Behind the scenes, away from the prying eyes of the media, the Princess was quietly pursuing her charity work. For a long time she had been secretly exploring royal visits that brought her as close to the people as possible without the need for smiling officials and the ubiquitous photographers. During the summer of 1992, when public attention on her marriage was at its most intense, she had begun a series of private visits to hospices, visits that resulted in her plan to one day open hundreds of such institutions around the world. At the same time she toured refuges for battered women and shelters for the homeless, as well as entertaining charity officials at Kensington Palace or joining them in a variety of discussion groups.
For years the Princess had been celebrated simply for being. Now she wanted to be judged for doing, in words and deeds, an idea that powerfully drove her desire to do more in the way of private charity work. It was an ambition which, however worthy, still required her to make adjustments, even sacrifices, to learn new skills, to adapt to circumstances, sometimes at a moment’s notice. In all these, however, she persevered, using friends and contacts to help her build a firm foundation from which to launch her new career. Determined to polish her speech-making, Diana enlisted the help at various times of the film director Lord Richard Attenborough, the actor Terence Stamp and the voice coach Peter Settelen. Her speeches, though initially hesitant, gradually earned her both recognition and praise, her sincerity and courage in dealing with difficult emotional issues shining through. For a girl who hated speaking in public, her speech-making gave her a real sense of control. Her audience was not always sympathetic, however. The agony aunt Claire Rayner, accused her of ‘glamorizing’ eating disorders, and in June 1993 the conservative columnist Mary Kenny, a Roman Catholic, criticized her ‘self-indulgent psychobabble’ after she had made a speech highlighting the problems faced by women dependent upon tranquillizers and other drugs. Diana was shocked and upset by the hostility. The issues she was addressing – Aids, battered women, drug addiction, alienation and loneliness – were challenging ones, not only for herself but also for society. She was learning that this was a school of hard knocks.
The unhappiness she had suffered in her own life gave her a genuine empathy with people in difficulties. Her friend Rosa Monckton has described her ‘intuitive genius’, and Diana herself spoke of her own instinctive ability almost to ‘see inside someone’s soul’ when she first met them. In this she believed she was watched over from the spirit world by her grandmother, Cynthia Spencer. Her psychic abilities and uncanny empathy with those making their last spiritual journey strengthened her conviction that in another existence she had been a nun. It may be for this reason that she felt so drawn to – indeed, adored – the late Mother Teresa who once said to Diana: ‘To heal other people you have to suffer yourself’, a sentiment with which the Princess wholeheartedly agreed. She herself once said: ‘Death doesn’t frighten me.’ Father Alexander Sherbrooke, who saw Diana going about her work in Mother Teresa’s House for the Dying in Calcutta, was one of many people who were impressed by the Princess’s ability to cope gracefully with suffering, to look with clear eyes and an open heart upon the diseased and the dying. He observed that the majority of people found that dealing with the severely disabled and afflicted required a special kind of courage, one that does not come easily to most. ‘But the Princess was completely intuitive, and saw something special in every human being,’ he said.
Examples abound. When friends asked her to visit a pensioner who was dying of a brain tumour she was pleased to help. There was also a guileless joy in being able to assist a friend in trouble. Again, when her lady-in-waiting Laura Lonsdale lost her 11-month-old son, Louis, through cot-death syndrome, the Princess spent many months counselling her through her grief. Her sensitivity and understanding were much appreciated by the family. ‘The Princess of Wales is the nearest thing to an angel on earth,’ said one relative. ‘She has a unique quality of being able to comfort someone without being pushy or over the top. She has a magic touch all of her own.’ A few weeks after the tragic death of the Labour Party leader, John Smith, she invited his widow and three daughters to Kensington Palace for a private lunch so that she could personally express her sympathy, and she took time to write to the parents of baby Debbie Humphries who was kidnapped from hospital when just four hours old. As Oonagh Toffolo, one of Diana’s friends, said: ‘Her public image is one of beauty, grace and caring. Her private life is one of simplicity and humility. She has time for everyone, the old, the sick and the deprived.’
In truth, Diana moved effortlessly into the role of ministering angel. As Rosa Monckton said: ‘She had a unique ability to spot the broken-hearted, and she could zero in on them, excluding all hangers-on and spectators.’ It was a view wholeheartedly endorsed by her brother, who observed of her work: ‘She strikes me as an immensely Christian figure and she has the strength which I think true Christians have and the direction in her life which others can envy; that sureness of her purpose and the strength of her character and position to do an enormous amount of good.’
The many private visits she made, undertaken without fuss or formality, could not have been in greater contrast to the carefully contrived and stage-managed artificiality of a traditional royal visit. At last Diana had the chance to perform meaningful and satisfying work. ‘I want to walk into a room, be it a hospice for the dying or a hospital for sick children, and feel that I am needed. I want to do, not just to be,’ she said. Her difficulty was that her position provided her with a role in which she was effective – the presence of a princess was guaranteed to raise money – but which also left her feeling personally unfulfilled. By contrast, her private work was fulfilling, but ultimately ineffectual without the wider audience of the world stage. It was a dilemma for which she had yet to find a solution.
The Princess was anxious that her sons should also see something of the real world beyond boarding schools and palaces. As she said in a speech on Aids: ‘I am only too aware of the temptation of avoiding harsh reality; not just for myself but for my own children too. Am I doing them a favour if I hide suffering and unpleasantness from them until the last possible minute? The last minutes which I choose for them may be too late. I can only face them with a choice based on what I know. The rest is up to them.’
She felt this was especially important for William, the future king. As she once said: ‘Through learning what I do, and his father to a certain extent, he has got an insight into what’s coming his way. He’s not hidden upstairs with the governess.’ Over the years she took both boys on visits to hostels for the homeless and to see seriously ill people in hospital. When she took William on a secret visit to the Passage day centre for the homeless in Central London, accompanied by the late Cardinal Basil Hume, her pride was evident as she introduced him to what many would consider the flotsam and jetsam of society. ‘He loves it and that really rattles people,’ she proudly told friends. The Catholic Primate of All England was equally effusive. ‘What an extraordinary child,’ he told her. ‘He has such dignity at such a young age.’ This upbringing helped William cope when a group of children with special needs joined fellow school pupils for a Christmas party. Diana watched with delight as the future king gallantly helped these youngsters join in the fun. ‘I was so thrilled and proud. A lot of adults couldn’t handle it,’ she told friends.
Again, during one Ascot week, a time of champagne, smoked salmon and fashionable frivolity for High Society, the Princess took her boys to the Refuge night shelter for down-and-outs. William played chess while Harry joined in a card game. Two hours later the boys were on their way back to Kensington Palace, a little older and a little wiser. ‘They have a knowledge,’ she once said. ‘They may never use it, but the seed is there, and I hope it will grow because knowledge is power. I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress and people’s hopes and dreams.’
Her quiet endeavours gradually won back many of th
e doubters who had come to see her as a threat to the monarchy, or as a talentless and embittered woman seeking to make trouble, especially by upstaging or embarrassing her husband and his family. The sight of the woman who was still then technically the future Queen, unadorned and virtually unaccompanied, mixing with society’s poorest or most distressed or most threatened, confounded many of her critics.
There was, too, another advantage, equally undesigned but no less beneficial. The peeling away of the layers of protocol surrounding the Princess meant that she became far more involved in the day-to-day running of her life than ever before. Her staff of 12 gradually dwindled as Diana reduced her royal duties and adopted a more hands-on approach. She and her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, began discreetly lobbying her many influential contacts on behalf of her charities. For a time, the Princess handled her own press relations, with mixed success.
None of this, however, not even the most fulfilling charity work or the most successful appeal, could hide the fact that Diana’s life was in limbo – officially separated, yet not divorced, officially a member of the royal family, yet no longer either a willing or a welcome part of it. She had left one world without a clear idea of where she was going next. For all the praise her charity work earned her, there was impatience that she should return to the fold, or forge a clearly defined new life for herself, or failing either, that she should fall from grace. Many were uneasy with, and intolerant of, this continuing hiatus as she quietly but sincerely endeavoured to carve a new lifestyle. Now everything from her fashions – she was accused of looking like a suburban housewife by Tatler magazine – to her battles with photographers began to come under hostile scrutiny.
It was the unfairness that hurt her most. Accustomed to an adoring press, she was startled by how quickly reverence and respect had evaporated since discarding the invisible but protective cloak of royalty. Meanwhile she watched with growing concern as her husband’s star gradually grew brighter. His was a much easier task. Unlike the Princess, Prince Charles was not rocking the boat, but merely waiting his turn to be captain of the ‘good ship Windsor’. With the voluble support of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the Church, the rest of the royal family, Establishment newspapers and the Great and the Good, and backed by a professional office staff, he was by definition able to play the waiting game.
The centrepiece of Prince Charles’s long haul back to credibility, following the collapse of his marriage and the ‘Camillagate’ tapes affair, was a documentary by TV star Jonathan Dimbleby to mark the 25th anniversary of his investiture as Prince of Wales. From the moment the Prince informed Diana of the project, in the summer of 1992, she had been on tenterhooks, concerned that her role as a mother would be questioned, and that her estranged husband might use their children as innocent props in the exercise.
In the event, the Princess herself hardly featured in the programme, broadcast in June 1994, which focused on Prince Charles’s working life. It was, however, her husband’s anguished confirmation that he had been unfaithful which hit the headlines next day. In response to Dimbleby’s question, ‘Were you, did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?’ the Prince replied: ‘Yes, absolutely.’ Dimbleby continued, ‘And were you?’ ‘Yes,’ Prince Charles answered, but after a brief pause added, ‘until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’ Asked about his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, the Prince confirmed that she remained the mainstay of his life, and would continue to do so in spite of her perceived role in the break-up of his marriage. She was, he said, ‘a great friend of mine … she has been a friend for a very long time and will continue to be a friend for a very long time’.
Diana had decided against seeing an advance viewing of the film, and on the evening of the broadcast, which was watched by 13 million people, she set out not merely to enjoy herself, but to be seen doing so. She had a long-standing engagement at the Serpentine Gallery. The dinner was a sophisticated international event, and one where she found herself among friends. Her flirty little black dress designed by Christina Stambolian could not have been a more appropriate choice, its style shouting the message, ‘Whatever Charles may do, I’m having a ball.’ It was immediately dubbed ‘The Revenge Dress’. Yet in private she was not so calm. Her initial response to the programme was: ‘My first concern was for the children. I wanted to protect them.’ Then she added: ‘I was pretty devastated myself. But then I admired the honesty.’
If the Prince had been candid about his affair with Camilla, what was less clear was the question of divorce. In the Dimbleby interview he was evasive, saying that it was ‘very much in the future’ and ‘not a consideration in my mind’. But his public admission of adultery – in effect, an admission that he was to blame – undoubtedly broke the stalemate surrounding divorce discussions.
From the beginning Diana was adamant that she would not be the one to initiate proceedings, and this had formed the basis of any dialogue about what she called ‘the D-word’. As far as she was concerned it was Charles who had asked her to marry him, and it was Charles who must request a divorce. ‘I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying put,’ she emphasized, insisting that the initiative had to come from her husband’s side. It was a view she would later reiterate during her famous Panorama interview.
A friend who regularly discussed the issue with the Princess explained her thinking: ‘She always operated on the basis that it was not going to be her that caused the crisis because she felt that it would reflect badly on her. She had a pathological fear of being blamed. At the same time she would have felt cheated out of all the effort and good work that she had been doing. At the end of the day she wanted to leave her mark and if she just walked away she would be the loser. Everyone would say that she had not been able to take the pressure. The royal family would be sitting there and she would have endured 13 years for nothing before opting out.’
Yet her understandable caution, especially regarding access to the children, worried some of her friends, who watched with concern as she slipped on the familiar psychological garb of the victim, a helpless pawn unable to shape the course of events rather than one of the central characters in the unfolding drama. If, they argued, she was genuinely searching for a new role and a new life then there was little point in marking time on the fringes of the royal family. The ‘pack-your-bags-and-leave’ school felt that the longer she vacillated the more she compromised the freedom for which she so clearly longed. Other friends and advisers, in particular her legal team headed by Lord Mishcon, took the view that tactically she would obtain a fair financial settlement – there was much discussion about suitable houses – but that overriding all other concerns were her demands in relation to the children, who were her first concern, and her royal status, particularly her right to use the title of honour ‘Her Royal Highness’, an appellation in the sole gift of the Sovereign.
In many respects she was ambivalent about keeping this ‘handle’, and at times even talked about reverting to her maiden name, Lady Diana Spencer. Not only did she feel that a royal title got in the way of her relationship with the public – the modest manner in which she conducted her engagements without an accompanying retinue underlined her lack of interest in outward show – but she was also far prouder of her own family heritage, the Spencers being a good deal more English than the Windsors, than she was of the royal family. While she had little truck with the style that goes with royalty, she knew that the position lent a status which allowed her to promote causes she believed in. A divorce implied that she would no longer be dusted with that special magic royalty confers, at a stroke radically diminishing both her prestige and her chance to perform effectively on the world stage.
Perhaps Diana’s true feelings came to the surface the day she took Prince William for lunch at a fashionable family restaurant, Smollensky’s Balloon in Central London, where magician John Styles took her wedding ring, placed it in a silk handkerchief and, with a flo
urish, made it vanish. Diana collapsed into a fit of laughter and cried: ‘Good.’ Sadly, though, she knew all too well that there was no magic wand which could erase the hurt of the last decade, or easily resolve the constitutional and financial consequences of a royal divorce.
Worse than that, while the issue remained unsettled, she was open to criticism from her enemies inside and outside the Palace. For instance, when Prince Charles privately complained about Diana’s £3,000-a-week grooming bill, his grievance conveniently found its way into two national newspapers known to be hostile to her. The criticism, which conveyed an image of frivolity and excess, perplexed the Princess who, while ridiculing the assertion, noted that a similar whispering campaign had been waged against the Duchess of York when she, too, was in the throes of divorce negotiations.
This was the downside of playing the waiting game. Not only did it put off the day when she could strike out on her own, leaving behind the royal family and all its trappings of prestige and privilege, but it made her a hostage to fortune, prey to continual hostile sniping. As she later acknowledged: ‘I was the separated wife of the Prince of Wales. I was a problem. She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem. I’ll fight to the end, because I believe that I have a role to fulfil and I’ve got two children to bring up.’
It was a lonely struggle. Thwarted by what she called ‘the men in grey’ in her attempt to redefine her role as a ‘princess for the world’ rather than as the Princess of Wales, frustrated by the prevarication over the divorce and continually judged by a fickle jury of the press and public, Diana once again felt a deep need to state her case. In 1992 she had used me as the means of articulating the true nature of her life inside the royal family. Three years later she decided to drop the pretence and speak to her public in person. This was both a courageous decision, and one which showed the extent to which she had grown up in the intervening period. For the first time she was prepared to take responsibility for her own words, her own actions, her own life.
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