by Andrew Marr
Even in 1995 Blair felt the Queen had good cause to be worried about Diana, an ‘unpredictable meteor’ in the Windsors’ ‘predictable and highly regulated ecosystem’. Diana was trying to radicalize the image of the monarchy, he thought, rather as he was trying to change the image of Britain: ‘For someone as acutely perceptive and long-termist about the monarchy and its future as the Queen, it must have been deeply troubling.’ The Queen knew the monarchy had to both stand for tradition and also evolve, but in a steady and controlled way. In Diana’s case, manipulating what used to be called Fleet Street was like a child in a pedalo trying to land a shark. She could out-picture and out-smart Prince Charles during private week-by-week competitions for coverage. But when stories of her possessive and aggressive behaviour towards one married man hit the papers, she promptly went to war to defend herself – and lost. Then came a book based on letters to her earlier lover James Hewitt, soon known in press shorthand as Love Rat, and stories about other liaisons.
To try to turn the tables on Prince Charles and those in the media who had decided she was unhinged and dangerously manipulative, Diana decided to allow Martin Bashir of the BBC’s Panorama programme to interview her in November 1995. It was a decisive moment. She had been advised against it by almost every one of the friends she had consulted. It was kept secret from royal circles; the BBC director general John Birt did not even tell his chairman, Lord Hussey, whose wife was a close friend of the Queen. Birt, who went on to work for Tony Blair, later said that the interview ‘marked the end of the BBC’s institutional reverence, though not its respect, for the monarchy’.7 After the recording, Diana informed the Queen that she had been interviewed, though gave no further details. The broadcast went out on Charles’s birthday. It was watched by 23 million viewers.
In it, she cast doubt on the Queen’s competence in handling her relationship with her people and suggested that Prince Charles might not be able to adapt to being King. Switching between third and first person – always an interesting foible, and one that prime ministers tend to share – Diana said: ‘She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem. I’ll fight to the end because I believe that I have a role to fulfil, and I’ve got two children to bring up.’ (Diana had played her good mum card often with photographers, taking the boys to theme parks or films: how she thought it was consonant with displaying her marital woes to the world, while they were left at school to deal with the consequences, is mysterious.) After careful practice, she had a series of devastating one-liners to deliver to the British public, most famously about there ‘being three of us in this marriage’ and wanting in the future to be ‘a queen of people’s hearts’. She admitted to her adulterous affair with James Hewitt but was not asked about others. Her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, who had been trying to rebuild bridges with the royal family, resigned from his job shortly afterwards.
The Bashir interview, certainly one of the television events of that decade, was an explosive upping of the ante and a direct challenge to the Queen, as well as to her son. In its immediate aftermath, large majorities in favour of Diana were recorded by polling companies. She seemed to have ‘won’. She continued on the attack by libellously mocking Legge-Bourke and refusing to attend the family Christmas at Sandringham. The Queen decided that things had gone too far and that Charles and Diana should divorce. She had talked to the prime minister and to the Archbishop of Canterbury. There followed a struggle over the terms. To start with, Diana refused a divorce. She had emotional support from the Duchess of York, then divorcing Prince Andrew, and the tactical support of a bright young lawyer, Anthony Julius. She demanded a huge, lump-sum settlement of £17 million, plus high annual support, and wanted too to keep the honorific title Her Royal Highness. Though ‘HRH’ does not mean anything legally, it is a mark of closeness to the Queen, reserved for inner members of the family only. Losing it meant she would be formally cast out and would not, for instance, have to be invited to state occasions. Eventually she won on the money and lost on the HRH. The settlement, formalized in July 1996, forced the Prince of Wales to borrow money from his mother to give Diana complete financial independence. It also gave them both something they had not had for many years, the chance of personal happiness.
Diana had made clear her ambition to be a rival, unofficial ‘royal’, and still had plenty of media and public support behind her. She would be able to marry whomever she chose, and of course that person would then have a family link to the British monarchy. The first such lover was an eminent Pakistani heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan, who ended the relationship. The second was Dodi al-Fayed, son of the maverick, foul-mouthed Egyptian owner of Harrods. Diana returned quickly to her high-profile charity work with Aids and leprosy victims and campaigning against landmines in Africa – she had told Blair, with icy calculation, that she had ‘gone for the caring angle’ – and continued to glow as a global star wherever she appeared. She was ready to make political mischief, telling anyone who would listen that Charles would never be King and that the Royals were in trouble.
At a time when Labour was making much of sinking the Royal Yacht and Blair’s ‘modernization’ theme could clearly embrace the monarchy, this caused real anxiety at the Palace. Yet Diana’s position was not as strong as it appeared to nervous courtiers. Charles was now openly being seen with Camilla Parker Bowles, who had divorced. Many felt she could never be Queen. Many felt they could not marry. The Queen herself bided her time. According to one of her advisers, there was a lot of private discussion around 1993–4 about Camilla’s future role and ‘how much things could or could not be acknowledged.’ At all events, it was clear that Charles felt liberated too and that the Windsors felt they had survived a series of devastating shocks. But of those shocks, by far the worst was still to come and Diana would not be there to watch it unfold.
Diana’s death in a Paris tunnel was an accident. Human frailty and greed were to blame, embracing the driver of her car and the paparazzi harassing her and Dodi al-Fayed from motorbikes. She was not murdered. She was not the target of shadowy forces, manipulated from Buckingham Palace, MI6 or the moon. How can we be so sure? It is hard to prove a negative. It is also possible that Harold Wilson was a Russian spy; that the Twin Towers were brought down by the CIA; and that Scientologists are in possession of an important truth. But so much effort has been expended to try to turn the events of that dreadful evening into a conspiracy story, without a shred of evidence, that level-headed people must conclude ‘it ain’t so’. Nobody who has seen Buckingham Palace actually at work could believe that the Duke of Edinburgh, say, could order any government body to do anything at all.
The conspiracy theories about Diana’s death do reflect two realities, however. The first is that she was much loved by millions of people, who had taken her side in the media war with the Windsors. The second is that her death removed a nagging problem for the British monarchy. Had Diana lived, it is likely that her star would have gently and slowly faded and that she would have lived the life of many wealthy and glamorous women who are not members of the royal family. It would have made her former husband’s remarriage harder, however, and possibly have prevented it. And on past form, she would been unable to resist taking sly pot-shots at Buckingham Palace, or offering unhelpful ‘advice’. Marrying a Muslim would probably not have been a problem. Apart from anything else, there are few white Christians as sympathetic to Islam as Prince Charles himself.
All of which is speculation, because Diana died. Her death on 31 August 1997 shook the British so hard that many became very slightly unhinged. It was a death of such a bright, vivid life; it happened in such a grisly way; and it came so much out of the blue, that it produced anger as well as shock. If anyone was a proper target for the anger, it was the media who had made such a lucrative market in Diana pictures that photographers would do almost anything to get them. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, photographers were spat on and their editors abused. But it is only a short step from blaming the newspapers to bla
ming the people who buy them for just those kind of stories; and that means millions of the very people who were angriest. Much the same could be said about phone-hacking.
Psychologically, it was therefore unsurprising that the anger was turned towards a different target. Who had been Diana’s enemies in life? Who had stripped her of her royal title? Who had she repeatedly complained of as cold and heartless? The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had tried to save their son’s marriage. So had the Queen Mother. Diana was hardly guiltless. No matter. In a remarkably short space of time the Queen herself became the focus of anger. This was something that had never happened in her reign – not even when she had made mistakes, such as not going early to the scene of the Aberfan disaster. We should not overstate this. The anger was felt by a lot of people, who expressed it right in the centre of London to the world’s media, who were themselves looking to shift any blame. But away from the flower-bedecked streets, calmer and kinder judgements were being made.
For a while, however, the public mood felt mutinous. The queen of people’s hearts had become the anti-queen of the streets. The real Queen was at Balmoral with her husband and their grandsons during those first days. They had taken the children for the Sunday church service at Crathie as usual and the whole inner core of the royal family gathered to help. The boys were talked to, and walked with, and kept well away from television, newspaper or radio reports that would have upset them. Princess Anne was particularly helpful but so was the Duke. A cocoon was put around the grief-stricken children. Throughout her adult life, the Queen had had to put up with people criticizing her for not being an active enough parent. Her critics were often the same people who would have criticized her had she failed to carry out the full round of British and Commonwealth duties. Now she was ignoring media-stoked demands for her presence in London, to join in a kind of state wake, so that she could concentrate on her grandchildren. What was the point of leaving Scotland to go to a closed Palace behind shuttered windows, she asked rather sharply, when she could be looking after the boys?
It should be said that, according to her family, the Queen had taken with great enthusiasm to the role of grandmother, one which had become more important because of the breakdown in her oldest son’s marriage. Like many others she missed the children who had fled the turreted nest. Princess Anne says of her mother that, having been at the stage ‘when you think you can’t get the children out of the house quickly enough . . . you suddenly realize how quiet it is, and I think she quite missed that part of having children, so the grandchildren were very much enjoyed, all of them’. They, and the various nieces and nephews, had delighted in the same places the Queen had loved as a child and had taken longer than her own children to distinguish between the Queen and the woman who was their grandmother. (Now, said Princess Anne, herself a recent grandmother, the Queen is ‘curious and delighted’ to have a great granddaughter, ‘but I think it may be a little while before we discover what it means’.)
Down in London in 1997 Blair and his media team were watching with alarm. Blair wrote: ‘The outpouring of grief was turning into a mass movement for change. It was a moment of supreme national articulation and it was menacing for the royal family. I don’t know what would have happened if they had just kept going as before. Possibly nothing, but in the eye of that storm, unpredictable and unnerving as it was, I couldn’t be sure.’8 That is quite something: a prime minister who half-thought the monarchy itself was tottering. Blair identified himself emotionally with people who, when things were done by the book, ‘couldn’t give a damn about “the book” . . . in fact, thought “the book” had in part produced the chain of events that led to Diana’s death . . . Public anger was turning towards the royal family.’ Meanwhile the Queen’s private secretaries, Fellowes and Janvrin, were in close touch with Blair’s Downing Street office as they arranged for Diana’s body to be brought back and began to discuss funeral arrangements. During long phone calls about how to arrange a suitable service at Westminster Abbey and what the role of Princes William and Harry should be, the Duke was angrily protective of the boys’ interests.
Buckingham Palace still expresses private irritation at the behaviour of Prince Charles’s spokesman at the time, Mark Bolland, who seemed to the Queen’s advisers to be briefing that, had it not been for the Prince of Wales, there would have been no appropriate or special arrangements made. By then there had been quite a history of bickering and icy silences between the rival courts. In fact it was the Queen’s team who arranged a special flight to bring back Diana’s body and who quickly realized that any notion held by the Spencers that this might be a limited, private funeral was impractical. Things seemed to be under control. Lord Charteris, that wise old hand, called up his successor, Robin Janvrin, to congratulate him: ‘You’re getting this about right.’ It was not so. The advisers were slow to grasp the scale of public anger. Alastair Campbell, always alert to a new mood in the media, telephoned the Palace to warn: ‘I don’t know what those journalists are up to but it’s something to do with the flagpole.’ This was a small but telling issue. Protocol and long tradition spoke with one voice. Only the Queen’s flag, the Royal Standard, flew over Buckingham Palace; and then only when the Queen was there. (It shoots up as she passes through the gates, a ritual of careful observation and timing conducted by the Queen’s Flag Sergeant, a soldier from the Household Cavalry.) When she was not there, no flag flew. The Royal Standard never flew at half mast – or only in theory, if a dead monarch was in the Palace, and the new one was not yet present. The Union flag was not flown.
This made no allowance for the demands of public grief, 1997-style, given focus by television reports and provocative newspaper headlines. The naked flagpole was held to symbolize a chilly monarch. Tear up the stuffy protocol, ordered the Sun. Eventually the Queen asked that the Union flag should go up, and fly at half mast: thus a new tradition has been set, for it flies generally there now, when the Queen is away, and is lowered as a mark of mourning, as for instance after the Twin Towers attacks in New York. If you want an illustration of the speed with which the House of Windsor can change tradition to fit a mood, look no further. As huge crowds gathered from Westminster to Buckingham Palace, and at Kensington Palace too, leaving bundles of cellophane-wrapped flowers, impromptu shrines, candles, teddy bears and handwritten cards, courtiers watched and waited. These were strange, strange days. Sober-looking men who had queued for hours to sign the condolence book at St James’s Palace reported that Diana was ‘appearing’ in a painting of King Charles I. Coachloads of people were arriving from all over the country and simply camping out. An undercurrent of hysteria showed itself in the raw and weeping faces and expressions of anger.
One of the Queen’s advisers remembered the sound of the plastic wrapping on the flowers outside rattling in the wind at night; ‘it was the most sinister noise’. Another returned from holiday to help and found ‘the nearest to a revolutionary atmosphere that I have ever witnessed. The silence of this extraordinary crowd milling around Buckingham Palace was dreadful. It was a difficult time internally at Buckingham Palace, and a terrible time outside it.’ Tony Blair had himself made a pitch-perfect emotional television speech on his way to church at Trimdon in his constituency: ‘She was the People’s Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.’ But New Labour did nothing except try to help. At this critical moment, there seems to have been no whiff of republicanism from Number Ten. Today courtiers remain grateful, including to the controversial Campbell. ‘It was no part of his job to defend the royal family,’ says one.
In his autobiography, Blair recounts a strange scene, the last time he had met Diana, when she had come to Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, in July 1997. Blair had invited her to see what formal role she could play for his ‘new Britain’ – wary he might have been, but he was still enthralled and wanted some of the Diana stardust to rub off. She brought Prince William, and the heir to the th
rone was obliged to play football with the police, staff and Blair family on the back lawn. ‘Poor bloke,’ reflected Blair, ‘I think he wondered what on earth she had brought him for and he didn’t much want to play football but, like a good sport, he did.’ Meanwhile, Blair and Diana had walked alone in the grounds while he challenged her about Dodi al-Fayed, whom he had not met but felt ‘uneasy’ about. Their conversation was in parts uncomfortable, but the visit had ended warmly. It is a rare glimpse of the role that Diana might have been edging towards had she lived and it puts Blair’s Trimdon tribute in a slightly different light. Blair used ‘the people’s’ in other descriptions too and clearly felt a strong sense of identification with a celebrity being hunted by media critics. Either you attempt to feed the beast, as he put it, or the beast eats you.
Courtiers were watching from inside Buckingham Palace as the Queen, the Duke and the young princes arrived from Scotland. From upper windows they could see the scene: ‘As the Queen came down in a car you could hear the crowd beginning to clap, and it was a bit ragged at first, and then it became warmer.’ When the Queen and Duke came inside they were talking about the crowd and the flowers, like anyone else, remarking on the strangeness of the scene and what seemed like so many ‘Daily Express readers’ – the heart of traditional Middle England royalism, on the march. Almost as soon as the Queen was back, the mood shifted again. A girl had come forward with flowers as she walked through Kensington Palace. ‘Are these for Diana?’ the Queen had asked. ‘No, Ma’am, for you.’
The Queen’s speech on the eve of Diana’s funeral was untheatrical, calm, even cool. She does not ‘emote’. No gallery has yet been found she will play to. But she tried to explain in a way she never had before. Everyone had been trying ‘in our different ways’ to cope. Among feelings of shock, disbelief and anger there was also ‘concern for those who remain’. She looked her subjects in the camera’s eye: ‘So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.’ She then did what was needed, with a graceful and Christian tribute to Diana as ‘an exceptional and gifted human being’ who in good times and bad was able to smile and laugh, and inspire others by her kindness. There were, for those who listened carefully, slight barbs about the millions ‘who never met her, but felt they knew her’. This was surely both an acknowledgement of her star quality and a hint that public Diana and private Diana were not quite the same. The Queen had been at Balmoral, she said, where ‘we have all being trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered’. Yet the overwhelming message of the short speech was that the Queen had listened, understood and was doing her best to change: ‘I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.’ And she ended with a plea for unity under the Crown. Diana’s funeral was a chance ‘to show the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect’.