One of the last and potentially most damaging fantasies the Princess acquired from such unconventional sources was the belief that her husband would not succeed to the throne – either through death or disinclination – and that his place would be taken by the Duke of York as Regent. This outcome plainly held attractions for the sisters-in-law and the Princess seldom lost an opportunity to extol the Duke’s kingly qualities – and, it has to be said, the fine figure he cut, especially in tropical naval uniform. ‘In those white shorts, he’s really rather dishy …’
In retrospect, the apparent relish with which she contemplated the disasters predicted for the royal family might show the Princess in a poor light. Even at the time, it struck me as rather tasteless, as I ineffectually tried to tell her. The fact was, however, that she believed herself beleaguered in the face of overwhelming numbers of heartless enemies, among whom she increasingly numbered her husband and his family. In this state of mind, help from any quarter was likely to be welcomed. Moreover, it was part of her vulnerability that – such was her selective attitude to more conventional advice – the more disreputable rescuers could expect the most avid hearing.
Running through it all was her mistrust of Fergie. No matter what misfortunes publicly befell her sister-in-law, the Princess would still torture herself with the thought that she might yet become a real rival rather than just a useful counterpoint to her own good fortune. Precisely because she must have known at heart that it was as much good fortune as any superior virtue that kept the popularity scales tipped in her favour, the Princess’s self-doubt always lurked close by.
Some years later, when relations with Fergie were notably strained, she had me arrange a secret meeting with John F. Kennedy Jr while we were visiting New York. The Princess’s wish to meet America’s most eligible bachelor owed more than a bit to the fact that he was at the time a particular pin-up of Fergie’s. Nothing came of the Princess’s meeting with him. They passed a pleasant enough hour in her suite at The Carlyle discussing, among other things, the burden of fame and the intrusiveness of the media. It was perhaps not the best moment, therefore, for John to request that the Princess appear on the first cover of his new magazine George. Being a cover girl was something she normally enjoyed, but refusing an invitation was sometimes more satisfactorily provocative. Sure enough, after a theatrical glance in my direction, she politely declined the offer.
When she was in the grip of the insecurity caused by Fergie rivalry, the Princess whipped herself – and her staff – into a pointless campaign of public competition. We would suddenly find ourselves soliciting engagements just to keep the statistics favourable to the Princess. It made me squirm to tout for business in this way.
‘Patrick,’ she would say in her morning phone call, ‘I really think we must do something quickly for … [here she might quote a cause championed in the morning tabloids]. D’you think you could tell them I might be free to help them tomorrow?’
At other times, particularly when stung by one of her sister-in-law’s rare media successes – ‘Caring Fergie backs research into Motor Neurone Disease’ was the sort of thing that sparked a reaction – her response could be uncompromisingly direct. ‘Patrick! We seem to be reading rather a lot about the red-haired lady …’ she would say, and I would dutifully rake up a spontaneous caring counterstrike.
Luckily for me and my conscience, and for the Princess’s image, there were usually quite enough genuine invitations to make these bouts of cynical exploitation fairly rare. I knew the media suspected what was going on, but they preferred to give their profitable golden goose the benefit of the doubt, at least initially.
Most of the patronages that benefited were quite realistic enough not to feel that any serious principles were being compromised. If they were happy, I reasoned, why should I ostentatiously hold my nose in disapproval? Charitably, I assumed the Princess had already reached the same conclusion, which would explain her lack of visible scruples about exploiting good causes in this way. No doubt she added to this a belief – not unreasonable – that she was a pretty good cause in her own right.
The Princess’s tendency to seek extra publicity for such half-baked reasons was always heightened at times of enforced inactivity. I came to anticipate her more bizarre proposals either during or immediately after her many holidays, or during the weeks she spent incarcerated with the rest of the royal family at Balmoral in the summer or at Sandringham at Christmas. Her intentions were sharpened by her wish to draw a distinction between the perceived idleness of her in-laws and her own tireless dedication to the needs of her constituency. In this instance her constituency comprised as much the headline writers of Fleet Street as the occupants of the hospitals and care centres that were the unwitting beneficiaries of her boredom.
It would go something like this. I might be at home one evening when the Balmoral operator would ring to tell me that Her Royal Highness was on the line. Briefly pausing in whatever domestic activity was occupying me at the time, I would grab my notepad and diary – the essential two tools of my trade – while the Princess was put through.
‘Patrick! I thought you’d like an update from my ivory tower.’
‘Ma’am, yes, what news from the front line?’
A giggle, then, ‘I’ll go mad if I don’t get a break from this place. Isn’t there something we could do? The country needs to know that not everybody is on holiday and I thought perhaps you might have some ideas about somewhere that needed visiting.’
With practice, I learned to curb my cynicism and instead have a list of reliable, stand-by engagements ready to activate at a moment’s notice. Inevitably, this list was drawn from organizations which I knew could be relied upon to produce a good show at the drop of a hat, so regional projects of Barnardo’s, Help the Aged, the Red Cross, Relate and similarly quick-witted charities would sometimes receive the unexpected pleasure of a royal visit. These charities also had the advantage of tacitly understanding my dilemma and responding swiftly to what was, after all, one of the easier prices to pay for having a patron of such media-pleasing qualities. Hospitals, particularly those with which she had an established link, such as Great Ormond Street or the Royal Marsden, also proved to be helpful sources of impromptu engagements.
There were many doors that readily opened for her to provide an emotional refuge from the barren wastes of ‘holidays’ and provide wholesome activity and favourable media coverage without asking questions. Their motives were, quite legitimately, sometimes a wish to attract attention to themselves, particularly if seasonal fluctuations of either income or activity could be brought to the attention of the public in this way. Sometimes they were also more worldly and compassionate in simply recognizing a young woman’s need to escape from confinement with often stressful company and instead to be with people who genuinely needed her as much as she needed them.
At times, either out of overfamiliarity with my list of reliable standbys or because of a wish to exercise her office at a time when they might also have expected to be on holiday, she would suggest something rather more ambi-tious. Occasionally this produced very worthwhile results, such as the time one summer when she flew unnoticed on a commercial flight to visit a hospice in Blackpool, repeating the exercise a few days later in Hull.
At her request, both establishments treated the Princess as they would any other volunteer – or so they claimed. Dressed in an auxiliary’s uniform, she assisted with various mundane, domestic chores and, more importantly, spent time with patients whose lives could be measured in days or weeks at most. This was especially appreciated by her because, in contrast to a normal public engagement, this time she was unhurried by an equerry standing in the doorway anxiously looking at his watch. Although we maintained strict security, it was no surprise to find that the news happily leaked out after the event to reassure both her admirers and detractors that the Princess was continuing her good work. Also, although she would not dream of pointing it out herself, while she was working certai
n people she could mention were decimating Scottish wildlife.
Not all such impromptu outings passed without a hitch. As the co-ordinators of all royal visits to their counties, Lord Lieutenants were not always amused by engagements that cropped up outside the normal, sedate programming process. Nor were they always entirely sure that they understood why a Princess who always claimed to be overworked could somehow suddenly appear to have time to spare to visit their patch in search of deserving causes. Soothing such troubled minds was very much my responsibility. Even when I felt I had accomplished the task with the necessary reassuring blarney, however, I never lost the feeling that we were causing a lot of extra work in order to appease a requirement which we could not truthfully share with our hosts.
The quality of the engagement was also less predictable in these off-the-cuff circumstances, whatever its novelty value. In addition, I was always conscious that curious and not altogether approving eyes were being cast at us by the Princess’s other patronages, many of whom had long-standing invitations still unhonoured but were waiting patiently in line for their turn. Eventually, the newspapers began to scent that they too were being manipulated and my colleagues in other households grew offended by the sight of so many sacrosanct holidays being defiled.
The Princess was oblivious to my concerns. In fact, I seemed to spend large amounts of my life ensuring that she remained oblivious to my concerns on a great many things. This may have been because I believed that nine times out of ten she would do precisely as she pleased in any case. My simple duty both to myself and to her was therefore to ensure that as few people as possible got hurt in the process. This made me feel trapped at times, but I consoled myself with the hope that, with luck, some of us might manage to emerge with credit at the end.
Eventually she felt emboldened by the success of her short-notice engagements to the point where she felt she could act almost literally on impulse to bring them about. Sometimes she concealed her self-publicizing motives by finding an excuse in a topical news story. When she was in this mood, it only took a Daily Mail report of a brave child in a ‘mercy dash’ for a life-saving operation in the USA to produce a surprise ‘caring’ letter or signed photograph for the distraught family. Such touching concern could then be revealed by the dazed but grateful parents and the watching world could renew its faith that – even on this most superficial level – at least one member of our royal family had a heart.
There were many examples of this sort of opportunism, and they were not all completely cynical. When she wrote the caring letter – or, more likely, had me draft it for her – her concern was genuine enough, but the quest for self-interest often came out on top. This was certainly the case with her wish, dutifully reported in the Daily Mail, to visit victims of the Warrington bombing in early 1993.
Unmoved by such publicly displayed concern – if not by the sentiment itself, which she surely shared – the Queen made her own choice of representative and sent the Prince instead. Undeterred, the Princess wrote directly to the Parry family, whose son Tim had been killed and to whom her letter obviously meant a great deal. Predictably, the letter became public. The kindness of her gesture was as genuine as the tragedy of the circumstances deserved; it was just that there was a further, secondary, agenda to the one presented more or less artlessly to the public. It was less noble, but it served a vital psychological function for the Princess. It helped her believe that she was wanted, and there was never going to be any shortage of opportunities for a public figure of her popularity to extract the desired level of gratification from such gestures.
Over time, she developed a formula for these gestures, repeated some years later in her Panorama interview. All she was trying to express, she maintained, was her wish to serve the higher concerns of humanity and the emotional needs of the nation as a whole. Such was her transparent sincerity that many people believed her, first among them herself. In reality, such idealism existed mostly in the eyes of the recipient. In the Princess its main value was as a smokescreen, helping both her and me to avert our eyes from the void in her life which, in the absence of a settled marriage, she was partly able to fill with work, wherever it came from. As a distraction from this very personal agenda, the Princess was able to enhance her image by invoking a naive idealism in others. The watching public seemed happy to set aside any suspicion that it was being led by the nose, just for the reward of seeing the Princess express a popular emotion. For her part, no emotion was too facile, so long as it was popular. This was the test.
Despite this, I knew that the impression I had formed on that first outing to Essex – that she genuinely cared – was not untrue. It was the instinctive reaction of any sensitive adult, heightened by a strong maternal instinct and a personal acquaintance with pain, all powerfully communicated by the most expressive eyes in the business. Not even the best actress could sustain such a convincing show of compassion for so long; nor would those on the receiving end be so easily fooled. Some of it had to be real.
Over time, however, I observed that this gift of empathy with suffering people could become confused with hunger for the unconditional love and understanding that she felt she needed for herself. Feed this internal hunger with unlimited media opportunities to appeal to greater humanitarian principles, and a balanced understanding of her own motives becomes all the more vital. That the task was beyond her was not entirely her fault. Much of it was mine.
All this was yet to become clear. The picture only emerged as the years passed and my knowledge of her deepened. At the time all I could try to do was to make sense of the contradictory evidence of my own eyes, while every engagement, every tour and often every glance or casual remark added to the mosaic of emotions that I saw at work in her.
Watching her, I came to feel that almost anything can be sanctioned, or overlooked, for the sake of a great principle. Royalty, being at its best a kind of manifestation of an ideal, is given enormous latitude to claim idealism for itself, no matter how hackneyed its chosen subject, how undisciplined its thinking, or how self-serving its motives. The truth seems to be that many of us prefer to think of our royal family acting out of principle in a way we have learned not to expect from our politicians. The trouble is, however, that by borrowing tricks from spin-conscious politicians some royal people have taken a major step away from their traditional and most highly prized function – to exercise the privilege of acting out of principle rather than out of a desire (or need) to secure short-term popularity. From there it is only a short step to hypocrisy, as I discovered late one night in a railway lavatory.
It was Christmas 1995, not long after the painful Panorama interview. Despite repeated reminders from me and others, the Princess had made no plans to take up any of the offers of seasonal hospitality which had been sent to her. She was lonely and bored. She felt unloved and unappreciated, and I believe it was sadly some form of consolation to her to bring this unhappiness sharply to the attention of any who might be planning a rather more conventionally happy holiday.
Having left London to go on leave with all outstanding business, as I thought, completed at the office, I received an urgent pager message to call my boss. As was my custom, I made my way unenthusiastically to the First Class lavatory, locked myself in securely and dialled the Palace number. The Princess’s first words confirmed the suspicion I had held for the previous two weeks.
‘Patrick, I’m so sorry to bother you when you’re away on your hols, but I think it’s really important we go to Calcutta to see Mother Teresa for Christmas. She’d love it. It would be a marvellous way of using all this wretched publicity of mine to draw attention to the wonderful work she’s doing.’
‘That’s a hell of an idea, Ma’am, but—’
‘We don’t need to tell anyone. I could just go with a policeman and offer to help with caring for the people who are dying.’
‘Where would you stay? In Mother’s house with the Sisters?’
‘Well, I don’t think that would do. N
o, we have to find a hotel …’
‘Ma’am, this is going to have to be done properly. I’m sorry always to sound so unenthusiastic, but if you arrive in Calcutta in a blaze of publicity in the middle of the Christmas holidays without us even having told the High Commissioner, a lot of people will be very embarrassed and the benefit of your visit for Mother Teresa would be spoilt.’
‘But Patrick, they’ll try and stop us. They don’t understand what these people need …’
I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Let me ring Mother and see what she can do from her end. I’ll call you back as soon as I’ve spoken to her.’
I looked in my address book under Mother Teresa and there was the number. Standing swaying in the loo (the aroma did rouse some distant Indian memories, now I came to think of it), trying to ignore the intrusive clickety-clack in the background and losing the signal every couple of minutes as we went under a bridge, I rang Calcutta. I was put through to the nun who was, I suppose, Mother Teresa’s private secretary equivalent, a very formidable American who, despite the fact that she had such a high spiritual calling, was very much a person of the world and took no nonsense from anybody.
‘The Princess of Wales has said that she would be willing to come and visit Mother’s work over the Christmas holiday,’ I said to her. ‘It’s something which on a personal level I think she would find very fulfilling, but she has also pointed out to me that the publicity it’s bound to attract might well benefit Mother’s wonderful work.’
I heard a muffled snort, or it may just have been interference on the line. ‘Patrick, this is good news; and so unexpected. Just let me spend a minute or two thinking about it and discussing it with Mother and then let me call you back.’
Shadows of a Princess Page 20