by Tim Clayton
* * *
Attempts to keep royal scandals out of the newspapers in the run-up to the election failed miserably. Lady Colin Campbell’s book Diana in Private was serialised in March. But Campbell’s stories were knocked aside by a bigger piece of news. On 18 March 1992, three weeks before a general election, the Daily Mail broke the story of the separation of the Duke and Duchess of York in an exclusive written by Morton and Richard Kay. The story was supposed to have been kept back and everyone assumed there had been a leak. The lunch-time radio news programme, The World at One, announced ‘the knives are out for Fergie at the Palace’.
Sarah Ferguson thought the Palace had leaked her unhappy news:
They also needed to send a warning to Diana, to keep her in the fold and shore up the monarchy. My public vivisection would be a pointed reminder: This is what happens if you cross us, (They did indeed scare the daylights out of my sister-in-law, who was now afraid to be seen with me, and I could not blame her.)
After writing the Fergie divorce story, Morton was warned by a trusted contact that the Palace was looking for his source. He was again told to watch his phones. Two weeks later his office was broken into. After this he started using public telephones for any sensitive calls. When he learned that journalists were seeking to obtain an advance copy of Morton’s book, so as to run a ‘spoiler’, Michael O’Mara decided to print his first edition in Finland.
The Princess, who had been on a ballet patronage trip to Hungary, now found it convenient to reverse an earlier decision not to go skiing with the Prince. So on 28 March, Charles, Diana and the boys arrived for a holiday in the Austrian ski resort of Lech. The next day the trip was cut short by the news that Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, had died in hospital. Overwrought as she already was, this very sad news caused Diana to break down completely, but she would not accept the Prince’s attempts at consolation. He decided to attend his father-in-law’s funeral against his wife’s wishes, and travelled to Northamptonshire by helicopter while Diana went by car. The press noted that he was not there to comfort her on the journey.
In April, with the election safely out of the way, Princess Anne opened divorce proceedings against Mark Phillips. Three out of three royal marriages were now officially in trouble. In May Diana again left the country for an official visit to Egypt.
* * *
As the serialisation of Her True Story approached, rival newspapers ran their ‘spoilers’, although none managed to penetrate Finnish printing security. The articles only served to heighten the excitement about what was coming. At the PCC, Lord McGregor was moving to condemn repeated speculation about the royal marriage. Andrew Neil sold the story aggressively as coming from people close to Diana. Hundreds of posters appeared by major roads and adverts ran on television. Other newspapers were equally certain that the story did not have royal authorisation and set out to prove it. Richard Stott, editor of the Mirror, thought he was on the firmest possible ground:
When we knew this book was coming out, we actually asked Diana. Kent Gavin the photographer asked her on her royal trip to Egypt whether she’d co-operated with this and she just said, ‘Absolutely not,’ in no way had she ever co-operated with it. We should have known then that she had!
Angela Serota spoke to Diana’s close Brazilian friend, Lucia Flecha da Lima, about the book, assuming that she already knew about it. The horror with which Flecha da Lima responded to the news unnerved Serota. But it was now far too late to stop. The Wapping presses were rolling and Pluto, the dark unraveller, was about to have his hour.
12
Her True Story?
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On Saturday, 6 June 1992 Robert Fellowes called Wapping to ask what the Sunday Times was printing. It sounded grim. Richard Aylard decided that the Palace must not stay silent. He drafted a statement condemning the book and insisting that it was inaccurate. Patrick Jephson read it to Diana. She refused to put her name to it.
Charles had the newspaper faxed to him at Highgrove. Then he marched upstairs to confront his wife, who left for London in a hurry. Charles went to play polo at Windsor. In a display of public support for her son, the Queen had invited Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles to join her in the royal enclosure. Sharp-eyed spectators noticed that Camilla was wearing a suit in Prince of Wales check.
The Mirror headline attacked its rival the next morning with Kent Gavin’s Diana quote: ‘I Have Not Co-operated With This Book In Any Way’. That same day the Press Complaints Commission drafted an angry statement denouncing this ‘odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’. Lord McGregor rang Fellowes and asked him to confirm that Diana had nothing to do with the book. Fellowes did so and the PCC released their statement. One of McGregor’s colleagues, David Chipp, already had a sinking feeling:
McGregor thought and was led to understand that there had been no help with this at all, and this was really a piece of pretty unpleasant intrusion. And he concocted, with some of us, a statement in which he used this extraordinary remark by Virginia Woolf about dabbling fingers in people’s souls which made the whole thing look rather ludicrous and made people laugh at us a bit.
Max Hastings from the Telegraph was aghast. He went on Radio Four’s Today programme to argue with Andrew Neil, telling him that royal reporting was what a chap did if he failed to land a job playing piano in a brothel. Neil challenged Hastings to deny the strength of his sources, but on ITN news Andrew Morton was obliged to fulfil his promise to the Princess. He denied that Diana had helped him in any way. The Palace and the PCC appeared to be vindicated, and Morton and the Sunday Times were exposed to widespread vilification, their book undermined.
The following day Andrew Knight contacted Lord McGregor.
I did write probably a rather pompous letter to him saying, ‘Look, we know that this book is true and moreover we know that it does have the willing sanction of the Princess of Wales.’ And he rang me and we had a conversation about it, which he was surprised by. ‘Well,’ Lord McGregor said, ‘I don’t believe you, Mr Knight.’ So I said to him, ‘Well, look, Lord McGregor, if you don’t believe me, just look at tomorrow’s newspapers, because in tomorrow’s newspapers will be reported an event which has not yet happened. Later today the Princess of Wales is going to visit Carolyn Bartholomew, who’s one of the sources for the book, and that story will be reported with photographs, and we know about it in advance. It will be reported with photographs in tomorrow’s tabloid newspapers.’ And he said, ‘How extraordinary. I’m amazed.’
Calls were made to the picture desks of various newspapers to tell them of the Princess’s imminent visit. Stuart Higgins says, ‘I took the call. It was a very, very polite lady.’ He says he is not certain who she was. Ken Lennox was at home in Chelsea when he also got a call telling him that the Princess of Wales would be leaving Carolyn Bartholomew’s house at precisely nine o’clock:
So I shot round there, got into the street, parked my car at the top of the street and ran down and there was a detective waiting for me who I recognised. And he said, ‘Can you do your shots from here, Ken?’ Which was forty yards away from the front door. And I said, ‘Yes.’ So he said, ‘I’ll leave you here and I’ll go back and sit in the car.’ The door opened up, sharp on nine o’clock, Diana stepped out, looked up at me, turned round. Carolyn came to the door and out on to the front step carrying her baby, with her husband. Diana kissed Carolyn on both cheeks, kissed the baby and kissed Carolyn’s husband, looked up to see if I was shooting, walked to the car, got in the car – the front seat, not the back seat – and looked at me all the way up the street as she drove towards me, giving me a full chance to get more photographs.
It was significant that whoever called me was able to tell me when the Princess of Wales was leaving. Lots of people know when somebody’s arriving someplace, but it’s very difficult to guess when somebody’s leaving.
. . . Well, only I know who phoned me – and I’m not telling you!
The photographs were used in most of the following day’s papers. David Chipp felt himself sinking lower:
And McGregor was outraged and furious, livid, because he felt that he had been misled – whether wilfully or not I’m not sure – but he felt he’d been misled by the Palace officials and by those around Diana in suggesting that she had no knowledge of this. And I don’t think he was ever quite the same again.
When Robert Fellowes returned from Paris he called Diana into his office. After a severe meeting she flew in the afternoon to Merseyside to visit a hospice. She called Joseph Sanders en route and told him that she was anxious about the reaction of the crowds. But when she arrived her audience burst into applause and she burst into tears.
* * *
The moment Diana posed for Ken Lennox’s camera was the turning point of her life, an act of open defiance. There could be no going back now.
‘Patrick . . . What do people think of me going to see Carolyn like that?. . .’
‘I think they see you as a very supportive friend.’
‘And the photographers?’
‘Well, they follow you everywhere, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they certainly do!’
Patrick Jephson was interrogated by his fellow courtiers: ‘Come on, Patrick, we all know that she did it.’ Jephson saw Diana by turns proud and anxious, one moment confrontational, the next timid. She told him that ‘this family had this book coming to them’, but he worried that, while the Royal Family might be damaged, in the long term she would be ruined – cut adrift and vulnerable to ‘those whose motives seldom began or ended with her welfare’.
* * *
Mary Robertson was visiting England. She had written to Diana asking if they might meet, and Patrick Jephson had replied offering lunch at Kensington Palace on 25 June. The Robertsons arrived just as the serialisation of Her True Story began. They read it with alarm, half expecting their lunch to be cancelled, but it was not. They arrived at Kensington Palace uncertain what to expect:
She was absolutely radiant. She’d been down to William’s school to watch him play soccer. Harry had gone with her. She was looking forward to seeing us. It was a very good day for her, although she’d had plenty of bad days. She seemed very much to have gotten it all together. All I did was vaguely allude to what a terrible time she’d had, and ask her if she was all right now. She said, ‘Mrs Robertson, I’m absolutely fine now, you don’t have to worry about me.’
She was humorous about the Royal Family. She had said that the myth that the Queen Mother had helped her in her first months as Princess was completely untrue. She laughingly referred to the Royal Family as ‘that lot’, and said, ‘They never let you know when you’ve done something right, but they certainly tell you if you’ve done something wrong.’
* * *
The great headlines in Morton’s book came from the Sandringham staircase story and the other ‘suicide attempts’. It’s clear now that the staircase affair was a simple accident misleadingly described, and the other incidents seem faintly ludicrous. As one of Lady Colin Campbell’s interviewees (‘a relation of the Prince’) asked: ‘How do you kill yourself with a lemon slicer? Do you peel yourself to death?’ Diana backed away from many of these stories and told later friends that Morton had exaggerated. But she accused him of making up the staircase saga too, although she had recorded it all for him on tape. After all, this was her true story, not necessarily the true story. A sensational piece of journalism, no question, but more of a divorce petition than a biography, and as one-sided as such documents habitually are.
Morton’s first reaction – that he was being invited to take a trip to ‘Walter Mitty land’ – is echoed in the response of Diana’s more sober friends to his book. Most of the people we have spoken to, people who knew Diana as a child, a teenager and even as a young married woman, say that the Gothic doom and gloom of Her True Story is not how they remember things. Janet Filderman sums up.
I know from Diana herself that she wasn’t as unhappy as that book purported her to be. It made it seem as though she was a misery all those years, and it wasn’t true, because I knew her in those years, very, very closely and very well. It’s exactly what would happen in any marriage if you take the wife and the husband’s side totally separately. You will always go one way or t’other and I think that is what it was all about.
Some of those who had played a major role in the book – like Felix Lyle – were soon having second thoughts.
I think it satisfied her need for revenge, it undoubtedly showed the Royal Family in a very unfavourable light, and to a lot of people this was long overdue. I just felt it didn’t get to the heart of it. I felt it had too much of an axe to grind, to be honest, and part of me felt a little bit ashamed of that actually, and I just felt that maybe I should have rethought my strategy originally.
Andrew Knight looks back with mixed feelings too.
I had second thoughts when my mother cried when we ran this book, and I realised that we’d hurt her and millions like her. And yet I knew it was true. And for that reason I also felt hurt that good people – because I think the Prince of Wales and the Princess of Wales are good people – I felt hurt that they were hurt.
In a report leaked soon afterwards, McGregor managed to improve on soul-dabbling when he accused Diana of ‘invading her own privacy’. From now on she could expect little in the way of protection from a Press Complaints Commission led by a very bitter lord.
I felt as I have always felt, that the protection of the privacy of public persons turns in part on their prudence, and the observance of proper standards of behaviour and partly on their truthfulness. And I felt that in this particular instance, on all those counts, there had been a serious failure.
* * *
On 5 July Diana’s masseur, Stephen Twigg, told the Sunday Express, ‘the situation has to end . . . otherwise there will be a tragedy.’ Charles read the article over breakfast at Highgrove and casually asked Diana whether there was anyone she knew who was not talking to the press on a daily basis?
If Charles couldn’t understand Diana’s behaviour, it was even harder for his mother, born and raised to the stiff upper lip. How should she handle the beguiling but skittish Princess now? Patrick Jephson felt that the Queen should make one final effort to try to understand his boss and coax the ‘nervous thoroughbred’ back into the stable. But the only thing that might have made a difference, the banishment of Camilla, was the one thing the Queen had never felt able to ask. And, anyway, Charles had by now made it clear to his own and to his mother’s court that Camilla was a non-negotiable part of his life.
A carefully balanced account by Robert Lacey in the August edition of Life magazine recognised that this was the end. ‘Two emotionally needy people have come together and have discovered they have only demands to make.’ Lacey’s prediction of the Palace reaction was as accurate as his analysis of the cause of breakdown: ‘the Princess’s refusal to disavow the book adds up in Royal eyes to a clear case of treason’.
This rebel princess appealed as never before to those Britons who disliked formality and the drab Victorian attitudes commonly thought to be embodied in the Windsor family. The historian David Cannadine described the monarchy as ‘passive, philistine, bewildered, anachronistic, obsessed with protocol and tradition, and smothered in a courtly embrace redolent of quarter-deck attitudes and saddle soap’.
The people had never witnessed members of the Royal Family at each other’s throats like this before, and many quite enjoyed it. Even monarchists could enjoy a frisson of anti-establishment fervour by backing Diana, because she wasn’t necessarily anti-royal, she was just anti-Windsor, anti-‘that lot’.
In Nottingham Dean Woodward rallied to her standard.
The royals want to stay up there, the public down there. I wasn’t interested in the royals, but ever since Princess Diana did what she did for me and my family, I’ve not been a royalist but I’ve definitely been a number-one Dianaist.
The whole world had gone ‘Dianaist’. Morton’s book was a bestseller everywhere. In America, the edition of People magazine that featured it was the all-time most popular. With its unbeatable combination of majesty and mischief, the Charles and Di story was a blockbuster now, with Diana cast firmly in the ever popular soap opera role of the wronged wife who won’t take it any more.
* * *
According to Jonathan Dimbleby’s account, Charles’s friends, disgusted by his wife’s treachery, contacted Richard Aylard asking for permission to speak or write on Charles’s behalf. Diana’s allies dismiss this as Palace spin. They say that St James’s Palace organised the counter-attack itself and then carefully created the appearance that Charles was being dragged unwillingly to the battlefield.
At first little appeared in direct defence of Charles. Just one account found its way into the Sunday Times. Then Lord Romsey spoke to Andrew Knight off the record. Knight passed his comments to Andrew Neil but told him not to link Romsey’s name to the story. But Neil did. Then Penny Junor wrote a long essay in Today under the headline ‘Charles: His True Story’. It was a point-by-point rebuttal of Morton, demanded, the newspaper claimed, by Charles’s friends. Junor had been telephoned by one of them after she had appeared on the radio defending Charles against Morton. In Today Junor described Diana’s conduct as ‘irrational, unreasonable and hysterical’. She insisted that Charles and Camilla were just good friends and that Charles was ‘not the adulterous kind’. On reading the piece, Diana asked Charles, ‘Why don’t you save yourself a phone call and ring the papers direct?’ Given her own recent contacts with the media, it is easy to imagine his response.
