Diana: In Pursuit of Love (11 page)

In the intense atmosphere before the separation Diana was fully aware of the hostility she faced not just from her husband and his supporters but from Buckingham Palace itself. Much as the Queen and Prince Philip tried to remain above the fray, it was clear that ultimately they would side with their son and heir. Blood ties mattered most. She had seen the way the wind was blowing at the royal showdown at Windsor Castle in June 1992 when Prince Philip stated that they had a tape recording of her telephone conversation with an unnamed man about the newspaper serialization of
Diana: Her True Story
.

While that came to nothing, it was extremely unnerving; then, in late June, Diana received a letter, the first of a series, from her father-in-law about the marital breakdown and her perceived involvement with the book. She was outraged and upset. Much has been written about these letters, most recently by her former butler Paul Burrell, who was working for Prince Charles at Highgrove at the time. His benign interpretation of Prince Philip’s letters – citing the fact that they were signed ‘With fondest love – Pa’ – as proof of Philip’s concern about her well-being, does not sit easily with Diana’s initial reaction. She was so alarmed when the first letter was delivered that she telephoned a friend and asked him to recommend a solicitor to help draft a suitable reply. He in turn contacted me, but in the time that it took me to produce a couple of names, the Princess had already found her own lawyer. Such an agitated response was hardly the behaviour of someone who considered Prince Philip’s intervention as
friendly. Lucia Flecha de Lima on the other hand – who, with Rosa Monckton, the wife of Dominic Lawson, editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
, helped the Princess draft several replies – found his notes ‘warm and helpful’, ‘like a father writing to a daughter’. But Diana had never been enamoured of her father-in-law. When, later, she was chatting to Sir Max Hastings, the former editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, she spoke in gleeful tones about the forthcoming publication of a biography by Kitty Kelley, the American gossip writer, of the Duke of Edinburgh (which never came about; instead she published
The Royals
in September 1997). ‘He’s got away with murder for years,’ she told Hastings, a frequent refrain in her litany of complaints about the royal family. Whatever her personal feelings towards him, Prince Philip did, in subsequent letters to Diana, express the universally held belief about his son’s liaison with Camilla. ‘I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla. Such a prospect never entered our heads,’ he wrote.

While these letters have now assumed dramatic importance in the cataclysm of the Queen’s
annus horribilis
, then they were just one cloudburst in a season of storms. Diana was at the time the object of a great deal of criticism, disapproval, rumours and allegations. She was criticized for making a speech on drug abuse on a ‘Balmoral Day’ in August, when the royal family should be on holiday. Not long after, she heard that the Queen had said during her summer cruise on board the royal yacht
Britannia
that the book had confirmed her view that Diana was ‘unstable’; and that, according to the royal writer Brian Hoey, no one in the Queen’s household had a ‘good word to say about her’. Thus the myth of the ‘loose cannon’ was born, and the whispering campaign, with its claims that she needed psychiatric help and suffered from Borderline Personality Syndrome, gathered pace.

In August 1992, not long after the ‘second honeymoon’ fiasco on board Latsis’s yacht, and while the press had been revelling in disclosures about the Duchess of York and her so-called financial adviser, John Bryan, came another bombshell – the publication in the
Sun
newspaper of illicitly taped telephone conversations between the Princess and a man identified as James Gilbey.

Just days before the extracts of the now notorious Squidgygate tapes were published we heard that one of Prince Charles’s closest supporters had been encouraging nervous newspaper executives at the
Sun
, who had had the tapes in a safe for many months, to publish the damning late-night chat of three years before. Ironically, the editors at the normally brash tabloid were so fearful of publishing the contents of the tapes, which graphically revealed Diana’s sense of isolation and unhappiness inside her marriage and within the royal family, that they would have held fire if they had been contacted by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes. He never called. The
Sun
’s executives, having overcome their scruples, even set up a phone line for people to listen to excerpts from the tapes.

Diana, who was staying at Balmoral, was so distressed that she was on the point of packing her bags and leaving even before her lawyers and those representing the Prince had started work on a suitable separation settlement. While she put on a brave face in front of the royal family, The Princess was, according to Colthurst, ‘at the lowest ebb for years’. But he and other friends managed to convince her that it was best to stay and fight it out rather than leave.

In spite of the pleasant smiles and polite tone, the negotiations were, as far as Diana’s private secretary Patrick Jephson was concerned, motivated by ‘spite, hypocrisy and injustice’. ‘I wondered if her opponents really understood the bloody-minded determination of the woman they were seeking to banish to the backwaters of royal life,’ he wrote in his memoirs. There were many who wished to see her pay a high price for her independence.

Perversely, those attempts to downgrade her status by limiting her use of the Queen’s flight and royal train, and access to the Palace machine merely served to shine a light more clearly on the true direction Diana wanted to take. For years she had railed against the flummery and protocol surrounding royal life; now she had a chance to demonstrate an approach to duty that differed in style and substance from the prevailing Windsor orthodoxy. So when in March she flew to Nepal in the company of Lynda
Chalker, the then Minister of Overseas Development, on her first solo trip as a ‘semi-detached member of the royal family’, the media sharks were circling in the water, sensing blood. A secret media briefing by Prince Charles’s aides, which pointed out Diana’s reduced status, served to define the news agenda for the visit. ‘We may be witnessing early signs that Diana is no longer a royal of the first order,’ announced a headline. That she had travelled by scheduled airline with her sister Sarah McCorquodale as her lady-in-waiting for the five-day visit was seen as merely underlining her inferior status.

In fact, Diana was only too glad to have the chance to shape an important overseas visit to fit in with her vision of how it should be, shorn of protocol and formality, with an emphasis on meeting ordinary people. It was a style she had been working towards for some time; at the height of the furore over the royal separation, for example, Diana was making secret visits to see London’s homeless at the Passage Day Centre in Victoria, run by the Catholic Church, to which she had been first taken by the late Cardinal Basil Hume in September 1989, and to hospices in London’s East End, Blackpool and Hull.

These visits were part of her healing process. In the world she lived in, everyone’s motives were suspect, everyone had an agenda, either to influence her judgements or further their own careers and lives. On the other hand, the people she was visiting lived in a different world – one which had no hold over her. As her friend Debbie Frank observed, ‘She was used to never having a relationship that was pure and clean. They all wanted something. It’s one reason why she got on so well with children and the dying. They didn’t want anything from her. Sad, really.’

The Princess’s day-to-day life was filled with rumour and hearsay of plots and counterplots. Rarely a day went by at Kensington Palace without there being some excursion and alarm.

In this uneasy atmosphere loyalty and trust were highly valued, and any perceived transgression assumed an importance out of all proportion to the event. Family, friends, staff, courtiers and police: they all came under her gimlet eye.

An incident involving a new full-time member of staff, Paul Burrell, her junior butler, represented everything about life at Kensington Palace which the Princess found constraining, invasive and alienating. When the royal couple parted, in December 1992, Diana had only agreed to take on Burrell and his wife Maria after representations from her private secretary and her butler, Harold Brown. Her first thought was that Burrell, like anyone who had worked for her husband, might turn out to be an enemy spy. While he was personable and flattering, her initial doubts seemed to bear fruit when one day in 1993 the Princess arrived back from the gym to find him rifling through her private letters on the desk in her sitting room. She was furious and sent him from the room, but minutes later, fearing the humiliation of dismissal, he returned to her, threw himself on the floor in tears and started kissing her feet. The astonished Ken Wharfe came by just in time to witness this bizarre spectacle and in an appropriately policemanly manner rebuked the butler for his ‘unforgivably disloyal’ and ‘deeply unprofessional’ behaviour. Unable to explain himself, Burrell scuttled from the room.

Shortly after, as Diana was leaving the apartment for a public engagement, Princess Margaret’s chauffeur Dave Griffin, who usually engaged her in cheery banter, commented to her that she did not look too happy. ‘He [Burrell] will have to go,’ she said firmly as she outlined the story. ‘She had caught him spinning the bins, going through her letters,’ recalled Griffin. While the Princess did see the funny side of the unseemly performance (in fact at the time had difficulty stifling her giggles), Burrell was for several weeks out in the cold and was fortunate to retain his position.

If this had been an isolated incident, the Princess would have probably been happy to laugh it off, but she was uncomfortably aware that nothing of hers was truly private.

Then, when Ken Wharfe made a few unguarded, and rather chauvinist, remarks about Diana to the
Sun
’s royal photographer, Arthur Edwards, the rumour mill quickly went into high gear. Edwards passed the comments on to his boss, the paper’s deputy editor, Stuart Higgins, who in turn told a royal contact he was cultivating, the Duchess of York. She wasted no time in relaying
the news to her royal friend in order to ingratiate herself. Everyone had their own agenda but the end result was that Diana, already feeling restricted by the police presence, was angry and annoyed that Wharfe had, to her mind, been disloyal. That initial spat sowed the seeds for a summer of growing distance between the Princess and her minder. He was angry when she had her rooms swept for listening devices by a private firm without telling him – ‘It’s my home and I’ll do what I want,’ she told him defiantly – and had briefed journalists about her plans without informing him. Eventually, with a degree of acrimony on both sides, the Inspector and Diana parted company in November 1993. For some time Diana went without official police protection – although she later employed Princess Anne’s former bodyguard, Colin Tebbutt, as her security driver. It was an arrangement that worked well – she had protection yet was in complete command, a situation she had craved for years.

Indeed, it was a deep-seated feeling of being out of control that lay at the heart of the Princess’s continuing dissatisfaction with Kensington Palace. While Prince Charles had now left, she still did not feel truly comfortable in her apartment. It was not just the obvious signs of being in a prison – the patrolling police and CCTV cameras – that contributed to her perpetual sense of anxiety and unease. Even after the formal separation she felt that she was still being watched and manipulated, albeit remotely. While she might have been mistress of her household, she neither employed nor held the purse strings for her courtiers, police and staff. Ken Wharfe, for example, was employed by the Metropolitan Police and reported directly to Colin Trimming, Prince Charles’s protection officer. Whether or not it was the case, to her mind this meant that her estranged husband knew her plans and movements. Every time she wanted to go on holiday, especially with her boys, others seemed to stand in financial and strategic judgement.

Even if Diana’s staff were on her side – which most were – she suspected that ultimately their loyalties, in terms of their pay packets and prospects, lay elsewhere. It was only following her divorce in 1996 that she became her own boss and could be sure of her employees. Until then she ran a shadow secretariat she had built up,
a motley group of men to advise, guide and protect. It was haphazard and uncoordinated as well as irritating and deeply frustrating for those already in place. As far as Diana was concerned, though, she had a team (even that word may be too defining) who owed their loyalty and allegiance to her alone. ‘I trust my own instincts,’ she declared. It was a valiant but fatally flawed assertion.

So while she listened courteously to her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, she felt that, like most of the courtiers, he would have been happiest had she remained within the orbit of the Queen and Buckingham Palace, where she could be more easily managed. So she continually pre-empted him, roping in others to do what he felt were his duties. Thus, for instance, she might invite all and sundry – her masseur Stephen Twigg, her voice coach Peter Settelen, the
Daily Mail
’s royal correspondent Richard Kay (who became friendly with her on the return flight from Nepal) and, later, the TV reporter Martin Bashir, among others – to help write her speeches; or she would discuss her future strategy (in everything from her possible involvement with the Red Cross to the style of her Christmas cards) with the likes of the banker Jacob Rothschild, the television presenter Clive James, the film producer David Puttnam, and her old friend Dr James Colthurst.

For example, a couple of days before Colthurst and the Princess had lunch at Kensington Palace in September 1993, I wrote a five-page discussion paper, headed ‘Short to Medium Term Strategic Planning’, outlining the issues and difficulties Diana faced at the time. The paper mainly dealt with her media image, speeches, public engagements and her search for a country home; one suggestion, as a long-term strategy, was for her to head a Princess of Wales Trust, which would act as an umbrella organization for all her charity interests. Unknown to me, Stephen Twigg, David Puttnam, and doubtless others, had made similar suggestions. Each time the Princess answered in the negative, saying that she did not want to compete with her husband’s charitable trust. The intervention of well-meaning outsiders like myself and others must have been deeply frustrating for her private secretary.