Diana: In Pursuit of Love (31 page)

Diana’s problems were coming not as single spies but as a platoon. Not only was she now fast-tracked on a divorce, but she found her staunchest allies were deserting her. At a crucial moment in the divorce negotiations, in early January 1996 her private secretary Patrick Jephson resigned, ostensibly because of the
Panorama
interview and the Tiggy Legge-Bourke incident. While Jephson’s departure left her bereft for a time, in truth it was remarkable that he had tarried for six years given that his long-term agenda for Diana – as some kind of saintly dowager princess doing good
works from inside Buckingham Palace – fundamentally conflicted with her emerging vision of herself as an independent princess for the world. In fact, he had first considered resignation in 1993, following Diana’s Time and Space speech, and later sounded out David Puttnam about a job in the film industry. When Diana heard of these plans, she refused to speak to Puttnam for several months because of his perceived ‘disloyalty’ and never fully regained her trust in her private secretary. ‘It was the most ridiculous thing,’ commented Puttnam.

It seemed to Diana that the circle of people she could trust was ever decreasing. At this critical time she felt that even her own family were deserting her. In early April, when divorce negotiations were delicately poised, she received a coruscating letter from her brother, accusing her of ‘manipulation and deceit’, adding that he hoped she was getting ‘appropriate and sympathetic treatment’ for her mental problems. While the origins of the row are unknown – it coincided with the revelation in a Sunday newspaper that month that Martin Bashir, the man Spencer had introduced to his sister, had forged documents – it added further pressures on the Princess. (In typical Spencer style, they healed the rift later in the year, the Princess visiting her brother in South Africa when he had his own marital difficulties.)

The question of whom she could trust was always on her mind and in this deteriorating atmosphere of acrimony and mutual suspicion she was at pains to exert more day-to-day direction of her affairs. Her links with her managerial staff became looser and more distant, as she sought to hire outsiders who were untainted by the Palace culture. The downside of this was that they lacked the experience to find a way through the labyrinthine maze that was Palace politics at this critical moment in her life. Additionally, they were hired very much on the Princess’s own terms. For example, when she appointed a media adviser, Jane Atkinson, a few days after Jephson’s departure, it was as a consultant rather than as a member of staff, a signal that the appointment did not carry much weight. Atkinson soon found that the Princess, who relied on her instincts more and more, worked to her own agenda whether it was right or wrong. Often Atkinson’s advice was
ignored, and while she was ostensibly Diana’s official mouthpiece, the Princess, having taken spoonfuls of medicine from the media, was determined to be her own spin doctor, using her secretary, Victoria Mendham, and butler, Paul Burrell, to place stories anonymously in the newspapers.

Since the success of her television interview, Martin Bashir had also joined Diana’s circle, helping to draft her speeches, much to the chagrin of the journalist Richard Kay who had acted as her unofficial mouthpiece for several years. Even when, in April 1996, the
Mail on Sunday
revealed that the bank statements Bashir had shown her were forgeries, the Princess kept faith in him. At the same time, she was regularly in contact with various Fleet Street editors, notably tabloid rivals Stuart Higgins (editor of the
Sun
) and Piers Morgan (editor of the
Daily Mirror
) as she attempted to ride the media bronco.

While this ad-hoc approach inevitably met with mixed results with the media, in other respects a more flexible arrangement served her well. Trust, loyalty and control were her watchwords. In 1995 she personally contacted Princess Anne’s former closeprotection officer, Colin Tebbutt, who had retired from the Metropolitan Police, and asked him if he wanted to work as her bodyguard-cum-driver. ‘Are you still a rebel?’ she asked gaily. ‘Come and join the rebels.’ Their relationship meant that she employed him or a member of his freelance team of drivers as and when she wanted, not because she was obliged to. (Contrary to public belief, when she was out and about in London and elsewhere she was often accompanied by a driver who was also trained in close-protection work.) The retired bodyguard became so close to the Princess that he and her butler Paul Burrell were the only mourners outside her immediate family to be invited to attend her burial on the Althorp estate.

With a small and inexperienced crew Diana entered the fray of divorce negotiations, relying on her own instincts and resources. She now understood that the Queen was, uniquely, as much a party to the divorce negotiations as Prince Charles. Indeed, the game plan of the Princess’s lawyers, Lord Mishcon and Anthony Julius, was to resolve what they called ‘the Queen problem’, namely
Diana’s future title, her continued residence at Kensington Palace and the custody of the children, before negotiating the financial settlement with Prince Charles. A satisfactory outcome of discussions with the Queen would have a considerable impact on ‘the Charles problem’. At a meeting at Buckingham Palace in February 1996 the Queen assured Diana about the custody and care of her boys and indicated that it was ‘unlikely’ that Charles would marry Camilla Parker Bowles. On the vexed issue of her future title, one report says that the Queen suggested that she should be known as ‘Diana, Princess of Wales’, while the Princess herself later told friends that she offered to give up her title because she assumed that that was the wish of the Sovereign.

The issue remained uncertain until the Princess had met with her estranged husband a couple of weeks later. In a note to Diana before the meeting on 28 February, the Prince said that they should let bygones be bygones. ‘Let’s move forward and not look back, and stop upsetting one another,’ he urged. While that may have been the spirit at the start, by the end of their forty-five-minute meeting alone together, the old suspicions crowded in. Diana was determined to issue her own statement before, as she saw it, her husband’s side beat her to it.

She made it clear in her statement in February that it was Prince Charles who had requested the divorce. Not only had she agreed to his demand, but she had decided to give up her HRH title and be known as Diana, Princess of Wales. The Queen and Prince Charles were dismayed at her unilateral action, the Palace making it clear that the Princess’s ‘decisions’ were as yet no more than requests. It seemed that Diana and Charles even disagreed about reaching a final agreement. This was perhaps a suitable epitaph for their marriage.

Irritation turned to anger when it appeared that Diana was briefing the media to the effect that she had been pressured into relinquishing her title. In response the Queen authorized her spokesman to state publicly and categorically that the decision was made by the Princess alone. ‘It is wrong that the Queen or the Prince asked her,’ said Her Majesty’s spokesman. Now everyone knew. It was the Princess that did away with her title, stabbing
herself in the back with her own knife. In many respects, the mixed messages she conveyed about the loss of her title symbolized her ambivalence about saying farewell to her old life, an understandable mixture of disappointment, resignation, sadness and regret for missed opportunities.

While Diana’s title was within the purview of the Queen, discussions about the financial settlement were with the Prince and his lawyers. In the cut-and-thrust of offer and counter-offer, Diana was doubtless eager to explore every avenue to gain the upper hand. Her unsettling conversation with the former orderly George Smith and his allegations of male rape had preyed on her mind. In the spring of 1996, with negotiations delicately poised she decided to see him once more and this time tape his shocking story. While her attempts at being her own private eye were not entirely successful – she had to visit his home in Twickenham for a second meeting when she discovered that her tape machine had not worked – she now had the evidence that she could conceivably use as a bargaining chip if the divorce discussions turned nasty. Whether she was seeing Smith for his or for her benefit is open to debate. Indeed, it is worth noting that it was not until the autumn of 1996, after the divorce had been finalized in late August, that Diana first informed her ex-husband of Smith’s allegations. If she had been truly alarmed she would have alerted him months earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the very fact that the information came through Diana served to devalue the currency of Smith’s claims. Inevitably, Smith was pitied rather than believed; the Prince, his staff – and even Hounslow police, to whom he also reported the alleged offence, in October 1996 – giving no credence to his account. As the Prince’s press secretary, Sandra Henney, observed, ‘All we had was one poor, sad individual making an allegation of assault some years before to the Princess, who, at that time, quite frankly wanted to find ways of embarrassing her husband.’ Indeed, the Prince’s senior protection officer, Chief Inspector Colin Trimming later admitted that he had dismissed the allegations out of hand mainly because Smith’s cause was being championed by the Princess.

Eventually, it was decided that the only sensible course of action was that Smith, who continued to have treatment for his personal
problems at a private clinic, should be let go. In December 1996 he was given a £38,000 settlement. Fiona Shackleton, then the Prince’s solicitor, told an internal household meeting that she had been ordered to make the problem ‘go away’ and confessed that an encounter with the distressed orderly was ‘one of the lowest points in my professional career’.

By the end of the divorce negotiations, the Princess had become a very rich woman in her own right. She might have lost the title of ‘Her Royal Highness’ but she had found £17 million as compensation. As for the title . . . ‘Don’t worry, Mummy. I will give it back to you one day, when I am king,’ William told her.

While Diana now faced the prospect of curtsying to junior royals like her neighbour, Princess Michael of Kent, whom she dubbed ‘The U-Boat Commander’, she was buoyed by a supportive letter from that lady telling her that it would cause her ‘great embarrassment’ if Diana even considered curtsying.

Diana used the loss of her title as a convenient excuse to relinquish her patronage of nearly a hundred charities – although she had in fact written her letters of resignation weeks earlier and kept them in the safe in her offices at St James’s Palace before the decision was finalized in July 1996. She did, however, keep formal affiliations with six charities that reflected her current interests in AIDS, the homeless, sick children, leprosy and, thanks to the last-minute suggestion of her media consultant, the ballet. ‘It will give you something light-hearted to do,’ Jane Atkinson told her.

While this move came as a considerable blow to a number of very deserving charities, realistically it was no great surprise. The Princess had stepped back from her charity work at the end of 1993, and as she was trying to define her new style and life, it was as well that she should make a clean break with the past. What she failed to mention was the fact that she now resented working on behalf of a family she had little sympathy for and even less in common with. It says much about her residual bitterness towards the institution which made her, tried to break her in and finally released her, that while watching a phone-in television debate on the monarchy, one evening in early 1997, Diana made several
anonymous phone votes in favour of Britain abolishing the monarchy and becoming a republic – with her eldest son, heir to the throne, stretched out on the rug beside her.

That said, whatever she thought in private, in public she was scrupulously supportive. She infuriated her friends, the fashion designer Gianni Versace and the singer Elton John, when she belatedly withdrew a foreword she had written in July 1996, just as her divorce was being finalized, for a book of photographs to raise money for the singer’s AIDS Foundation. The book,
Rock and Royalty
, juxtaposed suggestive images with pictures of the royal family, which she felt would offend the Queen.

Doubtless she was concerned too that it could affect the detail of her divorce settlement, which was finalized a few weeks later on 28 August 1996. ‘It’s a tragic end to a wonderful story,’ her brother-in-law, Sir Robert Fellowes, said to her in a phone call of support. Diana was resolutely upbeat. ‘Oh no, it’s the beginning of a new chapter,’ she replied.

It was her son William who helped her write the first page of that new chapter in her life. While the Princess was, by force of circumstance and design, reshaping her office to reflect her distance from the Palace machine, her older son suggested a scheme that practically and symbolically signalled a long goodbye to her old life. In July 1996, just after her divorce settlement was agreed, Prince William had the brainwave that she should sell her royal gowns for charity as a way of saying a farewell to her royal life at the same time as doing some good. It was an inspired idea, capturing his mother’s imagination, and very much in the spirit of her desire to free herself from the ghosts of the past. She chose seventy-nine of her favourite dresses, including the gown she wore at the White House when she danced with John Travolta, and joined in enthusiastically in the seven-month process of cataloguing, photographing and eventually auctioning her eventful royal history, appropriately, in New York, which she considered to be her second home. The auction, conducted by Christie’s, raised $5.7 million for the Royal Marsden Hospital, which specializes in the treatment of cancer, and the AIDS Crisis
Trust – much to the outrage of the virtually bankrupt National AIDS Trust, of which she was still patron.

The whole process was a joyous release, and the Princess responded with the kind of energy and eagerness that summed up the essence of her personality. During that time Christie’s creative director Meredith Etherington-Smith watched the new Diana emerging from the shackles of her royal past. ‘The Princess is very energetic. She doesn’t amble, she swoops and she’s fast,’ she noted. ‘It became quickly apparent that she was very funny.’ As she got to know Diana she began to ‘glimpse the down-to-earth person behind the princessly chimera’, a woman who was not exactly larger than life but ‘somehow brighter, more luminous’. When the Princess suggested that a fresh set of photographs should be taken of her by a new fashion photographer, Etherington-Smith had the idea of using the Peruvian cameraman, Mario Testino. ‘I want you to photograph her as a person, not as a princess, and I want you to capture her fun and her huge energy,’ she told him, an editorial direction that, given how tragically soon the Princess’s life would end, was unwittingly inspired. The photo shoot, in a disused schoolhouse in Battersea, was a memorably creative day, the highlight being an impromptu sashay down a make-believe catwalk by a barefoot Princess and her new best friend, the photographer from Peru. When she looked at the finished work, which eventually went on show at the National Portrait Gallery, Diana said, ‘But these are me. Really me.’