This in turn highlighted a dilemma faced by many of her favourite charities. The more she worked with them, the better they came to know her and the more they began to suspect that the motives for her involvement did not precisely match their own. This became most glaringly obvious after her dramatic withdrawal from public life in 1993, when easy ways back into the limelight were at a premium. By then, however, the charities concerned were experienced and tolerant enough to recognize their patron’s value to them even when her need for favourable publicity apparently outweighed any strictly philanthropic motive.
Knowing this, was it therefore more honest to call upon her services less frequently? Or should they close their eyes to any lack of purity in her motivation and content themselves with being used in ways that they could ultimately exploit for the benefit of those they were caring for? Most opted for the latter, and it says volumes for the maturity of the relationship she built up with them that both sides were able to exploit the other and maintain an appearance of high mutual esteem, whatever the frustrations that lurked below the surface.
Always a good example of her gifts was the work she did with the leading drink, drugs and mental health charity Turning Point. Although AIDS and landmines earned her the biggest headlines, it was actually her less reported association with Turning Point that absorbed more of her charitable engagements than any other.
The charity’s style was informal and practical. Operating out of spartan offices in Smithfield, it brought a simple message of hope to those on the least fashionable margins of society. Its clients had usually fallen through every safety net that the family and state could provide. In their despair they had turned to alcohol and other drugs, while many lived lives of exile in secure hospitals such as Broadmoor and Rampton. They might have been thought outside the pale of traditional royal interest, but to the Princess they were fellow sufferers – and for those who looked for distraction or inspiration, she was happy to be a gracious source of both.
Accompanying the Princess on such charitable visits, I learned something about her attitude to suffering. Traditional objects of royal compassion, such as the very elderly, the very young, the bed-bound and the disabled, were in many ways a captive audience. Unless they actively refused to receive the light of the royal countenance, if they were in the right ward they would be visited come what may. I did know of a few instances of people refusing to meet the Princess, even from their hospital beds. There was sometimes an undercurrent of suspicion about her motives and a reluctance to play opposite her in what some thought was her own version of a medical drama in which she had cast herself as the undisputed star. Indeed, I remember it was possible at one point to cut out of certain newspapers a small slip of paper, like a kidney donor card, which said something like, ‘In the event of accident I do not wish to be visited by the Princess of Wales.’
For the Princess, real satisfaction came from encountering sufferers such as drug addicts or mental patients who could vote with their feet if they did not want to meet her. She could always spot the person who hung back either through shyness or prejudice and took legitimate pride in persuading them to speak to her, which they often did with a candour that surprised even themselves. ‘They can talk to me, Patrick, because I’m one of them!’ she said. It was perhaps truer than she thought. Her belief that she shared with her charities’ clients a common experience of suffering, especially rejection, was a constant source of motivation for her, and there was enough truth in it to make her an acknowledged icon of concern the world over.
I gradually grew to believe, however, that her success was often achieved despite her emotional empathy with victims rather than because of it. This was because, along with the scars that made her a fellow sufferer, there existed the neuroses that could make her a fellow destroyer too. More and more I realized that my job was to coax her along and smooth out the peaks and troughs in her feelings. Her emotional state was always fragile. As she grew in understanding of her own personality she would even joke, ‘Stand by for a mood swing, boys!’ All the same, behind such disarming adult honesty I felt there was a damaged child, set loose in a tempting but dangerous world.
The temptations and dangers were unique because of the marriage she had made. Over much of her life, her word was law and there were few objects she could not have or people she could not influence. Yet from her adopted family she received little relevant guidance on how to cope with this, and even less sympathy when matters went awry. This is not a criticism which should be laid entirely at their door, however. An important aspect of her condition was her inability to accept the same care she tried to show others. At some deep level, her opinion of herself never rose high enough to permit it and she would eventually sabotage any relationship that threatened the reassuringly familiar pain of the status quo. This perhaps applied particularly to her relations with her mother-in-law the Queen. However eager she was to receive it, the Queen’s approval never took root in the Princess. What lingered was the memory of the many more times when she felt it had been unfairly withheld.
A catalogue of these destructive tendencies makes depressing reading, but no picture of the Princess would be complete without at least an attempt to identify the demons with which she wrestled. Only then, perhaps, is it possible fully to appreciate the effort she made to conquer them and the remarkable extent to which she succeeded. It is no secret that towards the end of her life some of her critics questioned her mental stability. Their invective might have been better channelled into recognition of her endurance in circumstances that would have driven a lesser person round the bend.
My efforts to encourage the Princess along a positive path met with more obstacles than I had anticipated. With her knack of humanizing even the most formal royal event, she had an unrivalled chance to persuade the many fascinating people she met to open up in a way they possibly would not have done with many of her in-laws. Since we light-heartedly thought of ourselves as being in ‘the happiness business’, it seemed logical to try to find for the Princess the satisfaction and contentment she craved from the very work she was condemned (or privileged, depending on the mood) to go out and do several times a week. This, I thought, would at least create the chance for her to begin to enjoy herself through what she did best – bringing happiness to other people.
That was rather too radical, as it turned out. The attitude she inherited with marriage was that her work was tolerable at best and stern duty at worst. The concept of having fun while doing it was unfamiliar.
At first, it was not even a conscious strategy. For one thing, until I was promoted to private secretary in 1990, I did not have a free hand with her programme. Also, in many ways what I was trying to achieve only reflected her own ambitions in charity work, her choice of public duties and general style. All I was trying to do was to add into the equation some element of happiness for her. Even if she did not agree with this, it turned out to be a reliable foundation for all my subsequent work with her, and a simple guiding philosophy in the many days of doubt that were to come.
I could often see that worthwhile engagements, carried out in the course of duty, were also a source of pleasure and inspiration to her. She never accepted this view, sadly, and looked at me with contempt or pitying tolerance whenever I mentioned it. She preferred to believe that her work was a heavy burden, and one she carried with little thanks or appreciation.
This was so obviously untrue, as I pointed out to her, but the philosophy of duty as suffering – quickly learned from her husband – was a hard one to shift. It was so convenient. It made bad moods excusable and good moods heroic. It underlined the exclusiveness of royal virtues, since no one else was up to the job. It justified all the luxury and status that went with the territory, since lives of such sacrifice deserved appropriate compensation. Best of all, it provided a permanent excuse to complain about the unfairness of life.
The Princess was certainly alive to the material compensations of her position, which were clearly far fr
om unfair. Perhaps surprisingly, she could be more acquisitive than her virtuous image might suggest. She never failed, for example, to spend the maximum allowed by the Foreign Office for dresses on overseas tours. The results were well worth it, of course, but the figures – which must have run to several hundred thousand pounds – were equally eye catching.
She was also surprisingly proprietorial about gifts that came to her by virtue of her official position rather than to her as an individual. Lavish presents from foreign leaders, including a sports car from one Gulf state, were stockpiled even if they were of no real use. The perks of being royal are no problem to a royalist – I certainly had no trouble accepting the comparative crumbs that came my way – but the Princess’s philosophy was one she clearly shared with the jackdaw. Her ultimate nest egg was the jewellery she had received as Princess of Wales, including some items from the Queen. This she said she would keep, as a reward for her ‘years of purgatory in this f***ing family’.
Her public work therefore fitted into a complex pattern of private feelings. Most of the time she was professional enough to suppress her personal state of mind when in the public eye, although she was sometimes able to let the mask slip for dramatic effect. The visible appearance of stress in front of the cameras at certain crucial moments in her bid for public sympathy – as on Panorama – was no more an accident than the looks she wore for hospitals, funfairs or garden parties.
Saint and martyr struggled within her for top billing. Later they were joined by an avenging Amazon as she did battle against her husband, and all the while, somewhere inside her a little girl also waited for her moment of attention. No wonder she said her marriage was crowded. Just sitting in the car with her was sometimes like dealing with a minibus of Princesses.
Her public engagements eventually became important for me only as the backdrop for her mood at the time. They acquired a sense of unreality, and not just because of the air of drama she inevitably gave them just by turning up. Living with her every day, reality was the personality she adopted in each one. Just as people became her toys, her public life became a sort of game.
In the year that followed my apprenticeship I had plenty of opportunity to watch her play this game with increasing skill. I also observed, over and over again, that regardless of her own complex motives, her involvement did a great deal of good for a great many causes.
The part of compassionate Princess was the one she played best. As I had already seen on my first awayday in Essex, she communicated an extraordinary sympathy to people in pain. She was also unmatched in her ability to bring a carefully measured vivacity to even the most depressing situations, and her patronage of Help the Aged gave her plenty of scope for displaying both talents.
I remember going with her one hot day to visit a geriatric ward in East London. Even though I had visited the place a few weeks earlier on the recce, I was still unprepared for the eye-watering blast of ammonia that hit us when we walked into the first room of incontinent old people. There were maybe 20 beds along each wall. Their occupants had been propped up on pillows and they stared in various states of incomprehension at the unexpected entertainment that was being provided for them. Others sat in chairs between the beds and in little groups along the route. Apart from a low murmuring between some of the more coherent occupants, a silence lay over the room which I thought could literally be described as deathly.
As well as the old people, there seemed to be dozens of staff, watching expectantly for something to happen. Behind me clustered a gaggle of hospital management and local politicians. The Mayor wore his chain and looked important. The Lord Lieutenant wore his sword and looked awkward. This was the best show in town and nobody wanted to miss a second of it.
The Princess metaphorically squared her shoulders and set to work. I watched in admiration as she systematically quartered the room, an innocent-looking girl among so many ancient, wasting bodies. In her sharply tailored, bright red suit, radiating health and energy against such a background of age and infirmity, she was like living proof of some youthful wonder-drug.
Here and there a bright eye would engage her and a surprisingly youthful voice would emerge cheerfully from a tired old face, but the general tenor was depressing. I mentally kicked myself for a bad recce and silently blamed the hospital management for fielding patients upon whom senility’s grip had tightened to such a deadening effect. The Princess gave no outward sign of sharing my small-minded lack of charity, although later she laughed about her new qualifications as a mortician. Instead she worked the fetid room like the professional she was, leaving happiness in her wake with anyone even barely conscious of what was happening.
On her tour she was accompanied rather too closely by a formidable matron dressed in blue and carrying in her face the weight of years of caring for people unable to give much in return. Such worthy escorts often unwittingly provided the Princess with the helpful contrast in appearance that her height, couture, energy and beauty so photogenically accentuated. I overheard a muttered conversation between two of the patients who had just been visited, which went something like this:
‘Oo was that then?’
‘Oo was wot then?’
‘Oo was that in the red?’
‘I dunno. But she was a lot nicer than the one in the blue!’
The Princess made light of her talent for creating such happiness, although it never did any harm to flatter her – preferably with some originality. This was important, as it seemed to be the only way to help her extract some personal satisfaction from what, on the face of it, was a pretty grinding routine of charming performances in depressing situations.
As soon as she was back in the car she might say, ‘God! Did you smell the pee? It was like being in a room full of tomcats!’
‘Ma’am, you made a lot of people happy in there.’
‘Oh Patrick, you are loyal … but I don’t think half of them even knew who I was.’
‘Actually, perhaps you’re right, Ma’am. I wasn’t going to tell you, but quite a few asked me when Princess Margaret was due to arrive.’
‘Thank you, Patrick. I’ll make the jokes around here.’
‘Sorry, Ma’am. But seriously, I watched them after you’d moved on and whatever you’d said made them really happy. The Sister told me a visit from you was better than any medicine she could give them.’
‘Really? She said that? I thought she was a bossy old battleaxe.’
‘Honest.’
‘Hm …’
The idea that she might possess some form of healing power may have grown in her mind from such exchanges. I do not recall it dating from a specific incident, but it was well established by the time she was making headlines by touching AIDS patients in 1990 and there was no shortage of voices, more sycophantic even than mine, to encourage her belief in it. The proprietor of the Princess’s current favourite restaurant – herself a deeply spiritual woman – was a particular advocate of this form of royal therapy, which I liked to think of as a benign echo of a more medieval faith in the power of kings. Anyway, if it helped my boss endure the sights, sounds and smells of wards like the one in East London, there was surely no harm in it.
As time passed and she became more attracted to the idea, it gave us hangers-on some irreverent pleasure. Initially she was rather diffident about what she was doing, but after a while a practised eye could spot the look of special saintliness that accompanied her attempts at this truly ‘hands-on’ form of treatment. ‘Look out!’ we would whisper as the Princess bore down on an unsuspecting leper or AIDS patient. ‘We’re laying on hands again!’
Sure enough, the photographers would be rewarded with a heart-warming image of the angelic figure, eyes demurely downcast, hands firmly in contact with the untouchable. To be fair, the scene was sometimes repeated – albeit briefly – even after the press pack had been shepherded out of the room.
No actual miracles were reported – but then, since so much healing takes place in the mind of the patien
t, who is to say that the unexpected physical expression of such kindness from a world figure did not somehow assist the occasional sufferer along the road to recovery? It did not seem to do any damage to the Princess either, except perhaps to her sense of humility.
Heaven knows, the sights, sounds and smells she confronted needed some sort of antidote. Despite the often defiantly tasteless humour, I noticed that she did not acquire the emotional immunity with which most professional carers protect themselves. One of the reasons why she was so good at communicating with people in need was that her own need often made itself apparent to them at what seemed to be a subliminal level. This provided a pathway for her emotions to express themselves and it undoubtedly made her a charismatic visitor to the sick.
The idea that she had some kind of gift of healing remains very much open to question, of course. If she did possess such a gift, then it was completely unrefined, undisciplined and undirected. Had it been recognized and developed as the talent it sometimes seemed to be, I believe that her round of compassionate visiting would not have taken the toll it did on her emotional stamina. More importantly, direction and discipline might also have given her the sense of personal fulfilment necessary if she was to bear applying such a gift properly. Sadly, the lack of any appropriate direction and discipline forfeited for her any chance to explore or use a gift for which she seemed otherwise so eminently qualified. After all, as many believe, it is a gift which requires a level of personal spiritual development that I do not think she would ever have claimed to have reached.
Shadows of a Princess Page 15