Not, I hasten to add, with the Princess’s equerries themselves – being men of stature both metaphorically and physically, they treated such baubles with the indifference they deserved. The Princess noticed the difference, however, and could not understand why her staff, who undoubtedly worked as hard and as loyally as any in royal service, should not have been recognized in the same way as their contemporaries in other households. Needless to say, the disparity was noticed more widely too, and in a world that was increasingly looking for evidence of the Princess’s estrangement from the royal mainstream, it did not help the cause of unity.
I occasionally sought an explanation for this apparent injustice, but none was ever forthcoming from the secretive cabal which advised Her Majesty on such matters. As an indicator of the attitude we sometimes felt we were up against, it perhaps serves a useful purpose.
Incidentally, anyone caring to check will notice that I was awarded a humble version of the order in 1995 – not for any act of outstanding loyalty or service, but simply because my name had come to the top of the list. The honour it represented was not lost on me, though its effect was diminished by my knowledge of the injustice described above, and by my knowledge that I lacked the guts to decline it on principle.
I digress, however. On Sunday 10 May 1992 the Princess of Wales flew to Egypt. The pretext for the visit was an invitation from the President’s wife, Mrs Mubarak, to visit various charitable projects on the banks of the Nile. So far as the watching world was concerned, this was a fully fledged royal visit, attracting a press pack of more than 50 and the formal recognition of the country’s head of state. In fact, that formal recognition was kept unconfirmed out of diplomatic deference to Palace sensitivities, but it was never really in any doubt.
The Princess’s Egyptian visit was high profile, glamorous, photogenic and a fine example of her ambassadorial role, of which I think most British people approved. The same appeared to be true of most Egyptians. The visit also proved to be an early example of the stratagems that had to be employed to thwart those who would clip the Princess’s wings and confine her to the habitat of fashion shows and nursery schools which they thought suitable for her.
I did not feel encouraged by Buckingham Palace to involve heads of state in the Princess’s programme for overseas visits, even if such reticence puzzled our hosts and – often – our Ambassador on the spot. In turn, such ambivalence about her status encouraged the impression that high-profile overseas tours were better suited to senior members of the royal family whose public image and private inclinations more closely suited a certain type of establishment picture of the monarchy. Ironically, as the Princess set out on what was by any measure a testing representational mission on behalf of British interests in the Middle East, her aircraft – paid for by the taxpayer – was shared by the Prince and a party of friends en route to what was variously reported as his seventh or eighth holiday of the year.
Diverting the aircraft to Turkey in order to deliver the holiday party added considerably to the Princess’s flying time. It meant that as we approached Cairo in the darkness after a long flight – during which the emotional tension of her situation had reduced the Princess to a prolonged bout of sobbing – I felt justified in wondering whether the Prince would have diverted his own aircraft en route to an official tour to oblige his wife and her friends. It did seem rather unlikely.
For enthusiasts of such detail, it is perhaps worth noting that at the end of the Princess’s tour the same aircraft had to make a double journey, returning to Turkey to collect the holiday-makers because their timings did not dovetail with the end of the Princess’s Egyptian visit. Not surprisingly, such apparent profligacy made unwelcome headlines.
It could be argued, of course, that the Princess’s tears on the outward flight were no more than she deserved. As she knew at the time, but as I only suspected, she had given full co-operation to Andrew Morton’s book, still some weeks from publication but already showing every sign of living up to its advance publicity of shaking the monarchy to its roots. The tears that I interpreted as frustration and unhappiness at her predicament – and it was quite possibly her intention that they should be seen in that way – might instead have been out of pure trepidation at the thought of the revelations about to be unleashed.
Either way, my immediate concern was rather more practical. Waiting for us less than an hour away lay the ancient kingdom of the Pharaohs, crossroads of Middle Eastern trade, culture and politics. Knowing as I did that it would provide for the Princess a backdrop of spectacular wonders including the Pyramids, the Sphinx and the temples of Luxor, I was filled with trepidation of my own as I contemplated the hunched figure sitting opposite me in the royal cabin. How on earth was she going to be ready to face the trials of the week ahead, not to mention the scrutiny of the press?
I gave in to the irresistible temptation to allow this professional concern to descend in my own mind into sheer self-pity. After all the work that had been put in on the recce, after all that I was personally staking on her success, how dare she succumb now to a bout of feminine weakness?
It was as if she had been reading my mind. I would not have been surprised if she had. The sniffles opposite me stopped abruptly. Once again the Princess disappeared to the royal lavatory – beckoned, I assumed, by the bulimia that was always prone to beset her at such moments of tension. My spirits sank even lower.
She emerged some minutes later a transformed woman. The puffy eyes had been bathed with water and freshly made up. The hair had been adjusted with fingertip precision. The leggings and sweatshirt of the long journey had given way to a sharply cut suit and power heels. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to let you down.’ Pressing the bell for the steward, she ordered champagne.
It was true. No matter how close she came to the edge of bottling out, she always produced the last-minute effort of will that could turn imminent disaster into serene triumph. To me it was one of her heroic qualities – even if, at the time, I would gladly have swapped it for dull dependability. I summoned the troops from the forward cabin and we drank to her success. Then, while the others vied with each other to tell the crudest joke, I tried to make her concentrate on her briefing for the arrival ceremony.
I need not have worried. The arrival ceremony, the departure ceremony and everything in between she played with consummate professionalism, poise and devotion to duty. I wondered if her opponents really understood the bloody-minded determination of the woman they were seeking to banish to the backwaters of royal life.
The lasting images of her Egyptian tour are of the Princess standing in front of various famous antiquities looking lonely and wistful. There was an unavoidable echo of similar images from the Indian tour, when the Princess had sat alone and forlorn in front of the Taj Mahal. This time, however, there was something about her stance and the angle of her chin which marked her transition from theatrically abandoned wife to capable international campaigner for a few lucky causes, the British nation being one of them.
As in Hungary and Pakistan, I had planned her programme so that it bore all the traditional hallmarks of a conventional royal tour. We had the private meeting with the head of state, the encouragement of British commercial interests, a visit to the British Council and the laying of a wreath at the Commonwealth war cemetery. The tour also carried the special stamp of the Princess herself in its concentration on children’s medical charities and centres for the addicted and disabled. In fact, it was only out of respect for understandable Egyptian pride in the relatively high quality of their health services that we did not press for visits to even more compelling centres of disease and disadvantage. With only the most minor hiccups, the tour progressed on a wave of gratifying success, thanks in large part to the characteristic efficiency and imagination of the British Ambassador and his staff, and the uncompromising efficiency of the Egyptian protocol and police departments.
As often happened, fortune smiled on the Princess in unforeseen
ways. During her call on President Mubarak it quickly became apparent to the handful of aides in attendance that the President and the Princess got on famously. Their animated meeting overran to an extent that for any other engagement I would have considered alarming, especially as Mr Mubarak’s next caller – President Menem of Argentina – was expected at any moment.
Another piece of good fortune, albeit at the expense of some temporary inconvenience to the photographer concerned, occurred when Fleet Street’s most famous royal photographer, Arthur Edwards of the Sun, contracted one of the tummy upsets for which Cairo is renowned. He had the compensation of being visited by the Princess’s own doctor, Surgeon Commander Robin Clark, whom I would not have swapped for his weight in gold, either on this or subsequent tours. By symbolically scoring a hit with the President and the pressman through adroit use of the gifts she had been given, the Princess achieved in one day the kind of success that marked her as an envoy whose effectiveness bore little relation to her qualification by age or experience.
The hiccups may have been few, but I think we must have offended one of the minor Nile deities to suffer one particular series of upsets. It so happened that on the day that the Princess visited the Pyramids the Egyptian police, in an excess of enthusiasm, had closed many of the famous monuments in the interests of security for longer than might otherwise have been considered strictly necessary. Thus, although the photographers got some wonderful pictures of the Princess standing on the Sphinx’s paws, a large crowd of tourists were excluded from the site.
Even though I was concentrating on the timing of the event, and in particular whether we would leave the Pyramids before President Menem arrived, I was conscious of raised French voices on the other side of the police barrier. They certainly seemed dissatisfied with the alternative entertainment that was being offered. As we sped off in a cloud of dust I complacently thought to myself, ‘Ah well, can’t win ’em all.’
A couple of days later, during a breathtaking visit to the island of Phillae on the Nile above the Aswan Dam, our paths crossed again. Once more the entente cordiale was the chief victim. As the Princess’s boat approached the landing stage a French tourist boat appeared on a converging course, heading for the same spot. With a blare of sirens and much gesticulating, our escorting police launch ordered the other boat to lie off and wait. By sheer ill chance, it was the same group of French tourists whose visit to the Sphinx we had disrupted. As some of the accompanying British press gleefully reported, a chorus of boos and even snatches of the Marseillaise were clearly audible across the enchanted waters of the Nile while we scrambled ashore.
‘Oh well,’ I thought, ‘that proves you really can’t win ’em all.’ Surely, I told myself, this would be our last encounter with the disgruntled tourists.
I was in for a horrible shock. On our last day in Cairo we paid a visit to that showpiece of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, the fabulous Egyptian Museum. Always thronged with tourists, the labyrinthine corridors of the museum had been carefully cordoned off along a prepared route so that the Princess could make an unimpeded progress around the main exhibits. That was the plan, at least.
Unfortunately, the museum’s director had not been present on the recce and appeared to feel that the planned route gave the Princess an inadequate impression of the true splendour of the range of exhibits on display. To my alarm he suddenly steered the Princess off on a route of his own.
In a flash the crowd had closed in around us. Where once there had been order and decorum and an opportunity to marvel at the relics on display, now there was just a hubbub of jostling figures, a tide in which the Princess was swept along, occasionally casting pleading glances in the direction of me and the policeman. Short of shooting the museum director on the spot – a fate which at that moment I felt was too good for him – there was little we could do.
The police, reacting as best they could to the situation, tried to anticipate the director’s general line of advance and clear rooms ahead of our arrival. It was surely the work of some deity’s curse that the first room from which they chose forcibly to evict the innocent public happened to be occupied by the same party of French tourists who had dogged our steps at the Sphinx and at Phillae.
As was so often the case, the Princess was quicker off the mark than me. While the Gallic protests mounted, the Princess fixed me with a glare and said, ‘I must apologize to them. What shall I say?’
As usual in such emergencies, my mind went blank. Somewhere, though, a small voice was complaining that this was a hell of a time to choose for a French oral exam. ‘Er,’ I ventured. ‘Je suis très désolée …’ Luckily for me, the Ambassador took charge at that point, giving an effective demonstration of why French is still regarded as the essential worldwide language of diplomacy.
Later that day the Princess flew to Luxor, where she visited the great temple of Karnak. By this stage thoroughly rattled, I arranged for an Embassy scout to go ahead of us by Land Rover to all the main sites on our route, checking for French tourists lying in wait. It was a great relief to find that the curse appeared to have been lifted.
Later that evening – our last in Cairo – there was a distinct outbreak of morale as we realized that we had almost reached the end of a tour which had begun with such apprehension but had ended with such success. The Princess was therefore at the top of her form as she joined the reception we had arranged for the travelling British press party. As in Pakistan, this was the Princess’s opportunity to mingle with those who would communicate her thoughts and views to a wider audience than could ever have been achieved by the osmosis which was the traditional way of conveying a royal message.
Ashley Walton, who attended the reception, was quoted in the Sunday Times on 17 May 1992 as saying, ‘It is a mark of her confidence that even after all the recent publicity about her marriage she is prepared to walk into a room of tabloid hacks. Charles could never have done it but then he isn’t really interested in people. The transformation in Diana has been quite incredible. Diana will never be a great intellectual but she is a very shrewd, sharp woman with amazing strength of character.’ Or in the words of another commentator from the same article, ‘Nobody should underestimate the Princess of Wales – she is a calculating and clever woman.’ Quite right, I thought – and just as well too, given the many who would rather have written her off as a self-obsessed clotheshorse.
After the press reception, spirits rose even higher and we all repaired in what fancy dress we could manage to the poolside in the Ambassador’s garden. One by one the members of our party were thrown fully clothed into the pool, with the decorous exception of the lady-in-waiting. She gamely helped to fish the survivors out of the deep end, which was soon bobbing with discarded jackets and funny hats.
Eventually we caught our boss and threw her in too. As she performed a graceful arc through the night sky it occurred to me that this might have been a jape too far … Suddenly subdued, we watched the little patch of bubbles that marked the spot where the Princess had disappeared into the water. Just as I thought she must have hit her head on the bottom and I would have some serious explaining to do, she reappeared shouting good-natured threats and snorting like a dolphin.
This was the pool that had been made infamous on the first day of the tour when a group of British photographers had illegally gained access to a rooftop adjoining the Embassy, from where they had taken illicit pictures of the Princess taking her morning swim in a distinctly unsexy black swimsuit. In a foretaste of the subsequent sneak gym pictures scandal, it was even suggested that she had connived at the intrusion. I was sceptical. It was not that she was incapable of such a stratagem, but that swimsuit banished my doubts.
Nevertheless, she was stung by the suggestion and vented her anger on the press secretary Dickie Arbiter, who in turn issued draconian banning orders on the culprits. She did not like that either, once she realized that she risked some temporary unpopularity among the pack.
‘Dickie totally ove
r-reacted,’ she confided to me.
‘They invaded your privacy,’ I said. ‘He had to make a point.’ I knew, though, that Dickie could not win in this situation.
‘But now he’s upset them. Nobody else understands the press like I do.’ This was arguably true, at least in matters concerning herself. Her long-suffering press secretaries, however, seldom knew from minute to minute what media-relations script she was working from, or what private stratagems she was cooking up. All they knew for certain was that they would get it in the neck when a news story incurred her displeasure.
Later that night I sat down in the office we had been lent in the Embassy, at the desk from which Cromer had virtually ruled Egypt in the early years of the century when Egyptian monarchs reigned by the will of British military and diplomatic power. After our departure the next resident of the Embassy’s splendid guest suite was going to be the Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who was due to visit Cairo on a Middle East peace mission whose importance would certainly dwarf our own.
Aware of the Princess’s high regard for the Foreign Secretary, and suspecting it might already be partly reciprocated, I thought that leaving him a letter would only enhance her image as a tangible asset to British diplomacy, worth entrusting with more such tours in future. I enjoyed drafting this sort of thing on my boss’s behalf. The mental exercise of pretending to be a 30-year-old Princess without a single O-level conveying her thoughts to a distinguished statesman made up for a lot of being chased around by disgruntled French tourists.
After some general remarks about how much she had enjoyed her visit and how impressed she had been by the work of the humanitarian agencies she had seen, the Princess reported on the content of her call on the President and dwelt at some length on the helpfulness and efficiency of the Ambassador and his staff. It concluded, ‘I do hope my short tour will have made some contribution to your aims. Please be in no doubt of my gratitude for the opportunity such a visit gives me to broaden my own horizons, or my readiness to give my support to our foreign policy in any way you think would be helpful.’
Shadows of a Princess Page 33