Charles at Seventy

by Robert Jobson

  There is no doubt Diana was a remarkable woman. Like her sons, she was never afraid of the controversial. She would roll up her sleeves and get involved. Her sons have followed her lead in their public duties. For that, and keeping her legacy and memory alive, they should be commended.

  The film promo boasted, ‘Through the personal and intimate reflections of her two sons and of her friends and family, many of whom have never spoken before, the film will offer fresh and revealing insights into Princess Diana, an iconic figure who touched the lives of millions.’ There were onscreen cameos by Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, and other members of the princess’s circle, including William van Straubenzee, Lady Carolyn Warren and Anne Beckwith-Smith. None of them had spoken publicly about Diana since her death but agreed to appear in the film, speaking sincerely about her life and loss.

  Those who had spent the most time with Diana and undoubtedly knew her best as an adult and during her time as a princess – her Scotland Yard PPO, Inspector Ken Wharfe MVO, her only private secretary, Patrick Jephson, and her butler, Paul Burrell RVM, who had all penned bestselling memoirs about the princess – were notably excluded. So too, however, as we’ve seen, was their father, the Prince of Wales.

  Yes, Charles had been consulted about the film in as much as they had told him they were doing it. Other than that, he was in the dark. He was not mentioned once for his contribution to raising his sons as a single parent, be that in the chat ahead of the film, in it or after it. Yes, it may have been a film about their mother, but a mention of how their father had done his best to support them in its aftermath and in the years that followed might have been nice. The lack of acknowledgement from his sons for his efforts undoubtedly saddened Charles. ‘It was as if he had never existed,’ one of his friends said. Clearly, this film diminished, even dismissed, his role in their young life.

  The princes had gambled. They had focused understandably on their late mother; after all, it was the twentieth anniversary of her death. They hoped it would remind the public, especially the generation too young to remember her, of their mother’s warmth and humour and also her achievements. It was, by the very nature of what it set out to achieve, a sugar-coated portrayal of Diana – their bold bid to take charge of the narrative about her.

  The resultant documentary was a commendable piece of work. It chronicled Diana’s personal journey, her campaigns supporting the homeless, people living with AIDS and to ban landmines. She was seen as a pioneer and yet still a victim. Despite the prince’s calls for openness about mental health in the months that preceded it, it did not tackle her mental frailties or her clandestine affairs. It was a candy-coated portrayal of somebody who, in person and in reality, was far more complex.

  ‘We won’t be doing this again,’ William said. ‘We won’t speak as openly or publicly about her again, because we feel hopefully this film will provide the other side from close family friends you might not have heard before, from those who knew her best and from those who want to protect her memory, and want to remind people of the person that she was. Twenty years on, Harry and I felt that it was an appropriate time to open up a bit more about our mother.’

  Initially, Diana’s sons, who had been children at the time of her death, found they could remember very few specifics about their mother when they began the film-making process. They even felt the need to caution their collaborators, film-makers Ashley Getting and Nick Kent, not to expect too much from them. ‘They prefaced their interviews by saying, “We don’t actually have that many memories of our mum”,’ Getting and Kent recalled.

  In truth, their grief and bereavement had suppressed or in some cases wiped out many memories. Perhaps they were too raw. But, relatively quickly, when the producers started the interview process on camera, somehow those memories, stored deep inside them, returned to the surface. There was one photograph of Princess Diana hugging Prince Harry that featured in the film. Without words it told anyone who saw it everything about that wonderfully playful relationship.

  ‘She would just engulf you and squeeze you as tight as possible,’ Harry remembered, ‘and, being as short as I was then, there was no escape; you were there and you were there for as long as she wanted to hold you. Even talking about it now, I can feel the hugs that she used to give us and, you know, I miss that, I miss that feeling, I miss that part of a family, I miss having that mother… to be able to give you those hugs and give you that compassion that I think everybody needs.’

  In addition to sharing fond memories of their mother, William and Harry also open up about their final phone call with Diana, and about the trauma of having a loved one ripped from their lives so suddenly. Another heart-wrenching moment involves William revealing how he keeps his mother’s memory alive for his young children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

  The age-old narrative of Diana, the saintly, wronged young wife and, by default, Charles (by the very fact that he wasn’t mentioned once) the calculated, sinful older husband, had returned ahead of what would be a pretty tough month in public-relations terms for Charles. If that wasn’t bad enough, what followed was more bruising.

  Never-before-seen videotaped confessions made by Princess Diana herself were aired on UK television as part of the anniversary coverage. The tapes, captured by her speech coach Peter Settelen, show Diana reflecting on her early life, her relationship with Prince Charles and her time in the public eye.

  This footage, aired in the documentary Diana: In Her Own Words on Channel 4, was recorded at Kensington Palace in the early 1990s and the tapes were never intended for public viewing, but part of coaching to prepare Diana to present her account of her life and marriage to Prince Charles.

  It was also part of preparation for her famous 1995 Panorama interview with journalist Martin Bashir, in which she blamed Charles and his mistress Camilla Parker Bowles for the breakdown of her marriage with her infamous comment, ‘Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.’

  Ralph Lee, Channel 4’s deputy chief creative officer and head of factual, who commissioned the film, somewhat disingenuously, tried to justify using the material, saying, ‘The tapes, which show a relaxed and off-duty Diana, are hugely illuminating about her personality, humour and charm. Combined with historical context and interviews with her closest confidants, this film provides a nuanced, multilayered portrait of the most famous woman in the world and a mother who has shaped the future line of the royal family.’

  The Spencer family, led by Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, vehemently disagreed and insisted that it was they who owned the footage, despite the fact that Scotland Yard eventually returned the tapes to voice coach Peter Settelen in 2004 after a lengthy dispute between both parties.

  Seven of a total of twelve tapes were found by police in a 2001 raid on the home of Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell. Settelen launched legal action to have them returned to him and then sold them to US network NBC, which broadcast some of the material in 2004. In 2007 the BBC paid £30,000 to use excerpts in a documentary, but it shelved the project after pressure from the palace. The other five tapes are said still to be missing.

  This time, much to Charles’s chagrin, the film was cut and it aired, anyway, with record viewing figures for Channel 4, who were thrilled by their commercial decision. Charles had always been consistent. As he had admitted to Jonathan Dimbleby, he had tried to be faithful in his marriage until 1986, when, ‘It became clear that the marriage had irretrievably broken down.’ Once again, however, he was cast as the villain of this narrative. It was as if time had stood still. Diana ripped into him from beyond the grave, even mocking his wooing techniques, saying he was all over her ‘like a bad rash’ at the start of their courtship.

  In the footage – fifty hours filmed over eighteen months in 1992 and 1993 and never intended for public consumption – Diana makes several startling revelations. She admits she and her husband did not have sex for seven years before their acrimonious split in 1992. She also claimed Pr
ince Philip had encouraged Charles to cheat on her, telling him he could always go back to Camilla after a suitable time lapse and she recounted how she once went sobbing to the Queen for help saving her marriage. She says the monarch simply replied, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.’

  In another section Diana reveals how she ‘got burned’ after she fell ‘deeply in love’ with one of her bodyguards, Barry Mannakee, a married man who was sacked amid rumours that they had become too intimate and who was killed in a freak motorbike crash weeks after his sudden exit. She talked too about how she was driven to bulimia because she did not feel she was good enough for the Royal Family. Some of the footage shows genuine voice-coaching exercises and a young Prince William heard walking into one recording session.

  William explained, ‘Part of the reason why Harry and I want to do this is because we feel we owe it to her. I think an element of it is feeling like we let her down when we were younger. We couldn’t protect her.’ He went on, ‘We feel we at least owe her twenty years on to stand up for her name and remind everybody of the character and person that she was. Do our duty as sons in protecting her.’

  So-called ‘anniversary journalism’ is by its nature benign. Even so, William and Harry knew going ahead with their documentary was a risk. It was touching and made compulsive viewing and the way they spoke of her, with a modern openness, was a natural resistance to pain. It was a programme about the love of a mother for her two sons, and, in crass terms, the scoop on their last conversations with her previously unshared reflections and private photos. It was also, by virtue of the fact that it avoided the subject, a reminder of the nation’s extraordinary reaction at the time, not the public grief, but the public anger towards Charles and the Queen over their perceived coldness towards the princess.

  The entire period was excruciating for Charles, like a Groundhog Day nightmare. In the last of the documentaries aired in the UK – BBC film focusing on the days around the time of Diana’s death – at least Charles was awarded some praise. William and Harry made a final contribution. They did it, they said, because they wanted to ‘stand up for her name’, saying they felt they had let her down in the past by not protecting her. By this time Charles had decamped, tail between his legs, to his beloved Birkhall to escape the furore.

  Diana, after all, was not always what she appeared to be. A mistress of manipulation, some of her security detail found her level of hypocrisy too much to take. One PPO, who left her service many years earlier, was so frustrated towards the end of his tenure that one morning he discharged all his bullets into a tree in a garden of a landed family where the royals were staying. ‘That should wake them up,’ he said to a shocked colleague. The SO14 colleague with him urged him to reload quickly to avoid a backlash and say nothing about the incident. Before leaving, the same PPO, whom I’ve chosen not to identify, remarked to his replacement, ‘Good luck, you’re going to need it. If these kids [Princes William and Harry] were brought up on a council estate somewhere in south London they’d have been taken into care by now.’ He was deadly serious. Diana let the pair run free and wild as young children. Harry’s nanny, Jessie Webb, frequently sandwiched the little prince up against the wall with her frame, saying it was the only way she could catch him and ‘gain control’.

  William and Harry would roam around Highgrove, relieving themselves from the top of the giant haystack in the garden when they were so inclined, much to the annoyance of their ‘papa’, who caught them in the act on occasion. He was not necessarily the most active father, but on weekends off he would often go looking for his sons to keep an eye on them and he was always aware of their antics, whether it had been go-karting around his garden and tearing it up in the process, or smashing cricket balls through the ancient glass of his woodshed. On another occasion Harry burrowed himself in a huge haystack and was struggling for breath before eventually being found in some distress just in time by his policeman. On another occasion he caused a major ruckus when he disappeared again on a hot summer’s day. He had crawled into one of the prince’s giant urns as it was cooler inside and could not hear the increasingly desperate staff and parents calling his name.

  There was an unspoken ‘understanding’ between Charles and Diana during this time which meant that during the week the prince rarely went to Kensington Palace and they, effectively, used Highgrove at weekends on a rota basis, neither being there when the other was. James Hewitt, Diana’s lover, became a frequent visitor to both residences at this time, and of course would stay the night with the princess, although he took care that his arrivals and departures were screened from prying eyes and, even more important, prying cameras.

  James would even join in the play fights the protection officers would have with William and Harry around the garden pool at Highgrove. Such was her state of domestic bliss at times that Diana would roar with laughter when she was thrown into the pool fully clothed, making an almighty splash. Of course, her sons did not know the sleeping arrangements of their mother and the dashing Guards officer. He was just another avuncular figure in their lives.

  That is not to say he stood in for Charles, but was just a fun figure to William and Harry. The prince was not a rough-and-tumble-style father. He would leave that side of their childhood often to their bodyguards, such as stalwarts Inspector Ken Wharfe, Sergeant Reg Spinney, Sergeant Dave Sharpe and Inspector Trevor Bettles. Wharfe recalled that they would often turn up at his bedroom at Kensington Palace (used by the Scotland Yard officer on duty). As regular as clockwork the princes would knock at the door. ‘Ken, do you want to fight?’ It was not really a request or even a question: it was a statement of intent.

  The two princes would pile in and made a perfect royal tag team. ‘One would go for my head and the other attack my more sensitive parts, landing punches towards my groin, which, if they connected, would make me keel over in agony,’ he recalled in his best-selling memoir Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, which I co-wrote with him. Their parents seemed to appreciate that their sons could let off steam in this way. Charles would pop his head around the door and, with a slightly quizzical look on his furrowed face, would ask, ‘They’re not being too much bother, are they, Ken?’

  ‘No, sir, not at all,’ he would gasp as he recovered from another fierce royal punch.

  Charles adored his sons but he rarely actually joined in such horseplay. It was not his style and, more often than not, he was not around or was away on business. One such occasion was when Diana urged her bodyguard to help set up a go-kart race at Highgrove, around Charles’s beloved garden without the prince’s prior knowledge. Despite their high birth and high-ranking position, William and Harry as boys were at heart just brothers in search of adventure, both thrill-seekers who loved speed.

  Wharfe telephoned Martin Howell, boss of Playscape Racing, where Diana herself had become a regular racer at its Buckmoor Park, Kent, circuit and at another venue in Streatham since the mid-eighties. She was a very keen and competitive racer and had introduced her sons to the junior karting experience at these venues privately on a regular basis. One weekend at Highgrove the boys kept pestering Diana to take them go-karting and so she begged Ken to call Martin and arrange for him to bring down two of the go-karts.

  The karts, capable of speeds of up to forty miles an hour, arrived and Wharfe and Howell set up a course around the prince’s grounds and within minutes the boy were racing at full tilt, tearing up Charles’s beloved garden in the process. Diana, mischievous as ever, cheered on her sons as they skidded through her husband’s secret garden, now a chicane as his sons battled for the lead. The prince was of course oblivious to it all. Weeks later, calmly, the prince spoke to Wharfe and half-jokingly teased him on whether he fancied becoming ‘the next Bernie Ecclestone’.

  If anyone overstepped the mark in correcting his sons, Charles in his idiosyncratic way would admonish the offender to let him know, albeit gently, who was the boss. On one occasion when it reached Charles’s ears that Wharfe h
ad been correcting William’s pronunciation, the prince stepped in. As a youngster, William spoke with that slightly clipped upper-class English accent. He persisted in pronouncing ‘out’ like ‘ite’ (as in ‘kite’), and Wharfe corrected him, but the prince insisted he was right because his father always said it that way.

  ‘Ken, I understand you have been giving William elocution lessons,’ he said, his tone a little but not overtly critical. The policeman had clearly overstepped his remit, and this was the prince’s gentlemanly way of telling him to keep his nose out of family business. He sheepishly made his excuses and left. ‘When Diana found out about my telling-off she thought it was hilarious,’ he said, and urged the policeman, an excellent mimic, to retell the story acting out all the voices.

  In the middle of a marital nightmare, the prince could be remarkably good humoured, side-splittingly funny without even realising it. Prince Charles’s comedic timing is sublime. Sometimes I am sure he doesn’t know he is being funny. Even during the height of the tension during the Wales’s marriage those closest to the couple, such as their PPOs found themselves chuckling at some of his remarks, much to the annoyance of the princess.

  One memorable occasion summed up the distance between Charles and Diana, as well as Diana’s absolute lack of appreciation of her husband as well as his sense of humour. It came on the evening of the state banquet held in honour of King Olav V of Norway in London. The prince’s policeman, Superintendent Colin Trimming, was off duty, and Inspector Ken Wharfe had to take the lead in organising and overseeing security for both principals. That night, in April 1988, Diana was in a particularly impatient mood, he recalled. Wharfe told me, ‘The princess was not above showing her frustrations physically, on this occasion tutting loudly and tapping her feet. The tension was always heightened when she had to attend state dinners at her husband’s side and having to dress to the nines.’