When Harry saw her red-faced he was desperate to know what had happened, but all she could do was hug him. She was sobbing her heart out when her hairdresser Natalie Symons arrived on the morning after the break-up and discovered the Princess had not even applied her mascara – always her first task of the day.
Now Harry was showing signs of increased anxiety and, while a marriage counsellor might have been a more suitable expert to guide a mother through this emotional maze, Diana poured most of her troubles out to the psychiatrist she had been seeing through the early days of her marriage. He warned her of the damage all this confusion could be doing to her sons:
I told her this would not be good for them, particularly for Prince Harry, who was already a fighter, and that this might well affect him in later years. I never met her younger son but from what she told me he was already starting to rebel. She said he loved his father and admired James Hewitt but it was obvious from what she told me that when other men came along he started to get not just confused but angry and she was especially worried that Harry was showing signs of the kind that lead in adult life to aggression and addictions of various kinds.
Alone at Ludgrove after William had left for Eton, Harry received another surprise visit from his mother. He was playing football when she arrived and sat alone on the sidelines until the game was over. The two went for a walk. ‘What now?’ he thought, remembering her previous ‘surprise’ visit when she had brought the dreaded news of her separation from his father. She wanted him to know that she had given an interview to Martin Bashir for a special edition of Panorama which would be shown on television the following week. Harry groaned: already sad about the loss of his brother’s companionship, he now faced the prospect of his mother pouring out the troubles of her marriage to the world. Although he was only eleven he could see that she was opening up all the old wounds he thought had begun to heal. She asked him to watch the programme as it would explain many of the things he had not been able to understand – hurtful things.
Like William in his room at Eton, Harry did watch the programme and, according to one in whom he confided the following day, he certainly did not enjoy it, although he blamed Bashir for asking ‘such personal questions’ on a television programme broadcast globally. His mother, however, held nothing back about her own infidelity as well as that of her husband. While William listened in silence twenty miles away, Harry, according to a Ludgrove teacher who sat with him through the transmission, grew ever angrier as Bashir grew increasingly intrusive and the Princess responded beyond the interviewer’s wildest hopes. Both boys learned things they would never have imagined possible. Did their mother really make herself vomit because of their father’s behaviour with ‘Auntie PB’ as they called Camilla at that stage? Did the people really believe she was stupid because she hadn’t passed any O levels and that she was as thick as a plank? Did Daddy’s friends really say that she should be put in a home for unstable people because she was ‘a basket case’? Had she really never met Andrew Morton, whose book she had told them was very unfair? Was she really having an affair with ‘Uncle James’ [Hewitt]? Had she lied to them that AIDS patients were suffering from cancer?
The red-headed Prince stormed from the room angrily. Mummy really had never told them much of this and, according to a friend of Camilla’s, he said she shouldn’t have told the world. He loved his Mummy, but he loved his Papa too. When it was over, sensitive William just sobbed. The Queen was absolutely livid – her family was falling apart. Her sister Margaret had divorced Lord Snowdon, Princess Anne had dumped Mark Phillips and Prince Andrew’s marriage to the former Sarah Ferguson was falling apart. ‘Do the younger generation have no discipline?’ Her Majesty was heard to say.
And why had his mother spoken out in the most public manner possible when constantly claiming that she wanted more than anything for her private life to be kept that way: private? Lady Tryon said it was Diana’s obsession with the media (though the obsession was reciprocated) that most annoyed Charles.
When the princes went to Scotland to be with their father, so did the photographers. He had plenty of opportunity to be with them, with his arms around them, with them smiling at him just as they had smiled at her. But he wouldn’t play Diana’s game; he’s too much of a gentleman. When he came in from fishing one day, I asked him how it had gone and he said, ‘Terrible! I only got twenty minutes in because the press were so awful.’ He had Harry with him and he could have taken the chance to turn it into a photo call, but he’s not like that and he never will be, no matter how powerful Diana gets by using the media … How can you treat two boys like Diana did? They suffer. No marriage is perfect but we make them work just so we don’t cause pain and suffering. Not Diana; she thinks only of herself and her amazing publicity campaign.
Harry never forgave Kanga for having been so outspoken and Charles had to explain to her that she was unlikely to see the boy again.
Long before the public realised it, Diana had been living the life of a separated woman. There were girly trips to Paris – the first in the company of two friends, Hayat Palumbo and Lucia Flecha de Lima. She had met Lucia, the 52-year-old wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Britain, during a tour of Brazil two years earlier. Lady Palumbo was the wife of Lord Palumbo, a controversial figure in property development who Harry had often heard his father curse. Harry sulked when his mother returned from jolly lunches behind the pink geraniums at the Kaspia restaurant near Berkeley Square with the friends of hers he knew his father did not approve of. During a second visit to Paris (which was supposed to be kept a close secret although she had an aide tip off the photographer Daniel Angeli) she met with President Mitterrand – a meeting which boosted Diana’s self-esteem so much that she vowed to return as soon as possible for a more private visit. No one could have imagined what would befall her the next time she visited the French capital.
Diana and Charles’s marriage was finally ended in August 1996. Harry was greatly relieved – seeing his parents part was far less painful than witnessing their often silent war. She was, as she had warned William, stripped of the ‘Her Royal Highness’ title and was henceforth to be known as Diana, Princess of Wales. She also lost the services of a full-time police bodyguard. Ken Wharfe was a thing of the past.
Harry was particularly amused when her new policeman turned up in disguise and driving an old Toyota. Diana would no longer have police protection other than when she attended public events, for which purpose the retired Royal Protection Squad officer Colin Tebbutt was engaged. Tebbutt told Harry he wore disguises because pursuing photographers were likely to recognise him even when they were travelling in his ‘old banger’, which Diana – instantly recognisable herself, of course – named ‘the Tart Trap’. She always sat in the front whereas other royals insisted on riding in the back of limousines transporting them. Princess Margaret had always called him by his surname and would yell out ‘Wireless!’ when she wanted the radio turned on. Harry and William called him Colin and never asked for anything without saying ‘please’. They liked Mummy’s new, albeit occasional, bodyguard.
She had more time for the boys when her charity commitments were pared down from around a hundred to six, but on her own instigation she mounted an anti-landmine campaign, telling her sons that war was wrong. Harry was not so sure: if he was going to be a soldier, there had to be battles to fight.
6
LOSING MUM
The summer of 1997 could not have had a happier start. On the first day of July Diana celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday and the morning began with a call from Harry: he had gathered a group of his classmates together to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ down the phone to her. In return she had a surprise for him: they were all going on holiday together to the south of France. Mohamed Al Fayed – a close friend of her stepmother Raine Spencer – had invited them to spend time with him and his young children, Jasmine, Karim, Camilla and Omar, at his palatial French home, the Villa Castel Ste-Thérèse, set in a ten-acre estate
high on the cliffs above St Tropez. What’s more, he had spent more than £10 million on a new yacht, the Jonikal, with the royal holidaymakers in mind. After all, they no longer had the royal yacht Britannia and this was his chance to put two fingers up to the Establishment which had always rejected his attempts to enter its midst. He even had his own photographer on standby to take pictures of him with Harry, William and their mother.
He had another ‘treat’ in mind: his son, Dodi, would be joining them although no one was to mention the model Kelly Fisher whom the playboy had left behind without any explanation. Al Fayed was matchmaking and he badly wanted Diana in the family.
Harry did not like Dodi – the pseudo-film producer he nicknamed ‘Sister’ for some obscure reason – any more than he liked Al Fayed’s son Omar, whose ‘arse he kicked’ according to one of the bodyguards who witnessed ‘a severe altercation’, but the jet-skiing, scuba diving, barbecues on the private beach and trips on the Jonikal made up for his displeasure to a certain extent. Still, he was acutely aware of the Fayeds’ fawning attention to all three royal guests. The constant circling of bodyguards in speedboats did more to alert the paparazzi than it did to put them off.
At night – when she was not being pursued by Dodi – Harry sat with his mother for long talks. Things had been going on which he did not understand. In particular he wanted to know what had happened to her friendship with Elton John, of whom he was particularly fond but with whom she appeared to have had a spectacular falling out. Suddenly the radio would be switched off when one of his records came on; magazines featuring the musician were consigned to the waste bin.
Harry was bemused – she had always spoken highly of the star and praised his work, especially his enormous charity efforts. But the two had had a bitter spat and now, in the heady atmosphere of the French Riviera, Diana decided it was time to tell him what had gone wrong. Elton was a very close friend of Gianni Versace and had been helping the designer put together an impressive coffee table book showcasing all of his products. There was to be a launch party for it and Elton wanted her to be there. She said she would think about it but, having examined some of the book’s content, had decided that she could not be associated with it: what would her boys think when they saw the nudes and sexual innuendo Versace had chosen to include in the glossy publication?
She told Harry that the two of them had exchanged angry letters over the matter and she had begun hers by coldly addressing her old friend as ‘Mr John’. Then why, Harry wanted to know, after Versace’s murder on a Miami street, had she travelled to his funeral on Elton’s chartered jet? The answer was simple: she needed a lift. He was puzzled when he watched television coverage of Versace’s funeral service and saw her comforting ‘Mr John’ in a way that suggested they had never exchanged a cross word.
During the holiday she also tried to make him understand why she had developed the deep hatred she obviously had for Tiggy, the nanny she knew both boys were extremely fond of – a fondness which brought out an irrationally jealous streak in their mother. Harry especially enjoyed memories of long walks and deep conversations with Tiggy, whom he had come to regard more as a sister than a nanny.
The previous month Diana had given the Fourth of June celebration at Eton a miss because, she said, she had not wanted to steal the spotlight. She was horrified to learn later that William had invited Tiggy in her place and, moreover, that the former nanny had gone armed with supplies of champagne which she handed out freely – many of them to people Diana was friendly with. Harry asked her if it was true his mother had referred to her as ‘a bitch’ and Diana reportedly replied, ‘Well she is. She gets ideas above her station.’
Her behaviour was beginning to confuse him and he was particularly concerned about the sudden presence of Fayed Jr in her life. Dodi had described himself as a film producer since stumping up the money for the movie Chariots of Fire sixteen years earlier, but he had taken no creative part in the making of the film. Harry grew deeply suspicious when Fayed arranged a disco for him and William at which there were a number of scantily clad young girls. No, one of them told Harry, they had never met Dodi before, but they had been recruited by two of his ‘team’ who were scouting the beach at St Tropez for some girls who would like ‘some fun’ with their boss’s guests.
The trio returned to London in the Harrods jet on 20 July. It was Charles’s turn to have custody of his sons, so Diana bid them an emotional farewell before they left for Balmoral. She was not to know she would never see them again. Happy to be away from the Fayeds, they enjoyed lunch with the Queen Mother at Clarence House to celebrate her ninety-seventh birthday before boarding Britannia for its last ever cruise to the Western Isles before decommission.
‘This is a real ship,’ Harry told his father, ‘not like Mr Fayed’s – his is a boat.’ And when it came time for a photo call in return for a promise from the press to leave them alone for the rest of the holiday, it was Harry who came up with the idea of climbing down a salmon ladder on the Dee and beckoning to Tiggy at the top who was smoking one of her trademark cigarettes. The photographers were delighted and Charles amused, but when she saw the pictures Diana was not so impressed.
Left to her own devices the Princess soon became bored ‘cooped up in Kensington Palace’. When Dodi Fayed phoned offering to take her on a Mediterranean cruise onboard the Jonikal – it was his father’s suggestion, he assured her – she accepted. She had enjoyed his company on the earlier holiday and had become quite attracted to him but assured her close friend Rosa Monckton that it was no more than a holiday romance and that in fact she was embarrassed by Dodi’s conspicuous spending on gifts for her – she was, after all, still getting over the break-up of her relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, whom she had desperately wanted to marry. The pair set off on 31 July for Corsica, where they began a cruise to Sardinia. To Diana’s surprise, Mohamed Al Fayed was not there; in fact, apart from the staff, it was just her and Dodi. This was no simple pleasure trip, it was a love cruise. Dodi was courting the woman his father longed for him to marry and, according to a member of the crew, the magic seemed to be working, although I am told that Dodi remained in secret contact with Kelly Fisher throughout. The Fayeds made much of the supposed romance: when Dodi said he would never have another girlfriend, it was in a supposedly private conversation with none other than the Harrods press spokesman Michel Cole. It came as no surprise when the remark was relayed to a hungry press contingent.
However, the magic seemed to have worn off by the time they flew to Paris: Diana realised that she was being manipulated by the storekeeper and his son. She had also grown tired of Dodi’s personal habits and was desperate to see her sons again. So, early on the evening of 30 August, after Dodi had disappeared into the bathroom and locked the door behind him, as Diana said he frequently did, fearing that he had returned to his old cocaine-using addiction, she telephoned her sons from the Imperial Suite of Al Fayed’s Hôtel Ritz. It was a joyful conversation: no one could have imagined it would be their last.
Dodi had a plan for the night. He summoned driver (not even a qualified chauffeur) Henri Paul from the bar where he had been consuming copious quantities of his favourite Ricard pastis, a powerful aperitif, and ordered him to drive himself and the Princess to his personal residence in the city. Their bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones made no attempt to have them don their seat belts (he was saved, though seriously injured, by the front seat air bag) and they set off at high speed on what would be a fatal journey. Diana, who was inclined to be superstitious, might not have been surprised that it was the thirteenth concrete pillar of the tunnel below Pont de l’Alma which her car crashed into at 68mph killing her, Fayed and Henri Paul.
Harry and William were in bed asleep in adjoining bedrooms at their grandmother’s castle – the Queen’s Scottish home which Diana had so hated – when a red-eyed Prince Charles went first to William’s room at 7.15 a.m. to break the dreadful news to his elder son. There was no easy way to put it: the boy�
�s mother was dead and now they had to go next door and tell Harry. The three of them wept and wept and wept, but despite his own grief, William did all he could to try and comfort his younger brother. Harry, however, was beyond comfort, inconsolable even when the Queen tried. Her Majesty had been woken at 1 a.m. by her private secretary Sir Robin Janvrin after he received news from the British embassy in Paris that the Princess had been involved in a serious road crash in a Paris tunnel. She summoned Charles who called his deputy private secretary Mark Bolland and asked him to find out how serious the accident was. After a number of calls to the Paris police, Bolland called back with the news: ‘Very serious.’ Diana’s injuries were critical: Charles’s first thought was that she might be brought home brain damaged or paralysed. How was he going to tell the boys?
It was shortly after 3 a.m. that Sir Michael Jay called to tell him that Diana was dead; Charles hadn’t even known that his former wife was in Paris. He wondered how he could possibly explain all this to his sons as he walked at sunrise on to the moors surrounding the Balmoral grounds.
Consumed with grief himself, he broke the news as gently as he could. Harry had had a bad night after arguing with his brother about Dodi – the man he disliked so intensely. ‘Is Mummy really dead, Daddy?’ were, Charles recalls, the first words he managed between sobs. In response the Prince could only nod and hug his son.
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