The weather once again played into our hands, the cloud cover being below limits for the Hercules chartered by the press party to fly them into the remote Himalayan valley. By contrast, our sprightly 146 handled this aeronautical obstacle course with ease. We took the precaution of graciously giving a seat in the royal plane to the photographer from the Press Association so that he could cover what I knew would be an engagement filled with photogenic potential.
Flying back to Islamabad at the end of a long but happy day, the Minister in attendance – a courtly Anglophile some 40 years the Princess’s senior – was so moved by the emotion of the occasion that he confided to his royal guest, ‘You know, Your Royal Highness, this country has never been the same since you left.’
His reference to the last days of the Raj fell on bemused ears. ‘Hold on,’ she laughed. ‘We haven’t even gone yet!’
That night she gave a reception for the travelling British press party in the garden of the residence. Once a standard feature of the Waleses’ overseas tours, the Prince had dropped the practice some years previously, thinking, I believe, that his hospitality had been abused when remarks he thought had been made in private became unexpectedly public the next day. The Princess, on the other hand, revived the custom with enthusiasm. The familiar faces that had followed us around the country in heat and rain now reappeared in suits and ties, unencumbered by telephoto lenses and tape recorders and all looking freshly scrubbed.
Press receptions were included in all her subsequent tours and she saved some of her best performances for them. It was effort well rewarded. She seldom took the opportunity to do more than josh and banter with the people she loved to hate, however. The real briefing took place later to a selected few in the aeroplane on the way home, while her watchdogs safely slept. This also became something of a habit, though why she bothered, having – as I later discovered – spent all that summer speaking into a Dictaphone for the benefit of Andrew Morton’s planned book, I was never quite sure. You might say, perhaps, that fame was her drug and these flirtatious, dangerous men were lover and pusher combined.
The Princess returned to England in triumph. It had been an exhausting trip, but in terms of establishing her in the public mind and in the eyes of her detractors closer to home as a semi-independent force to be reckoned with, it had succeeded beyond her expectations. The news spread through Whitehall. ‘The Princess of Wales took Pakistan by storm,’ enthused Nicholas’s official tour report.
For the next four years, until she became unjustly tarnished as a ‘loose cannon’, the Foreign Office never lacked enthusiasm for entrusting her with similar overseas missions. In return, she gave them great value – never committing an undiplomatic gaffe and always stoking up immense amounts of goodwill. Her journey from Lahore airport to the city centre had been lined by crowds six deep. ‘More even than for the Chinese President!’ an excited official told me. ‘And then we had to bring them in buses.’ This kind of comment became familiar to me, all over the world, wherever the Princess went.
I knew, nonetheless, how close we had come to disaster. That hot night on the tarmac at Lahore might have ended with a major diplomatic embarrassment without the intervention of a friendly thunderstorm. It had been just the most scary of a dozen little incidents in which her outward professionalism only narrowly succeeded in hiding the temperamental little girl that lived inside the glamorous Princess.
I knew also that the enthusiasm emanating from Pakistan and Whitehall would not find much of an echo in the corridors of St James’s Palace. As a priority, I wanted to reinforce her position as a fully integrated member of the royal family. There was no safety for her – or me – in simply indulging her occasional flashes of defiant independence. Somehow I had to find a way to let her feel independent while staying securely part of the main organization.
One obviously productive way for the Princess to assert herself as a senior member of the royal family was to carve a niche as the young and female voice of individual common sense. A promising route to this end was to make more serious speeches on issues, such as AIDS, drug abuse and mental illness, that challenged comfortable concepts of what were suitable subjects for royal involvement – especially when the speaker was more readily associated with a glamorous lifestyle and had no great reputation for intellectual insight.
She had done little public speaking in her early days as Princess, but by the time she went to Pakistan that was certainly no longer the case and she was improving all the time. For someone so articulate without a script, she was at first surprisingly underconfident when reading aloud to an audience. Her first few halting efforts had benefited from the advice of experts such as Lord Attenborough. The first real breakthrough came in the summer of 1989, when I wrote her speech for the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations of the charity Turning Point.
Intellectually it was no great challenge. All I had to do was imagine what I would want to hear from the Princess of Wales if I was an ordinary listener with no connections to royalty or drug abuse at all. The charity, as usual, provided briefing notes about their work in an unfamiliar world that even I could plagiarize quite effectively.
She delivered the speech in a firm and steady voice with just the right amount of girlish hesitancy to secure the audience’s sympathetic and unwavering attention. She extolled family values and warned of the dangers of addiction. It was good, straightforward stuff and the next day the papers were full of it. A fairly typical comment came from the Daily Express on 19 May: ‘Diana’s six minute speech to the Turning Point charity for drug and alcohol abuse was a powerful, poised and polished perfor-mance. It proved once and for all that she is more than just a pretty face to adorn magazine covers.’ Another commentator said, ‘The future Queen emerged for the first time as a powerful public orator campaigning against those twin evils in the most important speech of her eight years as a member of the Royal Family.’
In those pioneering days the Princess gave me the credit for this sort of coverage, which was music to her ears. Such positive reports fuelled her ambition to carve out an independent life for herself. Needless to say, they fuelled my ambition too. I had never written a major speech before and, knowing that my boss had not contributed a word to it herself, I took very private satisfaction from such complimentary reactions. Even when she later grew reluctant to swallow my drafts whole, the satisfaction remained.
The small milestone of that first successful speech was marked in tangible form by the Princess with typically impulsive generosity. The next day’s Bag brought a small package for me. Inside were a pair of expensive cuff links and a note which read:
Dear Patrick,
Something v small to thank you so much for all the time and effort you put into the Turning Point speech. I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciated your help.
Diana
In the years to come there would be more cuff links and other presents and many, many more notes. The Princess was a prolific note-writer, and took pride in responding quickly to incoming correspondence and in writing the many thank-you letters that her life required. Although they were sometimes overflowery and she could not resist borrowing contrived phrases from other people’s letters, their intention was simply to convey a straightforward emotion – gratitude, sympathy, irritation, laughter.
Rather like her many acts of kindness, when she wrote them she was entirely sincere, but I sometimes thought that once they had left her desk they ceased to exist for her. They captured the moment perfectly, but were not intended to be a permanent record of her feelings. It was as though, in her world, such expressions of feeling were pushed out of an emotional hatch, which was then clanged shut again for safety.
Given the constant calls on her emotional reserves, it is not surprising that she should develop such a self-protective carapace. She had to look no further than her in-laws, however, to see how it could become an almost permanent fixture. It is much in her favour that right to the end of her life she was still will
ing to open this hatch – perhaps more in hope than real expectation, and despite the fact that it only increased her vulnerability.
With the possible exception of the speech she gave on the subject of eating disorders a few years later, she did not seem to feel a genuine, personal commitment to any of the subjects on which she pronounced. The emotional hatch stayed firmly shut on these occasions and the speeches served a different purpose. Throughout her career, the Princess of Wales’s speeches sometimes attracted criticism, more often attracted praise, but always attracted attention. As the author of many of those speeches, I quite enjoyed this, but for her, I rather suspect, it was their principal appeal.
The speech was a prime means of attracting attention – to a good cause, certainly, but also to herself. The emotion she expressed, with rare exceptions, was for public consumption only. Speech-making, like walking round hospitals, was another means of conveying a sentiment and reinforcing an image. The words were not wrung from her soul – she never begged me to use my larger vocabulary to match the intensity of her feelings, or to communicate a deeply felt message. My vocabulary was there to make her sound what people wanted her to be – the voice of common sense and recognizably royal, as well as young and unstuffy.
Very few public speakers have the satisfaction of speaking with genuine sincerity all the time, of course. She was not a politician running for office. She was a conduit for other people’s images of what she ought to be, and if in the process she enjoyed public adulation and a vicarious expertise, there was surely no harm in that. Any benefit or satisfaction she got from making her long, lonely marches to the podium were paid for through the nervousness she suffered beforehand and the effort she took to prepare herself for the ordeal.
She became increasingly possessive of the extravagant praise her speeches regularly attracted, although it must have occurred to her that this credit was earned at least as much by the words as by her skill in delivering them – and she had not written the words. It was fine by me. Private secretaries exist to contrive credit for their bosses, and not just by writing speeches. They share in it too, albeit privately. The Princess, however, seemed to feel that this necessary and time-honoured professional protocol was an affront to her dignity. Her response, characteristically, was to sow dissent.
I soon felt I had invented a monster which had got out of control, as she cast about for novelty in her contributors. She was not always impressed, either, by my attempts to persuade her that the relevant government department was the correct starting point in her quest for authoritative things to say. Just as I had ridden roughshod over the sensitivities of those in the office who might have expected to draft her speeches, so she in turn let me suffer the discomfort of having strangers and outsiders put words in her mouth.
Long and sometimes incoherent drafts would appear in the return Bag, haphazardly typed on unfamiliar paper. Some seemed to have been written by the current therapist and were stuffed full of New Age clichés. Some bore the mark of Richard Kay’s easy style, recognizable from his day job as court correspondent at the Daily Mail. Others, on medical subjects, I guessed came from her close friend and (not that I knew it at the time) Andrew Morton’s collaborator, Dr James Coldhurst. Her regiments, on the rare occasions when she addressed them, had the benefit of the thoughts of Acting Major Hewitt – fair counterpoint, I supposed, for the thoughts of Lieutenant Commander Jephson. Other audiences heard the ardent offerings of her speech trainer, Peter Settelen.
Intriguingly, one day I found a draft written on what was unmistakably office paper. The Princess had successfully recruited an ally in the Prince’s camp, his deputy private secretary Peter Westmacott, and flattered him greatly by supplementing his duties with, among other things, part-time speech-writing for her. Peter’s draft was at least suitable for royal use, but it took a long time to persuade her that such scheming – however exciting – was unnecessary. I was not so proud that I would have minded the involvement of other contributors. In fact, provided their material was literate and reasonably uncontroversial, I welcomed it.
It was not unusual for her to test loyalties – and prove her power – by attempting to provoke professional jealousy. It was an emotion she was so familiar with herself that it must have felt soothing to be the cause of it in others. I was not immune, but I had learned enough to realize that if I visibly succumbed to the temptation, it would be fatal. Eventually, as with most nursery amusements, she tired of this game and my stoicism was rewarded. In a development that marked a growing maturity for both of us, she would collect the offerings of her various unofficial speech-drafters and give them to me for editing, polishing and on occasions completely rewriting.
As well as speeches, I was beginning to draft more and more of the Princess’s correspondence, briefings, introductions and forewords. From then until the day I left, there was almost nothing that appeared in public over her signature – and much in private, too – that I had not written. Sometimes I felt as if I was literally writing the script of her public life.
Meanwhile, as well as attempting to carve out an independent niche for herself, the Princess was still a willing and welcome volunteer to deputize for other members of the royal family when occasion required. She always reacted enthusiastically to a call for a volunteer to stand in. As well as a desire to help – and also a desire to cut a favourable image as the rescuer of an otherwise doomed engagement – I detected another and more touching motive behind the Princess’s habitual eagerness to assist on such occasions. By stepping into the breach, she would earn the gratitude of the family into which she had married. Since such gratitude was seldom forthcoming for any other reason, she valued it all the more. At an unconscious level, it may also have appealed to her desire to be recognized as an integral part of a larger family.
This most visible reminder of her continuing position in the royal framework was strongly underlined when she stood in for the most ‘establishment’ member of the royal family, the Queen Mother, at an engagement in Westminster Cathedral.
As has been reported elsewhere – not least in the transcripts of the ‘Squidgygate’ tapes – the Princess’s attitude to the royal family’s matriarch was ambivalent. She recognized the Queen Mother’s strength as the most powerful operator on the royal chessboard, especially in the influence she wielded over the Prince. Perhaps for this reason, however, she also feared and therefore privately criticized her. She would sometimes speak with satisfaction of the disruptive effects of the court mourning that would follow the older woman’s death, and speculate fairly irreverently on the choice of black clothes available to her. She seemed also, even if only subconsciously, to sense the vacuum such a death would leave in national life and her own potential to fill the gap in the country’s affections. It was not hard to imagine her, 60 years hence, exercising a similar degree of control over a future royal family, for whom she represented a precious link with a golden past.
While the Princess played her part flawlessly as a conventional royal performer at the engagement in Westminster Cathedral, the experience also opened up the possibility of a more spiritual answer to the public and private pressures that were gathering around her. Mainstream, traditional royal duty has always involved religion. There was surely potential for combining public duty with personal enlightenment – and the Princess, as I had begun to sense, had a vague but unmistakable spiritual hunger about her.
The engagement entailed going to the Cathedral for a Festival of Flowers and Music in aid of the Cardinal Hume Centre, a charity working on the front line in the war against youth homelessness. On the face of it this was an entirely standard royal engagement, familiar and traditional in its theme and structure. Having been planned for a guest some 60 years older than herself, the visit was more sedate and contained far more formal presentations than would normally have been the Princess’s personal preference. In contrast to some of the more frenetic engagements she carried out in unstructured and informal circumstances, often with peopl
e to whom a natural deference was quite unfamiliar, this time the Princess was forced to go at somebody else’s pace and I think that, despite herself, she found the old style had its attractions.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral seemed cavernous and dark. In the background the organ played softly and the air carried the heady perfume of incense. The Princess’s route around the great building was lined on every side by beautiful flower arrangements and quietly respectful, even reverential, guests. At her side, the tall figure of the Cardinal fell naturally into the role of fatherly guide.
After touring the Cathedral he gave her coffee in the Archbishop’s House, where she also met people from the Cardinal Hume Centre. That engagement, attended by the Princess only by chance, forged a relationship with the Cardinal’s homeless charities in London that lasted for the rest of her life.
The link with the homeless centre gave her a further opportunity to practise a type of royal visit that she made her own – engagements planned and conducted in secret but subsequently, and sometimes simultaneously, publicized through favoured parts of the media. It has since been copied by other royal people, but the Princess pioneered it in particular cases where advance publicity would have ruined the entire effect. This was especially true with homelessness projects, where the whole benefit – for visitor and visited alike – depended on her presence being kept secret.
The impression created publicly of good works modestly carried out did no harm either, nor did the news that William and Harry sometimes accompanied her on trips to see the rougher end of the social scale. This publicity bolstered her image as tutor to the boys in matters of real life, in contrast to their father’s apparent preference for traditional, and elitist, country pursuits.
Shadows of a Princess Page 23