge success, drawing around 400,000 people a year and necessitating the development of new facilities and a better Queen’s Gallery to show some of her art collection. What had started as a stop-gap to raise cash turned i
nto a major new source of income: revenue from Windsor Castle and Holyroodhouse, both run by the Royal Collection Trust, was running at nearly £17 million a year by 2002. More important, though, is the symbolism of opening the great palaces to visitors, as so many of Britain’s country houses have been opened. What were once rather stern walls and spiked railings now welcome the curious. Chilly old Buckingham Palace sometimes now seems almost cosy. The hideous notion of allowing the public in, which once so affronted Winston Churchill, has proved uncontroversial and popular.
As the shock waves from the Morton revelations continued, however, the feud between Charles and Diana proved anything but cosy and turned even more controversial. The Prince of Wales decided to hit back through an authorized biography by his friend the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. Dimbleby had been given very deep access to the Prince, from his private diaries to long recorded interviews and state papers. The Prince of Wales threw new light on Charles’s strong political views and his unhappiness about his upbringing. Most of the immediate attention, however, was focused on the admission in the book and an accompanying television interview of his adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles and his account of the failed marriage to Diana. This was devastating and unheard of from a modern Royal. When the Queen read through the galley proofs of the book she was observed to be pink with shock and bemusement. The code of silence, even of dissimulation, when journalists were around had been central to the monarchy’s self-protection. Prince Charles’s collaboration with Dimbleby also did damage by revealing in hurtful detail his thoughts about the failure of his parents in his own upbringing, explained in paragraphs felt to be cruel. The Princess of Wales was shown as unbalanced and paranoid. That too seemed a dangerous game to get into just at the time when she appeared to be playing half the British media like saxophones. One royal servant, who has long supported and still admires the Prince, described his collaboration over the book as the single worst decision of his adult life. Yet again, the curtain had been ripped aside; but this time by a future king.
At which point, it is worth standing back and considering the forces now ranged against one another. The key advisers at Buckingham Palace were men who had had long careers as royal servants, or in Whitehall, or in the City, but who had little experience of the raw end of modern British life. Their watchwords were tact and loyalty. They saw their job as protecting a discreet and cautious Queen, who had firmly old-fashioned views, and taking direction from her husband, who for good reasons had a deep suspicion and dislike of journalists. During the good years for the monarchy they had become complacent. Nothing in their experience could have prepared them for younger members joining the family and then conspiring with the press to put the most sensitive private matters into the public arena. Yet had they been being paying attention to the fast-changing world of the media, and to the new pressures on more junior members of the royal family, they might have seen the dangers ahead. Against them were the journalists, editors and proprietors of a media world which was in competition for survival and which owed little to the British establishment. The big newspaper companies were often owned by overseas proprietors – that was not new – who did not live in Britain – which was. Their editors had little interest in honours or being associated with the monarchy. Britain had become like America, largely a money-based hierarchy. Journalists had trained on the pursuit and disembowelling of celebrities and were using new technologies to steal information.
The Lightning Strikes
There were four and a half years ahead, before Diana’s death in Paris, during which the story of the separation, then divorce, and then her other affairs, screamed from newspapers and magazines, sometimes every other day. And sometimes, every day. The Windsor dynasty was in danger of becoming a sideshow to a soap opera it had spawned and could not control. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had started by trying to reconcile Charles and Diana. Later the Queen and Duke, with the rest of the world, watched and waited to see whether a stable ‘separate but allied’ life could be sustained by their son and daughter-in-law.
One who was with the Queen at the time says, ‘I think she really did go through hell. She found Diana frightfully difficult and was terribly sad when the children were “protected” from her; and then all the tantrums at Sandringham and so forth, which she couldn’t really cope with.’ The Queen had few illusions about her son: on that subject she has often been, if not salty, then at least peppery. Lord Hurd, the former foreign secretary, said of her during the ‘annus horribilis’, ‘I was surprised by the very great frankness with which she would talk about it – the problems – and how different people were coping with them in her family. She would only talk in a group she trusted.’4 The Queen was unused to extreme displays of emotion. Aside from her father’s famous rages or ‘gnashes’, before Diana, she had simply not encountered them. Diana, showing an awesome lack of inter-generational understanding, told politicians that the Queen needed to be persuaded to be more ‘huggy’. The gap between what the actress Helen Mirren, who played the Queen in that Oscar-winning film, calls ‘the noble generation’ of buttoned-up public-service Britishness, and the country of the late twentieth century, had never seemed wider.
At any rate, Diana would not be easily controlled. After she moved out of the family home, Prince Charles’s Highgrove House, Buckingham Palace could cut her out of most royal engagements and limit her to an apartment in Kensington Palace and a modest office at St James’s Palace. They could not make her go away. Her husband’s friends and the ‘royal set’ maintained a frosty, hostile wall of turned backs and unanswered letters. But Diana had her friends too. What remained of wealthy, ‘society’ London divided into two camps, his and hers. With the boys now at boarding school Diana became isolated, lonely and dangerous. Through it all the Queen carried on with a heavy routine of the usual engagements and the formal turning of the royal year. Meanwhile, Diana’s triumphs overseas, including photogenic trips to publicize aid work in Nepal and Zimbabwe, and a notably successful visit to Paris, were rivalling, and upstaging, visits and speeches by her husband. Her office consciously tried to project her as an autonomous, alternative kind of princess, who would speak openly about her eating disorders, weep with the bereaved and clasp the sick, an emotional openness – or exhibitionism – alien to the Queen.
That would have been difficult enough. But Diana, like Charles, was searching for real love. She was furiously jealous of the boys’ nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke, and, later, obsessively interested in whether Charles would marry Camilla Parker Bowles. She began a series of affairs, some serious, others not, which had to be conducted with cloak-and-dagger secrecy but were in media terms increasingly dangerous. Partly as a result of her own complicity in Andrew Morton’s book about her, the rules of the game, always slippery, had changed. She was now considered fair game by tabloids and by foreign magazines, in ferocious competition with one another. She would leak to one journalist or editor, to find the rest of them infuriated and after her. Nobody can win that game.
Diana was a past mistress of the art of being photographed for a purpose. Newspaper photographers who had followed her and other Royals for years – the Sun’s Arthur Edwards being the first and best of them – had developed ways of working which allowed them to get good pictures without excessively harassing their targets. But now there was a new private army of freelance ‘paps’ selling their wares to the highest bidder in a global market. They had no masters who could be summoned for a dressing-down, or pleaded with by phone. Editors could use their pictures and wash their hands of the behaviour needed to get them. They were as competitively aggressive as piranhas, car-chasing motorbike boys, skilled at provocative pushing to get the right expression of rage or fear. Pictures of Diana were soon fetching so much – selling so many copies – that almost anyone seemed to be bribable.
It was a life that many Hollywood stars have coped with; but they were surrounded by regiments of goons, minders and the privacy huge wealth buys. The royal famil
y, similarly, had their palaces and protection squads. Diana had protection officers too, but was relatively exposed. She continued to believe that she could play the media. For a while it seemed she could. She invited newspaper editors, columnists and executives to Kensington Palace, asked their advice, flattered them and flirted with them. When she met the up-and-coming Labour leader Tony Blair, she boasted to him about her ability to manipulate the newspapers and even hinted she would like to help Labour with the forthcoming election. At a dinner with Blair, Alastair Campbell and mutual friends in January 1997, Diana said she had now met almost all the editors. Images were all-important. ‘You have got to touch people in pictures. They can take a lot from you, but they can never take away the pictures,’ she told them.5
For his part Blair explained that ‘compassion’ would be a key theme of the Labour campaign and said ‘we had a lot to learn from her’. He said later that he was wary of her though she offered to advise New Labour – an extraordinary act for someone in her position: ‘Occasionally she would phone and say why such-and-such a picture was rubbish or what could be done better . . . she had a complete sense of what we were trying to achieve and why.’6 It is a bizarre picture of two then glamorous figures who believed themselves to be Mistress and Master of the Media Universe, foot-nuzzling. Alastair Campbell also believed that Diana was after him, or at least bedazzled by him. There was a more important game of self-delusion going on, however, which was to believe that the world of journalism could be endlessly manipulated into giving Labour, or the Princess, flattering coverage. Both would learn the bleak truth about that, Diana before Blair.