by Penny Junor
Tiggy was never a threat to Diana - a child’s love for its mother is as strong a bond as can be found on this earth, however good or bad she may be. Tiggy was simply an affectionate, effusive, demonstrative, confident, overgrown tomboy, who put a hundred and ten per cent into the job she was paid to do and probably would have done it for nothing. If their father told them to go to bed, they would ignore him or wheedle him round. If Tiggy told them to, they would call her a ‘bossy Old Bat’ but go. But Diana, with her old insecurities, once again felt threatened. She started a rumour that Tiggy and Prince Charles were having an affair, ‘proof’ of which was an innocent, and very public, kiss on the cheek on the ski slopes. It was hardly surprising since he had known Tiggy’s parents for most of her life - and she is the sort of generous, big-hearted girl who gives everyone hugs and kisses.
The hate campaign, which involved a series of disturbing messages left on Tiggy’s answering machine, culminated at the Lanesborough Hotel in Knightsbridge in 1995. It was the combined staff Christmas lunch party, which the Prince and Princess continued to attend together even after their divorce. Tiggy had recently been in hospital for a minor operation, and before everyone sat down, Diana allegedly sidled up to her and whispered in her ear, ‘So sorry about the baby’. The implication that she’d had an abortion was unmistakable. Tiggy reeled in shock and disbelief and Michael Fawcett, the Prince’s valet, took her home, while the party continued in high spirits, ending in a rather drunken crazy-foam fight. No one seemed to be enjoying it more than Diana. A letter from Tiggy’s lawyers arrived four days later, and although she never received the apology she demanded, she let the matter go.
Diana continued to obsess about Tiggy, who in her mind had taken over from Camilla in her ex-husband’s affections. She appeared to have come up with the fanciful idea that Camilla was just a smoke screen and that the real woman he loved and wanted to marry was the nanny. When she discovered that Tiggy (now only working part-time since the boys were at school for much of the year) had helped Charles with the invitations to William’s confirmation, in March 1997, she went through the roof. She threatened not to go to the service herself if ‘that woman’ was going to be there.
What should have been a joyous and spiritually meaningful occasion for Prince William turned out to be another family nightmare.
On arrival at Eton every boy has to sign the school register and state their religious denomination. William was not the first small boy who had to ask his father what denomination he was, although he was the only one who will one day become the church’s Supreme Governor. He had been a regular churchgoer all his life and there were weekly chapel services at Ludgrove, as there were at Eton, but, like most small boys, it was a routine he had never thought too much about. Confirmation was another routine he went into with most of the other Anglicans in his year. They all went to classes with the college chaplain, the Reverend T.D. Mullins, but while they were confirmed in College Chapel, he was confirmed separately at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
Sir Laurens van der Post had died a few months earlier, but all five of William’s remaining godparents were there, as were the Queen, the Queen Mother and both his parents, who, unusually, arrived for the service in one car with the Prince driving, Diana sitting beside him and William and Harry in the back. After the service, the group posed for an official photograph, and Ian Jones, who was attached to the Daily Telegraph and had been photographing the family for nearly ten years, was invited to take it. He was given three minutes, and owes the success of the picture to the Queen. The seating plan was a delicate matter, which he left to the Palace, but when he looked through the lens of his camera he realised that the second row was standing too far back. As he wrestled with the protocol of addressing several Royal Highnesses, a few Your Majesties and many Lords and Ladies, the Queen looked behind her and said, ‘Come on, come on, all move forward or you’ll all be out of focus.’ Then turning to Ian she said, ‘You see, I know a thing or two about photography!’ It had a wonderfully relaxing effect on the whole group and when Ian was finished, the Queen said, ‘Is that it? That’s very good. Snowdon [the professional photographer once married to Princess Margaret] always takes thirty minutes.’ It was the first time in four years that the Wales family had posed together – and it was to be the last.
Tradition dictates that the Archbishop of Canterbury presides over all matters spiritual relating to the Royal Family, but Charles, a deeply spiritual man with views that are as firm about religion as they are about everything else, wanted his old friend and Cambridge contemporary, the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres to conduct the service. Unlike Archbishop Carey, Chartres was a traditionalist who, like Charles, abhorred the ‘happy clappy’ evangelical wing of the Church and stuck firmly to the sixteenth-century Book of Common Prayer.
Tiggy was not among the forty members of the congregation. The Duke of Edinburgh was excusably away on a foreign tour, but another sad and glaring omission was William’s grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd. Diana was going through a phase of not speaking to her mother and had chosen not to invite her; in fact, she was asked to invite forty people and invited no one. When asked why she was not there, Frances had said, ‘I’m not the person to ask. You should ask the offices of William’s parents. I don’t want to talk about it.’ Instead, she placed a notice in the newsletter of Oban Cathedral (she had recently converted to Roman Catholicism), which read, ‘For my grandson William on his confirmation day, love from Granny Frances.’
William’s love for his mother would never be diminished; in his eyes she was and remains the perfect mother; but he was not blind to her behaviour and as a teenager beginning to make his own judgements and to step away from the parental yoke, he must have found some of her antics embarrassing and hard to handle, particularly when they caused evident pain to people he loved. He also disliked profoundly the media attention that she courted.
But when it came to choosing who to invite to the Fourth of June, Eton’s equivalent of speech day, William asked Tiggy and told his parents that he didn’t want them to come. Tiggy arrived with William’s friend, William van Cutsem, bearing a wonderful picnic and plenty of drinks.
When it was over, William went home to his mother for half-term, and found her in tears. She was distraught that he wanted Tiggy to be at the Fourth of June and not her, and as was her way, swiftly let the media know her feelings.
A month later, after the end of the summer term, Diana took William and Harry plus their two PPOs – at her request, she no longer had one herself – on holiday to the South of France. She had been invited by Mohamed Al Fayed, the wealthy Egyptian owner of Harrods department store, to spend some time with him and his family in St Tropez. William wasn’t thrilled to be going back to that part of the world: they had had a disastrous holiday on the French Riviera the previous summer when they had shared a villa with Fergie, the Duchess of York, and his cousins, Princess Beatrice and Eugenie. The paparazzi were everywhere and William spent most of his time hiding indoors.
Al Fayed promised total privacy. He would collect them from Kensington Palace in his private helicopter, take them to his home in Surrey for lunch with his family, then his private Gulfstream 4 jet would take the entire party to Nice, where they would pick up a private yacht for the last leg of the journey to St Tropez. There they would alternate between his sumptuous villa on the coast, which was closely guarded, and his boats, including the newly acquired £14 million yacht, Jonikal.
On the third day Diana was spotted on board Al Fayed’s 1912 teak schooner by a paparazzo who sold his picture to a Sunday tabloid. For the rest of the holiday the whole town was crawling with photographers. Their principal interest was the burgeoning romance between Diana and Al Fayed’s eldest son, Dodi.
Diana was on the rebound. For two years she had been having an affair with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistan-born heart surgeon, whom she’d met while visiting a friend at the Royal Brompton Hospital. She spent time with him at
his small flat in Chelsea and he became a regular visitor to Kensington Palace. Friends say she was very much in love with him and wanted to marry him; she even contemplated converting to Islam and moving to Pakistan. But he ended it just weeks before she went to France. As he told his father, ‘If I married her, our marriage would not last for more than a year. We are culturally so different from each other. She is from Venus and I am from Mars. If it ever happened, it would be like a marriage from two different planets.’
She made a point of introducing him to William, who, like most children of divorced parents, never much enjoyed meeting her lovers. Harry was always more relaxed about it, but William didn’t really want to know. According to Diana’s friend Rosa Monckton, ‘She told Prince William in particular more than most mothers would have told their children. But she had no choice. She wanted her sons to hear the truth from her, about her life and the people she was seeing, and what they meant to her, rather than read a distorted, exaggerated and frequently untrue version in the tabloid press.’
That same tabloid press, it must be remembered, to which Diana herself incessantly fed stories and most of the time, they compliantly ate out of her hand. She was in regular contact with the Daily Mail’s good-looking reporter, Richard Kay, ringing him just hours before she died; and she had invited most of the tabloid editors to lunch at KP where she had been hugely indiscreet. On at least one occasion, William joined them.
However, not even Diana was immune to the British delight in bringing down to size the people they have hoisted onto pedestals. When she went back to St Tropez on her own with Dodi a couple of weeks later and the two were photographed entwined on his father’s yacht, it was too much for the commentators.
‘The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William,’ wrote the late Lynda Lee-Potter, doyenne of columnists, in the Daily Mail. ‘As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense.’
‘Princess Diana’s press relations are now clearly established,’ wrote Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s former press officer, in the Express. ‘Any publicity is good publicity … I’m told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains.’
And Chris Hutchins, in the Sunday Mirror, wrote, ‘Just when Diana began to believe that her current romance with likeable playboy Dodi Fayed had wiped out her past liaisons, a new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! I must remember to take it up with Diana next time we find ourselves on adjacent running machines at our west London gym.’
Charles, like everyone else at court, was very concerned about Diana’s love affair with Dodi. Not because he didn’t want her to be happy but because Mohamed Al Fayed was a controversial figure. Long denied British citizenship, he had tried relentlessly to ingratiate himself with the establishment. What could be a better two-fingered salute to them now than to pair his son off with the former Princess of Wales? Or what better trophy to show off to the world than a photograph of him on his yacht with the Queen’s grandsons? He didn’t keep his delight under a bushel.
William and Harry didn’t enjoy their holiday. They hadn’t particularly taken to Dodi Fayed, nor cared much for the glitzy lifestyle, and they hated the publicity. William and his mother had a terrible row; Harry got into a spat with Mohamed Al Fayed’s youngest son, Omar; and Fayed’s heavies had attempted to give their PPOs brown envelopes stuffed with pound notes. The whole trip had been extremely uncomfortable.
It was with huge relief that they flew back to England to spend the remainder of the holidays with their father, their grandparents and other members of the Royal Family. After a lunch for the Queen Mother’s ninety-seventh birthday at Clarence House, they joined Britannia – a far cry from Jonikal – for her last-ever cruise of the Western Isles before being decommissioned. Then it was Balmoral and the peace of the Highlands and a month doing all the countryside things they loved best.
But first they had to endure a couple of photo calls with their father. Sandy Henney, the Prince’s Press Secretary, had promised editors that she would give them good pictures of the Princes and in return they would not use paparazzi shots. She then had the unenviable task of organising the photos: one for the daily papers, the other for the Sundays. ‘The first one, William did not want to do it,’ she recalls. ‘It’s not true to say that he didn’t like the press after his mother died; he didn’t like them before that. The three of them were at a particular cabin on the banks of the River Dee and they were going to walk down along the shore. William had his dog, Widgeon, the sister of Hercules, Tiggy’s dog. I said, “All you have to do is come down to the shore and walk along. I promise you the press are not going to shout questions – they’re too frightened to (joke). All you have to do is throw a couple of stones in the river, or whatever.”
‘The dog saved the day. William was throwing sticks for him and you could see Harry was egging his brother along. The Prince of Wales is just the master because he’s lived with it all his life, but the reluctance is there. A week later we did one for the Sunday papers at some weir. I was wracking my brains. So I said to Tiggs, “Have you got any ideas?” And she said, “Christ no, let’s go out in one of the jeeps with Harry.” And he was hanging off the back of the jeep like kids do and he said, “I’ve got a couple of ideas. How about doing this one, this one and this one.” I said, “Not sure that would work, Harry.” “I’ve got another idea,” so off we go. The third idea was brilliant, it was all Harry’s. There was a salmon ladder in the river. “Okay Harry, how are you going to make this one work?” “Well, William and I can run down here …” and Tiggy’s up there with a fag, and Harry’s clambering down and I’m thinking, Oh my God, we’re about to lose Number Two, and he came up and he said, “Right that’s what we’re going to do.” And I said, “Well done, Harry, that’s going to work. Now you’ve got to sell it to your father and your brother and bless this kid’s heart; what was he, eleven? Coming up twelve? He briefed the Prince, my boss. I had the radio and we were on the other side of the weir with the press and I said, “Right,” to the police, “get them to get out of the car and walk down and Harry will take it from there”; and you could see him directing his father – you couldn’t hear because of the noise of the weir – but Harry directed the whole thing and it worked. He was brilliant.’
TRAGEDY IN PARIS
The first call alerting the Royal Family to Diana’s accident, less than three weeks after that photo call, came through to Balmoral at one o’clock on the morning of Sunday 31 August 1997. Later that day, William and Harry had been due to fly to London and Tiggy Legge-Bourke had, as the Queen said, ‘by the grace of God,’ just arrived to accompany them. The holidays were almost over and Diana was flying back from Paris to spend the last few days with the boys, as she always did before the start of the new term.
The call came through to Sir Robin Janvrin, then the Queen’s Deputy Private Secretary, who was fast asleep in his house on the estate. It was from the British ambassador in Paris, who had only sketchy news. There had been a car crash. Dodi Fayed, with whom Diana had been travelling, had been killed, although there was no confirmation. Diana had been injured but no one knew how badly. Their car had smashed into the support pillars of a tunnel under the Seine. It had been travelling at high speed while trying to escape a group of paparazzi in pursuit on motorbikes.
Janvrin immediately woke the Queen and the Prince of Wales in their rooms at the Castle. He then phoned the Prince’s Assistant Private Secretary, Nick Archer, who was in another house on the estate, as well as the Queen’s equerry and PPOs. They agreed to meet in the offices at the Castle, where they set up an operations room and manned the phones throughout the night.
Meanwhile, in London, the Prince’s team were being woken and told the news, ironically, by the tabloid press. The first call to Mark Bolland, the Prince’s Deputy Private Secretary, came at the same time as the Embassy was on to Janvri
n. It was from the News of the World. Having had a very good dinner, Bolland let the answering machine take the call and it was only when he heard the voice of Stuart Higgins, then editor of the Sun, saying something about an accident that he picked up the phone. Higgins had the same story as the Embassy. Higgins then rang Sandy Henney, the Prince’s Press Secretary, who had just hosted a 40th birthday dinner for her sister-in-law. His call was closely followed by one from Clive Goodman from the News of the World. Bolland alerted Stephen Lamport, the Prince’s Private Secretary, and within minutes the lines between London and Scotland were buzzing.
Plans were underway to get the Prince on a flight to Paris as soon as possible to visit Diana in hospital, when the Embassy rang at 3.45 with an update. It was left to Robin Janvrin to ring the Prince and let him know his plans would have to change. ‘Sir, I am very sorry to have to tell you, I’ve just had the ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.’ She had sustained terrible chest and head injuries and lost consciousness very soon after the impact and never regained it. She was treated in the wreckage of the Mercedes at the scene for about an hour and was then taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital four miles away, where surgeons fought for a further two hours to save her life, but in vain.
The Prince’s first thought was for the children. Should he wake them or let them sleep and tell them in the morning? He was absolutely dreading it, and didn’t know what to do for the best. The Queen felt strongly that they should be left to sleep and he took her advice and didn’t wake them up until 7.15; but while they were sleeping, he sneaked into the nursery and removed their radios and televisions from their rooms, in case they woke up early and switched one of them on. William had a difficult night’s sleep and woke up many times. He knew, he said, that something awful was going to happen.
