The evening was a great success, not least because Clint Eastwood (present as a Warner’s ‘elder statesman’) gave a private supper party for the Princess afterwards at the Savoy. Eastwood himself spent most of the film in a Leicester Square pub, mingling apparently unnoticed with the evening’s revellers. At the beginning of the film I had suggested that he might like to go and take his seat, but he told me he had some urgent business to attend to and disappeared. It was the sharp-eyed police who later told me that he had apparently preferred the surroundings of one of England’s less atmospheric public houses to watching a film he had seen too often before. After the premiere, a large cheque – probably the largest in its history – was deposited with the Princess of Wales’s Charities Trust and, as agreed with Warner Brothers, a large slice of it went to one of the Princess’s patronages, the Tushinskaya Children’s Hospital in Moscow.
Around the core of the existing Trust, I proposed to assemble a board of advisers drawn from the upper echelons of the Princess’s patronages and a board of trustees drawn from her formidable list of contacts in industry and finance. Thus provided with funds and expertise, through an appointed chief executive the Princess could dispense largesse in the form of grants, practical aid, education or publicity. She would have a completely legitimate reason to involve herself in whatever branch of humanitarian activity caught her attention, travelling the world to oversee the work of projects she had helped to fund.
The funds would be substantial, there was no doubt about that. They would not just be raised through film premieres (all of which would follow the pattern set by Warner Brothers) but also through special events. In this context I was thinking of the Concert of Hope formula, which the Rod Gunner Organization had developed with the Princess’s co-operation and which had already successfully raised funds for the Red Cross, for AIDS charities and for children’s hospices.
These concerts – masterminded by the buccaneering impresario Rod Gunner, who had also organized the Prince’s ‘Symphony for the Spire’ concert in aid of Salisbury Cathedral – had already added to the Princess’s tally of celebrity admirers. She had invited Take That! to tea at KP (a qualified success due to the distracting presence of one of her typists) and Pavarotti remained a passionate admirer for the rest of her life. There was no doubt about the calibre of big names she could pull in and no limit to the earning power of an organization bearing her name.
I sketched the organizational diagram on the back of a menu in the Princess’s suite in Geneva one evening. Outside it was growing dark, but through the plate-glass windows we admired a spectacular electrical storm which flickered and flashed eerily across the Alpine skyline. Her initial enthusiasm was practically unbounded. Ideas for projects and fundraising events sprang to her mind in the course of the next few weeks, accompanied by great excitement and genuine eagerness. This really could be her ticket to the world. And mine, I thought irrelevantly.
Sadly, this project followed the fate of all the others. The same blow fell. When the Princess realized that the project’s success depended on a genuine and sustained commitment on her part, her enthusiasm ebbed away. She had no appetite or aptitude for undertakings beyond her immediate horizon, and that was often no further away than next week’s staff lunch.
Eventually we reached the point where I felt that the risk of starting such a potentially huge ball rolling without the unequivocal and clear-eyed participation of its propelling force was too great. The files were put away. I have since idly wondered if today’s heirs to the Princess’s name ever found them, or if they even looked.
Having only six months previously announced that she no longer intended to take part in royal events at a national level, the Princess reacted with some enthusiasm to the suggestion that she should participate in that summer’s celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. Her continued participation in national events had been agreed in our pre-separation negotiations in late 1992 but they had proved to be few and far between, and then she had made her ‘withdrawal’ speech. The D-day invitation was an enlightened sign from the Queen’s office that they had not forgotten their side of the bargain, even if she was no longer seen as central to the royal machine. She had, after all, been excluded from the ‘Way Ahead’ group of core royal figures.
She did not seem to mind very much, at least outwardly. ‘We’ve left all that behind, Patrick,’ she told me. ‘We’ve got new things to do that they couldn’t understand.’
I resisted the temptation to say, ‘In that case I’d like to know who can,’ and paused to reflect on what this eagerness to be part of the D-day celebrations might mean. Her enthusiasm seemed to offer further evidence that she secretly craved direction from above. Something I had read while studying Political Science came back to me, with disturbing implications. The nineteenth-century philosopher Emile Durkheim had a theory that, far from wishing to cast off their chains, the workers of the world would be lost without them. In certain cases it could lead to anomic suicide.
It could be just as true for Princesses as for humble workers, I thought, as I watched my boss nervously prepare for a big day of Commonwealth ceremony straight out of an elementary guide to being royal. She was due to attend the unveiling of the Canadian Memorial in Green Park (two of her affiliated regiments were Canadian) and later to appear at the main celebrations in Portsmouth.
She was visibly anxious and appeared to feel very much out of place. ‘God, Patrick!’ she gulped, adjusting her hat. ‘This is terribly grown up. What shall I say to them all?’
This seemed a bit extreme, coming from a woman who thought nothing of hobnobbing with Presidents and unflinchingly spoke on live TV. I knew what she meant, though. She was terrified of the hostility she expected from her in-laws. After all, in their view she had put herself outside their charmed circle and was now relegated to the role of an invited outsider.
‘Relax, Ma’am,’ I replied. ‘Don’t try so hard. They’ll be more nervous of you.’ It cheered her up, even if neither of us quite believed it.
For part of the commemorations, the Princess was in the royal yacht Britannia, mingling with other notables from all the Allied nations. There she encountered Bill Clinton. She was impressed, and not only by his grasp of the historical significance of the occasion. ‘He’s terribly sexy,’ she confided to me rather breathily. I judged this placed him in close contention with President Mubarak of Egypt for the top spot on my private league table of heads of state.
She and the Prince behaved in public towards each other with the civility they had shown at their first joint outing since the separation, at the Battle of the Atlantic service in Liverpool the previous year. It was a strain nevertheless, and I think the whole experience reminded the Princess of what she had given up.
While perhaps feeling scant regret, the uncertainty of her own immediate future can only have been heightened by such confident displays of relentless establishment continuity. She had always been sensitive to the Hanoverian implacability of her in-laws. That day it had radiated from them unmistakably and she had felt it, however outwardly civil they may have appeared. Ironically, that very continuity was about to come under scrutiny again.
For anybody watching royal events, 1994 was the year of Dimbleby. It was the year in which by default the Princess achieved her moment of clearest ascendancy over her husband and the future he represented.
Jonathan Dimbleby’s much trailed television documentary about the Prince of Wales was screened on 29 June, and the book was due to follow in the autumn. It represented the fruition of some two and a half years of painstaking research by Dimbleby and his team, during which they had been given access to all the Prince’s archives and had conducted nearly a hundred interviews with people well acquainted with him and his work. It achieved an enormous impact mainly because of the Prince’s televised admission of adultery, but also because of the debate it stirred up about his role as future Defender of the Faith, and even his suitability to succeed to the throne.
Some months earlier I had held a valuable meeting with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s private secretary Andrew Purkis, a move I thought important given the high profile the Archbishop was then receiving as a key player in constitutional matters. Andrew received me kindly as a distant comrade in the private secretaries’ trade union and I spent an instructive hour or two at Lambeth Palace, learning much about Church and State that would later prove relevant as controversy raged over the Prince’s publicly questioned suitability to become head of the Church of England. It was no secret that the question of Camilla Parker Bowles was going to need some kind of pretty miraculous answer.
Predictably, the tabloid papers scoured the Dimbleby extracts for the juiciest tittle-tattle which they then luridly reproduced. The more thoughtful commentators dwelt at long and damaging length on the poor advice the Prince must have accepted to undertake what was seen to be little more than a glorified PR stunt.
‘NOT FIT TO REIGN’ screamed the Daily Mirror on 30 June, the day after the TV film was shown. ‘This will only make it worse,’ intoned W.F. Deedes magisterially in the Daily Telegraph on 17 October after the book had been published. Even The Economist took time away from its normal areas of interest to pronounce authoritatively on 22 October that the Crown was ‘an idea whose time has passed. No wonder the Princess felt that the occupants of St James’s and Buckingham Palaces had no business criticizing her.’ The story dominated the royal scene all summer and autumn, except when the press could be persuaded temporarily to shift their attention back to the Princess.
Debate also raged about whether the film should ever have been made, with most commentators believing that, however brave an attempt it had been at telling the truth, the questions it had answered had only begged more. In any case, whose truth was it? Even though Dimbleby’s project had begun long before the publication of Andrew Morton’s book – let alone the separation – it was inevitably seen as the Prince’s riposte to the earlier work. In addition, by allowing such privileged access to one individual and with the subsequent serialization rights going to just one Sunday newspaper, the reaction of the vast, excluded portion of the media was always likely to be resentful.
In the midst of so much negative coverage, the Prince’s advisers must have wondered whether honesty had been the best policy after all. I wonder if even now, years later, anybody truly believes that something so complex could be accurately reported by just one account, however well sourced. Moreover, where Dimbleby dealt with matters relating to the Princess, he did so without any direct co-operation and his coverage of this aspect of the story was inevitably incomplete and nonauthoritative. Since this was the only part of his account which attracted a universal interest, such an omission was bound to devalue to some extent the exhaustively researched remainder of his work.
The day of the programme turned out to be another example of the Princess winning the publicity war largely through happy accident. By an extraordinary twist of bad luck, the Prince was at the controls of a Queen’s Flight BAe 146 that day when it overran the runway while landing on Islay, substantially damaging the aircraft. ‘ANOTHER ERROR OF JUDGEMENT?’ howled the papers.
Long before the date of the transmission had been announced, the Princess had accepted an invitation to attend a dinner that evening at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, having recently become the gallery’s patron. The dinner provided a perfect opportunity for her to demonstrate that, although an estimated 15 million people might be watching her husband’s programme, she was at work – and, what’s more, looking as glamorous as only she knew how.
It was generally thought that the Princess had deliberately intended to upstage her husband’s programme by appearing at the Serpentine Gallery dressed in a not very demure frock and inviting the press to come and admire her. In fact, the dress was a last-minute substitute because details of the outfit she had originally planned to wear had been leaked to the media. The huge press presence probably owed more to the fact that it was well known that the Prince was about to admit his adultery to the watching world, and nothing could make a better accompaniment to that story than pictures of his wife.
Her response to the dire publicity attracted by Dimbleby was surprisingly not to crow. She had been on the receiving end of enough media feeding frenzies to know that the release of such elemental forces created waves in the public mood whose direction was impossible to forecast. Also something about the sheer volume of coverage, regardless of its tone, perhaps reminded her that others could steal headlines too – intentionally or otherwise.
Nonetheless, the moral boost it gave her in the public’s eyes and in her own was incalculable. ‘There, Patrick! Now everybody can see what we’ve been up against,’ she said on our way to the next day’s routine engagement. That was fair comment, I thought – but she had also denied watching the programme, even though Richard Aylard had distributed video tapes generously in advance. Behind the outward display of insouciance, there lay a tangible anger.
The Prince’s ‘definitive’ account of what had constituted the irretrievable breakdown of their marriage offended her to the extent that she asked me to draft a letter to her husband’s solicitors, asking if they had known in advance of what was to be revealed and recording her disappointment about not being informed beforehand herself. She cited her genuine concern about the effect of the programme and book on William and Harry, both then and in the future. (Smart remarks about pots and kettles sprang to my lips, but I suppressed them.)
Meanwhile, the Princess was to be found at a hospital in Roehampton, quietly making the point that whatever media storm was blowing, she was getting on with the work she did best. Even in this moment of potential triumph, her own form of loyalty to her husband remained unbroken and she hardly ever criticized him directly. Instead she reserved her harshest criticism of the project for the Prince’s advisers who, she felt, had taken advantage of his naivety. Naturally, she also relayed accounts of her concern for the boys through the usual media contacts.
Most important of all, the Princess now felt that the error she may have committed over authorizing Andrew Morton’s book and the regret it stirred in her had been paid off. While it had never been the Prince’s intention that his project should contribute to the War of the Waleses, it was inevitable that the press would portray it as just that. Here for everyone’s entertainment was a public brawl and every media initiative thereafter was going to be seen as a punch aimed by one side or the other, in a contest that appears to continue even after the Princess’s death.
It was her good fortune that, while this brawl may have appeared to bring them both pretty close to the gutter, it was the Princess who was still looking at the stars. Even when, suspiciously soon afterwards, her public image came under fire once more, from the Oliver Hoare phone calls story and the publication of Princess in Love, neither attack reversed this widely held impression.
It was not just a lucky escape. The Dimbleby exercise had done nothing to shift the general perception that the Princess was more sinned against than sinning. She capitalized on this almost immediately, when in mid-August several papers were tipped off that the Princess had been making up to 20 phone calls a day to Oliver Hoare, a married London art dealer. The circumstances were quite enough to stir up a welter of suggestive press speculation.
As it happened, I had known for some time that the Princess was in touch with Oliver Hoare, although nobody except the two of them can really know the truth of their relationship. I was aware that he frequently visited KP – once, I was gleefully told, going so far as to arrive hidden in the boot of the Princess’s car. Later they seemed not to notice (or care) what people saw. He eventually parked his Volvo openly at the Palace.
For me, there was a more serious aspect to the friendship. The papers spoke of a police investigation which had traced what were thought to be nuisance calls all the way back to the Princess’s private line at KP. On the morning that the story was published, I asked a contact in the Roy
alty and Diplomatic Protection Group if there had been such an investigation and if there was a printout of the calls made. The answer was ‘yes’ to both questions. Could I have a copy next morning, please? (This was a Sunday.) ‘Yes’ again. Next morning, however, the printout was unfortunately missing. There was never any explanation as to where the newspapers had obtained their information on the police investigation.
It soon emerged that at least some of the calls had been made by a disgruntled schoolboy, and this contributed to the speed with which the incident was forgotten. I had my own uneasy feelings about the absence of any hard evidence, scrutiny of which might have enabled the Princess to cast further doubt on the likelihood of her complicity.
Commentators preferred instead to dwell on the plight of a healthy and attractive young woman deprived of male company. They wondered sympathetically at the state of mind she must have been in to make even one obsessive phone call to a married man. Verdict: unhappy Princess, possibly depressed enough to make the calls, but who could blame her?
Similarly, Princess in Love, published in September 1994, did her little real harm. It was an account of her love affair with James Hewitt, obviously written with the assistance of James himself. Hostile invective was heaped on the ‘kiss-and-tell love rat’, but in truth the book revealed little that was not already widely suspected. The public verdict seemed to be: the Prince and Princess were now separated, would presumably soon be divorced and anyway, he had Camilla, so what was the poor girl to do?
For form’s sake I asked the Princess if she wanted to sue and drew my own conclusions when she decided she did not. In media terms she had nothing to gain by it. While debate continued to rage over her husband’s public admission of adultery, further indignity was heaped on the beloved Princess by the kiss-and-tell memoirs of a man she was later publicly to say she adored. We let sleeping dogs lie, and now the book reads with a certain innocent charm. Nobody was going to begrudge the Princess any happiness she may have found with the handsome cavalry officer. In any case, I knew enough of her emotional complexity to suspect that any guilt attaching to the affair could not be laid entirely at one door or the other.
Shadows of a Princess Page 47