Her Majesty

by Robert Hardman

  The most damaging result of the Dimbleby book/film, however, was that it invited some sort of response from the Princess’s side. Here was her casus belli. A year later, amid great secrecy, she prepared her riposte courtesy of the BBC and its Panorama programme. This was not to be a profile of her life and work. Whereas the Prince had been very careful to avoid any criticism of his wife in his programme, the Princess’s interview was an extended dissection of her marriage in front of a global television audience. Worse still, she cast doubts on the Prince’s prospects as King. It was time for the Queen to act. Up to this point, the Queen and Prince Philip had gone out of their way to be conciliatory to their daughter-in-law. Now, though, the Sovereign could not stand by. Not only did she write to the Prince and Princess urging them to seek a divorce but the Palace released a statement to say that she had done so. That way, there would be no funny business by the spin doctors for both parties who had been busy of late. The Queen wanted her position to be absolutely clear. Shortly afterwards, the lawyers went to work and, on 15 July 1996, their divorce was stamped in the High Court, just three months after the Duke and Duchess of York had gone through the same process.

  Despite the outward impression of business as usual, the Queen was well aware that the monarchy could not possibly stand still if it was to regain its place in the nation’s affections. However much she disliked change for change’s sake, she was mindful of a popular and oft-quoted Palace mantra, lifted from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel, The Leopard: ‘If things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.’ After all, a radical Labour government was on the horizon. The creation of the Way Ahead Group, the committee of the senior members of the Royal Family and their officials, was part of this process. Post-Panorama, the committee began addressing the most fundamental issues. Nothing was off-limits. A few weeks after the Waleses’ divorce, it convened at Balmoral to discuss issues such as male primogeniture and Catholic succession to the throne. These were matters for governments, not monarchs, to decide but the Queen and her advisers wanted to have clear, considered positions on the matters should they arise instead of being forced into knee-jerk responses by events. Staff in the Private Secretary’s Office were charged with examining every aspect of the monarchy’s work. ‘In a sense, it was an exciting time,’ a member of the team recalls. ‘It took the 1990s for us to ask ourselves: are we doing the right things?’ It also helped to maintain a sense of perspective. Charles Anson describes the mood: ‘Mary Francis [the new arrival who would rise to the position of Deputy Private Secretary] had recently been in a very senior position in the Private Office at Number Ten. She would come to the morning meeting in the Palace and ask: “Why do we spend every morning talking about Fergie?” I thought: “My God, I’ve got sucked into this as well.” It was a wake-up call. We should have been talking about what the monarchy should be doing, not how the Duchess or Diana would be hijacking the media.’

  The Queen was adamant that there should be no sense of competition with the Princess. Even so, it was sometimes hard to avoid the impression that the Princess was in competition with the monarchy. In the autumn of 1996, the Queen was due to pay a state visit to Thailand to mark the Golden Jubilee of King Bhumibol. Upon her return, the Prince of Wales was to make important inaugural royal visits to previously uncharted royal territory across Central Asia. But after the Foreign Office and the Palace had fixed the final plans, the Princess announced that she would attend a charity ball and lunch in Sydney slap bang in the middle of it all. Most of the media opted to go with her. The more conservative elements within the Palace and Parliament became increasingly alarmed as the Princess turned her attention to landmines. At the start of 1997, she was branded a ‘loose cannon’ by a junior defence minister after calling for a world ban on the weapons – and was promptly applauded by the Opposition. Her stance was very popular but, given a clear party political divide on the issue, it was an inappropriate intervention from a member of the Royal Family. Except she was no longer a member of the Royal Family and, following her divorce, was no longer styled ‘Her Royal Highness’. So what exactly was she? What sort of role should be expected of the non-royal mother of the future Sovereign? And what were the appropriate limits to her new non-royal status?

  She never had the chance to find an answer. In the early hours of 31 August 1997, she died alongside Dodi Fayed and the French chauffeur who had been driving them through Paris. The following seven days would test the monarchy to the same extent as the whole of 1992. The events of that week – the human tragedy, the hysteria directed against an absentee monarch, the tensions upon the Queen’s return and the resounding finale – have been the subject of extensive court hearings, books, documentaries and even an Oscar-winning film. What has not been heard before is the story of those who were actually on the inside. For more than ten years they have kept their counsel. Even now they remain modest, although they are quietly proud of what was achieved. ‘I was worried. I was worried,’ says Lord Airlie, who, as Lord Chamberlain, was responsible for pulling the entire funeral operation together. ‘It was a very uncomfortable time. The Windsor fire was more difficult because it went on burning in so many different areas whereas, sadly, the funeral arrangements just had to be done. To be quite honest, we hadn’t got time to think of anything else. We just got on and did it.’

  The Palace had several carefully prepared blueprints for every sort of royal funeral. Every six months there had been internal rehearsals and military-style exercises for precisely this sort of eventuality. Cut the Royal Household and it would bleed khaki. Except that, once again, the Princess defied all known categories.

  ‘We didn’t use any files,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘We didn’t look at them. I said, “No.” We started again.’

  The man with the blank sheet of paper was Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Ross, late of the Scots Guards. His official title was Comptroller, Lord Chamberlain’s Office. In practice, he was the man in charge of all royal ceremonial and pageantry.

  ‘The Princess was thirty-six years old, no longer a member of the Royal Family but never off the radar,’ says Ross. ‘And because of her immense popularity, we all underestimated everything. The first day was spent getting the Prince of Wales out to Paris and getting the Princess’s body back. And we were in completely uncharted waters because there are certain legal requirements and we had never brought a dead member of the Royal Family back to this country.’

  Having repatriated the Princess in royal style, the funeral preparations could begin in earnest. ‘We sat in Buckingham Palace until two in the morning,’ says Ross. ‘I went home to St James’s Palace and there were a thousand or so people kneeling around the Queen Victoria Memorial with candles and it was the most moving thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was an incredible atmosphere – calm and serene. That was before the media got it. Then, of course, the fury started.’

  Pent-up public emotion needed a target and an outlet. To begin with, it was directed at the paparazzi who had been pursuing the Princess’s car through Paris. But then it started to be directed at the Royal Family and the Queen herself. The Royal Family were collectively criticised for the fact that Prince William and Prince Harry had been taken to church the morning after their mother’s death, for the fact that the Princess was not mentioned during the service, for the queues to sign books of condolence at St James’s Palace and for the absence of a flag at half-mast above Buckingham Palace. There were explanations. The boys had wanted to go to church. The Church of Scotland service was a matter for the minister. As Tony Blair observes in his memoirs, A Journey, the Queen was doing what she felt was right: ‘I knew the Queen would have felt that duty demanded that the normal routine was followed. There would have been no Alastairs [as in Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary] in the entourage suggesting that possibly mentioning the tragedy might be sensible. The Queen is a genuine not an artifical person … there is no artifice in how she approaches things.’

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p; The omission of Diana’s name from the service still baffles many. But those who know the Queen would have been equally surprised had a Church of Scotland minister been instructed, at her bidding, to insert specific prayers into his service. As he explained later, he had not mentioned the Princess by name out of concern for her sons. ‘My thinking,’ the Rev Robert Sloan told reporters, ‘was that the children had been wakened just a few hours before and told of their mother’s death.’ More than a decade after the Princess’s death, the minutiae of that week continue to polarise opinion.

  The books of condolence, meanwhile, were an untested innovation; the more that people became aware of their existence, the greater the numbers wanting to sign one. As for the Palace flagpole, it could only fly the Royal Standard – and never at half-mast for anyone, the Queen included. These might have seemed minor points from the detached perspective of Balmoral but they rapidly took on totemic importance for the increasingly emotional crowds in London. Just as the issues of fire damage, tax and marital discord had been conflated into a single crisis in 1992, so these perceived slights took on far deeper significance now: here, said the critics, was proof that those ‘remote royals’ just didn’t care. The problem was compounded by a new phenomenon. The Palace had not been the focal point of twenty-four-hour rolling television news before. Without regular helpings of fresh material to digest, the media beast would continue to regurgitate old information. There was no shortage of people in Kensington Gardens and the Mall to offer opinions. And the more angry they became about a missing flag, the more it occurred to other people that, come to think of it, they, too, were cross about the flag. None of this was lost on those inside the Palace. A senior member of the Metropolitan Police team on duty that week sums up the mood: ‘In the Mall, I saw a Jesus with a crucifix on his back meet a bloke carrying a flagpole with a flag at half-mast on his back. They greeted each other like old friends and it didn’t even look unusual. That was the atmosphere we were dealing with.’ One old member of the Household believes that if the Queen had been at Windsor rather than in the Highlands it would have been a different story. ‘You can feel as if you’re in another world at Balmoral,’ he says. ‘And she was.’

  Inside the Palace that initial sense of shock on day one was soon replaced by a steely unanimity of purpose. ‘It was an occasion when people pulled together like you could never imagine,’ Sir Malcolm Ross remembers. ‘We had daily conferences with the Archbishop or his representatives, the Dean of Westminster, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, the Head of the Army and so on. Lord Airlie chaired it and was going round the table saying, “Can you do that by lunchtime today?” “Yes,” said the Commissioner. “Yes,” said the Archbishop. “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.”’ Nor was the Royal Family as detached from it all as the critics suggested. The members of the funeral committee gathered in a Buckingham Palace drawing room each morning and were regularly joined by Prince Philip on a conference telephone. As one of those present recalls: ‘Prince Philip was being a typically crisp and efficient chairman from Balmoral and saying: “Hang on, why not do this, or do that?”’

  The new Prime Minister himself was earning plaudits – even from old foes like the Daily Telegraph – for protecting the monarchy. Some had winced at Tony Blair’s demotic language in lamenting ‘the People’s Princess’ hours after her death but his stature continued to rise as he defended the Royal Family from the brickbats. It needed it. Tabloid headline writers and the left-wing broadsheet commentariat had found rare common cause. The Royal Family, they declared in increasingly shrill tones, simply did not understand modern Britain. Proclaiming the dawn of an ‘emotional revolution’, an editorial in the Independent even suggested the following: ‘What would really do the monarchy good, and show that they had grasped the lesson of Diana’s popularity, would be for the Queen and the Prince of Wales to break down, cry and hug one another on the steps of the Abbey this Saturday.’ In retrospect, it seems hilarious. At the time, less so.

  Despite his mantra of ‘New Britain’, Tony Blair realised that his primary duty was to protect ‘Old Britain’, as the monarchy was being portrayed by much of the media. At the height of the flag hysteria, he urged people to show sympathy for the Royal Family and to understand that the Windsors were ‘trying to cope in a tremendously difficult situation’. As he writes in his memoirs: ‘I really felt for the Queen.’ He describes how he worked closely with the Prince of Wales to persuade the Queen that she had to come to London, to be seen and to address the nation. Contrary to the way in which these events would be depicted in the film The Queen, the Prince of Wales played a key role in helping the monarchy turn the corner. ‘I respected her [the Queen] and was a little in awe of her,’ writes Blair. ‘But as a new Prime Minister, I didn’t know her or how she would take the very direct advice that I now felt I had to give her. So I went to Charles.’ The Prince was in full agreement with the Prime Minister and, up at Balmoral, the Queen duly concurred. It would change the national mood completely. Looking back on it all now, Blair says that the Queen ‘rightly’ viewed some of the public and media hysteria as ‘irrational’. At the same time, she came to a pragmatic view about it. ‘She completely got the fact that it had to be met, at least a little part of the way,’ says Blair. ‘And once she did, she did that very, very adroitly.’

  At the same time, though, Blair’s emissary to the Palace planning meetings was getting a mixed reception. Just five years earlier, Alastair Campbell’s ‘HM THE TAX DODGER’ story in the Mirror had left some of the Royal Household in tears. Now he was back in the role of helper – or, as his own diaries suggest, as saviour. In his view, the Palace was hopelessly out of date and out of its depth. As one of those who attended the daily meetings recalls: ‘It was the big Alastair Campbell takeover: “We’ll take it over. She was the People’s Princess” and all that.’ The Downing Street team were advocating a ‘People’s Funeral’ with the public marching behind the coffin. Campbell refers to it as his ‘Pied Piper’ idea. The police and the Royal Household were less enthusiastic. ‘There would have been a major disaster if we’d followed Campbell’s idea to have a “People’s Funeral”. His ideas were insane,’ says one of the Metropolitan Police planners. ‘The first was to have the cortege with all the people following behind. One of the officers in charge said to him, “How many people do you want to kill?” All the people would have got to Parliament Square but you can’t turn a huge crowd like that. They would have ended up spilling down on to the Underground.’ The other Downing Street suggestion was for the coffin to be carried around Trafalgar Square. The police took an equally dim view of the likely crowd surge within the square. According to Palace and police sources, Number Ten then took a back seat and left the pageantry experts to put together this historic medley of ancient and modern.

  Not so, according to Campbell’s memoirs. He acknowledges that his ‘Pied Piper’ plan was vetoed by the police but says that the Royal Family and its staff needed his ‘constant assurance that they were keeping in step’. He also quotes their repeated gratitude for all his insights. The monarchy certainly was (and still is) grateful for Downing Street’s support during one of the worst weeks of modern times. But, at times, Campbell seems to misinterpret genuine expressions of warm appreciation – which the Palace does very well – as signs of inadequacy.

  If he was unaware of the tensions he was creating, others remember things differently. ‘He was ejected,’ says one of the Palace planning team. ‘Robert Fellowes handled it beautifully and I think he took Alastair Campbell outside and effectively removed it from his grasp.’ It must have been handled very well as each side would forever after speak warmly of the other and there are no lingering resentments. In his memoirs, Blair describes Fellowes as ‘a thoroughly sensible man’, adding: ‘I don’t know what he really thought of Diana – I think he saw both sides to her, loved the side he loved and shrugged at the other – but he was a professional and as you sometimes find with well-bred upper-class types, a lot more
shrewd and savvy than he let on.’ Fellowes, in turn, would invite Campbell to the Buckingham Palace leaving party which the Queen gave him on his retirement.