Diana’s original encouragement of her True Story might have been excused as one rash sally in a war that has had Royal partisans on both sides. But the Princess’s refusal to disavow the book adds up in Royal eyes to a clear case of treason … The Princess will not make an easy target … She has been a trouper – caring, brave and natural with an extraordinary ability to reach out and touch people’s hearts.
His final analysis of the cause of the marital breakdown takes some beating: ‘Two emotionally needy people have come together and have discovered they have only demands to make.’
Another independent observer, The Economist magazine, made its point with satire, providing a company brief on the House of Windsor in its 29 August 1992 edition. Describing it as a fairly typical British firm, the article went on to note that the company’s management ‘has diversified into younger brands and raised the firm’s profile to a new emphasis on public relations’. The management were hoping to increase customer awareness and prevent the possibility that ‘customers might switch to a cheaper Presidential product’. However, ‘high brand awareness can cause problems when quality is in doubt’. About the Princess, the article said:
Current difficulties with The Princess of Wales illustrate a different problem created by the dash into the entertainment business. The Princess was promoted so heavily that many customers transferred their loyalty to this one product at the expense of the rest of the range … If she were to leave there would be trouble for Windsor. She has outperformed the rest of the range so dramatically that she could carry the customers with her.
One final commentary on the events of that summer comes from a rather less impartial source, but for me it was the best and most significant of the lot as I searched for reassurance that I was doing the right thing:
I did so want you to know how much your support, encouragement and guidance has meant to me, particularly during the last 2 months … I do admire you enormously, not least for having to cope with a lady Boss, but you do it with a unique quality which I trust implicitly!
As with most of her missives, this one came ‘with love from Diana’. Love, I thought, whatever that means.
Darkening our horizon was the planned joint tour to Korea, due to take place at the beginning of November 1992. Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Seoul at that time was David Wright, who had led our joint tour to Indonesia and Hong Kong with such aplomb. Despite the eventual success of that tour, it had suffered its fair share of stressful dramas and David had borne the brunt of them. Now he was volunteering for a repeat dose. I could not quite understand why he had not invented almost any excuse to prevent such a visit occurring during his ambassadorship. His good nature and optimism certainly exceeded mine.
I was fortunate in that the only contribution the Princess’s office would make to the tour was the presence of Anne Beckwith-Smith as lady-in-waiting. I was pretty sure that by fielding our strongest player we were doing everything that could be done in the circumstances to support our boss through what were plainly going to be difficult days.
Then, in a sudden and deeply unwelcome development only days before they were due to depart, the Princess decided in the name of ‘honesty’ that she could not accompany the Prince on a tour which she saw as nothing more than a charade. In this, of course, she was very largely correct, but as I grimly coped with the fallout I reflected that it was a singularly inappropriate moment to discover one of the fundamental truths about royal tours in general.
Such was the overheated atmosphere of the time that I wrote a long and carefully argued note to her. Whatever point about her marriage she was trying to make, I said, she could make it far better if she was not at the same time risking being seen as the wrecker of a diplomatic initiative of national importance. If she did not do her bit in representing the country this time, how could we ever win Foreign Office support for her own overseas tour plans later on?
It was strong stuff and I concluded by saying that had I not been so blunt with her, she would be justified in sacking me for dereliction of duty. If she still decided not to go, she would pretty soon want to sack me in any case. In fact, I was on fairly safe ground here, as I already knew that the Queen was prepared to tell the Princess where her duty lay. I would like to think that my veiled threat of resignation helped to change the Princess’s mind, but you may prefer to believe that it was the Queen’s personal intervention which tipped the balance. Whatever the reason, the Princess reluctantly set out for Seoul with the Prince as planned.
She had hardly touched down in Seoul when the familiar pattern of highly charged phone calls began, as the Princess used me – and many others, I am sure – as an outlet for the frustration and isolation she felt. Taking advantage of the ‘cat’s away’ atmosphere at St James’s, I had sneaked off to the Land Rover factory to take up a long-postponed invitation to see the production line. Inevitably, just as the guided tour was about to start, my pager emitted its dreaded bleep. Some internal organ in the vicinity of my waistband always seemed to know instinctively that it was her.
‘Patrick! Why I am on this trip? It’s so dishonest! I knew I shouldn’t have come …’
I realized that, whatever other reasons she may have given for not wanting to accompany the Prince to Korea (the thought had crossed my mind that she only wanted to seize the opportunity to embarrass him), she might also have wanted to avoid being cut off from her network of supporters and friends at such a critical time. Since most of the support she derived from this network came down the phone line, however – often in fervent but not very considered terms – mere distance probably counted for little. More probably it was separation from her children that took the greatest toll, especially when uncritical love – or any love, in fact – was in such short supply closer to hand.
This factor, as much as disenchantment with her tour partner, might account for some of the doleful looks which characterized almost all the photographs emerging from Korea. Some newspaper editors subsequently admitted that they had deliberately chosen the most miserable pictures to give credence to their harsh predictions about the imminent demise of the Waleses’ marriage. Once again, unnecessary energy was wasted on remonstrating with the newspapers on their unhelpful choice of illustrations. Cynical it may have been, but even had they searched hard for the few photographs which could have been interpreted as showing the couple happy in each other’s company, I do not believe it would have made a jot of difference to events over the following few weeks.
As others have commented, if the first 10 months of 1992 had seen the press pack licking its lips at the prospect of the banquet in store, with the Korean tour they moved in for the kill. By the time the Waleses had returned to London for the annual Remembrance Day observations, the tabloids had their stories ready. ‘A MARRIAGE IN NAME ONLY’ said the Daily Mail and, with its reporters drawing on their typically ‘excellent’ sources, the tone was set for the tenor of royal reporting in the four weeks that remained before official announcement of the separation.
Much was made in some of the papers about the Princess’s appearance above the Cenotaph with the Princess Royal and the Queen Mother, standing at their traditional vantage point on the Foreign Office balcony. Either by use of a clever camera angle – or, it was alleged, clever computer gimmickry – the Princess appeared to be standing significantly apart from the others. Again such speculation was irrelevant. With or without trick photography, the gap between the figures on the balcony was spiritual and emotional rather than physical.
Given the increasingly fraught atmosphere, it was a relief to set out for Paris a couple of days after Remembrance Day on the Princess’s next solo tour. Friday 13 November – a date that might have promised ill omens – turned out to mark the start of a particularly rewarding trip. Its indisputable success finally threw down the gauntlet to those who might figuratively have wished the Princess to ‘get to a nunnery’.
As the official responsible for the tour, I was painfully conscious of the subplot of
Palace politics which would determine its perceived success or failure quite as much as anything that happened in front of the adoring crowds in Paris. The French media had already decided which side it supported. Paris-Match carried a front-page Demarchelier photograph along with the exhortation, ‘Courage Princesse!’ Not for the first or last time, we set off on our ambassadorial mission uncomfortably conscious that success abroad was unlikely to translate into universal approval at home.
‘We’ll show them!’ said the Princess, determined blue eyes staring fixedly out of the window of the royal jet. She seemed to be speaking to the whole city as we climbed into the sky above London. In fact, I knew her words were more specifically intended for the occupants of a group of buildings at the end of The Mall, for the newsrooms of the capital, and for certain residents of country houses in Gloucestershire.
Interestingly, she had also said ‘we’. I had come to recognize that simple pronoun as a codeword of huge significance. This was not the royal ‘we’ so beloved of dumb comedians. It was an invitation to a conspiracy. It was an offer of triumph or guilt by association with her one-woman crusade for independence. That ‘we’ gave her courage and recruited other consciences to share her doubts. It often gave me nightmares, but by now it was far too late for me to get off the roller coaster that her life had become. I was too closely associated with this turbulent Princess to expect the offer of a safe, alternative position in the royal machine – and anyway, the terror of the ride had become a powerful drug. I was hooked.
The Paris tour, though only lasting three days, turned out to be a triumph. Under the benign eye of the towering British Ambassador Ewen Fergusson, the programme ran smoothly from one successful engagement to the next. Each was a classic set piece in which the Princess’s striking beauty and crowd-pleasing style could be displayed to maximum advantage.
She glowed under the rapturous attention, responding as usual to the stimulus of public expectation by producing a flawless display of how to be a royal celebrity. Every gesture, every glance, every step of every walkabout revealed a professional at the peak of her form and no one, from the President of the Republic to the most cynical member of the press circus, was immune to her charm.
The President was perhaps particularly susceptible. In the ornate splendour of the Elysée Palace, he and his wife hosted an intimate tea party. Differences of age, language and status were swept aside as the Princess’s laughter and the growing animation of her hosts overcame the formality of our surroundings.
As she took leave of the Mitterrands at the top of the Palace steps, scores of flashbulbs erupted simultaneously, bathing the Princess in an eerie blue light, freezing her image starkly against the historic stonework. She somehow dwarfed not only the head of state, who bathed in her reflected glory, but even the imposing imperial backdrop itself.
Perhaps it was the convergence of powerful symbols that momentarily made me lose my professional detachment. I was suddenly gripped by the realization that I was witnessing a defining moment, and even then I was poignantly aware that it marked a peak which would never again be scaled. Subconsciously I never forgot the marital clash that awaited us back in London. Subconsciously I also knew that, even if she won the battle for her independence, the war would cost the Princess her crown. This was all still in the future, however. In that instant, as the electronic daylight threw the surrounding Parisian dusk into momentary blackness, the Princess shone at her brightest.
Less than five years later, in the same city and under the same remorseless flashbulbs, she lay broken and dying in the wreckage of a car. This time there had been no police outriders, only paparazzi on motorbikes; there had been no benign Ambassador at her side, only a playboy lover; and there had been no watchful protectors, under whose attention she may sometimes have chafed but from whom she had fatally cut herself off.
For me, her Paris tour of November 1992 marked the Princess’s apogee. Many more great and uplifting achievements still lay ahead of her, but in my memory these were always tarnished to some extent by the shortcomings and doubts which her new independence all too readily exposed. Paris saw her, briefly, without that tarnish. To my eyes, knowing what she had already endured and what lay ahead in the immediate future, there was something heroic in her. Like much heroism, it was not without its flaws and may even have been the compensating flip side of some deep fear. Nonetheless, that night in Paris it sprang from a strength of spirit momentarily freed from accumulations of false sentiment in a simple bid for survival.
PART TWO
OUT
FOURTEEN
HORRIBILISSIMUS
The Princess returned to London on 15 November 1992 with the Parisian crowds’ cheers ringing in her ears, a renewed confidence in her ability to outplay her in-laws – especially her husband – at their own game, and more irrefutable proof of her value to the cause of British diplomacy. And of course, being Diana, she also found time to join in the general merriment on the plane home, as some of our party compared risqué souvenirs from Paris’s less high-minded boutiques. God knows, we would find little enough to laugh about in the months to come, plagued by the harsh realities of the Waleses’ marital crisis.
Under a long-standing arrangement, the Princess was due to play her usual role in support of the Prince at a private weekend at Sandringham on 20 and 21 November. The prospect filled her with anger and dread. In many ways, that Sandringham weekend encapsulated the forces at work in the disintegration of the couple’s marriage. The Prince seemed to resort to a reliance on the dignity and status of his title, if only to conceal exasperation with a wife now completely beyond his control or comprehension. For her part, the Princess felt a burning sense of injustice at her position, pilloried for Morton and Squidgygate, yet surely no more a sinner than her straying husband. The clash over that weekend – ironically planned originally as relaxation for them both – left the Prince’s formidable strength undiminished and the Princess’s equally formidable defiance in full blaze.
‘They’re all his friends,’ she complained to me. ‘I’m going to be completely outnumbered.’ Later her familiar mantra made an appearance: ‘It’s all so false!’
I warned her that her absence would precipitate a crisis. In the discussion that followed she was undeterred, aware of her own strength after the success of Paris and perhaps recognizing a tactical opportunity to wrong-foot the Prince. I sensed that she was determined to force the issue, almost whatever the outcome. Anything would be better than this agonizing uncertainty.
I could see her point. The idea of playing happy families to an audience which would be at best cool towards her after the scandals of the summer seemed less than desirable, both for her and the children. Given the explosive tensions simmering below the surface, it also seemed plain folly.
Aware of the implications of what she was doing, therefore, this time she declined to play her allotted role. As so often in a real crisis, she was cool and utterly composed. She was also still able to find relief in black humour about her situation. ‘Just think, Patrick,’ she said. ‘Nicholas Soames can eat all the food they’d bought for me. I’d probably only have sicked it up anyway!’ Perhaps because of her ability to make jokes like this, there was in fact no sign of the bulimia that sometimes returned to torment her at moments of tension.
Faced with what he saw as his wife’s obduracy, the Prince’s reaction was one of understandable but unwise frustration, expressed in blunt and peremptory tones. In response, to emphasize that her intentions were not simply to express some peevish fit of pique, the Princess took the children to see their grandmother the Queen. Her Majesty, one may imagine, did not welcome this turn of events but was not in a position to demur. She had already resigned herself to the idea of separation, at least on a temporary basis, but to the Princess’s frustration she was still determined to remain above the squabble.
The Princess’s refusal to take William and Harry to Sandringham that weekend has been cited as evidence of her readiness to
manipulate the children as pawns in her manoeuvring with the Prince. The allegation could not be rebutted convincingly, because in my opinion it was at least partly true. The children were too powerful an asset to be left out of the dispute completely. Given the Princess’s highly stressed condition (undeniable despite her outward calm), and considering the strength of the opposition, such restraint would have been scarcely human and was certainly quite out of character.
Nevertheless, in order to assert her claim to the moral high ground, on her lawyer’s advice she wrote the Prince a careful latter of explanation in which, among other things, she said that she felt the atmosphere at Sandringham would not be conducive to a happy weekend for the children. Nor could she be sure that he would not expose them to guests whose presence would be unwelcome to her – a scarcely veiled reference to Camilla Parker Bowles.
This was too much for the Prince. I was duly confronted by Richard Aylard, wearing his most important expression and asking to be told the name of the Princess’s lawyers.
When I reported this escalation to the Princess, her reply added a plaintive echo of a time now far in the past; an echo more than tinged with apprehension. ‘But Patrick,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to speak to his lawyers. I want to speak to him …’ This was a touching sentiment, but even as she said it we both knew there had been ample opportunities to speak in the past, none of which had proved adequate. Except as a gesture, such a proposal was far too late.
The Sandringham weekend duly passed without the Princess or her sons. On 25 November she got her meeting with the Prince, but it was only to hear him say that he was determined on a separation. The lawyers went to work.
Shadows of a Princess Page 37