Never was this more true than in the preparations for her visit to Argentina, due to take place at the end of 1995. For a start, I felt it was necessary to arrange with the excellent Argentine Ambassador for an appropriately ‘charitable’ invitation to be sent from Buenos Aires to the Princess as a trigger for the tour. It was always going to be a sensitive trip, given the recent unhappy history of relations between Britain and Argentina, and it was not until I had a letter of support from the Foreign Secretary safely in my pocket that I allowed myself to feel with relief that once again we had pulled it off.
Nothing inspired a greater feeling of sedition than having to go to such convoluted lengths to carry out a visit that would bring pleasure to all but those who wished the Princess ill. In the end, the trip to Argentina turned out to be another outstandingly successful tour, capped predictably with an invitation to lunch with President Menem. Nonetheless, each time we went through this rigmarole, the sense of a battle won in a war we would ultimately lose became stronger.
It was not just the whispering suspicion in Palace corridors that I found so demoralizing. In the early days of my royal service, all aircraft – even the long-range VC-10 – were provided as a matter of course for such essentially diplomatic missions. Now I was reduced to negotiating on the Princess’s behalf with rich men for the use of their executive jets, or with British Airways for suitable seating on scheduled flights. I sometimes felt I was a conspirator even though I was trying to bring about perfectly respectable ends. It did not feel like a job with a future.
Perhaps I was just good at talking myself into a pessimistic frame of mind. The present still offered plenty of distractions if I wished to enjoy them. It might not turn out to be a job with a future, but right now I had unprecedented latitude in proposing ideas for the Princess’s programme. Thus it was that, not long after returning from Japan, I found myself on a plane to Hong Kong with the irrepressible David Tang.
Entrepreneur, bon viveur, socialite and unsung hero of many a charity, David Tang was not famous for shunning the limelight. Like many who choose a high-profile existence, he had attracted detractors as well as supporters in the course of a life which seemed to have been led according to the principle that not a minute should go by that had not been filled with some worthwhile and preferably entertaining activity.
Sitting in his study in Government House, Chris Patten, then Governor of Hong Kong, banished any lingering doubts I might have had about associating the Princess with such a figure. ‘You can rely on David Tang 110 per cent,’ he said. I later came to the conclusion that, where the Princess was concerned, the Governor’s figure was if anything an underestimate.
Resisting a temptation to which some others in his position might have succumbed, David took care to look after the underlings as well. During my four-day recce for the forthcoming Hong Kong tour I learned so much, and enjoyed myself so much, that my gathering cloud of gloomy thoughts about the future scarcely got a look-in.
On my last night in Hong Kong, David included me with characteristic generosity in a small dinner he had arranged for Lady Thatcher, who was passing through on her return from China. He had also invited several representatives of the mainland government and a lively ideological conversation ensued in the fabulously retro surroundings of the China Club. Lady T’s politics may not have been to everybody’s taste, but for a lapsed political scientist such as myself it was an evening of rare fascination. It was also evidence of the conciliator and philanthropist lying behind David’s cigar-chomping, ebullient exterior.
The Princess’s visit to Hong Kong was perhaps a model of how her working life might have evolved. In one evening she raised a quarter of a million pounds at a dinner attended by the colony’s socially competitive benefactors. The funds, channelled through her Charities Trust, went to medical and youth charities in Hong Kong and China – most notably to the work of the Leprosy Mission. They in turn provided the working focus of the visit, giving ample opportunities for the press to report on the good causes which were the Princess’s offering to our consciences that week.
A sponsor whose motives were spotless – exemplified on this occasion by David Tang – relieved the taxpayer of any nagging doubt that the public purse was footing a significant part of the bill. The local administration – in this case the Queen’s own representative – lent the visit a well-founded legitimacy and attracted valuable lustre to itself. What was more, the Princess, with all requirements for security, recognition, glamour and job satisfaction expertly provided, was able to feel justifiably good about herself.
Back home, life was not so smooth and the distractions were not all so positive. The public acrimony which had broken out in her brother’s marriage drew uncomfortable parallels with the Princess’s own recent past, while her continuing tendency to lobby journalists and court celebrities filled me with a growing sense of unease.
It was not that I disapproved of her entertaining Jenny Bond, Max Hastings or Barbara Walters to lunch at KP, but I was concerned that these encounters represented a significant expenditure from her limited reserves of intellectual capital. One lunch with the Princess of Wales was, at the very least, a change in the normal routine for people who lunch as part of their daily business. Almost invariably, it created a favourable first-hand impression as the captivatingly pretty, modest, articulate and transparently well-intentioned hostess revealed her hopes and fears with disarming frankness. However, much of the positive outcome that she hoped for from such encounters depended on their exclusivity. Perhaps wrongly, I felt that such access should only be given in pursuit of a specific strategy. The investment in credibility which these meetings represented should be directed towards a particular, measurable purpose. They should not just be seen as an end in themselves.
On a larger scale, it was this short-term desire for media gratification that was my main disappointment with the Panorama interview. As had happened with her ‘withdrawal’ speech, it was as if a small child had stamped her foot and demanded that the adults pay attention to what she was about to say. Then, having successfully attracted the attention of all the adults in the room, into the expectant hush that followed she could only venture the evidence of her own unfinished and frequently banal thoughts.
Her ever-growing taste for the company of celebrities was in some ways a safer bet than her wooing of journalists. I thought such encounters played very much to her strengths. In a room filled with the world’s most beautiful women, heads still turned when the Princess of Wales entered.
Her experiences in the public eye, the traumas of her private life and her struggles with her own form of addiction all attracted recognition – if not sympathy – from most celebrities, and even a tinge of envy in some. When she beckoned, whether it was to Take That! to top the bill at her latest Concert of Hope, or to Luciano Pavarotti to raise funds for her children’s hospice in Wales, they came with alacrity.
As I watched the more established members of the royal family recruit pop stars to their causes without apparent demur, I swallowed any scruples I had about the Princess following suit. Since she was so often tarnished with the accusation of being an uncultured devotee of cheap music, her charities might at least feel the benefit of it. It might have come as a surprise to some people to know that her husband actually attended more pop concerts than she did. His taste for being photographed in the company of the icons of youth culture seems undiminished today, without affecting his reputation as something of a cultural highbrow.
It was actually surprisingly dangerous territory. Just as individual members of the royal family had identified themselves with particular spheres of interest in the charitable world – and even in some cases with particular geographical areas as well – so they recruited loyal bands of celebrity followers on behalf of their patronages. Some organizations, such as the Prince’s Trust, operated a well-oiled machine to capitalize on their patron’s ability to attract performers to his famously successful fundraising concerts.
&
nbsp; Such established interests watched with no great pleasure as the Princess tentatively began to flex her muscles as a magnet for performing talent in her own right. As Pavarotti had shown by accepting at short notice the Princess’s invitation to perform for her Welsh children’s hospice – despite his long-standing support for the Prince’s Trust – the lady’s wishes were not to be lightly denied.
One rather surprising lunch guest during this period was Auberon Waugh, scourge of the trendy, the commonplace and the banal. I had been an admirer of his writing for as long as I could remember, but had him mentally pigeonholed as an instinctive opponent of my employer and the muddled, emotionally indulgent thinking she was thought to represent.
I had occasionally encountered him on the train up to London from the West Country, but had lacked the courage to interrupt his methodical dissection of the morning newspapers with a comment such as, ‘You should meet my boss, you know. You might be surprised by what she’s like in real life.’ One day, however, in the spirit of experiment that her unstructured life sometimes encouraged, I suggested that he might make an entertaining companion at lunch and a potentially influential convert. Contact was made and the great man of letters duly appeared at KP.
He and the Princess got on well from the start, perhaps attracted as opposites are by recognizing in each other qualities or experiences that could only ever be enjoyed vicariously. I was touched and pleased that a mind which I had respected and admired from afar should meet the Princess and immediately see in her perhaps some of the same things which made her worth working for. Auberon Waugh described her later as ‘a free spirit’, a compliment which from him I thought carried more weight than most.
Perhaps in the same spirit of adventure, and certainly with great generosity, he invited the Princess to present the prize at the Literary Review annual Poetry Competition Lunch. This produced some scornful comment in the press: what was the famously thick Princess doing at such a cerebral gathering? Deep in the cellars of the Café Royal, surrounded by wine racks and a Bohemian mixture of literati, she undoubtedly found herself in an unusual milieu. Perhaps because of the novelty, however, or the curiosity of her fellow guests, she sparkled with a rare and genuine happiness.
The Princess and I had thought it might be amusing if she replied to Bron’s speech of welcome at least partly in rhyme. Her few words ended, ‘So I’ve made time between therapy sessions and secret trysts to attempt a reply:
‘A Princess was heard to declare
Let gossips poke fun if they dare.
My real inspiration was Bron’s invitation.
Stick that in your tabloids, so there!’
The assembled guests guffawed uproariously and banged the table in approval. Here was the Princess displaying that special brand of strength not often found in the ruling classes, the best evidence of which is the ability to poke fun at oneself.
I guffawed too. I had enjoyed a very good lunch in the company of Harry Enfield and I suppose even limerick writers like to hear their stuff being warmly received. Nonetheless, I already felt that making up jokes for my boss to read out about her reported mental fragility and well-publicized weakness for English rugby captains was an occupation whose attractions would pretty soon start to wear rather thin.
Along with poetry writing, a visit with the Princess to the Cézanne exhibition in Paris and a thrilling evening at the premiere of Apollo 13, I was uncomfortably distracted by recurrent tabloid interest in my boss’s friendship with Will Carling, captain of the England rugby team. Here was further proof if I needed it that I had been right in harbouring misgivings about the Princess’s regrettable habit of hanging around public gyms. At the fashionable Harbour Club in south-west London, the Princess and Carling had recognized in each other a mutual interest in keeping fit. As has already been too well documented, the acquaintance thus born developed into a relationship which ultimately took the blame for the collapse of Carling’s marriage.
I was happy to remain at least ostensibly unconcerned about who the Princess met in gyms, or, for that matter, who brought her sons rugby shirts. But his tendency to visit my office – invariably in my absence – tended to disrupt the secretaries’ work, however amusing it was for them. (One secretary subsequently left to work for his company.) I became more concerned later in the year when, already fretting over our belated departure for the airport on the way to Argentina, the Princess caused a further delay while she scrabbled to find the right SIM card to go with the special mobile phone she had acquired to take Carling’s calls.
When eventually the Princess discovered that in Julia Carling she had met a younger, blonder and in many ways feistier female opponent, the reverberations for her public image proved disproportionately damaging. The Princess had always been blessed with more than her fair share of forgivability, but the Carling affair moved her noticeably further away from the fairy-tale image that had for so long been her greatest asset. Patience, even among her supporters, was wearing thin.
The publicity surrounding the Princess’s relationship with Will Carling injected further tension into her already tightly sprung emotional framework. It was at about this time that she became involved in covert negotiations with the BBC regarding the filming and broadcast of her Panorama interview. Given her state of mind at that time, an exciting subterfuge like Panorama was undoubtedly most attractive.
The Princess had an obsessive concern that others should think well of her. Her misdemeanours, which she lacked the self-discipline to prevent, must therefore remain undiscovered. If by bad luck they were discovered, then the consequences must be pre-empted or other distraction offered to draw attention away from them. On a deeper level, it also seemed to be necessary for her that whatever she might be accused of, others must be accused of as well, or preferably of something more heinous. This maintained the established order inside her mind. If she was going to be cast into the gutter, let others be found there too, if only to demonstrate the fact that she had not mussed her hair as she fell.
Bearing this in mind, what I believe mattered most to her in the Panorama interview was the attack it included on her husband’s suitability to be King. The confession of her love for Hewitt she accurately predicted would bring her more sympathy than condemnation, especially since her husband had never been heard to express such a feeling. (She could overlook the fact that his reticence might have been a recognition of the indefinable nature of the whole subject.)
Yet even as she spoke of both men, I doubted if she knew what she really meant – either about the succession or about love. As for her ambitions to be an ambassador or ‘Queen of Hearts’, there was nothing new in this for me, or for any of those who had heard similar saccharine protestations in the preceding months.
This small but decisive saga had begun exactly a week before the broadcast. We were sitting on the sofa in her sitting room, preparing to drive to Broadmoor for what would turn out to be her last visit to the scene of so many instructive and satisfying engagements. ‘Patrick,’ she said, eyeing me nervously, ‘I’ve done an interview for TV.’
My first thought was that she must have been persuaded to contribute some moist-eyed snippet for a charity promotional video. We had been planning quite seriously over the previous two months for a possible documentary about the work of the Special Hospital Authority, using her own involvement to focus public attention on mental health issues. I wondered if this might be an innocent piece of freelance work to boost her confidence for the main project. Later, I realized that the main project had probably been a feint all along.
‘Really, Ma’am?’ I said in my most neutral voice. ‘For which programme?’
‘Panorama,’ she replied.
That started the alarm bells ringing. This was no moist-eyed insert. This was the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, vehicle for the nation’s most momentous and significant issues. This was a major undertaking. Premeditated. A fait accompli. This was a conspiracy.
‘Good,’ I said wi
th as much sincerity as I could muster, knowing that this was the only way in which she could be persuaded to reveal more details. Perhaps it was not due to be broadcast for weeks yet, I said to myself. There was lots I could do to stop it in that time, or at least dilute its more dangerous aspects. Something in her eyes told me it was lethally packed with dangerous aspects.
‘It’s going out next week.’ She looked at me steadily. I looked back. Oh shit, I thought.
‘That’s good, Ma’am.’ I took a deep breath and added calmly, ‘Perhaps we can talk about it in the car.’
In the time it took us to drive to Broadmoor, I conducted a tentative interrogation, as if probing a wound or unmasking an affair. When had this happened? Who knew about it? What legal controls did she have over its broadcast and rebroadcast? Had there been a fee? Could the enormous sums of money it could command be somehow diverted into her Charities Trust? Were there constitutional implications in anything she had said? Did she realize we would have to tell the Queen? Were we all going to be out of a job?
Her replies were patient, then evasive, then flustered, and finally nonexistent. She returned again and again to what became her central theme – a mantra: ‘It’s terribly moving. Some of the men who watched were moved to tears. Don’t worry, everything will be all right …’
‘I’m sure it will be.’ I tried to sound soothing. ‘But can’t I at least get Lord Mishcon to look at a tape of it so that you’re protected from a legal point of view? We can prepare answers for your critics …’
As I had done two years before when confronted with her ‘withdrawal’ decision, I searched for an angle that might divert her. ‘We can use it as a springboard into a follow-up, structured campaign to highlight the importance of your new work.’ That sounded good. The Jaguar purred on. Other cars full of happy people leading uncomplicated lives drifted silently by. She sat back in her seat, fiddling with the door catch. My God, was she going to jump out? How much did I mind if she did?
Shadows of a Princess Page 50