It was perhaps significant, and certainly gratifying, that in his tribute after her death Douglas Hurd quoted from this letter as evidence of the Princess’s appreciation of her responsibilities as a roving ambassador for her country. After Pakistan, Hungary and now Egypt – to say nothing of the USA – I thought her qualifications for the job spoke for themselves. Never once, by word or deed, did she give any valid ammunition to those who liked to describe her as a diplomatic ‘loose cannon’.
As I sometimes found to my frustration, however, it was impossible to maintain the elevated tone for very long. As I have mentioned, the aircraft that brought the Princess back to England was then to return to Turkey to collect the Prince and his party. I watched without much pleasure, but also without much protest, as the Princess encouraged certain subversive elements in our party while they prepared a ribald message in cut-out newspaper lettering, which they left sellotaped to a bulkhead to welcome the aircraft’s next passengers.
However much it offended me – and it could certainly have offended many more if they had known about it – her occasional lapses into her own brand of juvenile delinquency were probably the smallest price anyone could expect to pay for a star of such untapped potential. Even as I tut-tutted to myself and self-righteously mourned my boss’s continual refusal to turn into a Completely Perfect Princess, I had only to remind myself that she had just pulled off a remarkable triumph in defiance of her doubters, without much tangible support from the organization she represented, to recognize what she was really worth. She had also performed successfully despite the crippling anxieties that must have been gnawing at her insides while she awaited the outcome of the Morton explosion and all that it meant for her future.
My dismay at the forthcoming revelations – which would have been even greater had I known of her active involvement – was tempered by a story she had quietly told me on tour. In retrospect, that was probably why she had shared it with me. She spoke of the evening when she had confronted Camilla Parker Bowles at a party and pleaded with her to leave her husband alone. The response had been stony, from her antagonist and her husband, and the Princess had fled in tears.
I was deeply moved, as was no doubt the intention. All my protective instincts bristled in her defence. The story, moreover, had been told without self-pity and without malice, at least towards her husband. Even the antagonism she clearly felt towards her rival – it was the first time I had heard her use the name ‘Rottweiler’ – was not to last beyond the separation.
It was as if, confronted yet again by the genuine emotions of such an encounter, she forgot the sort of petty vindictiveness which she so often directed at her own supporters. In the last analysis, she could be genuinely magnanimous to those who had hurt her, while simultaneously organizing the symbolic disembowelling of a loyal subordinate. It was hard to escape the feeling that the little people carried the can for the anger she felt towards her real tormentors.
Meanwhile, the Princess was returning from the success of Egypt to the uncertain sanctuary of her husband’s house in Gloucestershire. I was going home to do my best to forget for a short while about everything to do with the royal family.
THIRTEEN
TRUTH OR DARE
As some perceptive watchers could see at the time, and as anyone can see with hindsight, an explosive chain of events awaited only a spark to set it off. The Princess now effectively had her own office, her own press spokesman and virtually – in view of her husband’s lengthy absences – her own palace. She appeared to be finding a mission as a high-profile overseas ambassador for her country, as well as being the embodiment of glamorous compassion at home. She had a massive media following which she was able to choreograph with little help from others. The public perceived her as a model mother, a hard-working member of the royal team and a potentially powerful future Queen. Morton’s book would add to this the picture of a troubled woman fighting for survival in the face of her husband’s treachery and his family’s indifference to her plight.
Ranged against her in tabloid myth and often in reality too was an establishment which, if it was to remain true to itself, would have to align itself to the heir to the throne in any circumstances in which the succession might be threatened. The members of this establishment were the monarchy’s natural supporters, both out of inclination and out of self-interest. However, what they were beginning to learn about the true nature of the institution to which they willingly gave their deference was already unsettling some.
The same conviction that naively but compellingly made me see the Princess as more sinned against than sinning was growing in the minds of others no longer willing to accept at face value the axiom that right must lie only with those who by accident of birth find themselves as royalty. For me and many others in the establishment – to whom royalty was their natural focus and often their very raison d’être – this was an unwelcome discovery. As so often, the Princess acted as a catalyst in helping even the most unimaginative people to see the world differently. Thus the editor of one conservative broadsheet was heard to say that he was in the Prince’s camp because this was how a member of the establishment should react, but he was there without any heartfelt conviction.
Meanwhile, the monarch herself and her private office left no stone unturned in their determination to be neutral in the escalating War of the Waleses. This statesmanlike impartiality frustrated some of the old guard who might have wished that the Queen would come round to their point of view. Some even presumed that they could speak with her authority. To my knowledge, however, nobody spoke against the Princess with the authority of the Queen. Those who did were motivated by their own convictions or prejudices, or, in a few cases, out of some perverted sense of loyalty to the Prince.
The chain reaction of explosions may only have needed a spark to ignite it, but in briefing Andrew Morton as she did the Princess opted to use a blowtorch. People started to get burnt as soon as serialization of Diana: Her True Story began in the Sunday Times in the weeks preceding the June publication date. The impact of the book was harmful to the royal family, but for the Princess it was catastrophic. However gratifying it may have been to her sense of victimhood, any view in which detached logic played a part – and this, to be fair, was not her strong point – would have shown her that all efforts I and others might make to reinforce her image as an independent but still royal operator were now ultimately bound to fail.
The urge to command attention by any means remains for me the most likely motive behind her co-operation. It was a recurring temptation for her. With this she played into the hands of people for whom she was little more than a prospective bestseller. Once she had cast herself as victim, getting her story across was her priority at whatever cost. If people knew her story, her argument went, then their support and understanding would follow automatically and so, crucially, would their affection. For this end she was ready to risk anything. Even her normally acute sense of self-preservation could be bypassed temporarily. It was not a death wish exactly; she was just blind to the consequences, so driven was she by the need to be noticed.
She succeeded in this, of course, but only in the long term and only with those who were her natural supporters anyway. The benefit was never going to be worth the cost she paid, let alone the cost she exacted on the institution into which she had married. That consideration was never going to worry her much, however.
The damage done by the book went too deep to enable a reconciliation to take place, not just between the Princess and her husband but also between the Princess and the role she had made for herself. Long before Panorama, she had already become a ‘Queen of Hearts’, carrying the hopes placed upon her by many millions of people. Now this role could exist only as a saccharine gesture, unsupported by the authority she would have wielded from within the royal fold.
After Morton’s revelations, any success or satisfaction she created by operating independently would inevitably be short-lived. This was partly because the
Princess did not have the stature or the intellectual capacity wisely to employ the opportunities she now had, whatever her other gifts, and partly because the establishment would now be compelled to expel her as a dangerous foreign body. Worst of all, the image of a Princess who could stoop to share ordinary people’s suffering could only be damaged by the new image of a Princess who also stooped to wash her dirty linen on the front pages.
The damage was not limited to a single, cataclysmic event. It was a slow-acting poison. From my perspective, the process that began with Morton ended three and a half years later with Panorama. During those years the Princess breathed the heady but tainted oxygen of success and independence and then, with her judgement fatally impaired, she embarked on a course ruled by her own impulsive nature that would inevitably take her further and further away from the royal support structure. Without that structure she could only be vulnerable to those whose motives seldom began or ended with her welfare.
I was part of that royal support structure, of course, and I willingly stuck with her on the independent course she was beginning uncertainly to plot for herself. In some ways my motives were the same as hers. I was not quite sure where she was going, but I knew that it would be an exciting ride. I knew also that I stood a better chance than most of influencing her thoughts so that, whatever lay ahead, she would do minimal damage to herself and the organization I felt bound to protect.
This sometimes seemed to me like a risky leap in the dark, but I still had a blind belief that at least in her public work the course the Princess chose was likely to follow the directions of my own wobbly moral compass. In cruder terms, I also found her opponents’ hypocrisy increasingly loathsome and I had little of the inherited English concern for hierarchical distinctions which might have made it easier for me to bear.
The Princess chose not to let me in on the whole secret of her co-operation with Morton, just as she chose not to let me in on the secret of her Panorama plot several years later. In many ways this was a blessing. Credible deniability is sometimes a great comfort to a private secretary. It may even have been her intention to spare me the discomfort of conflicting loyalties. At least my ignorance enabled me to fight valiantly in her defence.
Another motive for her secrecy might have been that she just did not trust me. This is slightly less likely than it appears at first, however, given the astonishing confidences she shared with me on other matters.
A third possible motive also persists, at least in my own mind. I believe she was in many ways ashamed of her co-operation with Morton. She was not a natural rebel. Certainly she was angry, but she was also surprisingly timid. As the enormity of the events she had set in motion began to dawn on her, a wish to deny any involvement took root. Whatever her views about my other shortcomings, she knew at least that I was loyal. She also knew, however, that I was not slow to bring questions of principle into our discussions about her future programme, her relations with the other members of the royal family and her responsibilities as an extraordinarily gifted and privileged person.
I do not think she can have found it an uplifting experience to pour out her emotions into Andrew Morton’s Dictaphone. In fact, I believe she felt quite sullied by it. She was never normally slow to take credit for good news, but whenever the book’s huge success was mentioned she took no visible satisfaction. Instead she became evasive and uncharacteristically reticent. As a form of emotional bulimia, this was something to be hidden away, to be indulged like another dark and self-destructive urge.
It was perhaps significant that the chosen go-between who passed the Princess’s tapes to Morton was her friend James Coldhurst. As a doctor he had some influence over the Princess’s attitude to medical issues. As a concerned friend, his encouragement of such revelations – as a kind of emotional purging – might tacitly have helped them seem therapeutic. As it happened, however, the main beneficiary appeared to be the Princess’s denial reflex. In my experience, shame is not an emotion with which royal people are very familiar. Certainly, the more people urged the Princess to experience it in the wake of Morton, the less inclined she was to do so.
Nevertheless, there was no doubting her regret and confusion when she realized that her panicky denials of involvement with the author had caused her brother-in-law Sir Robert Fellowes to mislead the Press Complaints Commission under Lord McGregor. In a well-documented incident, Lord McGregor publicly admonished the press for ‘dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’. Andrew Knight, executive chairman of News International, shared a friend with the Princess who had told him the true origin of the revelations in Morton’s book. This was communicated to Lord McGregor, along with the information that the next day there would be photographs in the tabloid papers publicly endorsing the Princess’s friendship with Carolyn Bartholomew, a key contributor to the book. Lord McGregor could thus only conclude that either he had been deliberately misled by Fellowes, or Fellowes did not know what was going on.
The truth was that Fellowes had been misled by his sister-in-law and by her private secretary, both of whom denied she had anything to do with the Morton book. It will come as little comfort to Sir Robert to know that he was not the only private secretary who had been misled in this way. I had beaten him to it, although as the official most closely responsible, my willing credulity was the greater lapse.
My understanding of the self-destructive forces at work within the Princess was likewise greater than Sir Robert’s. Even had I known the truth of her involvement, my answer to the Queen’s private secretary – and thus to the Queen herself – might still have been the same. Such was my loyalty to my leader at that time, even though she had comprehensively misled me.
I duly gave my support to an internal press office briefing which said something like this: ‘The Princess of Wales has not given access/co-operation to the author on the production of this book for either the text or the photographs or in any other way. Her Highness is certainly not checking a copy of the text as alleged in one paper.’ All these assurances turned out to be false.
So did the assurances I received from the Princess in an illustrative little incident, the significance of which only dawned on my overcrowded brain as I descended the KP stairs afterwards. It was still early in the Morton saga, when a pretence of normal routine could still be continued. I had been with her in her sitting room, wading through routine correspondence and programme details. She looked drawn and distracted, but I sensed a suppressed excitement within her. The unspoken subject dominating her mind and mine was the question of her complicity in The Book.
At last I was able to put away my piles of papers, diary and notebook. ‘Ma’am,’ I ventured, ‘I had a long session with Robert and the others in BP this morning …’
‘Poor you! Are they all jumping up and down?’
‘Well, they’re worried. Nobody wants to think you helped Morton.’
‘I’ve never spoken to him. And why would I want to damage my children’s future?’
‘Exactly. That’s just what I told Robert.’
‘This family had this book coming to them. I can’t help it if people don’t like what they read.’
We looked at each other. Now she had colour in her cheeks and her eyes held mine with a challenge. It was one of those moments – one of many – when I had a choice. I could either accept the truth as she was giving it to me, or I could question her integrity to her face and so destroy the whole basis of our relationship. Like an ailing marriage, it depended on the outward appearance of mutual trust to have any purpose at all.
It was not a difficult decision. I did not have the evidence to refute what she told me (many people went half mad trying to find it), and I did not fancy being sacked. It was a truce. She would pretend to have told me the truth and I would pretend to believe her.
As it turned out, what she had told me was true – as far as it went. She was quite good at that sort of verbal contortionism, her favourite ploy being to deflect an awkward questio
n with one of her own. Being who she was, that gave her an unbeatable server’s advantage in this sort of unwholesome game of moral ping-pong. It could be confusing, though, trying to remember what I was and was not supposed to know.
‘Well,’ I said after a pause, ‘the press office is publicly denying that you had anything to do with it.’
‘Good,’ she replied, though the fire was now gone from her eyes. It was time to leave. By a twist of our curious etiquette, I was not supposed to make her prolong the act.
As I thoughtfully made my way downstairs, my mind was filled with the significance of what I had just learned. Her denial was the best confirmation I was ever going to get. OK then: her denial would be my denial. That was simple. But what about that business with the Bartholomew photographs? There could have been no clearer endorsement of Carolyn’s contribution to the book. (The press had been mysteriously tipped off by a woman with ‘a posh voice’ that the Princess was going to visit Carolyn Bartholomew and so give her a powerful endorsement as one of Morton’s most candid contributors.)
‘Patrick!’
She was leaning over the banisters above me. I stopped and looked up. ‘Yes Ma’am?’
‘What do people think of me going to see Carolyn like that? All those photographers popping up?’ It was uncanny. Once again she had read my mind. Careful now.
‘I think they see you as a very supportive friend.’
‘And the photographers?’
‘Well, they follow you everywhere, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they certainly do!’
Throughout the saga of the Morton book, I was aware that the allegations it contained – which if even half true demonstrated an astonishing degree of negligence on the part of the royal family’s senior management – were always at least partly obscured by this question of the Princess’s co-operation. It was as if the means of transmission rather than the message itself was all that mattered. It was not important that something might be seriously amiss, but only that anybody should have the temerity to blow the whistle on it. It was not important whether the Princess had been misled or mistreated at various stages during her time in the institution’s care, but only whether that institution might be accused of having even temporarily misled the press watchdog.
Shadows of a Princess Page 34