Diana: In Pursuit of Love (20 page)

C
HAPTER
S
IX

A Princess of the World

A
S SHE SETTLED INTO
her coach-class seat on the North West Airline flight from Minneapolis to Denver, Mrs Heather Rodd was in reflective mood. If anything, she was feeling a little sorry for herself. She had left her two sons behind in England to spend Christmas with her in-laws while she joined a group of strangers at a luxury chalet for a week’s skiing in Vail, Colorado. Hardly the ideal start to the New Year, especially after her plans to sun herself in Cape Town had been aborted because the Queen was due to make a visit to South Africa later that year. Even though she was officially separated from her husband, and thus from the royal family, ‘Mrs Rodd’, perhaps better known as the Princess of Wales, was still cocooned in royal red tape. During the long flight with her companion – her personal trainer Jenni Rivett, who had organized the stay with print tycoon Mike Flannery and his family in January 1995 – Diana quietly pondered her future, reviewing her own journey of exploration and discovery, a voyage that had tested her personal boundaries and the limits of her unique role.

On balance, while the absence of her boys clouded her horizon, the outlook was much brighter than at any time in her adult life. She was more in control of her body and her personal life, daring to revisit her past to understand her future, and, since her return to public life after her Time and Space speech in December 1993,
was gradually exploring her gifts, her interests and her exceptional position as what the press liked to call a semi-detached member of the royal family. Since her brief curtain call in 1993, the Princess was now firmly established on the world stage as a woman of some substance.

Her international standing was reflected by the reception she received on both sides of the Atlantic before her skiing trip. When she attended a banquet in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles outside Paris in December 1994, she was accorded a standing ovation by the great and good of France; and, some weeks before, in October, she was treated like one of the family when she joined Washington’s power elite at the dinner in honour of Katherine Graham. The transformation was almost palpable. Whereas she would once have been intimidated in the company of the then First Lady, Hillary Clinton, Katherine Graham and General Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s highest military post), now the Princess felt at home and among friends. ‘This is a warm and welcoming city in a great country,’ she told her American audience. ‘It symbolizes hope and the promise of better things to come.’

That sentiment served as a guide for her own thinking. For a woman prone to self-doubt, whose life had been characterized by feelings of worthlessness and inferiority, she found herself regularly acknowledged and accepted in her own right and on her own terms, not just by the man-in-the-street but by the men and women in power. In short, she was beginning to feel validated not only as a public personage but as a human being.

From the great and the good to the unwanted and the unloved, Diana demonstrated time and again her uncanny ability to connect. Just days after the glamour of Washington, she was back in gritty reality, visiting special secure hospitals, mixing with the most dangerous members of society. One day she was swapping jokes with Colin Powell, the next sitting in on a meeting of a patients’ council at the notorious Broadmoor high security hospital, surrounded by men who were locked away because of the danger they posed to the public. Her travelling companion on a subsequent trip to Carstairs secure hospital in Scotland was Jayne Zito, whose husband was
stabbed to death on a London Underground platform by a schizophrenic and who has since campaigned for better community care for the mentally ill. These two visits reflected her public direction, seeking out hidden, neglected corners of society and illuminating them, not just by her position but also her presence. The Princess did feel a degree of trepidation at entering these hospital prisons, surrounded by barbed wire and high-perimeter fencing – nervousness which she offset by making rather feeble jokes about understanding these institutions because she had been in a similar one for most of her adult life – but courage was not something the Princess ever lacked.

When she returned from her skiing trip – ‘What I liked about her was that she mucked in with everyone else,’ Jenni Rivett later remarked – Diana capitalized on that upbeat mood by drafting out her own plans for her future in public life. Under her blueprint she envisaged cutting through the red tape surrounding royal visits, operating a streamlined office that would be under her control, while utilizing what she considered to be her ‘healing abilities’ on the global stage. Not so much the Princess of Wales, more a princess for the world, a roving ambassador for the downtrodden. If her musings did not quite amount to a coherent mission statement, her thinking was much more than a series of transitory New Year’s resolutions. Indeed her thoughts formed the template for the unique union of the spiritual, political and humanitarian that her life had become geared towards. At least she was giving more consideration to her future direction than most, if not all, other members of the royal family.

While Patrick Jephson might have scoffed (though not in front of the Princess) at the contradictions and caprice in her plans, it was a genuine and significant progress from the days in the not so distant past when James Colthurst had been cajoling her to do something positive rather than always merely reacting to events. In fact, Diana and Jephson had parted company the year before over this very issue.

During early 1994 Colthurst had organized private meetings between the Princess and the American life coach, Anthony Robbins, to give her more formal training in the power of positive
thinking. As Colthurst had now moved out of London, was busy in his own career and could no longer devote the time Diana required for advice and counselling, he felt that she needed more professional training to cope independently with the vicissitudes of her life. He believed that Robbins could provide the necessary psychological signposts, and he arranged a meeting between the millionaire guru, with his wife Becky, and the Princess at Kensington Palace. It did not take Robbins long to see that here was a young woman with tremendous untapped potential – and, for all the sadness and isolation, a strong, brave woman who had tackled many difficult issues head on. Diana, who liked his drive and energy, told him lightly that, while she woke feeling positive, by lunchtime she often felt ‘lower than a cockroach in Bulgaria’.

Following this meeting, Colthurst arranged for the Princess to visit Robbins in Washington for private coaching. She could, he thought, stay with Lucia Flecha de Lima, but this scheme fell through. When another visit was arranged, this time to Houston, with a private jet and bodyguards laid on, Diana demurred, and Colthurst, realizing that she had got cold feet, sent her a note on the lines of ‘carpe diem’. She excused herself by saying that the Foreign Office had warned her about a stalker on the loose in the States, and that at the time there would be too many senior royals out of Britain; adding for good measure, and bizarrely, that she had to deal with her profound feelings of anger before she could see Robbins. The implication was that she was apprehensive of moving on with her life, or, perhaps more accurately, did not want to take the road suggested by Colthurst. Following a tart forty-five-minute phone conversation, the old friends agreed to differ and a period of coolness, familiar to many of those who were close to the Princess, ensued.

A year later, however, Diana was doing what Colthurst and others, including David Puttnam and Patrick Jephson, had long counselled, charting her own course but on her own terms and in her own time. That she came to these decisions herself was a reflection of her growing sense of independence and authority, as well as her maturing self-belief.

For the coming year – 1995 – she had taken on more than 120 domestic engagements and embarked on no fewer than ten overseas visits, from Hong Kong and Japan to Argentina, Italy and, of course, America. They all followed the model that Diana, in her self-made role of independent ambassador for good works and causes, had worked hard to sustain, and each was a triumph of glamour meshed with compassion. Even Patrick Jephson was moved to describe her fund-raising trip to Hong Kong in April 1995 as ‘the model of how her working life might have evolved’. On this occasion the Princess combined high-profile charity visits and a high-octane dinner with a woman whom she had always admired, the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who also happened to be visiting Hong Kong. Diana’s performance during these trips was faultless and her appeal universal, proving time and again that she was not a loose cannon, much as the forces ranged against her at Buckingham Palace and the Foreign Office would have liked to believe. She was no Duchess of York or, for that matter, Duke of Edinburgh, prone to accidents and gaffes, and the thick file of congratulatory telegrams from British Ambassadors and Foreign Office officials underlined her international status.

At a gala dinner for the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation in New York in December 1995, she was hailed as a ‘luminous personality’ by no less a personage than the veteran diplomat Henry Kissinger. Presenting her with an award for her humanitarian work, he declared, ‘She is here as a member of the royal family, but we are honouring the Princess in her own right who aligned herself with the ill, the suffering and the downtrodden.’

During her acceptance speech, in which she spoke of the need for ‘kindness of heart, bearing and sharing the grief of others’, the Princess even dealt deftly with a woman heckler who asked, somewhat incongruously, ‘Where are your children?’ Diana’s calm reply – ‘In bed’ – earned her a standing ovation.

This year saw her coming of age on the international circuit. Now confident, self-assured and sophisticated, the girl who had once figuratively hid behind her husband on tours deliberately chose a pair of high heels for a visit to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo in February 1995, so that she would tower over the
diminutive Emperor. ‘Her four-day tour [of Japan] shows every sign of turning into a major step on the road to rehabilitation for the Princess’s public image,’ noted the London
Evening Standard
, an observation matched by what Jephson called the ‘eulogistic terms’ used by the British Ambassador to describe the visit when he reported back to the Foreign Office.

Perhaps the high-water mark of Diana’s overseas work that year came in November during a visit to Argentina, a country where relations were still being mended following the 1982 Falklands conflict. It was a mission that perfectly encapsulated her thinking. While she had no interest in party politics, she saw the need to keep communications open between countries at loggerheads if only to facilitate humanitarian aid.

As Diana was regularly at odds with her own family, had little to do with other residents of the Kensington Palace compound and seemed to be entrenched in a duel to the death with her estranged husband, her aspirations to be a goodwill ambassador appeared to many to be both naive and disingenuous. But the Argentinian President, Carlos Menem did not see it this way. He expressed the utmost delight at her trip. ‘Princess Diana managed to make her way to the heart of my people,’ he declared as he hailed her visit as ‘exceptional, absolutely positive’.

‘I did my best,’ she said modestly, knowing quite well that acquiring the approval of the Palace and Whitehall for that visit, and indeed other overseas trips, had involved much behind-the-scenes work to convince doubtful courtiers and suspicious diplomats of her worth. She had lobbied skilfully to achieve her position, not only maintaining diplomatic links with the Queen but also wooing and wowing politicians, senior media figures and high-ranking civil servants with an overwhelming combination of charm and flattery. As she had on so many occasions, Diana showed that she was shrewder than she looked.

On the home front, her friend David Puttnam joined her for a meeting with Sir Hayden Phillips, who in 1995 was permanent secretary at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, where they spent several hours discussing ways and means of using her position more productively in Britain.

It was in Diana’s role as a humanitarian ambassador, as she instinctively realized, that her true value and appeal lay. In the first months following her separation she joined with the then Overseas Development Minister, Baroness Chalker (‘I look upon her as my favourite niece,’ the minister said), on a visit to Nepal in February 1993 and made it her business to get to know her, staying on friendly terms throughout the term of that government. Besides seeing Chalker, the Princess met with the Prime Minister at least once a year and maintained amicable contact with the then Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who described her as an ‘invaluable national asset’. As he recalled in his memoirs: ‘She looked to me for support in just one matter important to her: namely, her overseas work. I was glad, or more accurately, enchanted, to give it.’