As if on another planet, elsewhere in the royal universe normal life maintained the even tenor of its ways – and very nice some of them were too. At the beginning of December, in a bizarre contrast to the separation negotiations painfully dominating life in St James’s Palace, I went to Windsor Great Park for a very sedate day’s shooting with senior members of other households.
As always, the shooting was entertaining and we had the added interest on some drives of seeing in the distance the roofs of Windsor Castle, still all too plainly bearing the scars of the recent, disastrous fire. The occasion was also a useful opportunity to gauge attitudes in other households, not so much to me as to my mercurial boss.
This time my colleagues – all from secure posts in comfortably established households presided over by dull but reliable royal performers – regarded me with varying degrees of wariness. Some expressed a cautious sympathy, though whether because I had been put in an awkward position or simply because I worked for a madwoman was hard to tell. Others, even those I had known for years, appeared to fear contagion. To be fair, however, the speech and body language that conveyed their distaste had probably been bred into them.
I did my best to ensure that the Princess’s reputation was upheld in the respectable tally of birds accounted for by our office. I also tried to adopt the neutral bonhomie that I judged the most appropriate mask to wear in the company of people who I did not think could even begin to understand the difficulties I faced and who did not care very much anyway.
Other routine aspects of royal life also carried on, regardless of the tortured state of relations between the Prince and Princess. One fixture in particular was a far cry from the civilized predictability of the Windsor shoot. As the lawyers locked horns in earnest, the curtain was brought down on the final pretence of unity in co-ordinating the diaries of the Prince and Princess. The biannual programme meeting, scene in previous years of so much suppressed hilarity, was held at KP less than a week before the formal announcement of the separation. It was the merest fig leaf, the fag end of a process that had not worked harmoniously for many years, if indeed it ever had.
With a peremptoriness that seemed to be becoming a standard feature of the Prince’s mouthpieces, I was informed that His Royal Highness would be holding his programme meeting at such and such a time. Her Royal Highness very sensibly did not feel disposed to attend a meeting at which she would have been heavily outnumbered and the focus of hostile attention.
Less sensibly, I was determined to put in an appearance, not least because I knew that my presence was neither necessary nor welcome. I felt I needed no further justification and sat awkwardly through the usual interminable process of wheedling the Prince into agreeing his programme for the next six months. I made some nervous, pre-scripted remarks where I thought the Princess’s interests should be represented and stammered my replies to the Prince’s pointed questions.
‘How do you pronounce this disease?’ he said, pointing to an entry on a list of his wife’s charity engagements.
‘DystrophicEpidermolysisBullosaSir!’ A royal grimace produced the expected titter around the table. I wished I had stayed away. ‘Also known simply as “EB”,’ I added, remembering some defiance and the small, bandage-wrapped victims I had seen at Great Ormond Street.
At last it was over. We were dismissed and the Prince headed for his study. Not quite knowing what I was doing, I found myself following him and knocked on the door. ‘Sir, can I speak to you for a minute?’
The public face of the meeting had gone. He looked haggard and resentful of my intrusion. ‘What is it?’ he asked, busily sorting through the piles of books that as usual had accumulated around the edges of the room.
That’s a very good question, I thought, cursing the impulse that had brought me to this moment of acute shared embarrassment. Surely I was just salving my own conscience. ‘I joined this household to serve both Your Royal Highnesses,’ I eventually managed to say. It seemed a good start, but I was wondering what came next. Suddenly I had joined the ranks of those who thought that they alone held the key to resolving this poisonous marital impasse. As that thought entered my head, I also realized that any key had long since been mislaid. ‘I wish there was some way that this could still be the case,’ I finished lamely.
For a moment he looked even more resentful, but also more sad. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps there’s something …’ He trailed off.
Perhaps there was, but neither of us could find it. After a few moments I excused myself, feeling very foolish. Letting myself out of the front door of KP, I trudged slowly across the gravel towards my car, lost in thought.
Suddenly a strong arm was clapped none too gently around my shoulders. It belonged to the Princess’s duty policeman, a stalwart in every way. I had last seen him in Paris. ‘Cheer up, Pat,’ he said now. ‘Good God, man! I’ve never seen you looking so miserable!’
As in every separation, the involvement of the lawyers marked a significant deterioration in the atmosphere between the couple. Nevertheless, it also marked a further clarification for those of us who still sometimes woke up wondering if we were not just part of some horrible nightmare. This was no longer a nightmare: it was reality, albeit with nightmarish implications.
The Princess’s lawyer Paul Butner had his priorities clearly marked out. First and foremost were the arrangements for her contact with the children as the parent with the closest involvement in their day-to-day care. Second – by a long way – came the negotiation of what initially seemed to me a colossal financial settlement that would enable her to pursue her career and style of living. (I did not think it was colossal for long. The costs of maintaining a working Princess in the manner to which she was entitled to be accustomed could quickly be rounded up into the tens of millions – as the Prince discovered when the divorce settlement was finally reached more than three years later.)
To my dismay, under Lord Goodman Paul’s opponents were the royal solicitors Farrer & Co. My view was that this choice was highly symbolic – and highly regrettable. It invited defiance. The watching world would clearly see from the involvement of the Queen’s own solicitors that this was to be a fight between the royal establishment and the upstart Princess. To me this was a completely misleading message. The Princess’s grievance was against the conduct of her marriage not against the monarchy, whatever her occasional frustrations with the people who served it. The choice of lawyers unnecessarily exacerbated the image of a house tearing itself apart, especially when the Queen herself was taking such trouble to remain neutral.
I was also dismayed because both Matthew Farrer and Henry Boyd-Carpenter – the lawyers initially most closely involved on behalf of the Prince – had been in turn my cotrustees of the Princess of Wales’s Charities Trust. They had also, I hoped, become good friends and I think their dismay was little less than my own when they found themselves pitted against the Princess. As the pace of the divorce negotiations quickened over the next few years, their place was taken by Fiona Shackleton.
The dying weeks of 1992 were dominated by legal discussions, culminating in a separation document which was agreed in time for the Prime Minister’s announcement to the House of Commons planned for 9 December. This would be the first official acknowledgement that the Prince and Princess had legally separated.
Every part of our normal office routine and every engagement the Princess carried out took place against the continuous background accompaniment of these discussions. Some were just between the lawyers. Others involved Richard Aylard and myself, and sometimes also the Queen’s private secretary Robert Fellowes and her deputy private secretary Robin (now Sir Robin) Janvrin.
Their subject matter, to borrow an expression from Lord McGregor, was genuinely ‘the stuff of people’s souls’, concerning contact with the children, financial arrangements and the allocation of private possessions. This being no ordinary separation, however, the discussions were further expanded to include the question of the Pri
ncess’s future role. This was where I became not only involved but also indignant.
Whatever other advice the Prince was receiving at this time, it seemed to include the suggestion that, having reached the difficult decision to separate from his wife, he might as well grasp the nettle now and thwart her obvious ambitions to become an independent royal operator – or what one of his advisers, with his lip only slightly curled, described as ‘a semi-detached member of the royal family’. It was at about this time that the phrase ‘loose cannon’ also became popular.
They could perhaps see the danger (anticipated by both Life and The Economist in the articles I quoted earlier) in letting the Prince become a sitting target for a newly liberated Princess ready to wreak her revenge on him at every opportunity, and ready to continue eclipsing him in royal duties all over the world, wherever her fancy took her. Nevertheless, the Prince’s advisers were mistaken in the tactics they chose to combat this. In trying to circumscribe the Princess’s public activities – by, for example, restricting her use of the Queen’s Flight and the royal train, or by downgrading in some way the protocol due to her when visiting destinations at home or abroad – the Prince’s negotiators only succeeded in making themselves look petty and vindictive.
They also alerted some wavering minds at the heart of Buckingham Palace to the growing spite which had contributed to the present crisis. The negotiations were always outwardly polite, but I did not underestimate the forces arrayed against the Princess, or their capacity to act ruthlessly in defence of what they chose to interpret as the interests of the Crown. The problem for me was that, when they chose to make the Crown’s interests synonymous with those of the heir, I seriously thought they were wrong.
In the end, since the Crown declined to come down on the Prince’s side – particularly on the question of restricting the Princess’s future activities – the way was open for the Princess to drive a hard bargain. Thanks to Paul’s negotiating skills, she got practically everything she wanted in the separation agreement, including – against her husband’s wishes – the continued presence of her office alongside his in St James’s Palace. Only the question of finance defied resolution and this was not achieved until the divorce was finalized in 1996. The Queen’s one stipulation was that the Princess should not represent her abroad, though in practice it proved almost impossible to define exactly what ‘represent’ meant in this context – a happy outcome which I like to think the Queen fully intended.
The refusal of Buckingham Palace to become involved in what was therefore solely a dispute between the Waleses was a great encouragement to me and, I think, to some of the Prince’s advisers as well. In an attempt to promote bipartisanship among the occupants of all the Palaces, the Lord Chamberlain circulated a letter exhorting understanding for both sides.
Once the agreement had been settled, in legal terms the Princess was left in a very favourable position. Her role as mother had been reinforced as the parent with day-to-day care of the children. She would now have the apartment at KP entirely to herself and would be spared the weekly trek to Highgrove. Her finances, though not yet finally resolved, were at least ample. Her office remained where it should be, in the heart of London’s royal compound.
In an unintentional side effect, her public profile – which could now add ‘gutsy independent fighter for the rights of scorned women’ to its other laurels – had also been significantly enhanced. Furthermore, she held firmly in her own hands the opportunity to enhance it still further with an unfettered programme of public engagements at home and at worst a legalistic quibble over the definition of her status abroad. The Queen’s attitude seemed to be that no further injustice or demotion must be directed at the Princess, on the basis that she now had sufficient rein with which to do virtually as she pleased, and others should be left to judge whether her status and popularity were truly earned.
Exhilarating this might be, I thought as I contemplated the implications of Paul’s success, but on the rein or not, it was going to be a very lonely field in which our thoroughbred could now kick up her heels. In the distance, of course, the gate out of the lush royal enclosure was open.
Such leisurely speculation was for the future, however. Right now the race was on to tidy up this mess as best we could so that it could be presented formally by the Prime Minister to Parliament. We were terrified that further leaks in the press would force a premature confirmation of news that was already being widely touted in the media.
The urgency gave Richard Aylard and myself a sudden and welcome sense of shared purpose. I had already sent him a short note telling him of my hope that, with good communication at our level, whatever the estrangement of our principals, we could minimize the damage that was bound to accompany our painful task. Although he did not feel inclined to reply on paper, we found that we worked well together.
This was fortunate, because there was no precedent to guide us. Nor was there much time, which was another blessing since we had little opportunity to reflect on the enormity of what we were doing – until later, that is, when there was also the chance to feel very, very sad.
We and a handful of like-minded others laboured all weekend over draft statements and interminable lists of hypothetical questions and less hypothetical answers, to be used by the Palace press office when the expected deluge of enquiries hit them. Early drafts of possible statements and ‘Qs and As’ had been circulated as much as three weeks before, but now the intervening lawyers’ work had to be incorporated and our royal employers’ own views reflected as accurately as we could manage. The results were very much a team effort and showed, I thought rather wistfully, what we could achieve when we all worked together. How ironic that our greatest moment of co-operation should also be our last.
Most of the Qs and As were remarkably honest. They dealt with practical details such as offices and staff with simple accuracy: ‘There will be few changes.’ Others attempted to be a little more philosophical. Lifting our eyes for a minute from immediate practicalities, we were dimly aware of the emotions that were being wrung by the crisis from the hearts of ordinary subjects. So, to the question ‘Why has all this happened?’ we answered that the Prince and Princess had recognized with sadness that their relationship had broken down and that their marriage could not continue in its present form. They were, we said, still ‘fond and supportive’ of each other and hoped that separation would help them and their children to live in greater harmony.
Going out on a limb, we denied that there was any other party involved. Going a little further, we also asserted that there was no reason why the Princess should not still be Queen. This last answer caused a lot of raised eyebrows and a few actual gasps of surprise. Nonetheless, until there was a divorce – and we had skirted that tricky question with the politician’s ‘there are no plans’ answer – it was the truth, at least as far as anyone could judge. The history cupboard was ransacked to find appropriate precedents, without much success. The British constitution being mostly unwritten, there was no helpful subclause to which we could refer for guidance. So we pressed on, in my case at least, aware that we were creating a piece of constitutional history as we did so.
By the evening of Tuesday 8 December we were as ready as we could be and still, miraculously, the security held. In the end it was only when the teleprompt for Prime Minister’s Questions was being loaded that the cat got out of the bag.
The Prime Minister was due to make his announcement to the Commons the following afternoon, but first he said he wanted a final private word with the Prince and Princess separately. John Major may have had his critics, but I could not fault the instincts which helped make him so sympathetic to the causes of the separation and do his best to soften the blow when it fell.
In one of several phone conversations, John Major’s private secretary Alex Allan had said that the PM just wanted to see if there was anything he could do to help, even at this eleventh hour. In line with the PM’s scrupulously observed neutrality in the d
ispute, Alex had taken care to consult me on several occasions about the Princess’s concerns and intentions. Both then and throughout my remaining years with the Princess, I found him a regular source of encouragement and good advice (not to mention amusing lunches).
At 8.30 on the Wednesday morning I was at St James’s Palace ready to receive the Prime Minister and show him into the Prince’s office which, unusually, the Princess was borrowing for the occasion. By that stage, dog-tired and emotionally numbed as I was, the tall and energetic figure with its firm handshake and broad smile induced in me an almost uncontrollable urge to beg him tearfully to tell me the answer to the whole damn business. I did no such thing, of course. After my embarrassing encounter with the Prince, I had had enough of spontaneous gestures. They only caused trouble.
John Major and the Princess were alone together for about 20 minutes and when they emerged, I noted that they were subdued but friendly, as if consoling each other on the death of a mutual friend. I have no doubt that the Prime Minister’s attitude was the same when he called on the Prince that day.
‘He’s terribly nice,’ the Princess said to me after he had gone. ‘And very supportive.’ Indeed he was, then and in all our subsequent dealings with his office, although he struck me as someone who would have been sympathetic to any young person in such dire straits. His impartiality was never in doubt, even if the Princess might have wished to see it as favouring her. That said, he always supported any proposal that would have cemented her position as an established public figure with an important role to play in national life.
Shortly before the Prime Minister was due to stand up in the House, Charles Anson, the Queen’s press secretary, summoned a small party of senior royal reporters to his office in Buckingham Palace. Richard and I flanked him as he read out the prepared statements and took their questions, answering as agreed from our carefully written crib sheets.
Shadows of a Princess Page 38