‘No, Patrick. Everything will be all right …’ We were back to the mantra.
The M4 sped past as the implications sank in. Her inner child was going to grab the attention of every grown-up in the room and move them to tears with the poignancy of her tale of injustice. But there would be nothing to justify that demand for attention. Every expectation would be heightened, only to crash down further than before. It would be an epitaph for everything I had tried to do.
Then training took over. I could not just dissolve into a puddle of despair. Two days after the broadcast we were due to go to Argentina and two weeks after that we had another trip planned to New York City. There were speeches to prepare, letters to write, staff to hire and fire, and right now I was about to usher the Princess once more into the company of the criminally insane.
There and then I rang Buckingham Palace on the car phone and, in Robert Fellowes’s absence, gave the bare bones of the situation to the Queen’s press secretary Charles Anson. His carefully modulated response would have been just right for Broadmoor, I thought. He would have been great at talking suicidal maniacs down from high ledges. I wished I had his talent.
In the days leading up to the broadcast on 20 November, the Princess remained obdurate in her refusal to reveal any of the programme’s contents. Once again the Queen and her office were involved in attempting to wheedle, reason, plead or otherwise persuade the Princess into reconsidering her planned course of action. I drew on all my years of experience of her in trying to get her to reveal more. Her lawyer Lord Mishcon applied every form of persuasion, from avuncular sympathy to dire legal warning. Even her husband weighed in to express concern.
Whether it was a reaction against the combination of all these or whether she took exception to some of the individual efforts, the Princess was having none of it. Robbed of at least some of her thunder at the time of her ‘withdrawal’ speech in 1993, this time she was not going to repeat the mistake. She would not confide anything to anybody who might try to stop her.
In the end, sensing that she was beginning to enjoy the game, I gave up and went along quietly with her decision. ‘Don’t worry, Patrick,’ she said. ‘You’ll see. Everything will be all right. I promise.’ I was unconvinced, but as so often in the past, I saw my job now as doing what I could to stop the traffic during her latest bid to run naked down Piccadilly.
It was some satisfaction, therefore, to make the final arrangements for her attendance on the night of the broadcast at a glittering dinner at Bridgewater House in aid of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer. This enabled the Princess to present herself to the world, as so often before, as the very image of what she and others wanted her to be, while her other image simultaneously went through the motions of baring its soul on primetime TV.
As always in moments of great tension, she raised her game and gave Sir Ronald Grierson – the distinguished former banker and chairman of the charity’s fundraising foundation – and his distinguished guests full value in return for their unusually generous efforts on behalf of the charity. Then they and I and the lady-in-waiting could escape to watch our videotapes and learn the awful truth.
Anne Beckwith-Smith and I returned to her flat with a sense of foreboding. But, we joked, it was the kind of foreboding that parents experience when returning home after a dinner party in the knowledge that the nursery will have been left in a bit of a shambles. We sat on Anne’s sofa drinking her whisky and let the tape roll.
Groans and exasperated laughter rose like nausea to our lips. Then we uttered terse exclamations of horror. Finally we watched in silence until we could stand it no more. Anne switched off the TV and the ghostly face with the smudged, dark eyes faded from the screen.
I emerged wearily from behind the sofa where I had taken refuge. ‘That’s it,’ I said.
Anne, of course, had taken her own decision to leave the Princess five years earlier. Now, as a part-time lady-in-waiting with a new and prestigious life of her own, she was in the relatively comfortable position of spectator. Yet she gave no hint of schadenfreude at my distress, despite the fact that I had been at least partly instrumental in her own departure.
As she let me out into a wintry street, she wished me luck for the trip to Argentina. ‘Think of the air miles,’ she said. ‘You must have enough for your gold card by now.’
‘Actually,’ I replied, ‘you’re right. This trip should qualify me for it.’ That was a cheerful thought.
‘Oh well, then,’ said Anne. ‘It must be time for you to resign.’
I spent a restless night, rose late and so found myself standing fretting at a bus stop in the Wandsworth Bridge Road, hoping for either a bus or a taxi to take me to work, where I knew every phone in the office would be ringing as the Princess sought my reaction to what I had seen. An icy wind blew. The leaden sky, shivering trees and huddled, hunched commuters formed a perfect backdrop to my mood. As if handling a lump of pure plutonium, I reluctantly dragged my mobile phone out of my pocket and switched it on.
It immediately emitted a nerve-jangling electronic bleat. Feeling dead inside, with chattering teeth and slush round my ankles, I told the Princess that it had been a remarkable performance and the papers were full of it. I had not even looked at a newspaper yet. I had not dared.
‘What are they saying?’ she asked excitedly. She knew what they were saying. I was probably the fifth person she had asked and she would have read them all by now anyway.
‘It’s a bit mixed,’ I said, feeling fairly confident of my ground. ‘Can I call you when I get on to a better phone?’
‘All right,’ she said, now sounding very flat.
We did not speak again all day. By then we both silently acknowledged that the programme had been a public relations triumph, but only with the people who already supported her. For the rest, and that included the forces with whom I had been trying to reconcile her, it was all the evidence they needed to cut her loose to twist on the end of the rope she had so eagerly grabbed. There was no windfall for her Trust; no follow-up ideas and objectives; no new guiding philosophy. There were very few tears from strong men too, unless you counted me, and I was not feeling very strong.
On the other hand, I had a tour to run. My thoughts of resignation remained secret from her. She later thanked me with persuasive warmth for my loyalty for not resigning in the immediate aftermath of the programme. With greater integrity, her press secretary Geoff Crawford had already had the courage to do so, even though he was typically generous-hearted enough to come to Argentina with us.
Argentina provided a wonderful, highly coloured and highly successful respite from the crisis that Panorama had provoked. For a while in the South American sunshine, as the Princess once again delighted the crowds, I actually thought it could be all right.
Back in a grey London, grim reality waited. In the week leading up to Panorama I had made a point of keeping in close contact with the Queen’s office and had not hidden the fact from the Princess. In a way, the situation was easier now. Having also been kept in the dark, I was exonerated from complicity in the plot. From the Queen’s office, the sympathy for my position which I had always sensed during the previous tumultuous couple of years was now expressed more openly.
Somehow, however, my instinct to protect the Princess and encourage others to see the situation from her point of view remained intact. She had kept me in the dark, I stoutly maintained, so that I could convincingly deny that I had been part of any conniving by her and thus remain a relatively honest broker between what was now an outraged Palace and an increasingly penitent Princess.
She had lived for weeks and even months with the knowledge of what she was doing in preparing the programme. She had built up with delicious anticipation to the moment of emotional release in front of the cameras. Yet she had made no plans for what to do with the deluge she had released – least of all, it seemed, in herself. The aftermath, as I had sensed on the phone at the bus stop, was an anticlimax
followed by bewilderment. She had taken the biggest possible injection of her favourite drug, and now she felt even worse.
I therefore felt able to tell the Queen’s private secretary that the Princess had shot her bolt and was as ready as she would ever be to respond to the firm but compassionate intervention of the senior household to keep her out of further harm’s way. But this, it seemed, presented insurmountable problems. After Panorama there was no way back.
NINETEEN
UNDER THE WIRE
The day after we returned from Buenos Aires, I hurriedly drew up a blueprint for the reconciliation with Buckingham Palace which I still hoped was possible. Its central theme was to bring the Princess more directly under the benign control of the Queen’s household.
I went through the document point by point with the Princess and she agreed with everything – rather too meekly, I thought, but I was pretty sure she was not just humouring me. Probably she was still shell-shocked from the enormity of what she had done. Grey reality after the sunlit glamour of the tour had a distinctly sobering effect. I felt it too. Well, what the heck, I said to myself. There really was no alternative now. It was a time for radical measures if we were to save anything at all from the wreck.
I suggested that I and her secretaries should move to offices in Buckingham Palace. That the Queen’s press office should cover her press relations. That she should be removed from dependence on her husband’s financial support and placed on the civil list. That Buckingham Palace’s own infrastructure should provide domestic support for her apartments at KP. That her areas of work, geographical as well as charitable and public, should be clearly defined and agreed.
These points, with the Princess present, were all discussed at a meeting held at Buckingham Palace on 29 November. All received a sympathetic but guarded hearing. Sir Robert Fellowes, like me, had learned the hard way that the Princess’s apparent agreement to a course of action on Monday did not rule out the possibility that she would turn against it on Tuesday, with heartrending details of her impossible predicament being eloquently disclosed to the newspapers on Wednesday.
Sadly, the senior household’s misgivings – and mine – were proved justified. With my blueprint, I believed I had finally acquired the sugar-lumps necessary to coax the troublesome thoroughbred back into the safety of the ring. It was too late, though. The sugarlumps did not look that attractive after the rich titbits to be had from the crowd. Moreover, a relentless instinct to find an impossible freedom still drove her on. Even the influence of the Prime Minister, who in a characteristic gesture of concern called on her shortly before Christmas to renew his wish to be of help, could not halt the Princess’s seemingly irreversible descent into a chaotic form of liberation.
Robert’s guarded response to the blueprint was evidence, I sensed, that patience with the errant Princess was at breaking point. Whatever goodwill there might have been in Buckingham Palace towards her as a person – and I had no doubt there was plenty, not least from Robert himself – the offence she had caused was too great. It was a classic case of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’.
There was also another factor that the Queen’s office had to take into account. With their moral ascendancy restored by Panorama after the Dimbleby debacle, the Prince’s team were watching his wife’s manoeuvrings with interest. How much love there was in St James’s Palace for the sinner was a moot point. It was no secret that they wanted to shift our office out of St James’s, but their preferred destination was KP. A move under the wing of the senior household, and hence to the centre of royal power, was hardly going to have the marginalizing effect they undoubtedly hoped for.
Whatever support my proposal might have had in some quarters at Buckingham Palace, it received only a holding reply. Soon I realized why. Events were taking their own course and the Princess’s days of springing big surprises on major issues were numbered.
The receipt shortly afterwards of a letter from the Queen urging her and the Prince to put the country out of its state of uncertainty and seek an early divorce seemed to confirm in the Princess a sense that she was jettisoned. She decided, characteristically, to take the initiative herself. She elected not to stay at Sandringham for Christmas, but instead to be with her own family in Northamptonshire. She took steps to recruit her own press secretary and instructed her lawyers to take the offensive in the divorce proceedings that were now to be resumed in all seriousness.
Two months later, having agreed to an uncontested divorce, she even issued her own press statement, preempting an agreed joint Palace line. In it she announced that she would henceforth be known as ‘Diana, Princess of Wales’. I had left her by then and was intrigued by the possibility that her omission of the rank ‘Her Royal Highness’ had been a clerical error as much as a calculated act of defiance. Either way, the Palace took no steps to correct her and the perceived demotion passed into accepted use.
Set against such defiance, however, I could not forget the catch in her voice when she read the Queen’s letter to me down the phone shortly before Christmas. ‘D’you know, Patrick, that’s the first letter she’s written to me.’ She tried to laugh, and for once she failed.
With a pang, I thought back over the few days since our last trip together. We had gone by Concorde to New York, where the Princess was to receive a humanitarian award from her old admirer Henry Kissinger. Everything about the trip had encouraged a wistful sense of happier times. There were motorcades, Secret Service agents, adoring crowds and rooms full of rich, powerful and beautiful people to be charmed.
During her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony in the New York Hilton, the Princess had even dealt with a heckler. ‘Where are your kids, Di?’ someone shouted. ‘In bed!’ she shot back, with a coolness that would have surprised anyone who remembered the tongue-tied novice public speaker of only a few years before. It also earned her the biggest ovation of the evening.
As a sign of special affection, the Princess had appointed the courageous Liz Tilberis as honorary lady-in-waiting for the visit. Liz was by then the New York editor of Harpers, but had been a friend and staunch ally of the young Princess when she was still at Vogue in London in the 1980s. (At the time of our New York visit she was fighting an inspiring battle against cancer, for which she won the deep admiration of the Princess and many others besides. She died in 1999.)
In a direct echo of her former triumph, I had also arranged for the Princess to revisit the Harlem Children’s Hospital where, six years earlier, she had made headlines around the world with her visit to the AIDS unit. A gratifyingly large number of pressmen turned out to see her, and she was surrounded by smiling and appreciative patients, nurses and families.
Momentarily I had been optimistic. Here was another example of the kind of low-key, officially sanctioned good work that could be a model for a future, divorced Princess. Maybe even for her private secretary as well, I mused. As sometimes happens at the end of a long and occasionally acrimonious acquaintance, recent disagreements were forgotten and the Princess and I shared an almost conspiratorial conviviality during our brief stay in New York. Over a late-night glass of champagne, her review of the day’s events and characters had never been more acute or amusing, and her recognition of her own position and potential had never been more modest or realistic. She was a different person from my temperamental London employer.
For a few days, it had been fun to be royal again. Now this. The Queen’s letter snuffed out the illusion.
As always when forced on to the defensive, the Princess protected herself by lashing out. It mattered very little who was in the firing line. First of all, she felt she had to rid herself of people close to her whose minds must now surely be filled with unspoken accusation and reproof. Her suddenly baleful eye fell on her own office.
To paraphrase that haunting poem about the consequences of looking the other way, I had stayed silent when they came for the cook, the butler, the secretary and the housemaid. Now they were coming for me. I thought of
the Princess as ‘they’ because it now seemed that I was dealing with several people in one person – in fact, I felt as if a legion was coming after me.
Such was the pressure she herself was under, the Princess’s moods could swing from small-voiced vulnerability to icy hostility in the space of a single phone call. So many voices seemed to be queuing up inside her to have their say that it was becoming very hard to guess what she was really thinking.
On top of this, her paranoia had reached new heights. She saw plots everywhere, was obsessed with the thought that she was being bugged and honestly told me that her car’s brake lines had been cut. Looking me straight in the eye, she even said that somebody had tried to ‘take a pot’ at her with a gun in Hyde Park. Needless to say, I had all these accusations checked out, but the truth was as I had known all along: such threats were all in her imagination.
On one occasion, after yet another bugging story, I expressed my polite mystification – exasperation would have been nearer the mark – that none of these hidden microphones had actually been discovered. ‘Come with me,’ she said, looking grave.
In one of the rooms upstairs, she knelt and pulled up a stretch of carpet. Putting a finger to her lips, she motioned me to look at the floorboards. They had been recently disturbed. She pointed silently at the sawdust and nodded significantly.
I said nothing until we were back downstairs. ‘Ma’am, you know that’s just where they’ve been rewiring?’ It was true. In a colossal undertaking after the Windsor fire, huge amounts were being spent on upgrading all the Palaces’ electrics. She did not seem to hear me. Her look was enough. By then I knew when to make my exit from such conversations.
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