Shadows of a Princess

by Patrick Jephson

  ‘What’s that, Doug?’ she asked sweetly. Doug reddened.

  ‘Kevlar vest, Ma’am!’

  The Princess smiled at him, mischievously quizzical. Her hand gestured imperceptibly towards the seeming acres of lightly tanned royal skin on view. ‘Shouldn’t I be wearing that?’ she asked with wide-eyed innocence. Poor Doug was lost for words as we egressed the facility.

  The drive to Brooklyn took 45 minutes. As expected, a noisy party of demonstrators had assembled outside the Academy of Music, but they were swamped in numbers and volume by enthusiastic well-wishers. As we crowded into the Royal Box I discovered a recurring disadvantage to having the most exclusive seats in the house: unless you are in the front rowyou can usually hardly see the stage. I heard Mayor Koch’s fulsome welcoming speech clearly enough, however, and although I knew little about opera, even I could tell that the WNO had done their patron proud.

  After the final curtain the party from the Royal Box made a straggling progress through the cramped passageways and down the twisting stairs that led backstage. This was always a fascinating experience for me, repeated on many occasions. Excitement mixed with relief seemed to hover over the group of perspiring performers as the Princess moved slowly among them, talking quietly, laughing, sharing the drama that lingered after the audience had gone. Greasepaint and that special dusty backstage smell mingled with her perfume. TV lights cast sharp shadows in the sudden unnatural quiet. Evening gowns and patent shoes intruded diffidently onto a stage that still held the aura of the night’s music.

  Suddenly it was over and we were back outside. The cold New York night hit me in a sudden blast like a bitter gas. I was dizzy, momentarily lost. There were so many people. A bedlam of pushing journalists blocked the way to my car. The world seemed full of flashbulbs, grim-faced cops and shouting fans. Then above the close cacophony I heard chanting. ‘Brits out! Brits out!’

  Looking round, I saw the Princess and Anne being hurried into their car. Where was mine? I could see no familiar faces and in a second, sensing my hesitation, two of the grimmer-looking cops came towards me. Their breath cast plumes of vapour into the night air. What was I doing inside their police cordon looking lost?

  I fumbled for my security badge as the biggest one fingered his Federal riot gun. He was so close I could hear the creaking of his boots as I scrabbled on the roadway to pick up the precious enamel pin. He peered at it with myopic suspicion as the convoy revved up. The chanting sounded closer now. This is ridiculous, I thought, panicking slightly.

  ‘It’s OK officer, he’s with me,’ said one of Doug’s men, appearing beside us. He took my arm, looking urgently over his shoulder at the line of placards. ‘Come on, Commander. Time to move!’ I agreed.

  The inside of the Lincoln was pitch black, the seat so low I felt I was sitting on the floor. I was sitting on the floor. Don’t American cars smell strange? I thought irrelevantly, sliding surreptitiously up into my seat and hoping nobody had noticed. There was no interest in me, though, as I reclined in the darkness listening to the agents’ conversation. We were still not moving and the agents seemed to share my anxiety that we should. In a moment of silence I asked what we were waiting for. ‘Cain’t move till the Captain sezso.’

  It seemed that the Captain, like me, had been stuck in the crowd. In Britain, contact of the VIP’s posterior with the limousine’s upholstery is the automatic signal for immediate departure. Immobile in the growing clamour, I could keenly appreciate the wisdom of this practice. We were stuck fast aground in a sea of people.

  After what seemed an eternity the Captain came on the radio. Something dramatic was called for. ‘OK boys! Work the fenders!’ So it was that the Princess and her convoy lumbered slowly out of Brooklyn bound for dinner in Manhattan, a dozen agents jogging alongside, puffing like steam engines in the chill air off the East River.

  Less than 24 hours later we were heading home, our speed now supersonic on the evening scheduled Concorde. Across the narrow aisle the Princess worked daintily at a small patch of needlepoint.

  Needlepoint? I looked again. It was not a trick of my imagination. Our supersonic airliner had not transformed into a time machine. Here was the media superstar of New York, the world’s number-one celebrity Princess, lips pursed in concentration, re-enacting a scene straight out of eighteenth-century Versailles. Another act was just what it was, however. After a while she became bored and the needlepoint was put away. I never saw it again.

  Dickie and I sipped a companionable gin while the darkness outside whistled past at over a thousand miles per hour. In the cosy lighting it was a touchingly domestic scene after the triumphant tumult of the past few days.

  I had a lot to reflect on as I considered the lessons learned on my first solo overseas trip in attendance. Many of those lessons stood me in good stead in the years that followed. Some were obvious. Memorize the programme. Remember the really important faces, not just the faces of important people. Always try to leave a building ahead of the Princess, unless you want to be photographed with her (as some did), disrupt the hosts’ farewells and probably lose your car into the bargain. Also do not drop your security badge in front of heavily armed, nervous guards.

  Some lessons were more domestic. Organize your clothes for the next day before you go to bed. Try to sleep at least two hours a night. Make sure your insides do not resort to audible mutiny at moments of tension, and – not unrelated – go easy on the hotel minibar. Some lessons were fundamental. Stay at least one jump ahead of events. Whatever the distractions, stay focused. If in doubt, just shut up and watch out.

  I learned another valuable lesson before we reached Heathrow. Beware pressmen on planes. A tabloid reporter and his photographer had got themselves seats on our flight, which was clever, perfectly legal and a potential nuisance. They were rewarded with a useful scoop as the Princess tossed them a few emotional words about her visit to the Harlem Paediatric AIDS Unit when they lingered by her seat. The next day it made front-page headlines – ‘THE CHILD I CANNOT FORGET’ – and inside there was a two-page story under the heading ‘On Concorde: the vision of a dying boy haunts her still’.

  It was superficially great stuff, but the risks were obvious and most of them eventually came to pass. The greatest danger lay in the perception that exclusives were there for the taking, if you only had the energy to stroll up to the royal seat row. This led to resentment among less favoured – or less intrusive – journalists. It encouraged sensationalism, not least because of the altitude, the false intimacy and the chance of a direct quote. If unchecked it also caused traffic jams in crowded aircraft cabins. Ultimately, of course, it provided opportunities for direct briefing beyond the reach of Palace minders.

  As the years passed, the Princess increasingly gave in to the temptation to do her own briefing. If, as I observed, the press were a kind of surrogate family to her, she did not want to talk to them only through go-betweens, especially if the go-betweens were paid by her husband or in-laws.

  Eventually the Princess’s impromptu press briefings became a feature of our homeward flights after overseas tours. Typically, I would wake from an exhausted sleep – it was usually the middle of the night – and see her seat empty. A knowing look from the PPO was enough. Across the aisle, a snoring pile of blankets issued its own very public communiqué: the press secretary was off duty. Very sensible.

  Sure enough, when I padded through the darkened cabin, I would find the Princess outside the galley, surrounded by a cluster of pressmen. A stewardess would often be hovering, unsure whether to push past the bodies blocking her way. It was like interrupting the fifth-form smoking club. Half a dozen familiar faces would turn to look at me. There would be a sudden silence.

  I always tried to look pleasantly surprised. ‘Well! I thought there must be a better party going on back here.’

  The Princess would throw me a cold look, her hair unbrushed and her eyes looking tired without their customary make-up, dressed in her usual long-haul flying kit
– ski socks, leggings and a baggy jumper. ‘Everything’s all right, Patrick.’

  ‘Of course. Well, actually, I was just going to the loo …’ They would all press flat against the bulkhead to let me squeeze past. The stewardess would spot her chance and slip by too.

  Later still, the subject was taboo. It was part of the pantomime so that, the next day, we could all act surprised when we saw the headlines.

  In many ways, the years 1989 and 1990 marked the end of a state of innocence for the Princess’s reputation. After that it was virtually impossible to keep the lid on the truth. During those years the public continued to be fed the comforting story that rumours of marital discord and general unhappiness were groundless, but meanwhile, the Princess was playing a complicated game in which her public appearances were both the means and the disguise by which she acted out her own needs and ambitions.

  Anyone looking for evidence that all was well, at least superficially, could find it in the joint overseas tour programme for the Prince and Princess. For the next two major trips, as in the Gulf, I was involved as deputy to the private secretary in charge.

  Towards the end of 1989, in another of those violent contrasts which gave my life such a vivid sense of purpose but which also constantly uprooted it, I found myself miles from the comfortable routine of St James’s, doing my now familiar act of flying ahead of the Prince and Princess to make a last-minute check on the programme and generally prepare the way – this time in Indonesia, where the royal couple were to spend some days before travelling on to Hong Kong.

  ‘Do you know,’ our Ambassador said to me when I arrived in Jakarta, ‘if you superimpose the map of Indonesia on a map of Europe, from west to east it would stretch from Donegal to Tashkent.’ The geography of the place was certainly impressive. Unfortunately, my interest was in more mundane matters. As in the Gulf, the programme was unravelling fast.

  I was labouring under stupefying jet lag as the grim reality descended upon me. Outside the cool Embassy office, the oppressive heat of downtown Jakarta seemed to amplify the constant clamour of the city’s frenzied traffic. Inside, the air-conditioned chill was deepened by the expression on the Ambassador’s face. On balance I really preferred it when he spoke about geography.

  One of the greatest threats that can face any overseas tour was now looming over the one which was due to start in two days’ time. The programme we had agreed on the recce – which with some difficulty we had sold to our royal employers and which had been confirmed by the host’s protocol department – had only now, at the eleventh hour, been seen by the President and his wife. It was ominously reported that they disapproved of certain aspects of the programme. (‘Why does Her Highness wish to see so many sick people? It is very sad for her. Surely she would rather enjoy a visit to a fashion show and cultural theme park?’)

  However belated, once known, their views became the only ones that mattered, at least in the eyes of their officials. For my part, the only views that mattered were those of my own boss, and she had only approved our plans after the recce with a truly regal condescension. When drawing up her programme, I was always aware that she was just a hair’s-breadth away from rejecting the plan I had constructed on such a delicate web of compromises with her hosts – if only to demonstrate a wish to control her own life. (It was a view with which I might have sympathized, if it had not threatened to create such a huge amount of extra work for me.) To incorporate all the changes ‘suggested’ by the President, or in my case particularly by his wife, would put me square in the firing line of the royal couple’s severe displeasure.

  I felt a rising panic and resorted to what any craven courtier would do in the circumstances. I blustered to the Ambassador and suggested that he sort things out with the President’s office pretty quickly. Unenthusiastically, he lifted the telephone. I was joined by his wife, who listened critically to the string of capitulations that seemed to be the Ambassador’s half of the conversation.

  As he wearily put down the phone, he announced, ‘Well, I think that went OK.’

  His wife was unimpressed. ‘Oh Darling! You let him walk all over you,’ she said helpfully. My heart sank even lower. The Ambassador did not look very happy either.

  The two days available to me to put the finishing touches to the programme turned into a nightmarish cat-and-mouse bluffing game in which our hosts frustrated every pitiful attempt we could muster to oppose their changes to the programme. As seemed to happen to me so often, I could see their point. I could not picture the courtiers at Buckingham Palace acting very differently if the roles were reversed.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ said Graham Smith sympathetically, as we sipped beer by the poolside at the Mandarin Hotel. We both knew he was wrong. All the fears I had felt at a similar stage before the tour of the Middle East now returned to me with interest. When disaster finally struck, nobody would want the truth. They would simply want a culprit and, whoever shared my guilt, it was unlikely to be David Wright, John Riddell’s ener-getic deputy, a career diplomat and the person with overall responsibility for the tour.

  ‘More bad news,’ said the Ambassador when we saw him later. ‘The government guests to the various functions are beginning to pull out. The President’s office is really putting the pressure on about the programme.’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘At this rate hardly anybody is going to turn up to meet the Prince and Princess.’ The implications, not least to the British media, were not lost on me. ‘And,’ the Ambassador continued remorse-lessly, ‘the Indonesian Air Force delegation to the trade talks, which the Prince is supposed to be supporting, have also cancelled. It’s not looking good for the big export order.’

  He was beginning to look for a scapegoat and I felt his eye measuring me for the role. I had a horrid suspicion that I was acquiring all the qualifi-cations. My fears were not much eased by an uncomfortable phone call with St James’s in which I tried to explain to David what was going wrong. In the royal business there are few more unpopular people than the bearers of bad tidings.

  With only 12 hours to go before the Prince and Princess were due to leave England, I returned to the hotel to discover that at least something was going right. On the journey from the UK, QANTAS – in every other way a brilliant airline – had managed to lose my ceremonial sword. I was due to wear it to greet the royal aircraft when it arrived in Jakarta the next day. Its loss and the subsequent protracted search had added a quite disproportionate twist to the knife I was already beginning to feel between my shoulder blades. I was heartened by the news that the sword had been found in Sydney and I would have it in time for the royal arrival.

  Whether it was the next beer that Graham bought me, or the safe return of my beloved sword (it had accompanied my father throughout the Second World War), or whether I salvaged a sense of perspective about royal disfavour, I finally suggested to the Ambassador that we should give in. We would just have to make the best of it and forget the normal rules about recces and detailed plans.

  In the hours that followed, with almost as much relief as I was feeling myself, the Ambassador reported a sudden resurgence of official interest in the various social functions arranged for the visitors. The royal rap when it came could surely be no worse than the anxiety I had been suffering in the last few days. Anyway, in the topsy-turvy world of royal justice, I knew that success or failure lay as much in the hands of the hairdresser as in the hands of the head of Indonesian protocol.

  The next day I was out at Halim airport, pacing the red carpet and waiting for the VC-10 to arrive. At times during the previous two days I had pictured this moment in the direst terms. I had seen myself climbing the steps to the aircraft and greeting the Prince and Princess with the news that nobody was coming to their functions, nobody wanted to buy our exports and I had lost my sword. For at least two of the preceding reasons, therefore, they might as well not bother getting off the aeroplane. Instead, here I was in the sunshine feeling quite relaxed. The band was playing happily. I was surrounde
d by smiling Air Force officers and the head of protocol beamed from his place beside the Indonesian Foreign Minister and his wife.

  The VC-10 arrived on time, obliterating the band with its noise and dwarfing the reception committee with its commanding presence. I ran up the stairs and into the air-conditioned serenity of the royal compartment. The Prince was having imaginary fluff removed from his jacket by the ever-present valet. The Princess was fiddling with her earrings and peering out of the window.

  She looked up and greeted me with a smile that banished my remaining doubts and anxieties. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s Patrick!’ Everybody looked.

  ‘Hello, Ma’am. Welcome to Indonesia. They’ve mucked up the programme so much I was about to tell you to stay on the aeroplane.’

  She laughed. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘where will we go instead?’

  My instant relief at her sunny mood was only slightly tempered by the suspicion that it was contrived as a contrast to her husband’s concerned expression, but it was still an unexpected gift. With it, she set the tone of the tour. There was little outward sign of the tensions with the Prince that I had observed in the Gulf, though there was no sign of any particular warmth either. After New York, the Princess’s emerging role as an international performer in her own right seemed to have overtaken the earlier pattern of petty competitiveness.

  My earlier worries over the programme vanished in the prevailing, if unfamiliar, mood of royal adaptability. Any blame was effortlessly transferred to faceless protocol officials. It was not always thus, but it made the point: attracting or avoiding royal displeasure was often just a matter of luck.

  If the opening scenes of the tour had brought me panic and relief in equal measure, the next day produced emotions of a different kind. Thanks to our statesmanlike ‘compromise’ over the programme, many of the earlier planned engagements had survived. A large number of these reflected established areas of concern for the Prince or Princess, such as the environment or health issues. In an attempt to satisfy her curiosity about life and death in some of its more extreme forms and to reinforce her public image as a supporter of real issues in her own right, I had arranged for the Princess to visit a leprosy hospital at Sitanala, not far from Jakarta. In both objectives it succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.