Mind you, with painful regularity she herself found ways of strengthening the arm of her doubters. As I laboured under the burden of her disapproval, I was still able to perceive a further potential embarrassment in her attitude to public duties. She had allowed herself to become obsessed with the Gulf War. Every attempt to make her do something unconnected with the war, or something which might conceivably be interpreted as recreational, drew her violent opposition. As so often in history, a real war was the perfect excuse for those behind the lines to dispense gleefully with irksome routine. Her diary was cleared wholesale.
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the powers that be in Buckingham Palace and at the Foreign Office chose not to send the popular Princess to identify herself with the great wave of patriotic sentiment directed towards our boys in the Gulf. She had an unwelcome personal motive for going and would, in any case, steal too much limelight. She must stand to one side while the Prince duly donned uniform and went to perform his duty.
It was a pity, I reflected later, that this policy could not have been refined and packaged in a way that might have made its implementation more successful. Openness was not the chosen method, sadly. Instead, by trial and error, the Princess and her staff learned the limits of her freedom. Not that there was a plot against her – in some ways that would actually have been preferable. At least plotters have a clear view of their objectives. Rather, I think it was hoped that any damage she did could be contained by piecemeal restrictions and much wishing for the best.
With greater foresight, the Gulf War could have created the opportunity to use the Princess’s strengths directly in the service of the Crown, in exchange for a commitment from her to put that service ahead of any other ambitions she had. There were, of course, many other such opportunities, almost until her divorce, but they were not recognized either. Even if they had been recognized, they would have required a departure from customary ways of thinking that was just too abrupt.
These opportunities may well have been missed because I, with the closest vantage point, did not point them out sufficiently vigorously. That said, the organization of which I was a part – and the Princess too, however unwillingly – had a natural aversion to vigorous pointing out, and history will surely prove that such an aversion has been one of its greatest strengths, if at times its least attractive.
The Iraqi ceasefire at the end of February 1991 also signalled a thawing of hostilities between myself and my boss. While it was possible to fall from favour in an apparently vertical plummet of sudden unpopularity, negotiating one’s way out of purgatory took rather longer. The process of rehabilitation was hampered by the fact that the Princess did not find it easy to admit that she might have been wrong, at least in matters of real importance. Nor, I suppose, did I. A wary couple of months followed in which my presence was increasingly acknowledged once again and the work of the office, which had suffered during her preoccupation and my ostracism, resumed its normal tempo.
One further trick remained to be pulled from the Gulf War box. She instructed me, in a rather spare note, to make arrangements so that she could entertain the relatives of those killed in the conflict to tea and sympathy.
As a humanitarian gesture it was superficially irreproachable, but its subtext, as I well knew, had more to do with the Princess’s wish to salvage some of the media spotlight that had been lost to her during the course of the war. It would also, I thought unkindly but probably accurately, be a popular move with the returning soldiery, one in particular.
With minimal research, I confirmed what I already suspected from reports in the news. Of the 14 who had died, only two or three had suffered deaths that might be described as uncontroversial. I sent her a note saying this and was not very surprised to hear no more on the subject.
The Prince’s success in being portrayed as the only member of the royal family to brave the war zone rankled with the Princess, and her vengeful mood set the scene for the spring and summer that followed.
She had opted to go to the St David’s Day celebrations at Llandaff Cathedral on 1 March and planned to take Prince William with her, on what would be his first public engagement in the principality. It was a PR masterstroke, very simple in its conception and almost impossible to counter. Belatedly, the Prince added himself to the event and a convincing show of unity was staged. The only problem was that the Prince’s diary had not been designed to accommodate a morning in Wales, so he had to leave straight after the service by helicopter to go to another engagement while his wife and eldest son stayed on to enjoy scenes of mass popularity in Cardiff city centre.
For part of the trip I shared a car with Sir Christopher Airy. Christopher had replaced John Riddell as private secretary to both the Prince and Princess less than a year before. With a distinguished Army background and a rigid sense of duty and precedent, Christopher would have been ideally suited to the gentlemanly atmosphere of Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately, a different philosophy reigned at St James’s, in which the qualities that had served him so well as General Officer Commanding London District were of painfully little relevance. He quickly – and all too obviously – felt out of place in an organization already in the process of disintegration.
I sat next to the courtly figure as it waved genially, and quite inappropriately, to the Welsh crowds. I could see why it was common knowledge in the office that the shadows were already gathering around him. Having myself connived at Anne’s resignation a year earlier, I was in no position to hold my nose at the unsavoury ways in which Christopher’s demise was being engineered. In time-honoured fashion, ambitious subordinates were making the most of their better access to the royal ear. It was typical of our happy life at St James’s, however, that the General was probably one of the last people to realize what was happening.
The underlying tensions of the day were plainly as unwelcome to him as they were to the rest of us, and he consoled himself by remarking over and over again on the size and enthusiasm of the crowds. This was a bad sign, I thought, arrogant in my own professionalism. The crowds, large or small, should be the least important part of a private secretary’s job.
By the time I went to Salisbury for the day with the Princess in April, my rehabilitation was almost complete. This probably had less to do with the Princess’s rediscovery of what a nice chap I really was than with her realization that I was undeniably the devil she knew and had, indeed, even selected. Plans to replace me, which must have crossed her mind during my exile, had retreated. Her hopes of securing employment for James Hewitt, which I suspected was one of her motives, took a further blow with Christopher Airy’s dismissal just a short month or so after the Cardiff fiasco. Christopher had been a guest at that long-ago KP lunch when I met James and I think he had a kindly understanding of the pitfalls of young officers’ romantic attachments. In her emotionally charged mind at the time, I could imagine the Princess trying to wheedle a favour for her beloved out of the impressionable old boy.
The day of Christopher’s abrupt departure revealed him at his dignified best as he exhorted the office staff to be loyal to the Prince (though, forgetfully, not to the Princess as well, I noted with some wry amusement). Seldom can euthanasia have been administered with such a blunt needle, however.
To nobody’s surprise, except perhaps briefly his own, in May 1991, following a period of increasing influence as comptroller, Richard Aylard now assumed the title of private secretary – but to whom?
Although never on close terms, Richard and I shared a similar naval background and understood many of each other’s problems. Having served the Princess as equerry for several years, he had a valuable insight into much of her thinking and later on he frequently used his knowledge to urge moderation in his boss’s attitude to his wife during the stormy process of separation.
Sadly, Richard was a marked man in the Princess’s eyes for having, as she saw it, crossed to the enemy camp. Coupled with Richard’s enthusiasm for working with the media and his energetic a
nd arguably overdue attempts to galvanize some morale and efficiency into the Prince’s office, this made it relatively easy for her to see him as a schemer, always ready to aid and abet – if not actually conceive – moves to downgrade her. It was never likely that she would accept him as joint private secretary to herself and the Prince, which had happily been the arrangement with Richard’s predecessors since the early days of the marriage.
I had already effectively been doing the job – without the pay – for a number of months by this time, so the obvious choice was to appoint me as her own private secretary and, for all practical purposes, complete the separation of the office into two. There followed an uncomfortable few weeks while the Princess debated with herself whether I was sufficiently restored in her favours to warrant such a promotion. I, meanwhile, made quiet plans to resign if she chose any other course of action. In the end she decided in my favour.
Thereafter, however well Richard and I maintained civilized relations, the joint office was inexorably set on division. Since this administrative schism reflected an increasingly bitter marital feud, the Princess and I would also soon be struggling to hold on to the status she had acquired on marriage. The poisoning effect on relations within the office was slow and insidious. As time passed, our attempts to recreate the old spirit of teamwork – staff parties, office co-ordination meetings and the like – declined into a prickly charade of mutual suspicion.
My appointment marked the end of my first and longest period of estrangement from the Princess until my resignation in 1996. Certainly there were occasional bouts of frostiness in the intervening years, but I think we had both learned from the experience of the winter of 1990–91. She apparently reconciled herself to the thought that the trouble of replacing me was more than the trouble of keeping me, especially as relations with her husband’s office hardened, and I learned the painful way that my happiness was my own responsibility. In the end, she had enough to cope with keeping herself going without having to worry about my delicate feelings. Henceforth, I tried, albeit with limited success, to cultivate a degree of self-protective detachment.
The division of the office was accomplished with remarkably little publicity. Richard and I would probably not have chosen each other as companions on a desert island, but we shared a common understanding of the realities of our situation and I wrote him a short note promising my co-operation in what were plainly going to be troubled times ahead. Although we sometimes subsequently found ourselves at odds, when the chips were really down, such as at the time of the couple’s separation in 1992, we found we were able to work together with surprising unanimity.
In the course of the previous year, such a gap had already opened up in the way the two staffs worked that it only took a few secretaries to move desks and me to have my stationery reprinted for the transformation to be virtually complete. Common services such as the accountant and the organization of joint events continued to give us the facade of a combined operation, which prevented media mischief-making at what was a very vulnerable time. The Princess’s staff kept their offices in St James’s Palace and I helped myself to another pay rise.
The Princess would still only visit erratically, except during a brief period when I tried to introduce regular meetings to help reinforce the image of a working woman in control of her own affairs. Her visits were always exciting for the secretaries and almost despite herself I think she found them a welcome change of scene. They also brought her into contact with her husband’s staff – a mixed blessing for both visitor and visited alike.
It would go something like this. If it was one of the regular, planned visits, I always made careful preparations, mindful of the well-tried maxim about reducing the risk of surprises. The hall porters, for example, were told when she was expected, which enabled them to keep a space clear for her car. The green-fingered housekeeper lovingly tended the straggly foliage in my office. I casually mentioned the imminent visit to Richard, so that he could prepare himself and his staff (and the Prince, if he was around) for any impromptu walkabout.
The girls cleared incriminating paperwork from desktops and stowed it safely away from curious royal eyes, and then spent slightly longer making imaginary improvements to their appearance. The equerry rechecked his lists of forthcoming engagements and rehearsed what he thought she would like to hear about them. The press secretary braced himself.
Meanwhile, I thought hard about the agenda for the meeting. It already contained standard subjects such as programme, media, correspondence and domestic administration, but under ‘Any Other Business’ I could introduce subjects ranging from the latest famine to befall the Sudan and whether we should get involved, to the latest scandal to befall a Government Minister and whether she would want to share a speaking platform with him.
Alongside these weighty matters, we sometimes strayed on to things that sprang more readily into the Princess’s mind. Had we read the story in the paper about the girl making medical history as a guinea pig for a life-saving new treatment? She really wanted to send her a personal message. Would I draft something? Had I seen that programme about homelessness on TV last night? Would I phone the producer and see if we could send a private donation from her Charities Trust? Didn’t I have any other coffee cups? These ones would give my visitors a very bad impression. One of the girls could choose new ones from Thomas Goode in Mayfair and send her the bill…
When she arrived in Ambassador’s Court, therefore, we were ready. My office was the best lookout post in the Palace and I had time to see her car draw up and still run downstairs to meet her in the hall. She seemed to blow in on a breeze of vigour and enthusiasm, tall, laughing and confident. She’s been getting ready too, I thought. The hall porters bowed like the ex-Guardsmen they were. The housekeeper curtsied. I stumbled up the stairs. She laughed. We all laughed.
In my office the sun was streaming through my lookout window. Steaming coffee and expensive polish mingled with the scent of freshly laundered Princess. The new cups sparkled and so did the blushing secretary who was still artfully arranging them when we arrived. All six and a half feet of commando equerry inclined himself in the Princess’s direction. The press secretary winked.
Amazingly, my spindly weeping fig had cheered up under the housekeeper’s ministrations. Even the pencils were sharp, next to the crisp white blocks of embossed notepaper. As we took our seats and everybody turned to me, waiting for me to speak, I thought, not for the last time: this must be the best job in the world … now what do I say?
Every five or six weeks a note would come from the Princess suggesting that it might be time for another ‘A Team’ lunch. This was her way of thanking her male staff – me – and her policemen for the ordeals we endured in looking after her.
We were the ‘A Team’, while her husband’s staff were, inevitably, the ‘B Team’. This fairly harmless piece of morale-boosting was the Princess’s own idea, dating back to a time when she really felt she had hardly any representation in what was from the outset an office overwhelmingly designed to cater for the Prince’s needs. By 1991, however, such childish fun was beginning to grate and the use of the terms ‘A Team’/‘B Team’ was officially discouraged – a sure sign, we felt, that they were more appropriate than ever.
Once I had become her private secretary, the new equerry was included in the lunches, and occasionally a secretary or lady-in-waiting. To keep up the cosy image of the Princess and ‘her boys’, she classified any additional female guests as honorary men for the occasion.
This seems a good moment to pay a brief tribute to the Princess’s policemen, or personal protection officers to give them their proper name. During my years with the Princess I must have worked closely with about a dozen of them. Four senior PPOs worked weekly shifts with her, supported by back-up teams of varying sizes. Their professional roots lay in the Metropolitan Police, from which they were chosen through aptitude and ability for royalty and diplomatic protection duties. As well as being seasoned by years of
policing the capital, they also underwent innumerable courses, including training with the SAS.
These men, and occasionally women, were a breed apart. From my faltering first steps in England to what I hoped was the practised professionalism of our later recces around the world, they gave me support, friendship and invaluable advice. Their generosity in this and so many other ways was matched only by the consummate assurance with which they carried out their duties, one of which – though we never discussed it – was to take any bullet intended for their vulnerable charge. They were loyal, discreet, wise and brave, and I never fathomed the Princess’s eventual desire to cast aside their protection, let alone replace it with the well-meaning amateurishness of hired substitutes.
Our occasional ‘A Team’ lunches were a chance to provide an all-male escort for the world’s most famous lady-who-lunched in any one of London’s top restaurants that we cared to choose. You might therefore imagine that I was the most enthusiastic of her guests – and you would be right, but only just. It was always a pretty contented crew who settled down at the bar of Tante Claire, Bibendum, Cecconi or Clarke’s, or any of a dozen other favoured establishments.
We usually timed it so that we had some flying speed under our belts before the Princess’s car swept up to the kerb. She was always at her best in exclusively male company and I think her pleasure was heightened by the knowledge that, unlike so many of the meals she took either as part of her public duties or in pursuit of her convoluted private friendships, this was one where the company was genuinely grateful, genuinely discreet, and for whom she had to pretend to be nothing more than their boss.
Of course, none of us was foolish enough to believe that just because we were all off-duty, so was the critical royal eye. Playing a starring part in an ‘A Team’ lunch one week was no guarantee against summary ostracism and even enforced resignation the next. Nevertheless, we all entered into the spirit of the thing and traded gossip and dirty jokes at a pace which even her customary lunching companions might have envied.
Shadows of a Princess Page 28