Diana: In Pursuit of Love (22 page)

Her intense feeling that she was on a spiritual journey was further confirmed in 1991 when her masseur Stephen Twigg gave her the book,
Please Understand Me
by David Keirsey. It contained the well-established Myers–Briggs psychology test, which gives an indication of personality types based on temperament. According to the formula there are four basic temperaments: guardian, artisan, rationalist and idealist. There are four sub-sections to each temperament type, so that, for example, the idealist temperament is divided into four other categories: teacher, healer, champion and counsellor. After answering seventy multiple-choice questions, Diana was defined as having an ‘INFP’ temperament, that is to say she was introverted and intuitive, a woman governed by feelings and perception.

Her temperament type, which applies only to one per cent of the population, showed her to be a healer with a capacity for caring not usually found in others. As Stephen Twigg read out the description of the INFP personality type, Diana mentally ticked off many of these qualities as those which she either exhibited or wanted to develop. She was astonished and amazed by its accuracy. ‘This is me, this is me!’ she said.

Keirsey’s analysis reads:

Healers care deeply and passionately about a few special persons or favourite cause, and their fervent aim is to bring peace to the world and wholeness to themselves and their loved ones. They base their self-image on being seen as empathic, benevolent, and authentic. Often enthusiastic, they trust intuition, yearn for romance, seek identity, prize recognition and aspire to the wisdom of the sage.

The popular pseudo-scientific test, based on the theories of Carl Jung, reinforced her own instincts and belief that she had a healing mission in life. It was a significant building block in that it gave her further confidence to reach out, while in the process blurring the border between private emotion and public duty.

The Princess’s first ever solo foreign visit – to Pakistan in October 1991 – gave fuller expression to her developing public and private persona. She was nervous before she went – a friend remembered giving her a Bach Flower Remedy to soothe her – but she had the encouraging words of Felix Lyle ringing in her ears: ‘You need to see the world as your family. You want to go out and make the world a better place.’ That visit had a profound effect on her, as she told James Colthurst. ‘What is so ironic is that when I was supposed to go [the visit had been originally scheduled for 1990], mentally I could have done it but I would have skimmed through it.’ During the trip she met children made homeless by regional conflicts and first became aware of the scourge of landmines, visiting the prosthetic centre in Peshawar, on the turbulent Afghan-Pakistan border, which had been set up by the former TV newsreader and war correspondent Sandy Gall.

A year later, Diana was further inspired following a visit to the hospices in Calcutta in India, run by Mother Teresa and her
dedicated band of nuns. Her visit to the hospice where hundreds of desperately sick people spent their last hours had ‘the greatest impact’ as she realized that it was ‘probably the first time in their lives that someone has cared for them’. In a letter to Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, Diana wrote, ‘The emotions running through the Hospice were very strong and the effect it had on me was how much I wanted and longed to be part of all this on a global scale.’ She planned to take William and Harry to Calcutta to see Mother Teresa’s work so that they could witness at first hand the grinding yoke of poverty that so many laboured under. From 1995 onwards she spoke with increasing frequency about setting up a network of hospices around the globe. ‘Diana really wanted to change the world,’ observed Oonagh. ‘She felt very destined.’

It was perhaps inevitable that during her spiritual journey, her work with the sick and the dying and her vision of her humanitarian mission, Diana should be attracted to a man working in the caring professions. In early September 1995 the Princess received an urgent call from Oonagh, whose husband Joe had suffered a relapse following a heart operation. Her distressed friend asked Diana if she could visit Joseph at the Brompton Hospital where he was in intensive care. The following morning Diana entered Room 125, followed just five minutes later by Joseph’s doctor and the surgeon, Hasnat Khan, with his team. They were concerned about his condition and asked for his wife’s permission to operate once more. As Mr Khan (British surgeons are addressed as ‘Mister’ rather than ‘Doctor’) was discussing Joe’s medical problems with Oonagh, she introduced him to Diana, who was standing quietly in the background. Not really recognizing who she was, he gave her the cursory nod of a man who had been up all night and had little time for social niceties.

Then, still with Joseph’s blood on his medical boots, Khan left the room, leaving one heart beating much faster. Diana was smitten. ‘He’s drop-dead gorgeous,’ were her first words. ‘I would say it was love at first sight,’ Oonagh said. ‘She was so overwhelmed it can only have been a soul encounter.’

It seemed that Diana, seeing herself as an outsider and a healer, devoting her life to helping and comforting others, had found in
Khan a reflection of her own ideals and beliefs. Here was a man, from an ethnic minority – he was born in Pakistan – who dedicated his skills to saving lives. ‘It was the first time in her life that she actually admired the man she was involved with for the work that he did,’ Debbie Frank pointed out. ‘He cared so much for other people – and that resonated very deeply with her.’

It was a relationship that began in disguise – the Princess visiting Joseph Toffolo more often than necessary in order to see Khan – and continued in great secrecy. Diana would combine her visits to patients at the hospital in the autumn of 1995 with assignations with the new man in her life. She visited the hospital casually dressed in jeans and a baseball cap, and sat with critically ill patients, some of whom were just coming round from surgery. Eventually the Princess’s cover was blown, when she was photographed one night in November 1995 by paparazzi who were acting on a tip-off. To pre-empt the inevitable press stories, Diana took matters into her own hands, borrowing a mobile phone from one of the photographers. ‘There are hundreds of patients who are there without their own loved ones and they need a human presence. I really love helping, I seem to draw strength from them,’ she told an astonished Clive Goodman, at that time the
News of the World
’s royal correspondent, after the photographers who snatched her picture had identified themselves as working for that particular Sunday newspaper.

With this clever move, which made a virtue of her visits to the hospital while disguising her ulterior motive, Diana managed to put the media off the scent – at least for a while – and for the most part her two-year affair with Hasnat Khan was conducted in conditions of complete concealment, to the extent that Diana took to wearing some form of disguise whenever they ventured out together.

She would use a staff car and take circuitous routes to meet her new lover, often disguised in a wig designed by her hairdresser, Sam McKnight; sometimes she would wear sunglasses or glasses with plain lenses. The woman who had been entertained in the White House and the Palace of Versailles now dined with her boyfriend in an anonymous fish-and-chip shop near his flat in
Chelsea or, more frequently, at Kensington Palace. In the autumn of 1995, with the fallout from her relationship with England rugby captain Will Carling still reverberating, secrecy was essential not only to protect their privacy but also so that their friendship would not affect her delicate marital status. On one occasion, Diana climbed out of a ground-floor window when she was visiting Khan at Harefield Hospital, to the west of London, to avoid being seen. When he secretly visited her at Kensington Palace, Diana’s butler was entrusted with the task of smuggling him into her apartment.

As with her other relationships, Diana threw herself into his life and interests. Certainly, as with her other romances, she made a particular point of being friendly with his family. Within the first few months of their romance she and Hasnat Khan had had dinner with his uncle Omar and his British wife Jane at their home in Stratford-upon-Avon. When she visited Pakistan, she made a point of going to see his parents.

Just as she had followed the activities and interests of James Hewitt, Oliver Hoare and Will Carling, the Princess now turned her attention to human anatomy, in particular the heart, so that she would more clearly understand Khan’s work. For a woman who religiously watched the hospital soap
Casualty
every Saturday night and spent her life visiting hospital patients, her study of
Gray’s Anatomy
was no real hardship – she passed an impromptu ‘exam’ conducted by a friend after just a few days’ study. The workings of her own heart were rather more complex and contradictory.

At Kensington Palace the sound of choral music was replaced by the husky voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong as Diana got to grips with Khan’s love of jazz, even accompanying him, in disguise, to Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho, where she had the vicarious thrill of standing in line without being recognized. While she had already taken an interest in Eastern culture and religion, works on the Koran joined the small mountain of books in what she called her ‘knowledge corner’ in her sitting room, while her wardrobe was augmented by more than half a dozen bright silk shalwar kameez, the tunic and trouser ensembles worn by Muslim
women. While he was serious about his own caring mission, Hasnat Khan was in many respects an incongruous suitor, being overweight, a heavy smoker and a beer drinker, with only a surgeon’s salary to sustain him. For a woman who had passed muster as the bride of the future king because she was white, aristocratic and Protestant, the fact that she was seriously dating a Muslim whose family lived in Pakistan was a further sign of how far this young woman, who saw herself as a rebel, had travelled on her personal journey. ‘It was a sign of her devotion,’ noted Debbie Frank. ‘The lenience of a woman in love.’

Diana’s love affairs in the past had been about testing her own boundaries, enjoying the thrill and pain of romance without making the ultimate commitment; now she talked about crossing religious and racial borders by making a life with her Pakistani lover. The marriage of her friend Jemima Goldsmith, the beautiful daughter of Sir James and Lady Annabel Goldsmith, to the former Pakistani cricket captain and aspiring politician, Imran Khan, gave Diana a romantic signpost and the hope that one day she could follow a similar path. What particularly impressed Imran Khan about Diana was that she appeared quite unaffected by religion, nationality or colour: ‘She seemed to be above all that. It was this combination of ingredients that made her such a great figure.’

Thus, by the autumn of 1995 her life, if not perfect, had its share of excitements and a sense of opportunity and chance of fulfilment that had eluded her for much of her adult life. For so long confused, isolated and directionless, Diana’s life was beginning to make sense. Such was her popularity that she was edging towards her ambition of being made a roving ambassador, whatever the Palace or politicians may have wanted. Over and over again she had proved that her credentials were impeccable, however many obstacles were placed in her way. More than that, she was earning a grudging respect even among her enemies – a recognition that she had the courage, chutzpah and charisma to take on a significant and substantial role in national affairs. While she strode on towards the sunlit uplands, her husband was lost in the mists, seen as self-indulgent, introspective and lacking in judgement. Not only was she exploring and testing her personal
limits, whether spiritual or political, but, by the autumn of 1995, she believed that she had found the true love of her life.

Within a few short months her reputation would be savaged and her position as royal Princess become perilous. The Queen’s patience with her errant daughter-in-law would be exhausted, prompting her to write formally to Diana advocating divorce. At the same time, any remaining sympathy felt by courtiers was to evaporate, while government ministers would shake their heads in dismay at what was seen as a wilful act of self-destruction. What provoked this hostile response was her hour-long interview on the BBC’s current-affairs programme,
Panorama
, in November 1995. The show, watched by half the British population, was both her soap box and her snare, the Princess left swinging in the wind by an unforgiving royal family, infuriated by her airing of yet more dirty linen in public, and an indignant Establishment who felt she had betrayed their faith in her.

Both her supporters and her critics scratched their heads in bewilderment. For the last year the Princess had conquered all before her, her standing with the public and the powers-that-be never higher. She was focused and in charge. Her timing could not have been worse. So why did she put the noose round her neck?

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN