by Tim Clayton
It was a hell of a shock. The first I knew about it was somebody handing it to me and saying look at this. And I said, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I had a system called Ptarmigan, which was a field telephone. In the middle of the desert I used the army phone to ring her up and say, have you seen what’s in the papers? And she obviously had, and she was very cool and laid back about it. She said, ‘Don’t worry.’ Don’t worry! I mean, it’s easier said than done. She said, ‘Everyone’s cool about it here.’ It was extraordinary.
* * *
Diana was photographed at Thorpe Park with her sons on the water slide. ‘Charles the Absent Royal Father’ was castigated in the Mail. In stark contrast to the way Charles was raised, Diana’s sons were surrounded by maternal affection, dressed informally, taken to mingle with the people, and introduced into Diana’s charity work. She was undoubtedly deeply attached to her children and determined that they should not be as removed from real life as other royal children had been. So was her husband, although you would not have known it from the press reports.
With Jephson’s help, Diana attempted to upstage Charles as often as possible. Jephson took some pleasure in outwitting Richard Aylard, his opposite number in the Prince’s office. In March Aylard discovered that Diana had arranged to take William to Wales on St David’s Day without mentioning it to her husband. Aylard was forced to change all of Charles’s engagements on that day to spare him more critical press attention of the ‘Where Was Charles?’ variety.
In May 1991, following the departure of the joint private secretary, Sir Christopher Airy, Richard Aylard took over. If the loss of the amenable Airy was a disappointment to Diana, the idea of Richard Aylard as replacement was totally unacceptable. So the offices of the Prince and Princess of Wales finally split, and Diana formally acquired her own private secretary, Patrick Jephson. The offices, like their bosses, took ever more divergent paths. A member of the royal household told us about her firsthand experiences of this:
The sadness was that immediate staff would have to choose, either go with one side or the other. It was Jephson versus Aylard. The rest were piggies in the middle.
Diana’s side was clearly winning. With some dexterity, Jephson constructed an ever more positive image of the Princess. Also working just about full time for Diana were various friends, notably James Colthurst. They pointed out to Diana that Andrew Morton was writing pieces that were sympathetic to her. Morton received more and more information from ‘friends of Diana’. In late May in the Sun he was the first to write explicitly about Diana’s unhappiness at the role of Camilla Parker Bowles in her husband’s life. Camilla was hosting dinner parties at Highgrove, his story claimed.
* * *
On 3 June 1991, William was injured by a golf club. The story has been told two ways, each slotting neatly into the prejudices of one party or the other.
The Princess was lunching with a girlfriend at San Lorenzo when her bodyguard broke the news that William had been involved in an accident at Ludgrove School in Berkshire. He had been struck a serious blow to the head by a golf club wielded by a friend, and had been taken for tests at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. When the parents arrived, William was having a CT scan and doctors were advising that he should be transferred to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. Diana accompanied William in the ambulance while Charles followed in his Aston Martin sports car. Tests confirmed a serious depressed fracture to the skull requiring an immediate operation under general anaesthetic. There was a possibility of brain damage. Typically, the Prince of Wales felt unable to alter his schedule and left to attend a performance of Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with some environmental Eurocrats that he had set his heart on influencing. Diana, quietly furious with him for abandoning his child, held her son’s hand as he was wheeled into the operating theatre and waited outside throughout the seventy-five-minute operation. They were, she said, the longest minutes of her life. Then she remained at William’s bedside, again clasping his hand, as nurses checked his blood pressure and reflexes every twenty minutes through the night. A rapid rise in blood pressure, she was told, could prove fatal. Charles slept on the royal train – code for ‘he spent the night with a girlfriend’ – as he travelled to an environment conference in York. The next morning’s papers upset Diana, who was overwrought after a sleepless night, by suggesting that William was epileptic. Charles, who took no notice of what the public thought, was faxed the Sun’s front-page headline, ‘What Kind of a Dad Are You?’, which reminded him that ‘a fractured skull is not a trivial matter’. The nation concluded that only the most callous of fathers could dress up in black tie and go to the opera while his son underwent emergency surgery.
With the Princess at lunch in London, the Prince was at Highgrove when his policeman broke the news to him that William had been hit on the head by a golf club. ‘I knew it was something terrible. My heart went cold,’ said Charles later. His housekeeper noted that he ran down the stairs, shouting for his coat, his face white with shock. He told his anxious staff that he had been informed that the injury wasn’t serious, but that he felt that he must go to the hospital at once. Seconds later his Aston Martin roared down the gravel drive and sped away. Charles drove fast, dreading what he might find when he reached the hospital. To his enormous relief, he found William sitting up in bed chatting away. Nevertheless, the doctors suggested an examination by neurological specialists at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. They explained that it would be advisable for William to undergo an operation to pull the depressed bones out and smooth them off. They explained to both parents that this was a routine operation involving negligible risk and that there was no point both of them waiting in the ward. Diana made it quite clear that she didn’t want Charles around and it was obvious that there would be public friction if he stayed. Under the circumstances Charles decided to carry on with his arranged programme – to host the European Environment and Agriculture Commissioners and a group of Brussels officials at a performance of Tosca at Covent Garden. With this engagement completed, the Prince phoned the hospital to be told that the operation had gone well and that William was asleep with the Princess on hand, so the Prince travelled on by train with his European guests and British officials for the morning’s visit to the Yorkshire Dales. The next day he returned to London and went straight to the hospital to find that, as promised, William had made a complete recovery.
The version that appeared in the tabloid press was a lot closer to the first than the second. The Sun reported under the headlines ‘Wills in Brain Scan Scare’ and ‘Blood Soaked out of his Bandages’. One of Charles’s aides told us that ‘He thought he had checked out that he [William] was OK with his mother and that she was in charge. She was not furious with him – that was just the press. Day after day the hacks had got into that habit – she the goodie, he the baddie.’
Charles did have a busy schedule, but he set apart as much time as possible for two boys that he loved very much, as everyone who has seen them together testifies. But by now the press had their caricatures, and they were sticking with them.
Later that same year Charles and Diana visited Canada, where they joined their sons, who were already aboard Britannia. Jayne Fincher was in Toronto harbour to record the moment.
At first it was very formal and Charles and Diana were piped aboard by the captain and did all their hand-shaking bit. And suddenly these doors burst open and the two boys came out and they were so excited. They were hopping up and down waiting for their mum and dad to come, and Diana whisked past the hand-shaking people and her whole face lit up, and she took her hat off and she scuttled down the whole length of the yacht as fast as she could and was hugging them and kissing them.
Fincher’s photograph is one of the most famous ever taken of Diana, her arms outstretched, William launching himself into her embrace. She asked Fincher for a copy which she displayed in her dressing room at Kensington Palace. But it wasn’t the only pic
ture on that roll of film.
And then a few seconds behind her Prince Charles did the same thing. He came down, he was hugging and kissing the boys too. But the sad thing was that all the pictures that were used were her with her arms out, and nobody ever used a picture of him.
I think he got a bad press with the children at that time. Everybody kept saying, ‘Oh, this awful father’ and everything, which wasn’t true. He’s always been a lovely father. But I think he wasn’t seen with the children and she was – and in a lot of high-profile places like Thorpe Park. And so people tended to see that and think, Where’s he? all the time.
* * *
Earlier in the year, Adrian Ward-Jackson, an art dealer and governor of the Royal Ballet, had been presented with a CBE at Buckingham Palace. Nick Serota, Director of the Tate Gallery, held a celebration lunch at the Tate, and Ward-Jackson asked that Diana be invited as a special guest, since he knew her as Patron of the Royal Ballet. It was at that dinner that Diana met Serota’s wife Angela, a former ballet dancer and a close friend of Ward-Jackson. He was deputy chairman of the AIDS Crisis Trust, and that was the context in which he had originally met the Princess. Angela Serota was one of the few who knew that Ward-Jackson was himself HIV positive.
In the spring Ward-Jackson’s condition deteriorated, and he was confined to his Mount Street apartment. Serota was in constant attendance at his bedside, and Diana made frequent visits too. Ward-Jackson was a good listener, and Diana poured out the story of her life to him. Andrew Knight, chief executive of News International and a close friend of Serota’s, was another visitor.
* * *
As the couple’s tenth wedding anniversary approached, the press clamour against Charles reached a crescendo. In June 1991 the Daily Mail announced that he was intending to stay away from Diana’s thirtieth birthday party in London. Nigel Dempster was then briefed by a ‘friend’ to the effect that the Prince had offered Diana a party at Highgrove, but she had refused. Accordingly, he produced a front-page story headlined ‘Diana and Charles: cause for concern’. After citing Diana’s petulance as the principal problem with the marriage, he concluded that ‘close friends’ said ‘the Prince is being made to look bad through no fault of his own’. Andrew Morton in the Sun replied that Diana did not want to spend her birthday with Charles’s ‘stuffy old friends’.
Instead, she attended a lunch party at the Savoy Hotel in aid of the Rainbow House children’s hospice appeal. Sharon Carter, aged twelve and suffering from cystic fibrosis, helped Diana blow out the thirty candles on her birthday cake.
* * *
When President Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush visited London in the summer of 1991 Patrick Jephson took the opportunity to confirm to America that Diana’s transformation from clothes-horse to workhorse was complete. Diana took Barbara Bush to visit Mike Adler’s AIDS unit at the Middlesex Hospital. Adler had only a week’s notice:
This was one week of pandemonium, as you can imagine. It was very much Diana wanting to show Barbara Bush something that she, Diana, was involved in. And it was a terrific visit. I mean, Barbara Bush was terribly well informed. She herself was involved in HIV and AIDS among children and orphans in the States, and came across clearly as a very intelligent woman who, you know, knew a lot about it . . . But the patients loved Diana. She would sit on their beds, she would hold them and the mood after she left would be electric.
As they drove away, Diana said of Barbara Bush, ‘I like her a lot, but she hasn’t got intuition with these patients. They need lots of TLC.’
* * *
In mid-August Diana was at Balmoral with Fergie. The women were in playful mood, irritating the other guests by taking a nocturnal motorbike ride across the nearby golf course, and performing handbrake turns on the royal gravel in the Queen Mother’s Daimler. The Duke of Edinburgh told Sarah not to flirt with the staff. Diana and her sister-in-law retreated into their own world of shared confidences, in-jokes about ‘the Germans’ and daydreams of joint escape. On 19 August, Angela Serota phoned to say that the last rites had been administered to Ward-Jackson. Diana called James Colthurst and asked him to find her an executive jet. After spending hours on the phone, Colthurst managed to persuade someone to help. But Diana had already left by car without asking the customary permission of the Queen. With her detective, she drove 550 miles through the night from north-east Scotland to London so as to share Ward-Jackson’s last moments. In the event he clung on to life until the early hours of 23 August.
* * *
Diana’s relationship with Hewitt had flared briefly when he got back from the Gulf shortly before her thirtieth birthday. She had been telling him in her letters that she wanted to change her life. From what she had written, he once again hoped for a future with her.
As soon as I got back to England from the desert I went and saw her, went and stayed. And we didn’t really speak too much about it [the future]. There was too much else to catch up on. Obviously we touched on the subject of the situation as it now was.
After the News of the World story Hewitt was being followed, and meeting Diana in public was now impossible. She explained that things were even more complicated than that. The Yorks’ marriage was on the rocks too and Sarah was always on the phone seeking advice.
And that was it really, that was it. Back to a very strange existence. After a little bit of leave I went back to Germany again. To a terrible, terrible period. For six months or more before I was posted back to London, to Hyde Park.
Publicity killed the relationship. It was impossible to carry on as we had been in that environment. I do think the relationship would have continued had the publicity not been there.
In Germany life was made increasingly difficult for Hewitt. In the autumn of 1991 he sat exams for promotion to major and was told that he had failed each paper by one per cent. It was clear that his career in the army was effectively at an end. He met Diana on a couple of occasions at Kensington Palace but their meetings were furtive now.
Too much had happened and it fizzled out again. In a similar way that it had once before when I first went to Germany. I tried to contact her but as soon as I realised my calls weren’t being returned, I knew – been there before, so it was plain to see.
* * *
By the end of 1991 it was quite clear to anyone who read the newspapers that there was a great deal wrong with the Waleses’ marriage. But there was a consensus that there could be no question of a divorce. All the most damaging articles were accompanied by shorter, calmer pieces saying precisely this. But an enterprise was already under way that would prove them all utterly wrong.
11
A Malign Planet
* * *
From mid-1990 onwards, through her financial adviser, Joseph Sanders, and through James Colthurst, Diana had been preparing the way for a separation on her own terms. Then a new opportunity revealed itself. Colthurst learned that Andrew Morton was planning a major new biography of Diana.
James Colthurst had grown to trust Morton, with whom he regularly played squash. Morton was a talented, lively writer, and because he was freelance he was less vulnerable than most journalists to the threat of editorial interference. Following the sacking of Sir Christopher Airy, Morton wrote pieces in the Sunday Times that highlighted divisions between the Prince’s and Princess’s staff. Richard Aylard searched for the identity of the mole providing him with information. Robert Fellowes strongly suspected his sister-in-law’s private office. Photographer Arthur Edwards told Morton, ‘Watch your phones.’ All this cloak-and-dagger excitement made the writer even more attractive to the Princess’s circle. Colthurst asked Morton to a meeting far away from the normal royal beat.
It was over a plate of bacon and eggs in a transport café in North Ruislip, well away from prying eyes. We chatted about Diana’s life, and the real despair and despondency she felt, and how some of her friends really felt that she was on the verge of committing suicide. And he mentioned how she suffered from this eating disorder
– bulimia – how she was in a bad way, mentally. How she was really finding it hard to cope, how she would run out of the room when Prince Charles arrived in the room. How she couldn’t really get to grips with being an international superstar in the public eye and being treated in such a poor way by both the Royal Family and particularly by Prince Charles.
And the thing which riled her most of all was that she was living a lie in terms of her marriage. Camilla Parker Bowles was effectively the mistress of Highgrove and the mistress of Prince Charles. And that was driving her to despair. She’s a jealous woman, she’s an obsessive woman, and it was breaking her up. And this astonishing tale poured out, about how she’d made these various failed suicide attempts, how Charles had been consumed with a passion for Camilla Parker Bowles which had – in Diana’s eyes – been the cancer at the heart of their marriage. And when I walked away from that café, I remember thinking to myself, this is Walter Mitty land. It can’t be true.
Morton and Colthurst discussed whether the story of Diana’s marriage could be told with the direct help of the Princess and the on-the-record endorsement of her closest allies. The result could be one of the most sensational bestsellers of all time, but Morton’s publisher, Michael O’Mara, was nervous of proceeding without proof that Diana was truly willing to assist. By the time Colthurst met O’Mara, he was able to play some tapes that gave credence to his story. But O’Mara wanted more evidence. Colthurst went back to Diana. She was uncertain about whether to go ahead. Colthurst suggested that she might consult his friend Felix Lyle, an astrologer.
