About 15 minutes later – we were somewhere between Westbury and Castle Cary by then – the American voice confirmed that my plan had worked. ‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘Mother asks that you send her thanks and blessings to Her Highness and is delighted to hear that she wishes to help with our work in this way. But she says there’s no need for the Princess to come all the way to Calcutta, because as it happens our Order has recently opened two alcohol rehabilitation projects in a suburb of London called “Southwark”. Mother feels that, if the Princess would like to help us with our work, it would surely be more convenient for her to visit these centres instead of making the journey all the way to India.’
With a sigh of relief I said, ‘Thank you, Sister, very much.’
I thought I heard a chuckle. ‘God bless you, Patrick, and have a happy Christmas.’
I had a bracing cup of Great Western tea and nerved myself for the call I now had to make to the Princess to report my failure. With as much regret and sympathy as I could put into my voice, I relayed the essential message I had received from Calcutta. There was a long, hurt and unloved silence at the other end of the line before the train plunged into a tunnel and the phone mercifully went dead. I am afraid the alcohol projects never did get their visit.
NINE
HOT AND COLD
Further evidence that an age of innocence was slipping away from us came in my growing realization that the Princess’s place in the royal machinery was no longer beyond doubt. So far as the world was concerned, of course, she was still very much the future Queen. Her role as a mainstream royal operator – a senior board member of the royal ‘firm’ – is worth emphasizing in this respect. For anyone reviewing the events of 1989–90 and even into 1991, there is ample evidence of her role as a hard-working member of the royal team. This was very reassuring at the time, particularly for those who were beginning to believe the rising tide of stories about marital strains hidden from public view, although there were also growing signs of independence and assertiveness.
The royal family is a federation of semi-independent households, each one reflecting the character of the royal people it exists to serve. Those of us who worked for the Waleses were still, at least in theory, members of a unified household, but the Princess’s increasing wish to stamp her own personality on her public life inevitably put her on a divergent path from the organization which had been set up for her husband, to whom it largely still owed its first loyalty. Other members of the federation, particularly its leadership, could only view the emergence of a new and possibly incompatible body as potentially destabilizing, if not actually alien. It became my job as private secretary to do what I could to minimize these concerns.
It was a time of transition. The Princess’s stardom had not yet parted company with the reality of her achievements. It was still possible to believe only the best of her without having to set aside serious doubts about her motives. Unless, that is, you had inside knowledge of her well-established ability to manipulate public appearances to serve her need for personal recognition. Spin-doctoring – on behalf of the Princess or her husband – was not yet obtrusive either, so when Lesley Garner wrote the following fairly typical appreciation in the Telegraph on 17 June 1989, her remarks could be taken as genuinely representative.
If ever The Princess of Wales was just a frivolous Sloane, she has surely changed beyond recognition. As a working mother approaching her 28th birthday, she is patron or president of more than 40 bodies. She works hard, gets on brilliantly with people from all walks of life and, most importantly, she is prepared to tackle the least attractive causes … The young woman who dresses so beautifully and who lives such a privileged and apparently sheltered life probably understands as much about the major social problems that face us as anybody … The Mouse that Roared indeed.
It was high summer for her admirers. You could delight in her successes without even slightly compromising your loyalties as a monarchist – quite the opposite, in fact. Here was a Princess who many people thought could and surely would make the best possible sort of Queen for the twenty-first century. I was not alone in picturing her ultimately as the far-distant inheritor of the kind of affection currently reserved for the Queen Mother.
At that time it was also still possible to see her continuing in a traditional royal role. Her choice of engagements had not yet descended to the kind of cherry-picking that marked her final years. She still uncomplainingly carried out many public duties, not because they might enhance a particular aspect of her popularity but because they were just that – duties. Ironically, because they showed her as a mainstream royal figure, and because she carried them off with such style, these duties earned her the kind of unspectacular, reliable public approval that became so important in the years when the institution was trying to marginalize her.
She never recognized the debt she owed to these examples of routine, worthy royal work. Their setting was typically a grey industrial town, their audience typically the very old, the very young, the desperately poor and sad. These people felt that nobody spoke for them, but she made them feel they were not forgotten. Yet, when she had the chance, these engagements – along with the patronages they represented – were progressively discarded from her diary as she found easier popularity and more entertaining work to take their place. This was tragically wasted potential, both for her and for the monarchy, though at the time neither side perceived it.
Two contrasting engagements from this period come to mind. For me they show a final glimpse of the Princess in the role intended for her – royal, dutiful and conformist. The first was a visit in the summer of 1989 to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in Devon, where the Princess had been asked to take the salute at Lord High Admiral’s Divisions, the Navy’s version of a passing-out parade. It was a typical royal engagement, albeit more colourful and ceremonial than an awayday in yet another provincial town. In a bright red tricorn hat and matching suit with brass buttons, the Princess was the Day-Glo focus of attention in a sea of massed, dark blue ranks.
She was, as always, very professional about remembering the part she had to play in the proceedings. Before venturing out to take the salute, she was given a briefing in the Captain’s office on the intricacies of the parade to come. She listened with serious attention, only causing some consternation at the end, when she asked with wide-eyed innocence, ‘And will they do it all again if I ask them to?’
Then she emerged laughing into the sunshine, where the entire College was paraded in review order under the admiring gaze of their friends and families, who had come to witness their great day.
‘Look at all those uniforms!’ she breathed, her eyes roving up and down the ranks of men standing rigidly at attention.
‘Hmm,’ said the Captain. ‘And royal weather for you too, Ma’am.’
‘Of course,’ came the reply. ‘The sun always shines on the righteous!’
A Royal Guard was drawn up under the dais ready to give the Royal Salute. The band played, the Guard commander shouted his hoarse commands, and with impressive precision several hundred swords and rifles were flourished in a symbolic act of respect. The statuesque, strikingly female figure in red looked down at the beautiful tableau of military symmetry and very gently inclined her head in acknowledgement. Queen Mary herself could not have done it better, in the days when the College sent young officers to serve the most powerful Navy in the world.
If Dartmouth showed once again the Princess’s continuing potential as a popular combination of ‘old’ and ‘new’ royalty, a very different engagement from the same period showed the potential she still shared with her husband to be what the ordinary people of the country wanted them to be. It was a rare joint engagement at home in Britain. The town of Northampton had long been planning to honour its famous daughter and on 8 June 1989 the Princess was formally created a Freeman of the Town. Arrangements for the day were fiendishly complicated, involving the Prince and Princess arriving from different directions and departing separately as
well.
The whole day was an excellent example of the goodwill, efficiency and simple loyalty that lies behind so many royal provincial visits. There was a church service at which the Prince read the lesson, a civic ceremony at which the Princess made a pretty speech in reply to the honour the town gave her, a march past by the Army, a huge lunch, a tour of the museum and a squelching walkabout in pouring rain. The watching public loved it all.
By then, however, the Princess was in a foul mood. Her umbrella had broken in the wind and rain, her hair was wet and her shoes were leaking. To cap it all, we ended the afternoon with tea at Althorp, her ancestral home. Waiting to greet her was her stepmother Raine, in those days mercilessly demonized by the Princess. ‘You watch,’ she had said before we arrived, ‘she does the lowest curtsy in England.’ But the Princess was denied her fun. That afternoon Raine’s curtsies and conversation were all for the Prince.
Presiding behind the teapot, the Countess dispensed Earl Grey and dazzling smiles to the little group sitting awkwardly round the tea table. Amidst the imposing splendour of Althorp, we made a bedraggled group. Reaction to the tensions of the day was setting in, especially for the new Freeman of Northampton who had lapsed into a sullen silence. The Prince was coping well as he parried his stepmother-in-law’s unctuous offer of miniature eclairs. The lady-in-waiting caught my eye and grimaced imperceptibly. The table groaned under the weight of dainty cakes and tiny sandwiches. Even nibbling suddenly seemed an impossible effort.
Only the Princess’s father seemed oblivious to the mood of deepening gloom. He left the table and returned a moment later flourishing a bottle of Scotch. He spoke in breathy gasps, the legacy of a stroke. It was surprisingly endearing. Pointing the bottle at the Prince, he said, ‘Sir! Warm you up!’ The Prince declined in mock horror – at least, I think it was mock. Undeterred, Johnny thrust the bottle at me, winking broadly as he filled my teacup to the brim. Then he poured himself a similar dose and we raised our cups. Soon a warm glow began to suffuse at least two members of the chilly gathering.
As soon as decency permitted, the Prince departed by helicopter for an architectural assignment. The Princess returned to London by car. Once again they had put duty before their private feelings and produced a performance for the townspeople which should have reaffirmed their faith in the security of the royal marriage.
Touchingly, I thought, it also represented a major effort on the part of the Prince to honour his wife’s big day. He could not have enjoyed the rain either, and he was never at his best when being upstaged by his wife. This had been before her home-town audience too. Even though I had hardly seen them mutter a word to each other, as we sat in the mother of all traffic jams on the M1 I wondered if perhaps, after all, my royal employers could yet find a way to work happily together.
It was so much wishful thinking. All the day had proved, in fact, was what a strain it was for the Prince and Princess to share the limelight. What a grim day it must have been for her too, I realized: unhappy childhood memories, a stepmother she thought had stolen her father, a husband she could not bear to be with and who could not bear to be with her, a ceremony full of empty words of praise she felt she did not deserve and – the last straw – her favourite umbrella broken.
There was little chance of happiness in all this. Over the next two years such unhappy experiences accumulated, and eventually separate lives came to seem the only way of breaking the spiral of growing discontent between the Princess and her husband. In the summer of 1991 this spiral received an extra and very public twist. During golfing practice at Ludgrove School, Prince William was accidentally hit on the head with a club, causing a depressed fracture of the skull. As the world now knows, he fortunately made a complete recovery, but for a few hours there was real fear that he might have suffered some significant neurological injury. Nobody felt this fear more, naturally, than his parents. It was in the ways they expressed it that the differences between them were laid bare.
The Prince, as was widely reported, having checked that William was not in serious danger, carried on with his scheduled engagements. In publicity terms it was a pity that these included an opera at Covent Garden followed by an overnight train journey to Yorkshire. This was all the ammunition his critics needed to paint him as heartless and remote, not to mention a cultural snob for good measure. I think even the Princess was surprised by the venomous way in which the tabloid press condemned the Prince as an uncaring father. They certainly said more hurtful things about his alleged shortcomings than I heard her voice aloud on this occasion. Nonetheless, she did not let that stop her falling into her natural role as distressed mother, worried to distraction about her injured son.
‘He might have brain damage!’ she told me on her mobile phone from Great Ormond Street, her voice quivering with anxiety. I sensed also a strange exultation, confirmed later when I met her at the hospital. She had hardly slept all night, having kept vigil at her son’s bedside. She was careworn, dishevelled (by her standards) and very vulnerable – but this was real life at last, a real crisis in which she would receive nothing but sympathy. ‘And you know, Patrick, you can identify so much more easily with other people’s suffering when you’ve been there yourself.’ I could only agree.
In her eyes, of course, ‘being there’ was exactly what the Prince had failed to do. She thus further strengthened her position within the marriage as the most (visibly) caring parent. Although I never heard her reproach him for his absence, psychologically it gave her an important advantage in the marital battle to come as it played into the hands of the Prince’s own demons of duty and guilt. It reminded me again that almost every royal tragedy I witnessed was not the result of wicked things done by bad people. Most were the result of good left undone by people who lacked the necessary inclination, or sagacity, or sense of self-preservation – or good advisers, I later reflected in a habitual fit of self-doubt.
As so often when she was involved, following William’s accident there were many whose lives were touched by the Princess in ways that could never have been planned by the most imaginative media adviser. For a start, there were the parents and children whom she visited during her own unexpected stay at the hospital and whose worries she could now share with a rare sincerity. Another surprise beneficiary was Headway, the head injuries charity whose work she supported – with much helpful publicity – for years afterwards, even to the extent of hijacking one of their fundraising lunches as the setting for her melodramatic ‘Time and Space’ speech in 1993.
For those of us looking for charity a bit closer to home, however, this was a time of further disappointments. Another twist in the marriage’s spiral of decline was provided by the Prince’s plans to celebrate his wife’s thirtieth birthday in July 1991. The Princess chose to view his plans for a big party at Highgrove with suspicion. She possibly had grounds for this, knowing that the Prince seemed to be in need of his staff’s advice on what he should do to mark what might have been a relaxed family event but which would inevitably be a focus of media interest.
I belonged to the ‘anything for a quiet life’ school of marital management, as perhaps did the Prince, but a quiet life was not what the sad Princess was accustomed to; nor did she like the idea of others enjoying the benefits of such an alien concept. She preferred to interpret the planned celebrations as an attempt by her husband’s supporters to portray him as a devoted husband, which, by then, she no longer believed him to be. ‘I won’t be part of his charade!’ she said when I tactfully suggested that it might be a good idea to go along with the plan.
Predictably, she publicly snubbed her husband’s offer and thus earned a reputation for emotional honesty at whatever cost. As she well knew, the main cost was to the Prince’s image, but this was just another example of a predicament that was becoming familiar to him. He was damned for offering a party, and would have been doubly damned if he had not.
This sharp and public disagreement was also the most visible sign so far that the rifts i
n the marriage ran deep. In their most obvious bid yet to damage the Princess, ‘friends’ of the Prince contrived a doom-laden front-page story in the Daily Mail for 2 July 1991 which marked the lowest ebb so far in the gathering War of the Waleses. ‘CHARLES AND DIANA: CAUSE FOR CONCERN’ it intoned solemnly. The reader might have been forgiven for wondering if there had been an assassination attempt or an outbreak of plague at St James’s Palace. Reading on, it became apparent that this call for national anxiety was justified by something far worse. The friends were ‘furious’ on the Prince’s behalf that his wife had rejected his offer of … a birthday party.
I was very glad indeed to have the chance to get away from this cycle of suspicion and recrimination and concentrate on the kind of work that most people – including me – thought that royal officials were paid to do.
September 1991 finally saw plans approved for the Princess to make a solo visit to Pakistan – a major development of her public role as a high-profile member of the royal team. It was the greatest confirmation, and the greatest test, of her royal credentials.
Until then, my only involvement in major overseas tours had been as equerry, really just second-in-command to the private secretary, however indispensable I had felt myself to be. In the interim I had taken charge of a handful of short overseas visits by the Princess, mostly to Europe. For me Pakistan was the big one – my first major overseas tour for which I alone carried full responsibility.
It was not going to be a pushover. Pakistan is a proud nation, as I had discovered during my recce the previous year. From its period under British rule it had inherited a strong sense of protocol and a Byzantine Foreign Office littered with traps for the innocent and unwary visitor. In addition there were daunting logistical challenges involved simply in moving about such a geographically diverse country. Complications of climate and custom also had to be taken into account, as well as the ever-present scrutiny of what was regularly the largest of all travelling royal press parties.
Shadows of a Princess Page 21