Shadows of a Princess

by Patrick Jephson

  As in Pakistan the year before, however, the really significant elements of her programme lay in those parts of it which underlined her status as the mother of the future King and as a future Queen herself. Thus after the ballet she had a private supper with the President and his wife. The next morning she opened the new offices of the British Council, a task more normally associated with her husband. She called on the Prime Minister at the Hungarian Parliament building and she attended an export-boosting reception for British and Hungarian businessmen. Only then did she fly to a remote part of the country on the borders of war-worn Croatia, where she spent a harrowing couple of hours touring a refugee camp in freezing drizzle.

  A welcome novelty on this trip, and the forerunner of a practice that was to become routine, was the Princess’s decision to bring her elder sister Sarah along as lady-in-waiting. Unaccustomed to royal habits and procedures – a positive advantage – Sarah took a good-natured but questioning interest in the way we operated. It helped to protect us from creeping complacency, the occupational hazard of our trade. In addition, while she always showed a proper public deference towards her sister – and a healthy respect for her temper – she felt no need to toady, which made her something of a rarity. Her inexhaustible fund of risqué jokes made her especially valuable in moments of low royal morale. She smoked enthusiastically in the royal presence (and practically everywhere else) and provided a touch of family solidarity for a Princess growing increasingly distant from her in-laws. ‘Aunt Sarah’ was an immediate success.

  After flexing her powers of statesmanship in Hungary, the Princess returned to England and was soon exercising her other great powers as a wife and mother during one of the last of the increasingly awkward family holidays which she and the Prince were to take together. Even as she nimbly upstaged him during the ski-slope photo calls, however, her next role as grieving daughter was thrust upon her.

  News came to the skiing party that her father had died in hospital. The shock caused a violent outpouring of emotion, of which her husband bore the brunt. The death of a parent is perhaps one of the most powerful triggers that can legitimately allow the release of the inhibitions imposed so strongly by English upper-class culture, and something in the Princess allowed her to give her distress free rein.

  The holiday party returned to England, riven with the Princess’s grief. The anger which accompanied it seemed inexplicable, except that it seemed merged in her mind with resentment against the Prince. I quickly became aware of this when I called on her to offer my sympathy. I had already written to her, recalling her kindness to me when my own father had died a couple of years previously and reminding her of the advice she had given me then: to accept the grief and, in time, look forward to reliving happier memories.

  There was a warmth in her greeting that made much further talk unnecessary. It was one of those rare moments when our relationship lost its professional detachment and became instead an exchange of genuine feelings, uncompromised by the intricate codes and games of our day-to-day contact.

  It soon became apparent, however, that she resented her husband’s sympathy. Her anger reminded me of her reaction to the Prince’s thirtieth birthday party offer the previous summer. Behind his plans to attend the funeral she saw only the machinations of his PR advisers. ‘This funeral’s going to be turned into a charade. It’s so false!’ She determinedly thwarted all the Prince’s well-meant attempts to appear as the supporting husband. Judicious planning and the Prince’s use of a helicopter rather than a separate car preserved the outward appearance of togetherness, but the Princess made her feelings plain enough in the photographs that appeared the next day. From her body language it was very obvious that, emotionally, she was on her own.

  Such a spasm of feelings left her drained for several days. I kept my distance. When she resumed work the following week it was as though the experience of so much genuine emotion had been cathartic. The first major loss of a close relative added a maturity to her feelings of sympathy for others. Whatever the cost in personal pain – and in the Prince’s public image – the ordeal left her with a new understanding of bereavement which I saw reflected in her public work. The professionally sympathetic Princess had acquired an extra layer of sincerity.

  As time went on, the strategy of constantly reminding the public of the Princess’s royal status certainly had its critics. It became one of the most frustrating aspects of my own life that very often the most severe critic was the Princess herself. This was not because she disapproved of the overall objective, which as she could see even in her most obdurate moments was going to empower her considerably. Rather it was because, in carrying out the strategy, she had to impose a degree of self-discipline that was not part of her natural make-up.

  She could be enthusiastic when I first proposed a certain series of engagements and then turn against them, to the point of pulling out of them altogether, if the mood took her. These about-turns would be accompanied by a smoke screen of reproach – ‘What were you thinking of when you let me agree to this?’ – and sometimes self-pity – ‘All anybody does is take from me. Take, take, take. There’ll soon be nothing left! Who gives me anything?’ The fact that she was just as capable of saying this when receiving prestigious awards or the adulation of the crowd at Wembley did little to reduce its impact when delivered with blazing eyes and an accusatory glare.

  It was one of the less endearing consequences of being used to getting your own way most of the time. In her position, however, self-discipline was almost the only kind she was going to get. Its absence in someone not raised to duty and self-denial was scary. It was a tribute to her ultimately sound sense of self-preservation that she could take such obstinacy to the brink of calamity – sometimes having to be persuaded out of her car to perform at a great public event – but still come through as the professional she had learned to become.

  Her sense of self-discipline and purpose was at its wobbliest whenever she caught the scent of potential controversy or mixed publicity. Like the highly strung thoroughbred she so often resembled, her nostrils were always alert to such signs of impending danger. A comprehensive lungful of it arrived in the month after her father died. In an unaccustomed PR coup and with, I admit, a little partisan support from a certain naval member of her staff, the Princess had agreed to become sponsor of the Navy’s first Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarine, HMS Vanguard.

  At a time when the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was still a voluble force, the implications of such an association were obvious. The naming of the submarine by the Princess was irresistible as a rallying point for what was left of the shrinking anti-nuclear movement. As a means of portraying the Princess as a senior royal figure undeterred by the fickle winds of such controversy in pursuit of her duty to uphold the safety of the realm, it was also pretty irresistible to me. When two such sharply opposing forces met there was bound to be an explosion, and when it came I was unhappily standing on ground zero.

  The naming ceremony took place at the Vickers yard at Barrow-in-Furness on 30 April 1992. As an engineering accomplishment and as a demonstration of awesome firepower I found the Trident programme fascinating, but not even this blinded me to the fact that it was going to be a pretty tough day.

  On the recce I discovered that we would have to land the helicopter on a remote part of the site and travel by car to the headquarters and scene of the ceremony, partly along public roads. The police seemed suspiciously confident that they had anticipated every eventuality, and perhaps naively I thought no more about it until warning signs in the press and in the Princess’s postbag woke me out of my patriotic daze to the realization that there was real trouble ahead.

  The feeling was accentuated by the Princess’s sudden discovery within herself of a strong anti-nuclear streak. Even a long and closely worded memorandum on the theory and practice of mutually assured destruction and nuclear deterrence – with a line or two about her brave matelots for good measure – failed to shake her su
spicion that what she was doing might very well earn her criticism from some previously friendly quarters.

  She was dead right. Many of those who saw the Princess as the embodiment of compassion found it hard to reconcile this picture with one of the Princess as the embodiment of nuclear annihilation. Nonetheless, if she really was going to be the people’s Princess – and this was some years before the expression was coined – she was going to have to appeal to all the people, and that included the tens of thousands whose livelihoods depended on the defence industry. It also included, I rather pompously pointed out to her, the hundreds of men who would serve in HMS Vanguard and who might at a pinch have to fight and die in her as well.

  Whether it was because of the force of my argument or because she shrewdly calculated that to pull out would cause even worse controversy, the Princess agreed to go through with the engagement. We were still a tense little crowd, though, as we set off in the helicopter for the long journey north. Turbulence always seemed worse in a helicopter, but I had additional reason to feel queasy. Unknown to the Princess, I had discouraged the then Defence Minister Jonathan Aitken from sharing the helicopter because I did not want him to detect any lack of resolution in the star performer at the start of a day which was likely to test resolution all round before it was over.

  Having safely arrived at the remote landing site, we set off by car for the Vickers headquarters building. As we pulled into the public road I could see that it was lined with people. It was always like that, wherever the Princess went. Here and there a few policemen struggled cheerfully to hold back the enthusiastic crowd.

  Then, with a cold feeling in my stomach, I realized that this crowd was not at all friendly and the police, while certainly struggling, were anything but cheerful. The Princess realized it as well and an icy, accusatory chill settled over us. Sitting low down in the back of the wallowing limousine, I felt horribly vulnerable. I also felt horribly sympathetic, because if I felt like this, how on earth did the slim figure sitting rigidly next to me feel? ‘Shame!’ screamed the crowd.

  I noticed that most of the protesters were women. The sight of their uncontrolled anger, their contorted faces, their gesticulating arms and their shapeless bodies hidden under dufflecoats and shawls in the cold weather touched a chord of real horror within me. This was far worse than the incident the year before when, mistaking her for the Prime Minister, a crowd of student demonstrators had chased the Princess’s car down the Embankment near the Houses of Parliament.

  Putting on my best business-as-usual voice, I turned reassuringly to the Princess and said, ‘Ma’am, after the cabaret’s over we’ll arrive at the headquarters building, where you’ll be met by Lord Chalfont.’ She nodded very slightly in acknowledgement, her eyes round with apprehension as the crowd continued to boo and bay.

  At last the entrance to the headquarters building came into view. I could see the welcoming committee on the steps and the police cordon which, though obviously under pressure, seemed to be keeping the immediate area clear for our arrival. As the car pulled up to the pavement the Princess already had her hand on the door handle, anxious to escape from the Daimler that for a few awful minutes had suddenly seemed like a tumbrel.

  At that moment a terrifying face thrust itself at her. With a yelp of fear she pulled her door shut and the face pressed itself hideously against the glass. The protester was young and male, with long, dreadlocked hair and a face painted to look like a leering skull. I was getting ready to run all the way back to London when the Princess turned to me with a nervous laugh and very steadily said, ‘Patrick, I don’t think that’s Lord Chalfont.’

  After the protester had been hauled off and the normal civilities had been exchanged in the doorway, the Princess retired to powder her nose and I retired to smoke a cigarette between trembling fingers. I felt as if we had fought our way into a Wild West fort, only to realize that we would have to fight our way back out again. Through the glass doors I could see the senior police officers having a flustered conference on the pavement. The garrison seemed to be as rattled as I was.

  We moved on to the next item on the programme, which was to drive down to the submarine where the Princess would perform the naming ceremony. By then, unfortunately, the bus carrying the VIP guests had been halted by demonstrators staging a mass ‘die-in’ by lying on the road in front of it. When the Princess arrived on the casing of the great submarine, where the bottle of home-brewed beer hung ready to be smashed against the conning tower, she was accompanied by the naval chaplain and a very small group of nervous male companions and we found ourselves in front of a ceremonial grandstand full of empty seats, in clear view of a road bridge alive with shouting protesters.

  The experience still comes back to me in nightmares. As we huddled in the wind, the Princess struggled to hold on to her hat, the chaplain struggled to hold on to his cassock and I felt quite sure that I was struggling to hold on to my job. If a medal were awarded for light small talk above and beyond the call of duty and in the face of the enemy, the Princess would surely have won it that day, although a few others might also have received an honourable mention in dispatches. Slowly our nuclear winter thawed as the grandstand filled with the delayed dignitaries and high-ranking NATO officers. The brief ceremony passed off without further incident, to everyone’s relief.

  By the time we returned to Kensington Palace that evening the mood had changed again. Instead of being an exploited victim of a military industrial complex, the Cold War and an unthinking private secretary, the Princess had become the ice-cool hero of the hour who had safely shepherded her little flock through an ordeal for which we were all much the wiser. In addition, the Princess’s selfless dedication to traditional mainstream royal duty even in the face of physical danger had been publicized in a way that had exceeded my most optimistic expectations.

  The PPO and I retired to the basement wine bar opposite the gates of Kensington Palace and toasted our survival. We found time to toast our boss too, whose resolve when it mattered had once again proved unsinkable. As a postscript to the incident, it is important also to mention that the Princess and HMS Vanguard went on to enjoy a happy relationship characterized by regular mutual expressions of admiration.

  After the excitements of Barrow, just over a week was to pass before the Princess departed for another important solo tour, this time to Egypt. It was a week which even at the time I recognized as a new high-water mark in the schizophrenic nature of my life. Late one night, weaving my way as usual round Hyde Park Corner on my way home, I considered the dramas crowding into my mind. It was hard to know how to sort them into some kind of priority order.

  On the one hand I had a front-row seat in the royal soap opera, which by this point was building itself into an epic worthy of TV at its most melodramatic. A welter of speculation was beginning to break out about the impending publication of a new royal book by the journalist Andrew Morton. It would be pure dynamite, apparently, promising as it did to catalogue with irrefutable proof the tribulations inflicted on the helpless Princess by the unfeeling family into which she had married.

  On the other hand the cast of characters in the impending drama were also just the human beings with whom I worked on a daily basis and who for me seldom acquired the inflated stature or attributes, both good and bad, that I read about in the papers every day. As a media feeding frenzy began to gather pace over speculation about the future of the Waleses’ marriage and the significance of Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles in the plot, I and the rest of the Princess’s staff carried on with whatever we could contrive to call life as normal.

  It was quite possible to bury ourselves in work while the media drank its fill from the cup of royal scandal and intrigue. For us the story provided no more than a flickering backdrop to the day-to-day necessities of running the office of the world’s most famous woman. Allowing it to invade our daily chores would quickly have induced hysterics, in me at least, and driven our herbal tea consumption to dangerous levels. My work
ing routine was still filled with mundane considerations such as recces, working lunches, nonworking lunches, planning meetings for future engagements, doctor’s appointments for the Princess’s inoculations, and arrangements for the departure of one royal equerry and the integration of his replacement.

  This last item highlighted one of those idiosyncrasies which demonstrate that royal service still sometimes owes more to feudalism than modern management practice. David Barton left to return to the Air Force with promotion and honour all round, except for any acknowledgement from the source of all honour, the monarch herself. It was always a curious anomaly to me that equerries to the Princess of Wales could be expected to take time out from their military duties and submit themselves and their young families to all the rigours of court life in the service of one of the most high-profile and hard-working members of the royal family, and yet received no official recognition for their service in the form of the humblest class of the Royal Victorian Order.

  This is the Queen’s own order with which she recognizes loyal service, whether good, not so good or indifferent. The Princess’s equerry’s opposite number on the Prince’s staff received an award from the Order as a matter of course when he left his post. For carrying out the same job – and even, arguably, a more difficult one – the Princess’s man could expect nothing other than the Princess’s own thanks and an economical farewell party in the Palace billiard room. Why was this, when, on tour at least, he had alternated duties with the Prince’s equerry on an identical basis?

  According to Napoleon, men are governed by such trinkets. Although the RVO was modestly passed off within the household – at least in front of colleagues – as a slightly embarrassing reminder of the passage of time, there was a glaring disparity in the case of the St James’s Palace equerries, and it could easily rankle.