by Penny Junor
There was much discussion about how Charles was going to get to Paris to bring home Diana’s body. She was no longer a member of the Royal Family, therefore it was not automatic that a plane of the Queen’s Flight should be made available. ‘What would you rather, Ma’am,’ asked Robin Janvrin, ‘that she come back in a Harrods’ van?’ That clinched it: ‘Operation Overlord’ went into action, a plan that had been in existence for years but never previously needed – the return of a body of a member of the Royal Family to London. There was a BAe146 plane earmarked for the purpose, which could be airborne at short notice from RAF Northolt.
At 10 a.m. it was in the air with the Prince’s London team – Lamport, Bolland and Henney – on its way to Aberdeen, via RAF Wittering in Rutland, where it collected Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who lived nearby, and Lady Jane Fellowes. Charles had telephoned Robert Fellowes, who had broken the news to Diana’s sisters, and they both wanted to travel with him.
He decided that this was not a trip for the children and so they stayed at Balmoral with Tiggy. When he saw their mother’s body, laid out in a coffin which had been flown to Paris earlier in the day, as part of Operation Overlord, he was glad he’d left them behind; it would have been too distressing for them. Paul Burrell, Diana’s remaining butler, had flown out earlier and dressed her but her head had been badly damaged in the crash and her face was distorted.
Diana’s sisters and Charles stayed with the body for seven minutes. The girls left sobbing; Charles, his eyes red and his face racked with pain, stopped for a moment to compose himself, then, as someone watching remarked, ‘Went from human being to Windsor’, as nearly fifty years of training ensured he would. A small crowd was waiting in the corridor, most of them hospital staff whose hands he shook and thanked sincerely for everything they had done. And when he heard that the parents of the sole survivor of the crash, Al Fayed’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, were at the hospital, he immediately said he must talk to them.
On the flight home, with the coffin draped in the maroon and yellow of the Royal Standard, the Prince wanted to know what arrangements had been made at the other end. It had been an emotional and moving drive through Paris where thousands of people thronged the streets, their heads bowed in silence. He was told who would be among the welcoming committee at Northolt, which included Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, and that the Princess would be taken to the mortuary in Fulham, commonly used by the Royal Coroner.
The Prince put his foot down. ‘Who decided that?’ he said. ‘Nobody asked me. Diana is going to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Sort it. I don’t care who has made this decision. She is going to the Chapel Royal.’
It was sorted out in a series of heated telephone conversations from the plane, and when they touched down at Northolt the rest followed seamlessly. Diana’s sisters travelled with the body to the Chapel Royal and Charles took a flight back to Balmoral to be with William and Harry.
It was only as the hearse and its entourage crawled down the A40 and into west London that the enormity of what had happened began to dawn on the Palace staff. The motorway, the bridges and embankment – and when those ran out, the roads and pavements – were full of cars and people who had come to watch and weep as Diana’s coffin passed by. Tributes had started pouring in from all over the world, and flowers were being laid at the gate of every building with which Diana was associated.
This, they realised, was going to be unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
THE WEEK THE COUNTRY WAITED
How the Prince of Wales broke the news to his sons and how they reacted will remain between the three of them, though the memory of it will no doubt haunt him until the day he dies. Suffice to say that in a lifetime spent comforting the bereaved and being steadfast in the face of tragedy, nothing could have come close to the pain of that moment. Any parent who has ever had to tell their unsuspecting children that the woman who gave them life will never be coming home will share his pain. Just as any child who has been sat down by a red-eyed, tear-stained father and told their mother is dead will identify with William and Harry. The gut-wrenching shock, the terror, the disbelief, the impossible concept that the mother they adore will never again light up the room with her laughter, never again hold her arms wide for a reassuring hug, never again ruffle their hair … will never again be there is too much to absorb.
And for Charles too. For all the difficulties and exasperation and anger he sometimes felt towards his ex-wife, she was the mother of his children and as such he had always loved her and continued to worry about her. They had even started talking civilly again since their divorce, and she had been much more reasonable. She was always in his prayers. His faith runs deep and has always been an important part of his make-up. He will have drawn on it on that terrible day and no doubt used it to comfort his children. He firmly believes in life after death and sees death as ‘the next great journey in our existence’; a mystery and a painful parting but not something to fear. As he once said at a Macmillan Fund anniversary, ‘The seasons of the year provided for our ancestors a lesson which could not be ignored; that life is surely followed by death, but also that death can be seen as a doorway to renewed life. In Christianity the message is seen in the mystery of resurrection, and in the picture of Christ as a seed dying in the ground in order to produce the new life that supplies bread, and sustenance.’
Diana also believed in life after death. She frequently consulted mediums and clairvoyants; and she was quite certain that her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, Lady Spencer, who had died in 1972 when Diana was a child, kept guard over her in the spirit world.
William, newly confirmed, will also have had his faith to draw on; he too, will have understood that life on earth is just the beginning and that death is no more than a temporary separation from those we love. But no amount of belief can take away the agony of loss, the hollowness, the numbness, the inevitable rewind of last conversations, last thoughts, last memories, the what ifs, the words left unsaid and the guilt.
That morning at Balmoral everyone’s focus was on William and Harry and how best to help them get through the day and handle their feelings of loss. They were surrounded by a loving and supportive and probably rather inspirational group of people and both boys were very close to their grandparents. Their grandmother has always found grief difficult to handle, but the Duke of Edinburgh will have been a pillar of strength to them both. His early life was punctuated by loss. By the age of seventeen his mother had been admitted to a mental asylum, his father had virtually disappeared from his life, one of his sisters and her entire family had been killed in a plane crash and his guardian and favourite uncle had died of cancer. For all his bluff exterior, he understood grief.
William said he wanted to go to church ‘to talk to Mummy’, and Harry and he were as one, so the Queen took the boys and the rest of the family to the little kirk at Crathie, where she is a regular Sunday morning worshipper while at Balmoral. For those who have been brought up with religion in their lives, as they all had, there is something deeply comforting in the traditional ritual and language of a church service.
The secular media didn’t see it that way. They were outraged that Diana’s children should have been taken to church – one newspaper called it a public relations exercise – and they were even more outraged that the minister should have made no mention of the Princess in his prayers. And they blamed the Queen for it. The Reverend Robert Sloan, rightly or wrongly, had decided it might be less upsetting for Diana’s sons if he didn’t mention her name. ‘My thinking,’ he told reporters, ‘was that the children had been wakened just a few hours before and told of their mother’s death.’ What irked the media the most was that not one member of the Royal Family displayed so much as a wobbling chin on their outing to church.
Diana’s death was perceived as a national tragedy and in a week that saw the most unprecedented (and to some, entirely incomprehensible) outpouring of public grief, the nation, encour
aged by the media, wanted to see and hear from the Queen. At every other national disaster, she or a member of her family were the first to visit, the first to offer words of commiseration and comfort, and to be present alongside ordinary people, doing what royals do best, spearheading national sentiment, representing the nation to itself. And yet, in this greatest hour of need, there was no sign of them. And there was no indication that they were as grief-stricken as the rest of the country. In the remoteness of the Scottish Highlands, wrapped up in the needs of two fragile young boys, and pulling together as a family, their antennae for the mood elsewhere in the country were not functioning as they normally do. The Queen, rationally but mistakenly, viewed it as a private tragedy and decided her priority was her grandsons. And in human terms, who is to say she was wrong?
The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, got it right. That Sunday morning he paid a moving tribute to Diana that entirely caught the mood of the nation. His voice cracking with emotion he said, ‘I feel like everyone else in this country. I am utterly devastated. We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief. It is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world, with joy and with comfort. She was the people’s Princess and that is how she will remain in our hearts and memories for ever.’
Whatever the psychological and sociological explanations for the nation’s reaction to Diana’s death might be, there was not only grief but also anger on the streets of London. Some of it was directed at the tabloid press, for paying huge sums of money for paparazzi photographs (conveniently forgetting that if the tabloid-reading public didn’t buy the tabloids there would be no paparazzi). Some of the anger was directed at the Royal Family, so clearly out of touch and anachronistic in modern Britain; and the rest was directed at Charles. One of his first thoughts on hearing the news of Diana’s death was that he would be blamed, and he was right. Had he loved her instead of his mistress, they said, this would never have happened. They would still have been married and Diana would never have been racing through the streets of Paris with Dodi Fayed. Yet at the same time others were leaving tributes to the lovers outside Kensington Palace. ‘To Diana and Dodi, together for ever’ was a common message.
While William and Harry had been with their father, Diana had gone back to the South of France and she and Dodi had spent the previous nine days on Jonikal. The photographs of them entwined were what had led the columnists in London to sharpen their pens. On their way back to London, they had stopped in Paris for the night, where Dodi’s father owned the Ritz hotel, and also an apartment. The accident happened as they were being driven from one to the other. In an attempt to fool the paparazzi, a decoy car had sped away from the front entrance of the hotel, while Dodi and Diana left from the back, but they were soon spotted and a chase ensued.
No blame was ever levelled at Dodi, or even his father, who had provided the car. It was his employee, Henri Paul, the chauffeur, who had been driving well over the speed limit when he hit the Alma underpass. None of them had been wearing seat belts, and Paul was killed at the wheel. An eighteen-month French judicial investigation concluded that it was he – and not the paparazzi – who was to blame for the crash. He had a cocktail of alcohol, anti-depressants and traces of a tranquillising anti-psychotic drug in his blood and should never have been behind the wheel of a car that night.
In the meantime Mohamed Al Fayed did nothing to stop rumours that the pair were about to announce their engagement – and there were (false) rumours that Diana was pregnant. He also shared his own private theory about the crash with the media. It was, he suggested, a conspiracy cooked up by the Duke of Edinburgh and the British security services to assassinate Diana so that she would not marry Dodi, because such a marriage would have given William, second in line to the throne, a Muslim stepfather. All these allegations and more would be dealt with in subsequent enquiries and inquests.
But for the time being, there was a funeral to be arranged and a public relations disaster to be averted, one which threatened the very existence of the monarchy.
YOU CAN’T READ ABOUT THIS
The family was getting news of the mood in London, and advice from every quarter – politicians, friends, historians and VIPs from all over the world – and the newspapers were screaming at them to come back to the capital: ‘They’re up in bloody Scotland’ was the common cry, or ‘They should be here. Those children should be here.’ The absence of a flag flying at Buckingham Palace became another focus for anger. While flags were flying at half mast all over the country, at the Queen’s official London residence there was nothing; just mountains of flowers piling up outside. ‘Show us you care,’ demanded the Express. ‘Your subjects are suffering, speak to us Ma’am,’ said the Mirror. ‘Where is our Queen? Where is her flag?’ shouted the Sun.
It was a problem of protocol. The only flag that flies at Buckingham Palace is the Royal Standard and only then when the sovereign is in residence, and it never flies at half mast because, technically, the sovereign is never dead: the instant one dies, another succeeds – ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’
The people didn’t give a damn about protocol. They wanted to see some feeling, some indication that the Royal Family was affected by the death of the Princess. There had been none, and this most elementary of gestures, the lowering of a flag, had not been observed. To the press and to the nation this embodied everything that was irrelevant and out of touch about the monarchy in the 1990s, and stood in stark contrast to the warmth and compassion of the Princess. It caused a furious row internally and in the heat of the moment it was suggested that Sir Robert Fellowes might ‘impale himself on his own flag staff’. Eventually, the Queen was persuaded and on the Thursday a Union flag was raised to half mast.
While the headlines ranted and the leaders thundered, entire forests were devoted to the saintliness of the Princess, and for those papers that had been attacking her just days before for her antics in the Mediterranean, it involved a dramatic U-turn. ‘She was the butterfly who shone with the light of glamour which illuminated all our lives’, said the Express; ‘A comet streaked across the sky of public life and entranced the world’, said the Times, and the Daily Mail called her ‘A gem of purest ray serene.’
The Prince of Wales, via Stephen Lamport, was getting graphic updates on what was happening on the streets from Sandy Henney, his Press Secretary. ‘You can’t read about this,’ she said, ‘you can’t even see it on television. There is real hatred building up here, and the public is incensed by your silence.’ But, although some were urging him to make a statement, Charles recognised that he was not the one to take the lead. On the Tuesday, the Daily Mail headline read, ‘Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt’, printed above a photograph of him taken some months before. The Royal Family was appalled and from that morning onwards they stopped putting the newspapers out on display at the Castle. He knew that any public expression of sadness from him would be a red rag to a bull, but as the days went by and the anger mounted, and his mother’s advisers still saw no need to put on a public display of emotion, he became more forceful.
He also realised that the boys needed to be prepared for what awaited them when they went back to London – the mountains of flowers and tributes, the crowds, the emotion – and asked Sandy to come up to Balmoral to speak to them, as he often did, when there was something confrontational or difficult to impart. A week or so before, he had asked her up to Birkhall, the Queen Mother’s home on the Balmoral estate, where Charles himself often stayed, to speak to William.
The Prince did not, however, ask Sandy to Balmoral in order to talk the boys into walking behind the cortège at the funeral, as Alastair Campbell claimed in his diaries, The Blair Years. The Prime Minister’s former spin doctor believes that the Prince was frightened that if he walked without William, he might be attacked by members of the public. His theory is that
Sandy persuaded the Princes that their mother would have wanted them to do it. Initially, he said, William’s hatred of the media was so great that he refused to talk to anyone about taking part in the funeral, and saw walking as appeasing the media.
‘At no time,’ Sandy says, ‘was there ever a question of using the boys as a barrier against possible reaction from the public towards my boss. But there was genuine concern as to what reaction the public might have to the Prince of Wales – and indeed any member of the Royal Family from a highly emotionally (some may say irrationally) charged public. The boys talked about walking with the cortège to close members of their family and only those they trusted, and no one they talked to at that time would ever speak to a third party about what the children said.’ I think Mr Campbell might be that third party she’s referring to.
Sandy needed to explain to the boys the extraordinary scenes they could expect to see on the streets of London. ‘I was going up and down these queues of people [waiting to sign the books of condolence at St James’s Palace],’ she remembers, ‘and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, the things they were saying about the Queen and the Duke and the Prince. It was verging on hatred for this family.’ She was as loyal an advocate of the institution of monarchy as you could hope to find and like most of the people who have worked for the Prince of Wales, she was devoted to him and passionate about his children.
She took them aside and said, ‘Mummy’s death has had the most amazing impact on people. They are really sad because they loved her very, very much and they miss her, and when you go down to London you will see something you will never, ever, see again and it may come as a bit of a shock. But everything you will see is because the public thought so much of your mummy, it is the sign of their grief for your loss. We want you to know about it so you will be ready for it.’ She asked if they wanted to ask any questions and there were many but they were all to do with why she was telling them this, why people were behaving in this way. Harry was the one with the curiosity; William was very quiet and contained.
