It is probably fair to say that I was not in a very good state of mind myself by this stage. Apart from the occasional snatched week, I had not had a proper holiday with my family for more than three years, and even then I had spent most of it writing a speech and answering letters.
In addition, while I had watched the infrastructure of the Prince’s office expand, our own had been whittled away in a spirit of virtuous self-denial. The things from which courtiers traditionally drew strength when their royal employers made life difficult – such as the conviviality of household social events – had largely been denied to me. Or, I admit, I had denied them to myself out of sensitivity to the increasing isolation of the Princess and the thickening climate of whispering directed against her. I had no appetite for even kindly remarks over household lunch about the old guard’s mystification with my boss’s thought processes.
Now, it seemed, Nicholas Soames’s view of her mental state was widely shared in Palace circles. As he had unwisely announced, to many she seemed to be suffering from galloping paranoia. ‘She really has gone too far!’ confided one senior figure, as if brilliantly identifying the cause of all our misery, his exasperation inadequately disguised as sympathy. Tell me about it, I could have replied – or rather, please don’t. Instead I just nodded. We were planets apart. I felt as if I was the only occupant of mine.
The qualities that probably made me a loyal and obedient servant were the very ones which I now felt had been exploited. At the same time, my ingrained instinct of duty to the Crown made me feel that the entire weight of the Princess’s perceived transgressions lay on my shoulders. I was very, very tired.
In my reduced state, I found myself musing on her hypocrisy with uncharacteristic hostility. She was charming and foul by turns, but recently it always seemed to be the foul that came out on top.
As I had long ago realized, working with royal people does not suit everyone, not least because there are times when you just have to accept that you are there specifically to absorb without complaint the occasional personality lapses that are to be expected in a family dedicated – or condemned – to an eternity of public service and ever more public scrutiny. Everybody, from private secretaries to butlers, dressers and PPOs, knew this. They either accepted it as part of the conditions of service, or they left.
More vulnerable, I felt, were those not on the payroll whose loyalty was given out of personal generosity of spirit. Foremost were the ladies-in-waiting, whose gentle stoicism in the face of some of the Princess’s most icy and undeserved disfavour seemed all the greater because of their perceptive tolerance of her spitefulness.
From what I could see, her friends were in a similar category. One by one she picked them up and dropped them, but not before they too had first been smothered with attention, impulsive affection, gifts and secrets, all of which were then suddenly withdrawn. Some, such as Lucia Flecha de Lima, Rosa Monckton and Kate Menzies, had the stamina and inclination to go back for more. Others, such as Angela de Serota, Cosima Somerset and Prue Waterhouse, retired hurt. She played the same tactics with the camera – and always adopted victim mode as soon as she started to lose the game.
Finally, the patron of Birthright, Barnardo’s and dozens of children’s charities, the icon of maternal devotion and embodiment of feminine virtues, crept up behind her children’s nanny at the combined office Christmas lunch party in 1995 and whispered, ‘So sorry about the baby.’
The Princess herself told me the story as I accompanied her out of the lunch. She was exultant. I immediately knew what she had done. Such was her suspicion of Tiggy that she was even prepared to spread the false suggestion that the nanny had had an unwanted pregnancy terminated. The identity of the ‘father’ was left tantalizingly inexplicit.
‘Jesus Christ!’ I said to her, holding my head and thinking of my own two daughters.
The Princess was blind to my horror and consternation. As she strode happily to her room, she added, ‘I knew I was right. After I’d told her, [the butler] said she practically fainted and had to be held upright!’ I bet she did, I thought.
‘Ma’am, have you any evidence?’
‘I’ve just told you. Anyway, I don’t need evidence. I know …’
Once again the Princess’s ‘intuition’ – which was now replacing practically everything else as her lodestar – proved inadequate for the task she set it. Evidence was exactly what she needed and certainly did not have. Tiggy’s legal rebuttal was swift and conclusive, and must have caused consternation in Anthony Julius’s legal team, even if it left the Princess’s own denial mechanisms undisturbed. By then I was long gone.
My boss’s treatment of Tiggy was all that my wavering resolve needed. Later rather than sooner, I discovered that loyalty to the Princess did now conflict with a higher loyalty – namely to elementary decency. In the face of the Queen’s letter urging divorce I also concluded that, if I was to fight the Princess’s corner as I should, I would inevitably be in conflict with the head of state. I had never felt this was the case before.
On their own, these considerations would have been enough to activate my long-planned resignation. Conscientious chap that I was, however, I realized that it would take time to recruit a successor, train him or her and generally smooth what would be, in all modesty, quite a shake-up for our small organization. This put me in a dilemma. The Tiggy incident and my growing sense of estrangement from the powers at Buckingham Palace urged a quick departure. On the other hand, minimizing disruption in the office and for my boss – to whom I still felt an instinctive loyalty, despite everything – dictated a slower, more carefully paced withdrawal.
Then I remembered my image of the man trapped in a cage with a tigress. Maybe this was my moment to reach for the escape hatch. The tigress seemed sufficiently distracted – or subdued-to let me get out unscathed. How wrong could I be.
Wrestling with the problem of how to go about resigning was made no easier by the fact that I was feeling so physically and mentally wrecked. In this condition I was particularly vulnerable to attack from unexpected quarters. The assault, when it came, consequently caught me with my guard down. I too fell prey to the Princess’s particular style of aggression, which with sinuous dexterity combined a radiant smile with a knife between the shoulder blades.
The omens were all there, had I only seen them. The exaggerated thanks for my loyalty after Panorama, the conviviality of New York and the devastating confession about Tiggy were only the prelude to a violent reversal of attitude. Once again, I realized later, she felt she had revealed too much, allowed someone too close; she had made it impossible to reinvent herself in my eyes. It was my turn for execution.
The chosen instrument, as so often before, was the pager. As others had before me, I now got the poisonous message treatment. I was sitting in a deserted railway carriage, staring out at a pitch-black Wiltshire, when with an immediate stab of dread I felt the familiar summons of my pager.
I fumbled for the button to stop that awful, reptilian vibration. Then I stared uncomprehendingly at the stark letters.
The Boss knows about your disloyalty and your affair.
It was anonymous.
I had to read it several times before the enormity of it sank in. The message was timed so that, but for a delay on the train, I would have received it as I walked through my front door. Then I knew it was from the Princess. She was always so punctual.
There had been a spate of such messages addressed to members of her husband’s staff and nobody doubted where they came from. It spoke volumes for the atmosphere in which we were working by that time. Recently her own chauffeur – long an object of unfounded suspicion – had told me practically in tears of his own barbed message.
I was practically in tears myself now, though whether from rage, self-pity or impotence I was not sure. I knew that an attack on my professional or personal reputation was exactly the form of retribution which the Princess would choose once she had recognized that I was slipping bey
ond her control. I also knew with a frightening conviction that she could do untold damage to my future re-employment chances if she chose to use her media muscle. As for my private life … My horror deepened. I knew I had not had an affair with anyone, but that was an insignificant detail to someone who could accuse her children’s nanny as the Princess had done.
I told nobody of my agonized thoughts except God – over and over in the course of a sleepless night. He had heard most of it before.
The next day I found a chance to confront the Princess. This was definitely not the victim’s proper response, but having only recently counselled the chauffeur my blood, belatedly, was up.
‘Ma’am,’ I began, ‘I’ve been getting nasty little messages on my pager and so have others.’ I named them. ‘I have to ask. Did you send them?’
Her eyes widened with the practised innocence I had seen so often before. As I expected, she answered a question with a question. ‘Why would I do a thing like that? You should ignore it. I get them all the time.’
Suspicion turned to certainty in my mind and I heard myself saying, ‘Ma’am, I think it may be time for me to move on. You’ll be divorced soon and you’ll be starting a new life full of new opportunities. I belong to your old life. I think you should have someone new to help you with what comes next.’
She was staring at me intently. I could tell that I was doing myself irreparable damage in her eyes. Nobody dumped the Princess of Wales.
I felt giddy. I had never spoken so directly to her before and the urge to pour out several years’ accumulated frustration was almost irresistible. It might even have done us both some good. That missed opportunity belonged to the distant past, however. Right now I had to concentrate on getting out of the room alive.
Having started, I had no option but to carry on burning bridges. ‘If you want, I’ll stay until the legal stuff is over, but we could start looking around for my replacement right away. Then there’ll be less disruption for you. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to leave until you were happy with whoever came next. But I thought I should tell you now what I have in mind, so we all know where we stand.’
‘But what about the programme?’ she asked, in a voice familiar to deserting rats caught balancing on the ship’s rail and measuring the distance to the jetty.
‘The diary is very quiet at the moment. Chicago [our next planned tour, not due for several months] is all set up. There’s time for my replacement to read himself in and Anne and the police will show him the ropes.’
‘But who will I find?’
‘Ma’am, they’ll be queueing round the block.’ I was not quite sure about this so I carried on quickly, ‘But, I repeat, I won’t leave till you’re happy with my replacement.’
I sat back in my chair, feeling exhausted. By contrast, the Princess looked ominously calm and behind her eyes I saw that a shutter had descended. I remembered her reaction to Richard Aylard’s offer of help six years earlier and her words came back to me: ‘Once gone, always gone.’ I was now back on the nursery floor and destined for a very painful end.
Whatever I said about staying to ensure a smooth transition, I no longer had control over the speed of events. The twin torches of victimhood and revenge, now ignited in my employer’s mind, would see to that. This was going to be quick. I already sensed that she would be drawing a deadly bead on the only thing I could hope to take with me from the wreck. It was worth rather more to me than cuff links or a signed photograph. It was my reputation.
Later that afternoon I called on Robert Fellowes. I told him of the messages that I and others had received and of my reasons for believing who was responsible for them. I explained that I felt I was now in an impossible position. His sympathy and later that of the Queen, when I was unexpectedly received by her, touched me more deeply than perhaps either of them knew.
The next morning some routine memos I had sent up in the Bag came back unopened. I turned with something like relief to drafting my own resignation statement and Q and A list, just as I had drafted so many for the Princess in the past.
In an attempt to impose some honesty and goodwill on the situation, I then sent the Princess a carefully worded memo in which I repeated what I had said at our meeting: that I felt it was time for me to move on, but that I would not do so until I had had a chance to recruit a successor and see him or her safely into the job, if that was her wish. I also repeated my offer to stay until her current legal actions were resolved.
I handed it to my secretary and asked her to drive it at once to KP. Then, as if to take leave of it, I looked round the office that had suddenly become a prison, having been a palace to me for so long. It seemed impossible that something so familiar would now become part of my past. The thought triggered a jolt of fear and I almost ran after my secretary to stop her. Out of the window I glimpsed the tail-lights of her car disappearing in the direction of Lancaster House. There was no going back.
The expected phone call came less than an hour later. Perhaps she had blanked what I had told her yesterday about resigning. That was why I had sent my memo. Given the conciliatory way I had tried to write it, and the sensible offer of continuing service and a smooth transition to a new pair of hands, the response was far worse than anything I had feared.
She was hysterical. Her voice lost all semblance of control and expressed instead the raw emotion of a soul in torment. The theme was repeated over and over, in tones varying from the plaintive to the vicious. What had she done to deserve this? I struggled to repeat what I had said in the memo, but she did not or would not hear me.
Eventually her voice became clipped, flat, cold. ‘I have to decide what to do about you.’ There was a click. She was gone, hugging her power for comfort.
I should have left then, but some masochistic urge drove me into the office again the next morning. On my desk I found a letter on the Princess’s notepaper, plainly drafted with legal help, illogically forbidding me from sending her such a memo again. It seemed that somebody had failed to copy-check the typing. It did not make sense. Who had done the typing anyway? My mind briefly considered the unhappy implications for my staff’s loyalty – to me if not to her.
As I was digesting these implications, I simultaneously learned that the Princess had put in phone calls to several friends and acquaintances of mine who she might reasonably expect would help me find another job. In each case the calls were calculated to give the impression that I was not fit to be entrusted with so much as a dustpan and brush. Again by special messenger, I sent a further and probably foolish letter, protesting that such a transition would be more efficiently accomplished in a constructive and preferably amicable spirit. It was returned unopened.
I departed soon afterwards for the weekend, resolving to clear my desk on Monday morning and so free myself properly to look for some new way of earning a living. Before reaching Paddington, I had also taken the precaution of asking some discreet media contacts to be alert for any sudden interest in my direction.
On Saturday afternoon this early warning system tipped me off that the Daily Mail was planning to run a major story on Tuesday morning in which it would be reported that the Princess had sacked her private secretary for professional incompetence. This was no longer a resignation. It was a race.
I spent Saturday redrafting my curriculum vitae and avoiding questions from anyone. I had caught a bad dose of the Princess’s paranoia. Plots and imminent ruination chased each other through my jumbled thoughts, along with a dull sense of loss. I would have to look at that later. For the moment I had a great deal to do and very little time in which to do it if I was to beat my boss to the media draw.
I returned to London to empty my in-tray as conscientiously as possible – a Herculean task – and to write as many farewell letters as I could manage, then finally to clear my desk. There was a Sunday calm about the deserted offices as I read the last rites to my royal career. Down in Ambassador’s Court the usual genteel congregation was emerging from the Chapel Royal. I e
xperienced a sudden pang, wishing that I too could be comfortably thinking of a warm fire, sherry, Sunday lunch and a secure future in the royal household. My future, whatever it was, now lay in a different world.
How sad, I thought, as I looked out on the cosy ritual and listened to the loud, confident voices. For nearly eight years I had worked in the same organization as a small army of eminent clerics, from the Archbishop himself to the household chaplains, all of us called to serve the head of our Church. Yet in all the trials and crises we had survived together, neither the Princess nor I had thought to call on them for the spiritual guidance they were presumably employed to provide.
Not that they had seemed particularly eager to offer it, I reflected. Beyond the routine conduct of the court’s religious business and their own silent intercessions, I never felt the benefit of my pastoral colleagues’ spiritual support. Here were more lost opportunities, missed connections, spurned compromises to regret. Surely we should all have been working together to uphold the same principles and values. To me, what was happening to our foremost national institution had the greatest symbolic importance. Without its symbolic value, I seriously questioned the purpose of our royal system. ‘It’s all about principle,’ I murmured to myself, adding pompously, ‘or it’s nothing at all.’ On that gloomy note, I turned back to the loose ends on my desk.
At 2.30 a.m. on Monday 22 January 1996, I fell into a bed kindly lent to me by a friend in St James’s Palace. He and a couple of others had come to my rescue and I will never adequately express my thanks to them. We drank a bottle of champagne to toast my escape and, if not for very long, I at least slept more peacefully than I had managed for weeks.
Later that morning, feeling curiously calm, I wrote my formal letter of resignation and obtained an audience with the Princess for 10.00 a.m. Then, feeling distinctly less calm, I realized that in the hurry of returning to London I had forgotten to bring my suit. I rushed out to spend an expensive but therapeutic half hour in Jermyn Street, buying myself something suitable to wear when resigning from royal service.
Shadows of a Princess Page 52