Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition

by Andrew Morton

  When the boys were with their father, or had gone back to school, the apartments in Kensington Palace returned to their customary quiet. The cloistered atmosphere was disturbed only by the shrill sound of the telephone, an instrument which was at once the Princess’s confessional, her best friend and her occasional doom. The publication of the Squidgy tape had caused Diana grave embarrassment and distress. Now, however, it was Prince Charles’s turn to rue the telephone’s invention.

  The Prince’s public image had been seriously harmed in the months before the separation, and in January 1993 it was dealt a further blow when tabloid newspapers published the transcripts of a tape-recorded telephone conversation allegedly between the Prince and Camilla Parker Bowles, said to have taken place on 18 December 1989. Its content, which was both intimate and distasteful, forced many leading Establishment figures traditionally loyal to the Crown – notably members of the Church, the military and Parliament – to question Prince Charles’s fitness to rule.

  The late-night call made plain the couple’s undying affection for one another, not least by its sometimes childishly lewd intimacy. After various words of endearment from the woman, the man says: ‘Your great achievement is to love me,’ adding, ‘You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies.’ The woman responds: ‘I’d suffer anything for you. That’s love. It’s the strength of love.’ The man makes a coarse joke about being turned into a tampon so that he might be constantly joined with his lover who, if this were indeed Camilla Parker Bowles, was then the wife of one of his oldest friends. Just before he rings off he says he will ‘press the tit’, meaning one of the buttons on the telephone. The woman replies: ‘I wish you were pressing mine.’ He answers: ‘I love you, I adore you’, and the woman answers in kind: ‘I do love you.’ Significantly, neither the Prince of Wales nor Camilla has ever denied that the tape was genuine.

  For some time friends of Prince Charles had been trying to explain away the whispered telephone calls, the clandestine meetings and the secret gifts between Charles and Camilla in terms of friendship. Diana, however, had always preferred to trust her observations and her instincts. Although she was in no doubt that the taped conversation was genuine, she was still shocked to see the sordid details written down in black and white. Appalled and sickened, she read the transcript with mounting anger as she recognized the names of so many friends, people she had known and trusted for years, who had conspired to deceive her by providing cover stories or safe houses where the Prince and Camilla could meet in secret.

  The tape fuelled the Princess’s continuing obsession with the relationship which had cast such a shadow over her marriage. While she pretended indifference to the fate of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, she watched their every move like a hawk. With her astrologer she pored over Camilla’s chart – she is Cancerian, like Diana – brooding over the couple’s fate with a fascination that was at once morbid and unhealthy.

  In public, the Princess put a brave face on her troubles, but privately she was a woman in grief, mourning her lost innocence, a failed relationship and the wasted years of her adult life. At moments of optimism Diana felt she could beat the royal system and use her position in a more positive way. At other times she would suddenly find herself in tears, unexpectedly moved by a sentimental film, or some innocent remark that brought back all the misery of the past. It was noticeable, too, that she took to wearing sombre colours, especially black, a striking habit in someone who set such great store by colours. Isolated and lonely within her cocoon at Kensington Palace, she fell prey to drift and indecision.

  The collapse of her marriage, her awareness of the hostility directed towards her by many in royal – and especially Prince Charles’s – circles, her obsession with her husband’s affair, and her often rather meaningless life within the depressing atmosphere of her home, all contributed to a deep loneliness and a destructive lowering of her self-esteem. There was, however, another factor in the Princess’s profound and growing isolation, for she was still struggling to find a fulfilling public role. In March 1993 she flew to Nepal for five days on her first official overseas visit since the separation. The media dwelt on the signs that she was being treated as a second-class royal, quite failing to realize that the low-key, informal nature of the visit was something that Diana herself had requested.

  Unwittingly, the Princess had established for herself a persona that would, in time, become a phenomenon. Almost uniquely among leading members of the royal family, she had recognized the public’s desire for a more modest and relevant monarchy, a wish that neatly coincided with her objectives of reshaping her royal public life to her own design. Overseas work she found stimulating, not only because it gave her a different stage from that occupied by her husband, but also because it took her out from under the gimlet eye of Buckingham Palace. In these early days of her separation, both the Princess and the Palace were uncertain about her future plans. Her constitutional position was simply that of the mother to the future king; that, at least, nobody could take away from her. But her public role was unclear. As she herself said: ‘People’s agendas changed overnight. I was now the separated wife of the Prince of Wales, I was a problem, I was a liability. “How are we going to deal with her? This hasn’t happened before.”’

  Whatever the personal feelings of the Queen’s men towards Diana, their primary task was to serve the Sovereign and her son, and to maintain the status quo. To this end they too, like the Prince of Wales’s friends, attempted the difficult task of resurrecting his public image at the price of reducing the status of the Princess, whom they readily acknowledged was still the shining star in a fading royal firmament. If their vision of a role for the Prince cut across the undefined ambitions of his estranged wife, then so be it. Now Diana began to find that visits abroad were being blocked and letters going mysteriously astray. When, for instance, she expressed a wish to visit British troops and refugees in Bosnia under the auspices of the Red Cross, she was told that Prince Charles’s plans to go there took precedence. Then, in September 1993, she was told that, for ‘security reasons’, she could not undertake a private visit to Dublin to meet the Irish President, Mary Robinson – yet two months later she attended the Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, potentially an infinitely more hazardous trip.

  Privately, Diana suspected that the Establishment did not want her to enjoy such a high public profile, and thus inevitably overshadow her estranged husband. Moreover, she was in no doubt that a campaign was being waged against her by people she termed ‘the enemy’. ‘The enemy was my husband’s department, because I always got more publicity,’ she said. Yet the Princess was no royal rebel. She had learned enough during her decade inside the Firm to toe the party line. She recognized that her popularity was seen as a threat to the Prince of Wales by the ‘men in grey’ at the Palace, ‘But I wanted to do good things. I was never going to hurt anyone. I was never going to let anyone down.’

  It was a frustrating situation, and one exacerbated by her exasperation with a system which subtly straitjacketed or sidelined her proposals and ambitions. Her frustration came to a head that autumn after a series of sympathetic newspaper articles about the changing face of the monarchy, which were based on briefings to journalists by Sir Robert Fellowes and other Palace officials. In one piece, an unnamed courtier was quoted as commenting patronizingly: ‘Diana is headstrong but we must show her love and understanding and bend over backwards to avoid a chasm in the early stages because, if she became bitter and twisted, it would be impossible for the children.’ Furious at her portrayal as a foolish child, she spoke angrily to Fellowes, her brother-in-law, telling him that not only was she sick of being used by the Palace as newspaper fodder, but that this kind of story merely fanned the flames of speculation about her life.

  It was in any case true that during 1993 the battle of the Waleses was fought out as much in the media as behind the scenes, Prince and Princess alike attempting to win the hearts and
minds of the public. By the summer there were nine officials working directly or indirectly either on Prince Charles’s portfolio of well-publicized interests, or on improving his image. By contrast, the Princess, whose staff were paid from the Prince’s estate of the Duchy of Cornwall, made do with a part-time press officer. Yet she found herself accused of being a media junkie, lurching from one photocall to another: a holiday in the Caribbean, riding a log flume at Thorpe Park leisure centre, or skiing with her children. For a princess used to an adoring media, this change in fortunes undermined still further her precarious self-esteem and fed her existing anxieties. Her belief, at times all-consuming, in the predictions of her astrologer shows how little value she placed on her own instincts and judgement.

  It was, for Diana, a miserable summer. She had started the year with a burst of energy, but as the months went by the constant criticism, both inside and outside the Palace, wore her down, something which showed in her stale response to bread-and-butter royal duties. The continual round of handshaking, tree-planting, small talk and smaller children was, to her mind, both repetitive and pointless. At the end of June the Princess decided that her ‘Awaydays’, her visits outside London, should end. A photocall in the course of a visit to Zimbabwe in July, during which she was pictured doling out food to children, symbolized her deep dissatisfaction with the inane circus. She felt the exercise patronized the children and reinforced the ‘begging-bowl’ image of Africa. She vowed that it would never happen again.

  During an extended summer break, first in Bali and then with her boys in America, Diana thought long and hard about her future. She returned home, refreshed, to hostile headlines and disturbing news from the Palace. Prince Charles had hired a ‘surrogate mother’ to take her place when the boys were staying with him.

  Diana could hardly contain her anger. Already edged to the margins of royal life, she was now being undermined in her most fulfilling role. She watched in simmering silence as Alexandra ‘Tiggy’ Legge-Bourke organized outings for the boys, took them shopping and kept them entertained. She winced when she saw newspaper photographs of Harry sitting on Tiggy’s knee and shuddered at the idea of Tiggy calling the boys ‘my babies’. Tiggy was all the more of a threat because she was similar in age and social status to Diana and mixed easily with Prince Charles’s friends.

  The long-standing resentment was to come to a head more than three years later at a Christmas party when Diana made a remark to the boys’ nanny about the relationship that she enjoyed with Prince Charles. Tiggy was left in tears, and subsequently sent a solicitor’s letter to the Princess, demanding an apology for the ‘false allegations’. It was an unpleasant incident. Quite innocently, Tiggy seemed to represent in Diana’s mind all that she resented about the royal system and what she saw as its attempts to wrest her children from her. Fortunately, before her death, Diana became reconciled to Tiggy’s active involvement in the lives of her boys. At the time, though, she felt that the wolves were circling for the kill. Her enemies had undermined her status, her personality and her position. Now they wanted the one thing in her life she held most dear: her motherhood.

  During the autumn Diana began to plan her withdrawal from public life. Confused by the hostility of the media which had once lauded her, battered by the Palace machine and constantly looking over her shoulder at Prince Charles’s camp, the Princess was at the end of her tether. Her private misery spilled over into public anger. ‘You make my life hell,’ she shouted at a photographer as he took pictures of her and her children leaving a West End cinema. She prodded his chest and jabbed her finger in his face before stalking back to William and Harry. The incident was only one of many ill-tempered spats with professional cameramen.

  It was, however, an amateur photographer who proved to be the last straw. If she had been hesitant before about retiring from the public gaze, her mind was made up when she looked at the front page of the Sunday Mirror early in November and saw a full-page picture of herself working out at her former health club. She had long suspected that these photographs existed, but it was still a shock to see herself, dressed in a leotard, exploited in this way. The pictures had been taken secretly by the gym’s manager, New Zealand businessman Bryce Taylor. Their publication constituted a flagrant invasion of privacy, but it was one for which Taylor was paid a six-figure sum. Buckingham Palace, MPs, other newspaper editors, and Lord McGregor, the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, howled their fury at the offending newspaper group. The Princess felt betrayed and violated. ‘Bryce Taylor pushed me into the decision to go,’ she said. ‘The pictures were horrid, simply horrid.’

  She was further infuriated when Taylor had the gall to claim that she had secretly wanted the pictures taken. Such was the hostility towards her among the Establishment that several influential columnists and politicians took to implying that there was a grain of truth in Taylor’s accusations that the Princess was manipulating the press. Nor did the fact that she had taken the rare step of instructing her lawyers to sue Taylor and Mirror Group Newspapers still her critics. It was a further signal to her that however hard she tried, however innocent her actions, a cancer of cynicism was gradually corrupting the public’s perception of her. All of which hardened her in her fierce determination to break free from the fickle and gloating media who had for so long held her in their power. Months later her stand was vindicated, the newspaper paying a large sum to charity.

  On Friday, 3 December 1993, at a charity luncheon in aid of the Headway National Head Injuries Association, the Princess announced her withdrawal from public life for a period. In a sometimes quavering, yet defiant, voice, she appealed for ‘time and space’ after more than a decade in the spotlight. During her five-minute speech she made a particular point concerning the unrelenting media exposure: ‘When I started my public life 12 years ago, I understood that the media might be interested in what I did. I realized then that their attention would inevitably focus on both our private and public lives. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become; nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner that has been hard to bear.’

  As she later said: ‘The pressure was intolerable then, and my job, my work was being affected. I wanted to give 110 per cent to my work, and I could only give 50 … I owed it to the public to say “Thank you, I’m disappearing for a bit, but I’ll come back.”’

  Indicating that she would continue to support a small number of charities while she set about rebuilding her private life, the Princess emphasized: ‘My first priority will continue to be our children, William and Harry, who deserve as much love, care and attention as I am able to give, as well as an appreciation of the tradition into which they were born.’

  While she singled out the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for their ‘kindness and support’, Diana never once mentioned her estranged husband. In private, she was unequivocal about where the blame lay for her departure from the stage. ‘My husband’s side have made my life hell for the last year,’ she told a friend.

  When she reached the relative sanctuary of Kensington Palace that afternoon, Diana was relieved, saddened but quietly elated. Her retirement would give her a much-needed chance to reflect and refocus. If the separation had brought her the hope of a new life, her withdrawal from royal duties would give her the opportunity to translate that hope into a vibrant new career, one that would employ to the full her undoubted gifts of compassion and caring on a wider, international stage.

  A few months later, at a reception at the Serpentine Gallery, of which she was patron, the Princess was in fine form. She was relaxed, witty and happy among friends. The events of 1993 seemed a dim and dismal memory. As she chatted to the movie star Jeremy Irons he told her: ‘I’ve taken a year off acting.’

  Diana smiled and replied: ‘So have I.’

  11

  ‘I Am Going To Be Me’

  Throughout her life, Diana was dominated by men; Prince Charles shaped her p
rivate life, the ‘men in grey’ her public life and newspaper editors her international image. Nowhere was this ambiguous relationship more apparent than with her personal bodyguards. They were at once her gaolers and her friends, protecting her not just from the unwelcome attentions of the paparazzi but acting as lookouts in her continual battles with the Palace.

  They told her the latest Palace gossip, covered her tracks and kept her supplied with risqué jokes. Over the years several, like Barry Mannakee, Graham Smith and Ken Wharfe, became father figures, listening to her problems and giving advice – friendly faces in a hostile world. It was no coincidence that she went to see the Kevin Costner film The Bodyguard as soon as it was released.

  While they were allies, they were also part of the system, a club she was trying to resign from. If she were to define her own life, exercise her freedom, she had to do it on her own. Quite simply, she wanted the right to grow up, to learn from her mistakes, to achieve something for herself. At the same time she wanted to enjoy the simple pleasures most people take for granted. As she once said: ‘I like to live as normally as possible. Walking along the pavement without a bodyguard gives me such a thrill.’

  Now that she was semi-detached from the royal family, she believed that she had the right to be treated like a private citizen. It was no easy task. The Metropolitan Police, who guard the royal family, were horrified at the idea of leaving the Princess, one of the world’s most famous faces, on her own, prey to the attentions of terrorists, aggressive photographers and lone madmen. While they agreed, albeit with the greatest reluctance, to withdraw her personal protection, they continued to monitor her movements – but from a discreet distance.

  It was not going to be an easy option, but then again, nothing in Diana’s life was straightforward. The paparazzi who dogged her footsteps were not slow to see their opportunity. ‘Why don’t you rape someone else?’ she shouted at several cameramen during a private shopping trip. They quickly got used to her avoidance tactics – the sour expression, the averted head and the handbag strategically placed in front of her face – and dubbed her the ‘royal baglady’. She had to prove to the many Doubting Thomases in the Metropolitan Police that she could survive without a permanent shadow. More than that, however, she also wanted, quite simply, to be left alone.