That incident actually caused a blistering row between Tiggy and her normally supportive employer, Prince Charles. Although hurt, she soon recovered whereas Harry was angry at his father for ‘picking on her’ and refused to talk to him for days.
Under Tiggy’s free-spirited guidance, Harry became even louder and more self-confident while William retreated further into his shell. Harry and Tiggy would have pillow fights and engage in mock battles on the sofa. This woman was fun and despite his young age Harry clearly had a crush on her. He did everything he could to impress Tiggy which was just what Charles had wished for when he told her that he wanted them to enjoy their young lives in a way that he had never been allowed to, although he did warn her to be cautious when anyone likely to report back to Diana was around.
And what a sound piece of advice that turned out to be for when she saw, or at least thought, that she was losing her sons – especially Harry – to the boisterous, fun-loving, if slightly unorthodox, Sloane, Diana reportedly composed a set of rules: ‘Miss Legge-Bourke will not spend unnecessary time in the children’s rooms. She may not read to them at night, nor supervise their bath time or bedtime. She is to carry out a secretarial role in the arrangement of their time with their father [and] that is all.’ In another she instructed: ‘Miss Legge-Bourke is to stay in the background on any occasion when the boys are seen in public. She is neither to be seen with them in the same car, nor to be photographed close to them.’ Apparently Charles told Tiggy to ignore the eccentric instructions.
But it was that ski-slope kiss in 1995 that festered in Diana. She became convinced that the new royal employee was having an affair with the man she was still married to – a view confirmed in her mind when she saw Tiggy wearing a diamond fleur-de-lis brooch of the kind that Charles had given to previous girlfriends. Diana had one herself. Things came to a head at the Christmas party for St James’s Palace staff in the Lanesborough on Hyde Park Corner. Flushed with the success of a trip to New York where she had received the Humanitarian of the Year award from the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation and made a triumphant speech declaring ‘Today is the day of compassion’, she bore down on Tiggy and said in as sarcastic a voice as anyone can remember her ever using: ‘Hello Tiggy, how are you? So sorry to hear about the baby.’ The insulted nanny fled the room in tears and returned to the safety of Kensington Palace where she could be with Harry and William.
The implication that Tiggy – who Diana referred to as ‘the woman who looks like a man’ – had aborted a child fathered by the heir to the throne was a serious sign that Diana was losing it. As for Tiggy, the following morning she decided she had had enough: she instructed libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck to write to the Princess’s law firm, Mishcon de Reya, accusing her of circulating ‘malicious lies which are a gross reflection on our client’s moral character’. The Queen’s private secretary Robert Fellowes wrote to Diana telling her that the allegations against Tiggy were completely unfounded – on the date of the implied abortion the nanny was at Highgrove looking after Harry who, despite his tender years, could have been called as a witness against his mother had the case gone to court. Diana was furious but she wasted no time in settling, telling one close to her, ‘The bitch can have all the money she wants, but never my sons. I gave birth to them, they belong to me.’ For his part, Charles took steps to ensure that Olga Powell was back in overall control and despite her stern nature and their affection for Tiggy, Harry and William were glad that that war at least was over. The row between people they were both so fond of had disturbed them deeply.
Harry, however, was particularly upset by another very public episode. With ever increasing paranoia, Diana realised that the family now thought of her as the enemy and Tiggy, the woman she regarded as her own most bitter rival, as a friend. Despite settling with the nanny, her façade was beginning to crack and, far from seeing her as an enemy, the Queen described Diana to a regular companion as ‘not a well woman’. Her Majesty’s insight had already been proved when just five days after the twelfth anniversary of her wedding, Diana had taken Harry and William to see Jurassic Park. When photographer Keith Butler snapped their picture as the trio left the Empire cinema in Leicester Square, she dashed up to him and, standing on tiptoe to confront the six-foot-three-inch-tall cameraman, screamed: ‘You make my life hell.’ Passers-by gazed in amazement at the sight of the Princess of Wales, fetchingly dressed in black blazer and silk trousers, brushing tears from her eyes as she stormed off down the street ahead of her sons and their detectives. The mask had slipped. Butler, one of the paparazzi’s shrewdest operators, had crossed the line; he admitted later that ‘she was clearly very distressed’, but evidently failed to recognise that he was the cause of her vexation that night.
Diana retreated to Floors Castle, the Scottish home of the Duke of Roxburghe, where her old friend Willie van Straubenzee was staying. When the press followed, her fury returned. Once the Queen learned about the Leicester Square incident and the fact that Harry had burst into tears and even screamed at the sight of his mother’s anger, she telephoned Diana and insisted that she return and seek help for her public display of anger, however righteous it was. The two women had kept each other at arm’s length since Diana spent what turned out to be an innocent night at Gatley Park, the home of the Lord Lieutenant of Hereford and Worcester, Thomas Dunne and his wife Henrietta. The Dunnes had not been in residence as they were away shooting, but their son Philip was at home. And Diana, although separated, was still very much married to Charles, who had his reservations about Diana’s apparent attraction to the dark and handsome merchant banker. Her Majesty had a long memory and recalled previous incidents reported to her by royal protection officers, including the time Diana disappeared from Highgrove for an entire weekend and couldn’t be traced. The monarch had been particularly disturbed by reports that during an official visit to Portugal with Charles she had flirted with both Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva and President Mário Soares.
During earlier disagreements between the Queen and Diana – the latter of whom had the previous year threatened to walk out once Harry started boarding school – Diana had stood her ground but this time she knew Her Majesty would not tolerate any argument. The Queen more or less ordered Diana to seek further therapy. The Princess obeyed and for a time it appeared to work. Encouraged by her American pal, Lana Marks, she set about an amazing PR operation to demonstrate to the world that she was not the broken woman who had caused such a much-publicised scene in public, but one very much in charge of her life in general and her sons in particular. She took Harry and William, along with Mrs Powell, on holiday to Nevis, an exotic island in the eastern Caribbean, one of the sixteen sovereign states that make up the Commonwealth to which both boys are heirs to the throne.
It was Ken Wharfe who had suggested Nevis after he had ruled out her first choice, drug-swamped Jamaica, as being too high a security risk. On a reconnaissance visit to Nevis he had discovered the Montpelier Plantation Inn owned by an English couple, James and Celia Milnes-Gaskell. The first few days of the holiday were idyllic: intricate arrangements had been made to ensure that no one – particularly the press – knew where the Princess and her princes had gone and they were able to sunbathe and swim from a deserted beach watched over by Wharfe and three other Scotland Yard policemen, each armed with a Glock self-loading pistol. The Milnes-Gaskells reckon it was one of the happiest times in Diana’s life, a time when she strongly re-bonded with her sons.
Harry, nevertheless, preferred to spend as much time as he could at the nearby (and larger, much to Diana’s annoyance) beach house occupied by their police protectors. Encouraged by them to find diversions from what he considered to be his mother’s girly company, he was the one who came up with the idea of the Nevin Giant Toad Derby. With the help of his brother and the Milnes-Gaskell children he managed to capture a dozen of the creatures and then, having selected the most athletic-looking toad for himself, invited the adults to place bets on the others. H
e made quite a few dollars that day and it gave him an entrepreneurial sense that continued to develop and, in later years, would influence his choice of friends.
Soon after her return Diana took Harry and William to Thorpe Park, the adventure centre in Surrey to which she had introduced them two summers earlier as her shaky marriage continued its helter-skelter descent. But on this later occasion she was a changed woman: Daredevil Di, wet hair slicked back as she thundered down the rides in black trousers, leather jacket and suede ankle boots. ‘This,’ she said ‘is what the boys need – especially my danger-loving Harry!’ While other pleasure-seekers had been astonished to find the royal trio in their midst, the half-dozen freelance photographers and a television crew showed no such surprise, having been tipped off in advance. Harry, clad in jeans and bomber jacket waved to them as he shot down Thunder River getting soaked in the process. One photographer, particularly familiar with the trio, said it had been made clear to him that this was a major PR exercise:
I don’t want to risk money-in-the-bank jobs by ratting on my source. Let’s just say no one from Thorpe Park had told me they would be there and Diana wasn’t surprised to see me and the other snappers. Harry seemed to know exactly what it was all about and played his part to perfection.
The PR operation was far from over: the following day Diana took her sons to lunch in Knightsbridge at San Lorenzo on Beauchamp Place, a short thoroughfare of bijoux shops in Knightsbridge where her friends, the Italian owners Mara and Lorenzo Berni, made her feel nothing if not wanted, needed and loved, and once again the forewarned paparazzi were there in force. Despite the mischievous spring in her step as she approached the restaurant, Diana, dressed in a figure-hugging navy blue suit with a skirt short enough to be called eye-catching, paused at the doorway with her sons, both smartly dressed in jackets and ties. All three displayed broad smiles for the photographers (although, according to the waiter who served them, Harry’s briefly turned to a frown when he was told that fish fingers were not on the menu). Diana had clutched the hand of each son as she descended the nine stairs to the basement level, aware that all eyes were on her. As she made her way to her usual table beneath the potted palms she made a point of pausing to greet those she knew and to make sure Harry and William cheerily acknowledged them too – especially the photographer Terry O’Neill, of whom she was particularly fond: ‘How are you today, Terry? Did you enjoy the motor racing?’ – a reference to their last encounter at Donnington Park a few days earlier. She and the boys were warmly greeted by Mara. On this one occasion the trusted owner knew not to hand her the personal mail that Diana had regularly delivered to the restaurant – she did not trust the Palace postal system with intensely private items. Lana Marks had done her work well. The year 1993 may have been Her Majesty’s annus horribilis II (Andrew, her favourite son had acrimoniously separated from his wife Sarah Ferguson) but Diana was determined to make it a recovery year for herself, a year in which she would happily withdraw from public life, declaring, ‘Being a princess isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’
It had been four months since the Prime Minister announced the official separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and his suggestion that Diana could still rule as queen since one day her son would be king had disappeared into the mists of antiquity. But Diana knew that, barring a divorce, there was still a possibility of it happening. Queenship was something she had been prepared to sacrifice to gain her freedom from the nightmarish life she had lived as a royal. As Mara Berni was to say later, ‘Charles did choose right. He chose the perfect future queen. The trouble was that, unlike other royal wives, Diana was not prepared to look the other way while he two-timed her. I feel so sad for those boys, especially Harry who in my opinion is the more vulnerable of the two.’
Diana had declared, ‘I’m just myself.’ That was a statement that earned her brownie points from many but was not enough to silence her critics once the Squidgy tapes of her conversation with Gilbey, with whom she had frequently sat at the same San Lorenzo restaurant table, had exploded the convenient myth of ‘Shy Di’. Nevertheless she was carefully changing every aspect of her life which failed to comply with her new image, even to the point of having speech therapy so that she would sound, as well as appear, more confident. Harry said to her on one occasion, ‘Why are you talking like that?’ Even at his tender age he had noticed that the whining accent on the Squidgygate tape – heard by millions via a playback telephone line The Sun had helpfully installed – was in the process of disappearing. She didn’t tell him that she had been receiving the speech therapy as part of the improvement agenda. The new accent, a cross between Howards’ Way and Howards End, added a modern, composed touch to her outwardly calm exterior.
The difference in her was as clear to see as it was to hear and the San Lorenzo diners made an adequate preview audience for yet another facet of her performance as a liberated woman. ‘She took everyone’s breath away,’ says Terry O’Neill. ‘She looked so beautiful; she looked a million dollars, she was radiant – and she knew it.’ Under the watchful eye of Ken Wharfe – who had been reinstated at Diana’s insistence after being removed when it was established that he had set up rendezvous between her and Gilbey – her sons, the perfect extras for such an occasion, ate a hearty lunch aware that their mother was as happy as they had ever seen her. It was the perfect way to spread the word that, whatever else was wrong with the Royal Family, Diana was in sparkling form and Harry and William were the loves of her life.
After the jolly lunch the young princes flew to Balmoral to join their father for what remained of the Easter holiday, leaving Diana to begin a new chapter in her social life. It might have been the end of her royal life but for her sons it was just the beginning of theirs. In August 1995, at the age of just ten, Harry undertook his first official engagement attending the fiftieth anniversary of VJ Day at the Cenotaph, proudly saluting officers in the military parade. It was one of the most important ceremonies in the royal agenda and his father had made him acutely aware of Lord Mountbatten’s part in it, to the extent that Harry even passed on to a school chum Charles’s disgust that President Clinton had referred to it as ‘The End of the Pacific War’. How proud Mountbatten would have been of this boy.
Harry was so excited about the prospect of his role in the ceremony and so impressed with the event when it happened that he paid no attention to a new friend who had emerged in his mother’s life – the eminent heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan, who might have become his stepfather had circumstances transpired otherwise. Diana originally met Khan in Australia in 1989 but it was six years later that she fell for him during a chance encounter in a lift at the Brompton Hospital where she was visiting a sick friend. As they stepped away from the lift she told her companion Susie Kassem, a retired magistrate and hospital visitor, that she thought he was ‘drop dead gorgeous’. On several occasions she tried to phone him but when he did not take her calls she began to write to him at the hospital and, although a modest man who shunned the limelight, he finally agreed to meet her. Paul Burrell would be sent to pick him up from The Anglesea Arms, a pub close to the hospital, and transport him in the boot of his car to Diana’s quarters at Kensington Palace.
It was the beginning of the end of the Princess’s affair with James Hewitt and Harry was not pleased. Hewitt was a soldier, Hewitt was fun. The Pakistani doctor was pleasant and polite but he was no brave warrior, no role model. Aware that Khan did not meet with her younger son’s approval, Diana played it low key. He and William were not invited downstairs to the Kentucky Fried Chicken meals she sent out for and she certainly did not tell her sons that she had asked a friendly Catholic priest they knew as Father Tony if he was prepared to secretly marry her and the Muslim doctor – a request that was turned down in no uncertain manner. They did not breakfast with Khan on the occasions he stayed overnight at the Palace and Diana had to leave early for engagements. To her he was ‘Mr Wonderful’; to them he was ‘the doc’ – or sometimes something rude
r although they never said it to his face.
Meanwhile, Harry was facing a problem of his own: he was about to be separated from his best pal. William was off to Eton and he would be alone at Ludgrove for the next two years. The worry did not stop him mischief-making, however. There was no other suspect when an American woman visiting Highgrove accepted a pint of beer and discovered halfway down it that she had swallowed a goldfish.
Meanwhile, Diana was once again becoming distracted. Falling deeper and deeper in love with Khan, she did everything possible to get him to make the relationship permanent: ‘She was very much in love with him,’ says her friend Rosa Monckton. ‘She hoped they would be able to have a future together. She wanted him to marry her.’ But the dedicated surgeon, in fact, had no wish to join the royal circus – for him it was a very private affair. Or so he thought. Khan was furious when he discovered later that reports of their ‘secret’ romance had been the result of his telephone being hacked: ‘I feel as if I’ve been robbed,’ he said, after police told him that his name and phone number were eventually found in paperwork uncovered during the Operation Weeting hacking inquiry. He stated later that the Princess told him it was nonsense to suggest Prince Charles resumed his relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles only after their marriage foundered irrevocably: ‘Diana had every reason to believe that Charles and Camilla never stopped seeing each other,’ he says. Although she desperately wanted to become Mrs Khan she knew it was impossible because she could never have taken her sons to live in Pakistan, even though she had visited Khan and his parents there and began to study the Koran. Torn between her lover and her boys, she made the most painful decision of her life, arranging to meet the doctor in Battersea Park for what turned out to be their final encounter. ‘When she came back to Kensington Palace she was streaming with tears,’ says one close to her.
Harry Page 8
