Her car would return promptly at 2.30 and she would make a scene-stealing exit, accompanied by the hapless duty policeman who, being armed, had not joined in our plundering of the upper reaches of the wine list. Their departure was the signal for waistbands to be eased, ties loosened and serious demands placed on the restaurant’s supplies of Cognac and cigars.
I usually left them to it after a while, in order to be back at my desk before the inevitable phone call from Kensington Palace. She would almost always check to find out how long we had stayed after her departure. If it was too long – and there was no reliable way of measuring it – she would feel exploited and resentful. This was the flip side of much of her generosity. At least it had the benefit of making me sober up pretty quickly after any lunchtime excess. It also gave me a chance to write our joint thank-you letter, which custom demanded ought to land on her desk before the Chablis had even finished working its way into the bloodstream. It was for this reason that I usually wrote the letter with a steady hand some hours before the lunch took place. Luckily, I also remembered not to put it in the midday Bag.
We were an increasingly foreign body at St James’s Palace and from time to time the host organism would try to expel us. I knew, however, that for her office to retreat to the cosy security of Kensington Palace would condemn the Princess to being sidelined from the great debates that were soon to ensue between St James’s and Buckingham Palace about the future of the Waleses. It would enable us to be dismissed and the world to be given the impression that we had gone away to occupy ourselves with trivial things in a peripheral palace. This objective was only finally achieved after my resignation – with, I believe, the consequences I had predicted.
Staying at St James’s Palace also enabled me to keep an eye on the internal politics of the Prince’s office. I was aware that during my period of banishment the Princess had recruited an ally in the Prince’s camp. To my chagrin, as I mentioned earlier, she had enlisted the help of his deputy private secretary, Peter Westmacott, in drafting one of her more important speeches. Creating this channel of communication, so attractively illicit in nature, seemed to satisfy one of the Princess’s major enthusiasms, which was to spread her affections and sow mistrust as widely as she could. Both at St James’s and later, when he had been posted to the Embassy in Washington, I believe Peter performed many valuable services for the Princess. He did me a big favour too, by teaching me the futility of taking the bait of jealousy, which she was apt to dangle in front of any whom she thought dependent on her benign disposition.
The opening salvo in a war of media briefings was fired by Andrew Morton in the Sunday Times in May 1991. In an article which, among other things, praised the professional diplomats who were saddled with the impossible task of serving the Prince, Morton castigated the heir as unfeeling, hypocritical, self-indulgent and a danger to the future of the monarchy. To my eyes, the article read very much like the Princess on her favourite subject.
The furore over Prince William’s head injury from a golf club stirred up the war of words in June. Not long after that, at the beginning of July, the Prince’s camp hit back with a front-page story in the Daily Mail headed ‘CHARLES AND DIANA: CAUSE FOR CONCERN’, in which Nigel Dempster wrote at length, attacking the Princess’s alleged petulance and ingratitude over the Prince’s plans to mark her thirtieth birthday. It was a naked example of briefing by ‘friends’, elevated by its portentous headline to the point where national concern over the Waleses’ marriage and who was to blame for its failure appeared quite legitimate.
I think this was the first time that the two armies came truly into the open. Its significance for me was not that the marriage of the Prince and Princess was in trouble. I had known that practically since I had joined. To me, it was far more important to realize that the issues at stake were whose fault it would be when it happened and what would be done with the Princess after it had happened. It was also vital to appreciate that, whatever means the Princess might find to put her case, the Prince’s ‘friends’ would not hesitate to return her fire tenfold. In addition, without being unduly concerned with scruples ourselves, the hostility of their intentions demonstrated a depressing ability to overlook the moral responsibilities of the office they were loudly seeking to defend.
Another indication that the gloves were coming off in what was still at that stage merely the skirmish of the Waleses had come with a diary clash slightly earlier in the summer. The Princess was due to attend a combined National AIDS Trust and National Children’s Bureau conference. The invitation, once accepted, was subsequently upgraded to include a request that the Princess should also address the conference. Her reaction was enthusiastic. She was getting the hang of speech-making and enjoyed the impact she was able to create, which far exceeded anything she achieved by just turning up and being photographed.
In passing on the request I also warned her that the Prince was due to make a major speech on the same day. Strictly speaking he took precedence, mainly because he had accepted an invitation to speak before she had. To make speeches on the same day would be seen by the media at best as poor co-ordination between the Waleses’ offices. At worst it would look like a deliberate act of rivalry, of the kind on which Andrew Morton was so soon to capitalize in his Sunday Times article.
My reservations carried no weight with her – indeed, they seemed only to reinforce the froideur which still existed between us at that time. I got on with writing the speech, a task which occupied most of my Easter holidays. The media explosion duly came, but its main victim, I regret, was the hapless Christopher Airy who was accused of poor diary co-ordination. In terms of public impact there was really no contest. In a competition between AIDS and standards of English in schools, AIDS was always going to win the battle for column inches.
By this stage the Prince and Princess were conducting almost separate existences as independent stars of the royal stage. Competition – never acknowledged as such – increasingly affected their dealings with each other. That clash of speeches was just one example among many. The old routines of office life continued as in the days of innocence, at least in part, at least for a while longer, but we laboured under a growing realization that our increasingly un-joint household was no longer coping with the demands of our two diverging bosses.
The engagements diary was always a minefield. Every six months the small mountain of invitations that had been sent in from around the country and around the world were processed by the Prince’s and Princess’s staffs – filtered, assessed, studied with jaundiced eyes and, in the great majority of cases, politely rejected. The few that made it through the filtering process, maybe one in ten, found their way into the draft programmes prepared by the private secretaries for consideration at the twice-yearly programme planning meeting.
By the time I arrived at St James’s the PGM meetings, as they were known (nobody quite knew what the initials stood for), had become bloated gatherings of close courtiers and other hangers-on, all anxious to be seen to be involved in what were recognized as the most important strategic planning sessions of the year. I imagined that the routine had begun originally with the young Prince and a few close advisers sorting out how he wanted his life to be for the next six months. Now in his forties, the Prince came into the room where the PGM was held and saw more than 20 people waiting for him, including his polo manager, his press secretary, his senior policeman and all his senior office staff – and his wife with her staff of two, a private secretary and an equerry. With the Prince and Princess sitting opposite each other in the middle of a long table, flanked by these unequal teams of support staff, an agonized progress through the coming year’s proposed diary was conducted under the baton of the Prince’s private secretary.
From 1990 I was responsible for the Princess’s input to these meetings and by then I had had plenty of opportunity to work out that they were not suitable occasions for reaching any conclusions about anything at all. In the week leading up to each meeting I the
refore sat up late at night, surrounded by piles of files, scribbling draft programmes in the smart, blank diary pages that we used in the Palace.
To a tinkering bureaucrat such as myself, this was both an onerous chore and a bit of a hobby. I would take whole suitcases of files home in the evening or away for the weekend and, through a process of osmosis and intuition mixed with a semi-scientific analysis of the Princess’s likely preferences, I hashed out a series of draft programmes from which she could choose. In my mind’s eye the heaps of widely varied invitations represented a stampeding herd of cattle which I somehow had to transform into the neat little tins of corned beef that I served up as part of a persuasively typed proposed programme.
Every six months I tuned my own mechanism for the production process and every couple of years I reinvented it completely. I tried to be ultra-democratic, sharing royal favours equally between the patronages which had first claim on her time. I studied county maps of the United Kingdom and tried to ensure an even geographical spread for her appearances. Then I filled in the gaps with interesting-looking daytime engagements in London. The whole tapestry was woven around the great fixed state events such as the Queen’s Birthday Parade, the garden parties, Armistice Day and Ascot. Space also had to be allowed for overseas tours, although dates for these were seldom available at the time of the programme meeting, which made for extra planning work (a crystal ball was handy too).
With our business thus pretty much done and dusted before the meeting even began, the Princess was able to look forward to it as a kind of entertainment in which her husband’s staff were nervously put through their hoops as they pitched for their own slice of his overcrowded diary. His staff were divided into separate portfolios – industry, architecture, art and music, etc. – and there was therefore a degree of competition between the assistant private secretaries to gain the right level of prominence for their own subjects.
The Prince’s private secretary refereed the contest, but had a much more difficult task than I had. No matter how much preparatory work his staff had done, the Prince never really seemed to focus on his forthcoming diary until the day of the meeting and even then, it sometimes seemed, only intermittently, especially if the weather was nice and there was a view of the garden through an open window.
On one occasion the meeting was being held in his ground-floor office in St James’s Palace. Not untypically, the Prince jumped up and announced that he was going to open a window. He had failed to notice that the shadow of a large tour bus had fallen on to the net curtains and as he opened the window he was confronted, at a distance of no more than four feet, by 50 camera-wielding Japanese tourists disembarking from the bus. Their look of frozen disbelief at seeing what they must have thought was some sort of hallucination was a treat to behold.
The meeting could be a cause of considerable tension, especially as stresses between the Prince and Princess became more obvious. With most of our own planning done and nothing to do but spectate while the Prince’s staff made their carefully prepared proposals, the Princess frequently became bored. She would sometimes lighten the moment with scribbled, irreverent notes which she surreptitiously passed to me, sotto voce asides to those next to her, or ill-suppressed giggles.
The Prince bore any irritation at these distractions patiently, even when, tiring of notes and whispers, she started to intervene in the deliberations about his diary. Her contributions were usually astute and reflected her own instinctive knowledge of what would please the public. Once or twice she crisply urged him to cut through Palace red tape to resolve a problem of co-ordination with other households by making a direct personal call to the Queen – which he did, there and then. Apart from these rare interventions, however, she would sit and fidget while the process ground interminably on. Tension would rise as the few joint engagements were discussed and I could see the apprehension in the eyes of the Prince’s staff, watching her as one might watch a temperamental animal whose next move – whether to snarl or purr – was quite unpredictable.
There were, of course, several opportunities for silent, internal amusement, perhaps the best being when the Prince enquired about the state of progress with a programme for a complicated overseas tour. All eyes turned to the equerry whose unenviable task it often was to pick up this sort of loose ball.
The imperturbable Commander in question probably had an IQ greater than the combined total of all others in the room. He looked at the Prince unblinkingly and said, ‘It’s inchoate, Sir.’
There was a general knitting of brows, including those of the Prince, but only for a moment. ‘Right,’ said His Royal Highness. A pause followed while we all cleared our throats and thanked God for an equerry who had swallowed a dictionary.
Momentarily flustered, the hapless private secretary – Christopher Airy at that time – then marched confidently on to some very thin ice. As he occasionally did, the Prince was now rhetorically asking his unfeeling staff and the world beyond why he was yet again obliged to attend some state occasion. Oblivious of the danger, Christopher informed him that it was ‘his duty’.
The Prince stiffened and there was a perceptible intake of breath around the table. ‘Oh is it?’ he asked, with heavy sarcasm. Christopher could only nod. Duty was sacred to him and no doubt it seemed incomprehensible that it could be a subject for debate. The rest of the meeting passed in the sudden, pervasive chill of royal displeasure. Even the Princess had lost the urge to giggle.
There were many differing interpretations of the notion of duty on view at the Palace. My own institutionalized upbringing and natural sense of deference let me see as duty almost anything rather joyless but grimly necessary. (Any joy that was encountered unexpectedly in the process could be part of the duty as well, of course.) At first, this aligned me with traditional thinking at the Palace. Duty was what we did, and the simpler the better.
By contrast, the Princess’s view of duty was anything but simple. The concept appealed to her in that it provided a sense of abstract sacrifice as she endured the trials of her daily life. It gave to mundane public events at least an appearance of higher purpose.
The label of duty was thus applied pretty indiscriminately. As time went on, I found myself faced with two uncomfortable truths. The first was the discovery that it was fatal to introduce the word ‘duty’ to a royal ear if there was any suggestion that its owner did not understand the subject better than you ever would. Duty was what we did. Duty was what they lived.
The second discovery gave my conscience an occasional tweak. Most of the time, most of what I did for the Princess had a simple moral value that made it a natural companion for my own rather overdeveloped sense of duty. Her public life symbolized all the virtues applicable to a socially concerned young mother – and a few more besides – so, by association, I received regular injections of moral certainty about what I was doing. This was deeply comforting to one of my rather Calvinist upbringing, but it did not really withstand a rigorous moral audit. Our royal family stands for many good things, but, with rare exceptions, working for it is not a soul-enriching vocation. At least, it was not for me, and I was perhaps less coy than others about admitting its many moments of pleasure.
As the programme planning meetings grew more edgy, an increasingly contentious undercurrent was the involvement of William and Harry in public engagements. Their theoretical potential as pawns in the Waleses’ game of rivalry was loudly decried on all sides, but it did not stop it happening.
The Prince was perhaps slow to recognize the value of being seen to be introducing the boys on to the public stage – or, more likely, he jealously guarded their privacy. His wife, on the other hand, suffered few such inhibitions, quite reasonably holding the view that their education in their future duties – particularly on matters of social concern such as homelessness – could not start soon enough. If in the process she could also be seen to be modernizing the whole task of educating royal Princes in their often unenviable role, then that was fine by her.
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When I joined the Princess, both young Princes were less than seven years old. They and their organization were collectively known as ‘the nursery’. It was almost a court in its own right. There were bedrooms, playrooms, a kitchen and a dining room snug under the eaves of KP. There were full-time and part-time nannies, policemen, a shared driver and a separate routine of school runs, parties, shopping and trips to the cinema. Every Friday morning almost the whole apparatus would transport itself a hundred miles to the west, to spend the weekend at Highgrove in Gloucestershire. There a duplicate set of rooms awaited, together with all the attractions and diversions of life on a small, picture-postcard country estate.
This self-contained routine needed little interference from new and junior courtiers and I saw little of William and Harry at that time, except for chance encounters in KP. That suited me. Noisy small boys – which these certainly were – were an alien species to me, at least since the time I had been one myself. These ones were third and fourth in line to the throne and so were, at least potentially, to be revered and feared accordingly. Nevertheless, their day-to-day status was that of children first and royalty second.
My aversion to addressing anyone as ‘Sir’, let alone ‘Your Royal Highness’, at least until they were old enough to shave, seemed to put me in tune with accepted practice. Others were understandably less certain. I will not forget in a hurry the distinguished, but perhaps overpunctilious cavalry Colonel who bowed low in front of Prince Harry and greeted him with a ringing military ‘Sir!’ The look of bemused delight on the three-year-old Prince’s face almost made him fall off his tricycle.
Shadows of a Princess Page 29