Our employers did not like surprises or changes to habitual routine, except of their own making. In the royal world, ‘how things should be done’ is a way of life. Sometimes it may be irksome and sometimes it has to undergo evolutionary change, but, when all other reference points disappear, it is a very comforting handhold to reach for. I remembered how long it had taken me to acquire the rudiments of competence in planning, recceing, press management, security and protocol, not to mention an elementary understanding of my boss’s priorities and thought processes. With my departure, at a stroke the Princess had deprived herself of a mine of painfully amassed knowledge. Of course she could compensate for this inconvenient fact, at least for a while. Hence the recruitment of unlikely substitutes. Nonetheless, however enthusiastic the newcomer and however willing the Princess to accommodate their learning curve, a difficult job just got more difficult.
The order and space she needed to perform at her best was disappearing. Crowds hemmed her in, publicity-hungry hosts pressed too close, cameras invaded the sacred royal personal space. On one famous occasion, a visit to a public gym again provided the setting for victimhood, as another paparazzo found his quarry unescorted and very much cognito in the street. It was as if, with the title of Her Royal Highness so carelessly lost, the aura of royalty was going with it. The aura of celebrity, with which it had uneasily coexisted all these years, now grew on shallow roots to take its place.
Worryingly, what did not seem to have changed were the old notions of royal infallibility. If anything, these seemed to have deepened. Her previously quoted remark to Le Monde – ‘I don’t need to take advice from anyone’ – dates from this period. This was fertile ground for a decidedly disrespectful and unsympathetic new media treatment of their favourite money-spinner. As speculation grew about a certain Pakistani heart surgeon, I remembered one of our last conversations.
‘Honestly, Patrick!’ she had said. ‘The press are trying to marry me off again. Apparently my latest boyfriend’s a doctor!’
Confessions did not come much plainer, but by then I was rapidly losing interest. As was later revealed, so was Hasnat Khan, the diffident object of her affections. From the same reports, however, I could deduce that the Princess had not changed her tactics much. An excruciating home video appeared on British television. In a significant and, as it proved, unwise breach of her own privacy, the Princess was seen showering the doctor’s uncomprehending family with gifts and familiarity, accompanied by much nervous giggling. I recognized the signs of a Princess unhappy with herself and defiantly laughing to prove the opposite. I saw even more of those signs in the next, fateful development.
The Princess’s increasing closeness to the Fayed family fitted the new pattern. In preceding years Mohamed al Fayed had seen to it that his path crossed hers on a fairly regular basis, especially when, after her successful tour of his homeland, there was an Egyptian element in her programme. The Harrods delivery van and its patient horses were regular visitors to KP, often bearing gifts for William and Harry. These expressions of interest were treated by the Princess in the same manner as so many others from similarly well-heeled admirers. Where they could be useful they were regally received. Where they were intrusive or insistent, they were equally regally ignored. For some, this was a powerful incentive. The Fayeds were not deterred.
Through whatever combination of curiosity, need or manipulation, the Princess conspired with Mohamed’s son Dodi in his suit. In return, courtesy of the Harrods tycoon, the trappings of royalty suddenly reappeared: the jets, the yachts, the bodyguards, and the happy disregard for the cost of anything. The Princess might have been forgiven a wonderful feeling of déjà vu. Such accessories were her meat and drink, her natural habitat, her entitlement – but only, I sensed, if she were able to suppress memories of the days when they had also been earned.
The illusion continued. Her sons and her surrogate family, the press, seemed able to make the transition with her. It has been persuasively argued that the whole show was intended to incite jealousy in Hasnat Khan. That soon became irrelevant, I suspect, if it were ever true. Here was all the fun of being royal, with no suggestion that it must be paid for with a visit to an old folks’ home in Frinton.
Sooner or later, though, the bill – whatever it was going to be – would be presented. The gods of royal decorum, or the expectations of her devoted public, would surely not be mocked. There was a palpable anticipation, a dread even, among amateur and professional royal-watchers alike that the Princess was leading us inexorably to a confrontation with her new persona. She herself, heading for the Fayed yacht, promised a boatload of pressmen that they would soon get a big surprise.
It never arrived. Repayment for her late ration of happiness – and I feared it could only have been in the form of a tightening downward spiral – was never demanded. Instead, all her debts were cleared in an instant in a Parisian underpass.
The phone woke me at 4.00 a.m. It was more than a year since we had spoken and our lives, so closely intertwined for so long, had reverted to an unbridgeable remoteness. Soon the world would wake and realize she was gone and react however it might, according to how it remembered her. I suddenly recalled the image on the Elysée Palace steps and heard again the Nikon chorus. And I wondered how it had come to this – that the future Queen I had gone to serve in 1988 now lay cold in a French hospital.
The news was strangely not unexpected. I slowly realized why. The Princess I had known had been dying in my eyes since long before the crash. The life she had begun to lead did not belong to her, however independent it must have seemed. It felt an impossible contradiction that the figure of the Princess of Wales, the future Queen, could be related to the antics on the Fayed yacht. That was surely not what she had been born to. Her role was to ascend the British throne, suffering harsh lessons on the way, as I had witnessed. Now on the television I had seen a smirking woman in a swimsuit, taunting the press boat with juicy disclosures still to come. The glossy magazines, her faithful messengers, were full of pictures of her posing and canoodling with Dodi Fayed. Yet a part of me refused to believe what I saw. It was as if it were some bizarre hallucination.
Hence my uncomfortable feeling that the tragedy was somehow inevitable. Yet it was hardly what she deserved after all she had endured. She had come and played her part on the world stage and raised a host of questions about everything from the monarchy to the nature of human suffering. Then she abruptly vanished before she had to provide any answers. As in life, so in death. She always had to have the last word.
Now she was dead. Another weekend she had ruined, was the grim joke. It was just like old times.
The phone rang incessantly with requests for interviews, articles, facile comment. I resisted all but a couple. For these, my excuse was a belief that somebody who actually knew something of the departed should get a word in edgeways with the dozens more who suddenly seemed to find they had been the Princess’s lifelong chums and confidants.
The next day I arranged to meet a couple of other former escapees. We offered our assorted experience to the Buckingham Palace funeral machine that had swung into action. In the heyday of my work with the globetrotting Princess, I reckoned I could have knocked up a funeral programme overnight and had her approve it, too. This was rather different. Although she had largely eluded them when alive, the forces of royal conservatism could now claim her back.
‘Couldn’t her own regiments and ships and air station provide the military escort?’ I asked, rather diffidently. ‘Does it have to be the Guards?’
Yes, it certainly did have to be the Guards, came the reply. Then, before I could feel frustrated at such condescension, I remembered that the Palace could claim to throw the best funerals in the world.
Working in uneasy harness with the BP experts was the rump of the Princess’s office, operating out of their new, remote quarters at Kensington Palace. When it seemed that they were unable to offer a draft funeral invitation list – there was a real fear
that the Abbey might be half-empty if the ‘right’ people were not invited – I suggested that files for the Princess’s last Christmas reception might be a good starting point. I was told that they could not be found.
Somewhere else, the Princess’s own family were trying to put their stamp on the proceedings as well.
I retreated, aware than an uninvited and certainly inappropriate indignation was beginning to burn in me. Was it conceit, I wondered, that made me so sure I knew better – about who should be there and what she would have wanted? Or perhaps, most shameful of all, it was the impotence of the royal outsider. After some gloomy introspection, I settled for conceit. Anything was better than pressing my nose to the royal window again. It was their party, after all.
Before the funeral, in the warmth of a late-summer evening, I had lingered with thousands of others in front of Buckingham Palace. Instinctively, mourners had gravitated there for some form of comfort, but the blank windows seemed to stare back impassively. The silence of such a vast crowd was uncanny.
Bad recce, I thought, using a phrase from the past to describe any royal engagement that did not work as it should. I could feel the disappointment around me, and the active resentment in some. A single candle in a window, a wreath, a piper playing a lament – the moment and the mass of honest sentiment deserved a response. Royalty is mostly theatre and that night the management seemed to be neglecting the audience.
The management, of course, had its hands full. In the crucial first hours after the crash – hours which became days – the senior household seemed unable to match or reflect the sudden national sense of bereavement. Perhaps in a reflex gesture to the newspapers’ strident demands for visible grief, the Princess’s in-laws kept their feelings private. As I sensed from a few conversations with the Queen’s office at Balmoral, the outward inactivity hid a feverish search for a shared and appropriate response to the traumatic event. The reactions of different members of the royal family to the death of the Princess have since been widely leaked. Few seemed to echo the almost universal public experience of loss.
The audience in the drama had played their part to the full. The approaches to Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace were carpeted in flowers. The air was filled with their perfume … and with that unfamiliar tension I had felt among the silent crowd as it waited outside a deserted Buckingham Palace.
So it was with the appearance of reluctance that the Queen and her family flew from holiday in Scotland to lead the capital’s mourning. I believe that only the Queen’s unprecedented and nationwide broadcast, in which she paid tribute to the Princess’s charity work, saved the mood from turning ugly for the Windsors.
On the day of the funeral the weather was perfect. ‘The sun always shines on the righteous!’ she had laughed to the Captain of Dartmouth Naval College all those years ago. Well, she would certainly laugh today, I thought, as Westminster Abbey filled with assorted great and good. She may not have had much luck with her withdrawal speech and her Panorama performance, but this time she had stamped her foot and they had come running.
We had walked to the Abbey through a silent London. Traffic had been banned from large parts of the West End. The main processional route from KP to Westminster was thronged, but our route lay through side streets, where the only sounds were our footsteps and the endless tolling of the funeral bell.
In the Abbey I found our seats in a distant corner at the back of the transept. My uncharitable pique at being placed as far as possible from the official or invited guests soon faded as I realized we were surrounded by charity workers from the Princess’s patronages. On every side, friendly faces I had thought were gone from my life for ever smiled in recognition and welcome. We had the best seats in the house.
I had seen some of the crowds in the streets as we neared the Abbey, but the arrival of politicians, film stars and grieving royalty was invisible from where I was sitting. There was an ironic justice at work. Many of those who would have belittled the Princess while she was alive now had to be in the front of the homage when she was dead. She would have liked that, too.
At last the coffin appeared – I could just see the top of it. With the music and prayers the emotion rose and fell inside me. At one point I cried. Yet I was detached enough to wonder if it was the lost innocence of the sunny Princess of 10 years ago that I mourned, or my own.
The feeling passed. By the time the coffin had been borne from view on its way out of the Abbey and the senior guests had departed, an extraordinary levity seemed to spread through the remaining congregation. There were so many familiar figures to greet, so much news to hear, so many memories of the Princess to share.
Outside, the sun shone on to crowds suddenly released from their paralysis of dutiful respect. This was perhaps truer than I thought since, only minutes before, these same crowds had applauded Charles Spencer’s thinly veiled pulpit jibes at his sister’s in-laws.
I had agreed to give a short interview to Barbara Walters from the ABC news network. I found her encamped on the rooftop of the Methodist Central Hall overlooking the main door of Westminster Abbey, surrounded by the paraphernalia of an outside broadcast studio and its satellite dishes, sharing the sunshine with a delegation of London pigeons.
As well as the pigeons, I found a small collection of Diana experts. Their credentials were of varying credibility. Next in line was Andrew Morton, whom I would quite have liked to interview myself. Others, such as Lord Archer, I felt had rather less direct knowledge of their subject. My own motives were probably more to do with ego than erudition. Nevertheless, we all prepared sombre faces with which to pronounce on the day’s momentous events and on the Princess, whose cortège was even then on its slow, flower-decked journey to Althorp for the burial.
Suddenly it was my turn to sit on the parapet, my back to the Abbey, and face the doyenne of American TV interrogators. She wasted no time. ‘So, Mr Jephson, you knew her better than anybody. Was she a saint?’
Very good question, I thought, gulping slightly. Trying not to sound too glib, I gave an answer that, for me, was the truth. Saints are made in heaven and the Princess would not have claimed to be one. Yet I had known her to be saint-ly on many occasions, and there was no doubt that she had inspired good works on a huge scale. Judged by these results, she had a better claim to sainthood than most.
I might have added that any of the very human failings I had witnessed could not detract from that achievement. Indeed, in writing this account, I have come more firmly to the view that, by succeeding in so many ways despite such imperfections, she only enhanced her saintly status. Succeeding, even surviving, against the odds was a virtue she shared with many of those she comforted through her charity work. Being royal did not make it more saintly, but being royal had not made it any easier either.
The rest of the interview passed in that condensed blur that television cameras and lights always seem to produce – in me, anyway. Afterwards I retraced my steps, down dusty staircases and through the deserted gloom of the great building, before I emerged blinking into the glare and hubbub of the hot London afternoon.
I saw faces registering every kind of emotion. Some were crossed with grief. Others, perhaps numbed by days of so much shared feeling, seemed in a trance. Overwhelmingly, to my surprise, among the milling mourners in Parliament Square and across St James’s Park to the palaces, the atmosphere was more like a wedding or a carnival than a funeral.
My heart lifted with the thought that she would have liked this as well. It reminded me of the hundreds of happy walkabout crowds she had never failed to delight. Here we really were celebrating the Princess’s life. And if, secretly, I was also celebrating my final release from any resentment HRH still nurtured against me, then that was just one more thing for which to give thanks.
An irreverent thought occurred to me as I walked on. I imagined myself addressing a gathering of royal image consultants. ‘I strongly advise none of the royal family to die for a few years. We won’t see scenes
like this again.’
After a few yards, I added the obvious conclusion. ‘But then, we won’t see anyone like her again, either.’
The restaurant was crowded. I had known my lunch partner for several years. His opinion was much sought after in royal and media circles, so I was not surprised to see him glance briefly at our neighbours. Eavesdroppers were a constant occupational hazard. He leaned forward to give his words emphasis.
‘You ought to write something. You knew what she was really like, what really happened. Otherwise the only thing that’s going to be left is Morton and all this rubbish …’
By ‘rubbish’ I knew he meant the outpouring of largely sanctimonious comment on the life and legacy of the Princess which had appeared since her death. I had even made my own immodest contribution to it, I remembered with some regret.
He went on, ‘Nobody’s going to want the real truth. The people who think she was a saint don’t want to hear that she had feet of clay. And the people who wanted her out of the way want her to fade into obscurity now she’s conveniently died.’
‘But I can’t,’ I protested. ‘I signed a confidentiality clause.’
‘Yes, but only with her, surely? Anyway, it’s up to you. One thing’s for sure: the old days of royalty never answering back are over. It’s a new game now. PR and news management are what it’s all about. The Queen’s even got herself a Director of Communications. Nothing’s going to stop them saying what they like.’ He stood up to go. ‘You really should. Nobody else can.’
This conversation came some three months after the Princess’s death. It happened to follow a morning spent labouring over a foreign businessman’s latest bout of egomania. The royal family might have been enjoying their flirtation with PR, but I was just beginning to feel the opposite. What I had said about the confidentiality clause was true, however. I had waved it at enough departing employees to treat it very seriously. My lips were to remain sealed, whatever anybody else said about the royal family or its recent history.
Shadows of a Princess Page 54