‘Oh no,’ – innocently – ‘but she does seem to be having rather a lot of holidays … and we’re so busy. It just seems so unfair on everybody else …’ Her voice would trail off, leaving me to pick up a fairly typical clutch of veiled barbs:
-Charlotte is lazy. She may be taking no more than her holiday entitlement – or even less, it was not uncommon – but this inconvenient fact can be overlooked. Now, by royal command, she is lazy.
-I am incompetent. Why have I allowed a secretary to go on holiday when the diary is so busy? The fact that there is actually a lull in activity – hence the conscientious Charlotte’s decision to take leave this week – can also be overlooked. This is a pincer movement, designed to intimidate me from taking the victim’s side. Too often, I confess, I allowed it to silence me.
-The Princess, by contrast, is working very hard. You could dispute this, but only if you were ready to lose your job. In royal circles it is accepted as a matter of sacred truth that, by definition, all members of our modern royal family work terribly hard all the time – even if a cursory analysis of their daily existence might call this into question.
-She cares about the extra workload now shouldered by the other staff. Here was a classic example of ‘caring Di’ behaviour that was not quite what it seemed. By expressing concern for her remaining hard-working staff, she was actually isolating the absentee and preparing the ground for the execution to follow.
For added emphasis, the rest of the staff – even those notoriously less dedicated than Charlotte – would receive redoubled praise and interest from the Princess, now advancing on them with a careless laugh and a prepared ration of girly gossip.
It took a curious form of toadying to enjoy favours thus received, but some managed it. For most, though, it was enough just to keep your head down and hope that it was not going to be your turn as victim just yet. Perhaps it would not come at all. Such comforting thoughts came easily when the big blue eyes looked on you favourably. The gaze seemed full of trust and expectation then; quite incapable of measuring you for your professional coffin.
Being frozen out was a lingering death in which messages would be unacknowledged, memos ignored or even destroyed, and mere physical existence ‘blanked’. This was especially easy when chances to ignore a desperate bow or curtsy were so abundant. For people chosen for their sense of loyalty, it was a torture few could bear for long. Many saved the Princess the trouble of sacking them and quietly took their leave, usually with great dignity.
I looked at the unhappy secretary standing by my desk, and she looked back at me. We both knew she had done nothing to warrant her dismissal. We both knew life would be unbearable for her if she stayed. I could not contain my revulsion; I had to get outside. I took her for a walk round Green Park and asked her how the parting could be made easier for her. References, medical insurance, gratuity – I promised, and delivered, them all. Her quiet tears diminished me even further.
I ran into her again some years later. Being the sort of person she was, she had quite forgiven my part in the shameful charade. Curiously, and not untypically, she had forgiven the Princess too. It is an astonishing fact that such forgivability was freely conferred on the Princess by a sacked secretary and a besotted world. It was surely her greatest and most exploited talent.
The executions continued throughout my time with the Princess: two ladies-in-waiting, a butler, a cook, three secretaries, a chauffeur, a housemaid, two dressers, and others I cannot now recall. Most went quietly. When the time came, few had any regrets. The Princess saw to that, which I suppose was a form of unintentional kindness, if a cruel one.
In its extreme forms the softening-up process could be actively hostile. In one case, the Princess started a rumour about a secretary’s personal life, waited for it to gain currency and then cited it as damning evidence of unsuitability. (The secretary left, but only out of disgust.) In another she launched a bitterly resentful assault on a junior member of her staff whom she observed enjoying a happy relationship with another. (They are now married.)
She thought nothing of laying false trails, once accusing another junior employee of leaking secrets to the press when she knew that the only real perpetrator of such indiscretions was herself. ‘I saw him speaking to a photographer,’ she hissed to me between public smiles during an engagement. ‘He’s always tipping them off. That’s why I’m being photographed so much at the moment.’
This seemed unlikely. To most royal employees, especially junior ones, the rat pack was to be feared and avoided – whereas I knew it often suited the Princess very nicely to be ‘surprised’ by paparazzi. Depending on the location, it enabled her to send powerful messages to the British public, even if it was just that she looked great in gym kit.
‘Take a look,’ she whispered urgently. ‘He’s doing it again!’
From the window of the homeless hostel we were visiting I observed the accused driver approaching a notoriously zealous photographer. ‘I’ll deal with it,’ I said, making for the door. I was propelled by curiosity, and by a desire to prove her wrong, if only to myself.
As I approached the pair from behind, I heard raised voices. The driver was administering a friendly warning. ‘And if you stand there with your stupid ladder I’ll bloody well run you over …’ A policeman overtook me, hurrying to the driver’s support. I returned to my post, two paces behind the Princess.
Later, I went through the formality of reassuring her that her driver was to be trusted, but sadly this awkward fact went the same way as so many others which did not fit the scenario on which she was currently working. Car journeys were frosty for weeks until a new target presented itself.
Her tantrums were the stuff of nursery vendettas. Her weapons were only grown-up versions of playground cattiness – the poisoned word, the sly rumour, sending to Coventry. As I laboured one night with the long-suffering personnel officer over the tortuous administration of another mercy killing, I wondered at the deep well of bitterness that must lie within the unhappy Princess. Nothing else could explain her insatiable appetite for human sacrifices.
Such was the innate loyalty of most people in the Waleses’ service, and such the mystique of happy normality that we tried to create around our bosses, that even this rather feudal system for staff motivation produced few audible murmurings from the lower deck. It was just accepted that life in royal service might not pay very much and might terminate abruptly, but it still carried enough attractions to make the risk worthwhile.
I was relieved to find that my role as occasional executioner was not held against me by the staff – or at least they were too kind to show it. The greatest opposition came from within myself. Loyal functionary that I was, I still felt uneasy at the fundamental injustice of so many of the dismissals.
Sometimes, however, the toys fought back. Soon after I resigned, a hitherto timorous housemaid was selected as the next victim. To everyone’s surprise, she sued the Princess for unfair dismissal. To nobody’s surprise, she won a generous out-of-court settlement. The incident attracted little attention, but I hope its significance was not lost on my former employer. Perhaps the humble housemaid taught her a lesson I never had the audacity to attempt. Of course, I had my mortgage to protect.
Taking into account all these factors about her relationship with her staff, it is not difficult to imagine the vehemence with which the Princess dismissed Richard’s offer of help. The finality of her judgement was not lost on me, and if she could be unfeeling with her own staff, she could be merciless to those she perceived to be her enemies.
The list of enemies most certainly included any who worked for her husband. Being legitimate targets in her eyes, and temptingly defenceless, these were marked for special attention. Any she thought had crossed her – such as the chauffeur who took a shrewd, long-term career decision to switch to the Prince – were cast into the icy Siberia of her disapproval. She would pretend they did not exist, even as they made their loyal bow or curtsy, and they became
leading players in the conspiracies which she increasingly saw formed against her. The fact that most of these plots did not exist outside her imagination was little consolation to those on the receiving end of her suspicion.
As I pondered the significance of Richard’s exclusion, one thing was clear. However saintly her intentions and however justified her generous treatment in the press, my boss kept a knife in her handbag. It was long and jagged and quick, and I was going to do my damnedest to make sure it did not end up protruding from my back for a long time to come. That it eventually would, I think deep down I never doubted, but that painful experience was still six years in the future. As time passed, I also recognized that I could not rely on a repeat of Richard’s promotion to a cosy refuge on the Prince’s staff if my place in the Princess’s toy cupboard started to look shaky. Opportunities to change horses midstream became increasingly rare as we felt our way into the uncharted waters of the Waleses’ separation.
Perhaps it was hardly surprising that people became toys to her. For the first time in her life she was beginning to wield real power, even if it was only over a few people on her own staff. The power, however, came without responsibility. She did not have to deal with the consequences of her decisions.
Also, as I could already see, she was increasingly battling to make herself popular in her own right and so less traditionally royal. In the process she developed a tendency to pick on those least able to fight back. It takes no great insight to see this as a reaction to her own weakness. She felt powerless in the face of her superiors, the in-laws she saw as cold and hard, and she felt oppressed by work that in her eyes only exploited her. Her subordinates were the obvious target.
I had no evidence, but I increasingly felt that some unconscious childhood memory was being endlessly replayed. The unfairness she felt, though painful, was at least familiar, and if ever its pain showed signs of easing up, she would reimpose it either in her imagination or by deliberate provocation. Like anyone setting out to find reasons to be unhappy or dissatisfied, she had no need to look very far. The people nearest to her – family (with the notable exception of her children), staff or friends – provided plenty of material. If, for tactical reasons, they did not fit the bill, there was always the diary, stuffed full – at her request – with endless demands on her good nature.
It became just part of my life that I saw this reality while the world saw the saint it naturally preferred. In the end, the contradictions in her character created unbearable tensions for many who were close to her. These were only magnified by the knowledge that such self-destructiveness was bound to infect the good she was capable of doing. Too many people’s hopes rested on a belief that she was as wholesome as she looked. Trying to keep that image alive and at the same time contrive some purpose – even happiness – for her own life eventually became too frustrating for me and I resigned. In the same way, I imagine, her husband eventually felt unable to resist the attractions of life with someone less psychologically demanding. In fact, the temptation must have been all the stronger for him, given his own tendency to morose introspection.
Away from the Palace intrigue, the Princess was busy on most days with public engagements in London or the provinces. They were the routine fare of a thousand court circulars. For a public still trusting in a royal happy ending, they were further proof that she was an integral part of the familiar and treasured face of our rock-solid ruling family.
This humdrum work in drizzly Britain contrasted sharply with the colour, drama and glamour of the overseas tours which she eventually came to prefer. Abroad, in the sunshine and surrounded by impressionable foreigners, stardom came easily, especially against so many exotic backdrops. Nevertheless, it was the work she did back home in the UK that was the bedrock of her reputation, and it repeatedly pleased and surprised me that it brought such obvious benefits to the people and organizations she visited.
It made her feel tired, but from wholesome hard work. It made her feel appreciated, however hard she might try to dismiss it. It stimulated her intellectually, however thick she claimed to be. It also confronted her over and over again with the painful, ugly realities of life at the other end of the social scale. For her amusement and interest therefore, as well as my own, I set out to keep her occupied in ways that would stand her apart from her adopted family and encourage her to think differently about the people who came under her influence.
It was no coincidence that, just as her private life was undergoing such traumatic upheavals, she increasingly wanted her work in public to tend towards the grittier end of the charity spectrum. This was a highly visible way of expressing her growing sense of independence from the traditional royal way of doing things, but her reasons also went deeper than that. Rightly or not, she felt an increasing affinity with those who had suffered and particularly with those whose illness or disability made them outcasts, at least metaphorically.
It was as though she was trying to say, ‘I may look OK on the outside, but on the inside I know what it’s like to be rejected,’ and it was perhaps because victims are said subconsciously to recognize other victims that this proved such a rewarding philosophy in planning her public engagements. The more she involved herself in ‘unfashionable’ causes – and the more intimately too – the more she felt appreciated, even loved, in return. One example of this tendency was her increasing involvement in AIDS charities, and in one particular instance it gave her scope both to give and receive the affection she felt she so desperately lacked.
Adrian Ward-Jackson was known as an engaging and warm-hearted figure in the art world who had been a driving force in marshalling the performing arts behind the cause of AIDS awareness and treatment. Less well known was the fact that, behind the outgoing and charming exterior, he was himself fighting a desperate battle against the disease. With another friend, Angela Serota, wife of the director of the Tate Gallery, the Princess found in Adrian the chance to focus enormous reserves of compassion, as well as a particular fascination with this disease, which appeared to her to draw its victims principally from the beautiful and talented. It was as if Adrian provided the opportunity for her to exercise on a personal level the compassion which so publicly linked her name with a cause she had done so much, since 1988, to make fashionable.
After a protracted illness, Adrian’s final weeks and eventual death drew from the Princess an almost obsessive interest in the harsh realities of mortality. I remember the panic that ensued when she decided she wanted a personal pager to carry with her at all times so that Adrian could reach her day or night. Finding the right style of pager quickly took priority over every other consideration. It was maybe not surprising, therefore, that I reflected that perhaps the calls from Adrian’s deathbed made her feel wanted in a way that less dramatic situations seldom could.
I noticed the same type of sublimated emotion in many of her activities on behalf of AIDS charities. As a cause, it had unmatched publicity value. The juxtaposition of sex and death made great copy and photographs of the glamorous Princess touching the gaunt men who were the image of the disease in its early days went right around the world. These images, and others of the Princess with AIDS-stricken children in America and Africa, made an incalculable contribution to greater understanding of the disease, those who lived with it and those who cared for them. It was a prime example of the way the Princess acted as an agent of compassion, whatever her own motives, bringing unpalatable truths to life before our eyes and showing the way to make things better.
‘I have to do it Patrick,’ she told me. ‘Nobody else understands the rejection they feel!’ I thought this was overdramatic. She had a tendency to assume an acquaintance with suffering that did not immediately seem to square with her life of unusual health and comfort. She believed it was true, however, and as events were to confirm, she had her own reasons for speaking with authority on being an outsider. This being her motivation, she was able to share an extraordinary understanding with patients of a disease that on the fac
e of it represented the antithesis of her own pure and saintly image.
She was reluctant to share this virtuous spotlight, although she made an exception in the summer of 1991 when the American President was in town and she accompanied Barbara Bush to the AIDS unit at Middlesex Hospital. The two women set to work in a ward crowded with patients, officials and relatives. On her home turf, the Princess sparkled as she deployed the unbeatable mixture of charm, humour and controlled pathos that was her trademark. Mrs Bush, far from home and of a different generation, adopted a more traditional, almost regal style. It was an impressive performance nonetheless, and in its own way every bit as sincere.
The two champions of compassion posed for pictures outside in the sunshine before the American motorcade departed in a phalanx of blue limos and Secret Service agents. Following in our own more modest convoy, I told the Princess how much I had admired the First Lady’s professionalism. The Princess’s agreement was tinged with pride in her own technique. ‘I like her a lot,’ she said, ‘but she hasn’t got intuition with these patients. They need lots of TLC.’ TLC – Tender Loving Care – was a commodity in which she felt she had cornered the market. It became a favourite expression but seldom appeared, as on this occasion, without a hidden barb.
Of course, such images of compassion would not have been used to best effect unless there was an organization in existence to exploit in the most effective way the Princess’s association with the good cause. Although during the last few years of her life the Princess’s name was frequently linked to all sorts of AIDS organizations, in fact she was only ever patron of one – the National AIDS Trust under the direction first of Margaret Jay and then of Professor Michael Adler.
The NAT provided the Princess with a perfect vehicle for involving herself in almost any aspect of the disease and its treatment worldwide. Even when at her most enthusiastic, however, I knew she had reservations about her identification with the illness. It was not a matter of prejudice. Although squeamish about the mechanics of the virus’s sexual transmission, she shared the royal family’s generally tolerant view of homosexuality and, perhaps more graphically than most, demonstrated her interest and concern for the real person behind the outward image. Yet when the AIDS statistics obstinately refused to spiral out of control in the way so scarily predicted by certain experts at the beginning of the decade, and when pointed questions were asked about the amount spent on AIDS treatment per patient compared with other diseases such as cancer, she began to get cold feet. By 1995 she had relegated what had once been her great crusading cause to the role of helpful stand-by when a compliant victim was needed for the purpose of securing a timely or poignant photo call.
Shadows of a Princess Page 14