What usually came out on top was her sense of having suffered a cruel injustice. This was particularly easy to sustain while the public remained ignorant of her own transgressions, but her favoured role of innocent victim was at daily risk of exposure and this put her under enormous pressure. After ‘Squidgygate’ and various other salacious revelations, that sense of injustice grew.
She knew that the royal family was not a byword for marital virtue, yet she felt she was being singled out and pilloried for having made her own small bid for happiness. She frequently made claims about her in-laws’ romantic activities which I chose to take with a pinch of salt. In any case, the stories lost their impact when repeated several times with added embellishments. The more lurid they became, the more bitter I knew she was feeling about what she saw as others’ invulnerability to the sort of media scrutiny she increasingly faced.
There was also a strong streak of stubbornness in her which would have opposed on principle anything the Prince suggested. Finally, it was beginning to dawn on her that, however much the Prince and his supporters might try to intimidate her – which they did – she still had some powerful cards to play. Her aces were her children, her media value, her public image of caring good works and the great groundswell of opinion which held that she was more sinned against than sinning. As the year progressed and the marital battle lines were drawn up, she was canny enough to delay showing her hand until her opponents, in frustration and overconfidence, had revealed theirs.
After the skirmishes of 1991, 1992 saw battle joined. It was a battle in which the Prince’s legions, though numerically superior, became bogged down in a swamp of self-righteousness. They were encumbered with prejudice and self-importance and would have liked to extricate themselves by appropriating the Crown’s authority. The Crown, however, remained obstinately aloof from the fray. Throughout the separation – as the Prince’s lawyers tried to limit the Princess’s independence, as his ‘friends’ briefed the press against her and as his staff grew more condescending towards us – the Queen’s office stayed resolutely impartial. The Prince was an unwilling leader of such supporters. He repeatedly let it be known through Richard Aylard that they acted without his consent, although it did seem that he was able to turn a blind eye to many of the attacks made on the Princess on his behalf.
Against such an enemy the Princess was styled in my mind like Boadicea – flawed but imperious; lightly armed and outnumbered, but able to strike without warning when opportunity offered and then melt into the thick cover provided by press popularity. Even then I knew that, however many battles we might win, we would be sure to lose the war in the end. Yet one look at the forces being deployed against the Princess in her doomed bid for independence made me happy to align myself with the revolutionaries.
For all the squandered chances, the self-indulgence, the stupidity and the occasional downright wickedness, there was something heroic about her, just as there was something essentially brutal and intolerant about those gathered against her. For me she represented a feminine vulnerability combined with a dogged determination to survive against whatever odds she faced and, although I was well aware that neither side could claim a monopoly of virtue, that made it an easy decision to throw myself into the fray in support of her. To this I could add my romantic belief that history always had room for valiant last stands, whatever the strategic folly which had landed the heroic few in such trouble in the first place.
If this all sounds rather overprincipled, then it probably was, but I had a vague idea that the monarchy was supposed to be all about principle anyway, that its main function was to represent certain core national values. Essentially I saw these as something to do with the strong protecting the weak, natural justice outweighing blind precedent and humility getting more than a passing nod along the way. I saw more of these values – just – around the Princess than I did around her husband. I felt she had not received protection from those from whom she could have expected it. I observed that attempts to restrict her activities were at odds with her obvious ability to do a good job for the monarchy when suitably encouraged. I also saw a surprisingly honest humility in her attempts to discover her role that was lacking in the high-handedness of her detractors, most of whom should have known better. It was as simple as that.
Two other factors influenced my decision and contributed to the freedom I felt from any serious doubt about my course of action. The first was my belief that the concepts of monarchy which I so high-mindedly saw in the Princess were still best embodied in her mother-in-law the Queen. This was a belief I was happy to see that I shared with the Princess. In all the disintegration that was to follow, I never heard her refer to the Queen in anything other than respectful terms. ‘The Top Lady has to put up with such a lot,’ she said to me more than once, ‘and she always tries to be helpful.’
This was crucially important to me. If I had felt that my first loyalty to the Queen was jeopardized by my second loyalty to the Princess, I could not have done what I did. It was only when those two loyalties became irreconcilable towards the end of 1995 that I realized I would have to go. In 1992, however, it was a source of constant encouragement to me to find that the Queen and her office remained true to my concept of the principles of monarchy – just as it strengthened my resolution to find those principles being kidnapped as camouflage for those who plotted against the Princess on behalf of the Prince.
The second factor was even simpler. Although I did feel that the Princess represented a cause for which I was prepared to crusade, it was also true that at the time I had nowhere else to go. After the brush with resignation I had experienced the previous year, I had no wish to subject myself again to the horrible uncertainties I had felt then.
The forces the Princess was up against were most crudely exposed at the end of the annus horribilis when, in the course of negotiating a separation agreement from her husband, attempts were made to limit her access to the very royal infrastructure that enabled her to do the job expected of her by the public. These were accompanied by attempts to downgrade her status as a royal individual in her own right. Frustrating such moves became for me practically a pleasure. The hypocrisy and injustice from which they sprang ultimately provided all the motivation I needed to crusade under the Princess’s banner.
The first major event of the year, a joint tour of India, provided a microcosm of what was to come. The Prince did what was expected of him and what he did so well, promoting British exports, the work of the British Council and the environmental and health issues that meant so much to him. The Princess meanwhile launched a daring guerrilla raid on the Taj Mahal and captured it and the world’s hearts just by sitting down and being photographed in front of it. She then underlined her victory by manoeuvring just as skilfully to avoid the kiss her husband aimed at her cheek when receiving a polo trophy from her.
I did not accompany the Prince and Princess on this tour. By now my boss had in David Barton an experienced and efficient equerry, while the Prince had his own strong team. I learned enough on the phone, however, to realize that this tour had plumbed new depths of animosity behind the scenes as well as on the public stage.
The Princess responded to her own unhappiness by projecting it on to her luckless team, who experienced her wintry side under the blazing Indian sun. Between photo calls, including the first of many emotive shots with Mother Teresa, she fell into a familiar pattern of looking for, and inevitably discovering, things with which to find fault, while icily rebuffing her loyal staff’s attempts to show their support. The lady-in-waiting for the tour, Laura Lonsdale, was still new in the job and, from all I could gather, earned every penny of her dress allowance.
I remained in London, taking maximum advantage of the breathing space which the Princess’s absence always created. It was a chance to recce in peace and to take rather longer lunches than usual, in the fairly certain knowledge that the pager which I wore like an electronically tagged suspect would not suddenly start bleeping in a
way that I came to dread. Even so, by her usual sixth sense, I always felt my boss was convinced that while she had been away the mice had been behaving like rats.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, by staying in London I found myself well placed to observe an ominous new development. As a beleaguered town might notice with foreboding the progression in incoming bombardment from long-range bombing to close-range artillery, so we noticed the involvement of the Prince’s lawyers as a sign that the enemy was no longer distant but had advanced to within visual range.
The Prince’s advisers were already anticipating the legal battles that would lie ahead as separation loomed. In what I interpreted as an attempt to overawe the Princess’s fledgling organization, Richard curtly advised me that they had already approached Lord Goodman who, as a Law Lord of formidable years, reputation and ferocity, might very credibly have been expected to blow any resistance out of the water by his very presence.
Forewarned is forearmed. In what was a foretaste of the type of tactics we would have to use, I took the opportunity through a friendly intermediary of calling on Lord Goodman in his flat. The ostensible reason was to discuss a possible commission for a portrait to be painted of the Princess, because among other things the good Lord was almost as eminent in the world of art as in the world of law. On this pretext I hoped to add some balance to whatever he had been told about the Princess and her office. This might at least make him a less reliable weapon for those who wanted to train him in her direction like a piece of heavy legal artillery.
During my visit I noticed a signed portrait photograph of the Duchess of York standing on a side table. ‘Oh yes,’ said Lord Goodman, ‘very unfortunate. I did give her some advice, but I’m afraid she didn’t take it.’ He got rather unsteadily to his feet, padded across the room in his slippers and removed the photograph with an air of finality. He politely gave me the impression that this was not symptomatic of a generally disapproving attitude to young royal wives. His references to the Princess at least suggested that he would not take at face value much of what he was hearing as briefing from ‘the other side’. It was about all I could hope.
I duly reported my legal reconnaissance to the Princess. Then, on her instructions, I cast about for suitable divorce lawyers and found several who were unsurprisingly keen to take her on as a client. In the end she found her own in the genial figure of Paul Butner of Wright, Son and Pepper.
When I first spoke to him – inevitably on my mobile phone from a filling station on the A303 – he was in Istanbul preparing to depart for his stag night with what sounded like the cast of a Turkish Carmen in the background. Seldom without a dangling cigarette in his hand or a look of world-weary tolerance on his benign features, the Princess found him an unlikely but ideal champion to set about the task of legal jousting with her opponents.
She quickly learned (others, to their cost, took longer) that his slightly crumpled appearance and absent-minded manner were not to be mistaken for mental lethargy. A plain-talking divorcé with grown-up daughters, he had surprisingly little trouble in empathizing with her position as he cast an unruffled eye over the legal talent being assembled to oppose him. Any signs of overbearing pomposity on their part, and there were a few, very quickly inspired in him a natural defiance on his client’s behalf and scant respect for those sent to intimidate him. His client’s interests were what mattered to him most, and let the constitutional niceties find their own place in the list of moral priorities.
We were thus as well prepared as we could be for the serious business of separation which finally erupted in the autumn. Meanwhile, Lord Goodman’s remarks about the Duchess of York stuck in my mind. The incident reminded me, if I needed reminding, that the Princess’s association with the Duchess was never to her advantage. The Princess was not unaware of the risk to her own reputation, but she had to play a difficult balancing act. She needed to remain close enough to the Duchess to be the recipient of confidences, while at the same time putting increasing distance between them in the public’s eyes.
The Princess had realized that she was in danger of becoming a straw to which the drowning Duchess might try to cling. Once she realized that Fergie no longer had special access to the Queen – an access of which the Princess had always been suspicious anyway – and that she no longer had helpful Windsor family intelligence to relay, her mind was made up. In a pattern that was now all too familiar, she allowed the axe to fall on a friendship that had outlived its usefulness. It was, after all, a battle for the survival of the fittest, and the Princess’s apparent unkindness displayed a brutal pragmatism that was to serve her well in many ways.
The Princess had good reason to be worried. The threat from people who might tar her with the same brush as the Duchess was a real one. In an article in the London Evening Standard in January 1992, Peter Mackay devoted three out of four columns to deploring the well-documented faux pas of the Duchess of York. He then included the Princess in his criticism, for no greater justification than that she had enjoyed a friendship with a man which was open to misunderstanding and had spent long periods apart from her husband.
While both facts were undeniably true, they created an understandable resentment in the Princess at a time when her husband’s contribution to the strains in their marriage could still be disregarded by commentators on the grounds that their main purpose was to protect the monarchy. This sort of hypocrisy cut the Princess very deeply. At a time when her devotion to her public duties was becoming more and more irreproachable – always the best way to pre-empt criticism – to be castigated en masse with ‘the younger royals’ (code for the daughters-in-law thought by many to be the source of all the royal family’s troubles) fanned a flame of injustice deep inside her which was not going to be smothered by the crude tactics of exile so bluntly applied against her sister-in-law.
If she were in any doubt about how blunt these tactics could be, the Princess had only to consider the infamous briefing given by the Queen’s press secretary to the BBC that January in which he revealed that ‘the knives are out’ for the Duchess at Buckingham Palace. Although the Duchess could exercise considerable influence over the Princess, my boss’s instinct for self-preservation was stronger. She cannily watched what happened to Fergie and resolved not to fall victim to Buckingham Palace’s anger herself.
She realized that the best counter to criticism from that quarter was to establish a popularity with the public that would make it impossible for her opponents in the Palace to sideline her without putting their own reputations at risk. In the event, this did not deter some of them for whom misplaced loyalty to the Queen sanctioned distinctly ignoble tactics as they tried to rid the institution of a figure whose unpredictability they increasingly grew to mistrust.
Be that as it may, for the Princess the best tactic was undoubtedly more hard work. She was good at what she did, therefore her popularity grew. Although she was not averse to briefing selected journalists when it suited her, such a programme of transparently diligent public service required no campaign of media manipulation on her part. Her activities spoke for themselves. Happily, I was successful in filling her diary with engagements that were calculated to show her not only at her best but also at her most royal, and this frustrated even further those of her detractors who wanted to portray her as an empty-headed clotheshorse.
Contrary to the image some tried to create for her, she obstinately refused to go to pop concerts, be photographed leaving late-night restaurants, take a succession of freebie holidays or generally live a life of flippant pleasure. Instead her life became increasingly constrained in private at this time – not just because of the limitations suffered by all famous people, but also because she imposed on herself a regime that would make it difficult for her detractors to write her off as an inconsequential, self-indulgent bimbo lucky enough to have ensnared the heir to the throne.
This became a continuing pattern for my remaining years with her. As her private life became
more and more restrained, her public work became more important as the visible expression of her independent existence. This did not necessarily imply a higher degree of saintliness in her public good works – the sincerity of her actions was a matter of daily variation depending on the mood she was in, and she always had an eye to the next day’s headlines. Her conscientious professionalism became even more pronounced, however, even when she scaled down her public engagements towards the end of 1993. She remained an unsurpassed royal performer even when her own doubts about her future role prejudiced any credible, long-term personal strategy.
In order to appeal to the public over the heads of the old establishment beginning to gather like predators around her, the Princess needed to look the part and feel good within herself. While she may have denied herself many other pleasures, therefore, she did not economize on her wardrobe or her grooming expenses (except, touchingly, certain types of make-up which she always bought from a standard Boots range). It was no surprise, either, that this period saw an acceleration in her keep-fit campaign. Nor, such were the times, was it a surprise to find that the costs involved were somehow leaked from the Prince’s accounts.
For the rest of the year the Princess carried out a pattern of engagements that put her in the royal spotlight as never before. March saw her returning to Hungary, this time for a solo visit in support of her patronage the English National Ballet. She also paid a repeat visit to the world-renowned Peto Institute, where she had an emotional meeting with British families to whom the Institute offered practically the last hope for their crippled children.
Shadows of a Princess Page 31