The only task she had set herself was to decide how far she wanted to go with her quest for independence and public recognition. Her views on this matter depended on her nerve, which fluctuated alarmingly from day to day. Sometimes she was full of bravado: ‘I’m really strong, Patrick! People don’t realize how strong I am!’ At other times she was distinctly apprehensive: ‘I’m just sitting here not knowing where the next explosion is coming from.’ Or she would simply ask, for the umpteenth time: ‘What are the papers saying?’
The infrastructure was already in place to support her role as an independent royal figure. I had also made long-term plans for further solo overseas visits, as well as following up an idea to coalesce her leading patronages into an informal advisory committee – effectively a potential nucleus for a new Princess of Wales’s Trust. The opportunities were all there, and I think this knowledge strengthened her in the private ordeals she faced when she was alone with the royal family in the weeks immediately after the Morton revelations.
During that year’s Ascot Meeting, she spoke regularly to me of her sense of isolation both at Windsor Castle and in the public displays of togetherness in the Royal Box, and I had a strong impression at the time of the degree to which the senior households underestimated her. They did not truly appreciate her importance as the mother of the future King and as an applauded royal figure in her own right, but this was something that I do not think ever came easily to them. More importantly, they drastically miscalculated her abilities as a fighter and survivor.
From a position to which deference has always been paid, it must be only too easy to see manipulation and instability in any attempt to change the status quo. The Princess never lacked respect for the offices held by her husband and his family. As she memorably said, they were, after all, offices to which her own children were born. Nonetheless, on a person-to-person basis she could call upon her own noble lineage, her sense of injustice and all her many other talents in resolving to fight when family diplomacy failed.
The failure of her adopted family to provide regular words of encouragement and reassurance – at least in a form that worked on her – made it easier for her to feel besieged. From this position it was only a short step to the kind of guerrilla tactics – press manipulation, diary rivalry and emotional blackmail – that she increasingly favoured in her battle for survival.
The fact that the Princess may have needed an inordinate amount of indulgent handling must have been alien for the Queen and others of a generation which prized above all else the ability to control emotion and suppress spontaneity. However, such an attitude – to which I had also been raised and which claimed to uphold so many of the great British strengths which had withstood all the tests that Empire and war could bring – missed the point. To borrow a word so often ascribed to royal activities, I felt it was their duty to make whatever effort was necessary on a personal basis to understand the Princess of Wales and then to persist ad infinitum in affectionate attempts to lead her into safer paths. Whatever else I learned about her nature in eight years, I was quite sure of this: when handled with honesty, respect and affection, her response would be co-operative and loyal. It would be appreciative too.
In various forms, this sermon was constantly in the back of my mind that summer. I preached it on several occasions to patient members of the Queen’s office, who demonstrated their own good nature not just in hearing me out but also, I believe, in agreeing with me. Their apparent impotence only added to my own.
In the private family meetings that followed the serialization of Diana: Her True Story, the Princess inevitably felt the full weight of the accusations made against her. She was, after all, the outsider. She received several well-intended letters from Prince Philip at this time, but appeared to register only what she chose to hear as their unsympathetic tone. ‘He thinks I’m just in it for the publicity!’ she complained to me.
Once again, it seemed that the messenger not the message was her in-laws’ principal concern. Unfortunately, what the Princess saw as overbearing attempts to whip her into line only strengthened her defiance. She was very good at defiance. It is often a sign of emotional immaturity, as I think it was in the Princess’s case. Allied with her other attributes, however, and strengthened by the hypocrisy of which she felt the victim, it made her a bad enemy.
Bearing all these factors in mind, it seemed to me that the Morton furore had a silver lining. At last the truth was in the open, even if that truth were only that the Prince and Princess were now irreconcilable. Surely some action must now be taken to resolve the situation.
On the morning after the serialization began, the Princess rang me privately and said, ‘The Prince and I have decided to separate.’
My first reaction was one of relief. ‘Good,’ I said, and really meant it.
Other reactions followed as the implications of the news sank in. I was speaking on my car phone while negotiating the middle lane of Hyde Park Corner in the rush hour. Somewhere a distant part of my mind – that bit which did the steering and braking – registered how alert my fellow commuters were that morning, as I somehow avoided adding ‘collision’ to the word ‘constitution’ at the top of my list of immediate priorities.
By the time I reached the office I had got as far as thinking that, although ‘Her Royal Highness Diana, Princess of Wales’ definitely had quite a good ring to it, I was equally sure that, both for the sake of the monarchy and for her own personal happiness, this might be the time to leave the stage completely. Fired as I was with a crusader’s righteous passion on her behalf – and, somewhere lower down the scale, slightly concerned for my own future – I nevertheless saw this as a golden opportunity that might not return, publicly to finish the job that Morton had started. She could choose to sweep from the stage with her head held high, her enemies in shame and confusion behind her and a new life of fascinating possibilities ahead of her.
Later in the day I phoned her. ‘Look, Ma’am. If I come into work tomorrow and there’s a note from you on my desk saying, “Patrick, I’ve decided to run away with Mr Perfect. Please sort everything out,” then I’ll be only too glad. So long as you send for me afterwards.’
She laughed. The relief was evident in her own voice too. ‘No, Patrick,’ she said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’ That being the way the wind was blowing, I settled to the task of finding her the sort of work she wanted while lending her what sympathy and advice it was in me to give.
I did not accompany the Princess on the family cruise aboard the Latsis yacht, but it was by all accounts a holiday in name only. She sat in self-imposed isolation or with her children, avoiding the other guests who were overwhelmingly drawn from her husband’s circle. She knew, she told me, that her husband was taking radio phone calls from Camilla Parker Bowles. She even claimed inadvertently to have listened in on one.
Knowledge of that relationship seemed no longer to pain her. Rather, it seemed a vindication of her stand and therefore something of a relief. It was also a kind of permit, as she began to see her own departure from the marital straight and narrow as in some way more excusable than her husband’s. She had almost perfected the appearance of hurt innocence, which she kept up more or less until she felt able to shoulder her share of the guilt in Panorama three years later. Meanwhile, her references to Camilla Parker Bowles as ‘the Rottweiler’ became fewer and she could still find in her heart the generosity to say of her husband, ‘I wish he could be happy. He’d be far better off going somewhere and painting. That’s what he’d like. In Italy or somewhere.’
Soon after the cruise, in August 1992, I teamed up with the Princess for a very successful engagement in Glasgow on behalf of a Scottish alcohol treatment charity. After the stresses of the holiday it was visibly a relief for her to be back at work, if only briefly, before the next ordeal began at Balmoral. After the engagement I accompanied the Princess on her flight to Aberdeen, where I would leave her to travel on to Balmoral while I returned to London. Also on board
the plane were the Prince and the Duchess of York, as well as the children.
The Duchess had recently returned from France and was running just ahead of the publicity surrounding the infamous toe-sucking photographs. The atmosphere inside the small aircraft can be imagined. A black gloom settled over the royal compartment. The Duchess devoted her natural vivacity to lightening it, but she only seemed to make things worse. The Prince retreated into paperwork and the Princess stared fixedly out of the window or at the Daily Mail, while Fergie organized a kind of hide-and-seek for the young Princes and Princesses. As airborne recreation, the game had its limitations.
In Aberdeen I watched the royal people climb into their cars and set off in the direction of Balmoral. I knew my boss was heading into a lion’s den, but my sympathy for her was elbowed aside by a sudden and overwhelming urge to acquaint myself with the Aberdeen airport bar. Utilitarian as my surroundings were, a martini at the Savoy would not have been more welcome.
No sooner had I embarked on my own brief holiday in the West Country – I did not dare go abroad in the circumstances – than the phone began to ring. It was the Palace press office. There was a vague rumour about some tapes.
I had heard this rumour before and dismissed it as just another among so many ghastly whisperings, gobbets of disinformation and black propaganda that were by then my daily diet. This time, however, the rumours were true and ‘Squidgygate’ burst upon us.
With a mixture of horrified prurience and fascination, anyone who could read a newspaper could follow the Princess’s unhappy mobile-phone discussion – illicitly recorded nearly three years earlier – with a male admirer, generally accepted to be James Gilbey. She had never spoken to me directly about him, but I knew he was a ‘best friend’ whose precise status I was happy to leave a bit vague.
It was an unedifying conversation to read, revealing an all-too-human Princess with an adolescent’s vocabulary and an angry child’s sense of injustice at her treatment by the royal family (notoriously described by her as ‘this f***ing family’, an expression I had heard often enough to recognize its authenticity). Being so out of date, the recording was an uncomfortable throwback to a time when she was just coming to terms with her situation but had not yet found the courage or means to do something about it.
Given our peculiar way of dealing with matters of truth, I never bothered to ask the Princess if the tapes were authentic. Although I was at pains never to confirm it, everybody at the Palace knew they were the genuine article. If I had any doubts, I had only to call the Squidgygate phone line helpfully provided by the Sun to hear my boss’s familiar tones. During our daily phone calls the Princess and I laughed about it. ‘Hope you’re able to charge the call to the office!’ she said.
Every morning brought a new rash of allegations and revelations. Incarcerated as she was in the north of Scotland – ‘like a rabbit’ she said, trapped in her ‘lonely turret’ – she was unable to see the London newspapers before the dubious delights of meeting the other residents of the castle at breakfast. Every day, therefore, I rose at 5.30 to fetch all the papers from the early train at a country station in Devon. Then I stood in a call box outside the newsagent’s, breathing in the evidence of last night’s boozy occupant and reading to the Princess as calmly as I could the printed transcript of her intimate conversation with James Gilbey and the damning chorus of comment that accompanied it.
On these occasions her mood could be anything but composed. She was alternately despairing, defiant or lost in self-pity. Any crusading feelings I had gave way to simple sympathy for someone younger than me buried in misery and surrounded by the very people to whom she should have been able to turn for help but knew she could not.
One day I rashly set off for the beach, hoping that for perhaps 10 hours the phone would not ring. I was wrong. Three miles down the road my pager summoned me to another public call box. ‘Patrick!’ said the Princess in a shrill voice. ‘I want to talk to the Prime Minister!’
I watched a lone buzzard circling high over the sunlit Devon fields. What freedom, I thought enviously as my brain tried to produce the right reply. In its absence I came out with the private secretary’s Sir Humphrey-ish stand-by. ‘Ye-e-es, Ma’am,’ I said slowly. ‘Is there anything in particular you’d like to say to him?’
Her voice grew shriller as her exasperation mounted at my failure to catch the obvious. ‘About this family, of course …’ She became incoherent. She had better not talk to the Prime Minister like this, I thought.
I adopted my most soothing and therefore probably my most irritating bedside manner. ‘I understand, Ma’am, but perhaps you’d let me speak to the Prime Minister’s office first. I know Alex Allan [the private secretary] quite well and perhaps I could brief him on what it is exactly that you think the Prime Minister can do to help. Shall I call you back in, say, an hour?’
‘All right,’ she said, her voice dropping back to something like its normal pitch.
I drove on towards the beach and in due course stopped at a Happy Eater. The phone box smelt better than the restaurant. It was therefore an easy choice to do as my conscience dictated and make my call before attending to the sudden, urgent requirement for lunch.
‘Well, Ma’am. Have you decided what it is exactly you’d like to say to the Prime Minister?’ It was no surprise to learn that she had not. All of a sudden, however, there was a load of other, more important things she wanted to be done quickly. I never did made it to the beach that day, nor for many afterwards.
The fallout from Squidgygate turned the rest of that unhappy summer into a protracted rehabilitation exercise, both for the Princess’s image and her personal equilibrium. In the event, perhaps surprisingly, both survived pretty well. She certainly fared better than her husband did when his own telephone intimacies were revealed in the ‘Camillagate’ tape early in 1993.
Of course, few people who came into contact with the Princess – especially those who were trying to obtain favours from her – were likely to reveal any adverse reaction to the tapes. Most seemed happy to act as though it had never happened and, privately, most accepted that it was none of their business. Who, after all, could honestly relish the idea of their phone conversations from the distant past being splashed all over the papers?
In the furore that followed the decision by some papers to print extracts from the conversation – and they were naturally the most cringe-making bits – proceeds from the accompanying phone line were offered to several of the Princess’s charities. To their eternal credit, all refused. David French, the head of Relate, led the stand for decency. ‘We have to show we have a moral compass in all this,’ he said.
Undoubtedly, the scandal hastened the decline of the Princess’s pristine image. In its place, however, grew something more durable: here was a young woman with flaws who nevertheless aspired to something better. Rather like her bulimia, a secret some might regard as shameful actually became a scar which she bore with an acceptance of her own fallibility.
Crucially, the Squidgygate drama also revealed her to be unhappy in love. The sentimental British public – or at least the media that served its tastes – might enjoy the process of finding out about this fact, but they were not ready to condemn her for it. If anything, they were more likely to blame the people most obviously responsible for it. For this reason, outside a narrow circle of existing supporters who saw in the revelations some vindication for their man, the Prince did not benefit from his wife’s embarrassment. The fact that he was shown in his own subsequent tape scandal to be in a happy relationship himself only made the public reaction more disapproving.
Two independent accounts of this period make interesting reading now, so many years after that confusing, emotionally charged summer. In the heat of the moment, I may sometimes have fallen short of the professional objectivity that I thought was not only my best qualification for the post of private secretary but also my best tool in my quest to make a success of it. It was hard sometimes not to becom
e emotionally involved in such a dramatic saga. Luckily, however, it contained so many elements of farce – I had only to picture myself spelling out lines from the Squidgygate transcripts on the crackling phone line to Balmoral – that it was usually possible to return to the real world of mortgages and gas bills with a laugh of sheer disbelief. Nonetheless, in circumstances devoid of most reliable outside reference points, it was a relief to find some independent commentary which could lend credibility to my gut-feelings about the Princess and her situation.
The first was from the August 1992 edition of Life magazine. Under the heading ‘ALONE TOGETHER’, Robert Lacey made some very acute observations, not least an assertion that Diana: Her True Story was ‘the Princess’s personal petition for divorce … as one-sided and unfair as such documents usually are’. ‘But,’ he said, ‘many parts of its story must be considered authentic.’ He went on, ‘She considers her marriage dead and she wants the world to know about it – even at the risk of jeopardizing her Royal position … she has not lived happily ever after.’ Like many others, Lacey saw Her True Story as the end of a fairy tale – an image that now had to be replaced with a picture of bleak, ‘almost gothic’ tragedy.
He put the current frenzy in some sort of royal context: ‘Diana is being criticized by traditionalists for breaching a cardinal protocol – Royal folk don’t blab. Yet a look at the history of the Monarchy’s relationship with the media suggests that Diana could be forgiven for not fully understanding the rules of the complex and often devious game.’ He went on to describe how both the Queen Mother, with her pre-war media courtship as Duchess of York, and the present-day Queen, with films such as Royal Family, had been involved in ‘calculated surrenders of cherished Royal privacy’. He also listed instances of active collaboration with biographers by Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, Princess Michael and the Duchess of York. Then he commented:
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