Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  I don’t think I could really say that we acted respectfully or diplomatically and gave her a status greater than any other celebrity we were photographing, because it’s kind of hard to think of using the right knife and fork when you are operating a camera. And it would be a lie for me to say we were always polite. I mean, certainly we weren’t rude, but you could say we were being rude by virtue of the fact that we were there.

  I remember once where she got into a taxi and put her head down between her legs. And there were . . . members of the paparazzi all around the taxi. She put her head right down between her legs and put her hands over her head, and one of the Spanish photographers said, ‘Why don’t you put your head up and start acting like a fucking Princess?’ And she shot up. And she just looked as stunned as any woman would be who had been so insulted. And I thought, don’t look on this as if you’re not involved because you are involved. I myself as a photographer was there, was part of that. And that’s certainly not something I would look back on with any sort of pride.

  One day a passer-by with a home video camera filmed Diana trapped by a crowd of photographers in a London street. Her arms were wrapped around her face and she was whimpering like a wounded animal.

  * * *

  After a few months Jephson persuaded Princess Diana to slip back into what he considered real work. Through Mike Whitlam she was induced to become a British board member of the advisory committee of the Red Cross Federation and the International Committee of the Red Cross. She attended some meetings in Geneva during the summer of 1994, but as the serious meetings got under way Jephson ‘watched my boss’s eyes glaze over’ and she quit in September. Even the Palace occasionally extended an olive branch. She was invited to join the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day and accepted enthusiastically. Less pleasant was the leaking – widely blamed on sources in Prince Charles’s office – of Diana’s yearly grooming bill, £160,000 worth of dresses, make-up, haircuts, facials and massages.

  Diana could still be great company – warm, gossipy and mischievous. Kensington Palace would echo with laughter and chatter, as if its mistress was back in Colherne Court, a carefree single girl again.

  Vivienne Parry frequently saw Diana in this mood.

  Diana was like a light. I knew Diana for a very long time and I remained loyal to her. She could be difficult, she could be awkward, but you always, always forgave her. She earned your loyalty a hundred times over. And, on good form, she was the most sparkling and energetic person you’re ever likely to meet.

  But the friends who shared the chatty lunches and the animated evenings could find Diana on the phone to them, later that same night, in sudden distress at some real or imagined slight. For much of her marriage Diana had been fragile like this. In the 1980s she had often dreamed of independence, of having her life back again. But freedom wasn’t making her better. The buffeting she received from the press, the reports she received of high-society gossip, the leaks against her from ‘the enemy camp’: they all made her needy and dependent.

  Joseph Sanders, on good terms with several newspaper proprietors, received his share of late-night calls, and early-morning ones too:

  I think she was a permanent little girl lost. She’d keep phoning up from seven o’clock in the morning and she used to read all the papers. So if there was anything in them that she didn’t like, that she was dating a man, or there was a photograph she didn’t like, she used to phone up and say, ‘Joseph, why have they written this about me?’

  Another recipient of calls was AIDS clinician Mike Adler:

  There were a number of us who recognised that we could become close friends, that she could pull us in. And I know three or four of my friends took a very conscious decision, as I did, that we were not going to be pulled into a sort of inner circle where we would be called up at four o’clock in the morning.

  * * *

  One source of anxiety was James Hewitt. The affair had again been extinguished, but Diana was fearful that he might talk. The press carried much speculation but as yet had never been able to print the truth. Since returning from the Gulf, Hewitt had been under incessant pressure. Cheques for hundreds of thousands of pounds had been waved in front of him. He had been told that there were compromising tapes in newspaper safes and that the whole story was about to break at any moment.

  Despite being mentioned in dispatches for his conduct in battle, Hewitt had seen his military career collapse. He was trailed and taped and photographed wherever he went. And he was cut off from Diana.

  I still hadn’t said anything at all. I wouldn’t return any calls from the papers. The hacks and the paparazzi were using extraordinary tactics in order to try and glean more information . . . And I had to try and handle the situation as best I could. I had no professional advice or agent.

  I didn’t know what tape recordings or pictures were in existence and I was bribed and blackmailed into meeting these people. Which is a ghastly thing.

  From time to time he would speak to Diana on the telephone, asking her how to react to the latest approach from journalists. She encouraged him to give a misleading version of his story in the hope of throwing the other royal reporters off the scent. He decided to meet a journalist from the Daily Express called Anna Pasternak.

  We had to find out how much they knew. It was suggested, I mean by Diana, that I put my side of the story, which was to be a sort of an anodyne account of the situation, to a newspaper, which was the Express, I think. And I tried to do that and it didn’t work.

  Some of Diana’s friends recall that she asked Hewitt to speak to Richard Kay rather than Pasternak, but that he did not favour the Daily Mail reporter. Hewitt’s denials to the Express were ridiculed by the other tabloids.

  Pasternak learned more than perhaps was healthy. I was persuaded that it would be a good idea if I gave Pasternak a certain amount of information because she would then put the situation a little more favourably than it had up until that moment been put in the press. I was coming under a lot of attack and criticism, unnecessarily so.

  People have all sorts of ideas on what you should be paid for and what you shouldn’t be paid for . . . but I really do regret getting involved in the media, full stop. But, you know, they know their business and they’re good at it. And I didn’t know the business and I was hopeless. And that is my biggest crime. And I’ve had to live with that.

  In early August Diana went on holiday to America with her friend Lucia Flecha da Lima. There she learned that Hewitt had told their whole story to Pasternak, who was writing it up in a hurry for a book that would come out in October, the same month that Dimbleby’s was expected and just in time for the Christmas market.

  * * *

  Diana’s turmoil that summer owed much to a more recent relationship that was rapidly going wrong. Throughout much of 1993 and 1994, Diana had been seeing a married art dealer called Oliver Hoare. One of the reasons she had dispensed with her protection officers was she that wanted to conduct her private life without detectives following her everywhere.

  Diana made several hundred telephone calls to his home. Sometimes the line went dead when Hoare’s wife, Diane, answered. Mrs Hoare called the police. They quickly traced the calls to private numbers inside Kensington Palace and to phone boxes nearby. Oliver Hoare asked Scotland Yard to drop their investigation. But in August 1994 someone leaked the story to the News of the World. Under the headline ‘Di’s Cranky Phone Calls To Married Tycoon’, the paper printed the story in detail, including the results of the initial police investigation. To Richard Kay, Diana admitted making some of the calls, but said she was not responsible for the majority of them. Several of her friends knew better. Joseph Sanders got an admission direct from a very fearful Diana:

  Diana told me that she made probably three or four hundred telephone calls to Oliver Hoare. She made them from phone boxes from different addresses. She wore disguises to go to the phone boxes, she wore gloves and she really covered her tracks. But she did ma
ke the phone calls. If he didn’t answer the phone she normally put the phone down. And she was really very worried about it . . . She was actually worried that she might be arrested and charged with making nuisance calls.

  I shouted at her and I said, ‘You know, you’re a very silly girl to behave like this, you really shouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t think that you can get away with it.’ And that evening I thought about it and I thought maybe I’d been a bit cruel to her. So the next day I saw her and I apologised. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Diana, maybe I was a little harsh on you.’ She said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, the Palace are shouting at me the whole time.’

  Diana assumed that St James’s Palace had leaked the story to bring her down. She may have been right. However, policemen have long handed stories like this to newspapers without any encouragement.

  The Daily Mail printed Diana’s plaintive response: ‘What have I done to deserve this? . . . I feel I am being destroyed,’ but it made little difference. She was faced with a barrage of bad publicity, all of which she read and reread, brooding over the unfairness of it all.

  Elsa Bowker was close to Diana at this time, and a conduit between her and Oliver Hoare. Before Bowker died in 2000 she gave us a dramatic portrait of Diana’s friendship with him, suggesting that when anxious or upset Diana wanted the comfort of hearing Hoare’s voice, and, in need of his approval, became fixated with the idea of speaking to him.

  * * *

  Free speech and liberty! The British have long laid proud claim to their right to discuss whatever or whoever they like, in whatever terms they like. When Britain acquired a German royal family in the eighteenth century, Germans became very interested in British culture, and especially this notion of free speech. In 1804 a journalist from Hanover was shocked to discover that the Englishman:

  talks about his King, his Princes and Princesses just as he might talk about the lowest of his fellow countrymen . . . The private affairs of the royal household are discussed with no regard for majesty, just as one might discuss how well or badly a valet runs a household. If a man’s actions expose him to the mercy of the public, it doesn’t matter whether he is an Esquire or a Lord; he must put up with being discussed in detail and criticised by everyone who has heard the whisper of Rumour’s hundred tongues. One is most aware of this shameless freedom in the English literary lampoons and caricatures which are published in such numbers . . .

  Saturday night in the West End of London. Groups of young people hurry down Oxford Street or Piccadilly to the Tube, across the Strand to Charing Cross and the last train back to suburbia. The Sunday papers are on sale from roadside trestle tables. ‘Oh, go on, get the News of the Screws as well. We want all the goss.’

  The cheerful cruelty of the British tabloid press grew from deep roots. Before 1800 unsteady late-night promenaders would have walked these same streets, hurrying home on foot, by chair or coach or river-boat, past Holland’s caricature print shop, or Fores’ or Darly’s. By day, to the horror of respectable visitors from Hanover, crowds of ordinary folk would gather round these windows, all laughing like drones at pictures of princes or prime ministers. At Fores’ print shop in Piccadilly they might have marvelled at a picture of the Prince of Wales having sex with his mistress, Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow six years his senior – His Highness in Fitz, ha! ha! ha!; at Darly’s there was no mistaking the crude innuendo of The Scotch Broomstick and the Female Besom, in which the young Queen Mother holds the bushy head of her besom, protruding from between her thighs, ready to receive the end of the Earl of Bute’s broomstick. ‘Come lassie, let’s make the most of the game for I am strong in hand & we are above the vulgar,’ exclaims the Scottish favourite.

  Camillagate and Squidgygate: they were tame compared to the print and pamphlet mockery of the sex scandals of the Georgian courts. George, Prince of Wales, the later Prince Regent, actually married Mrs Fitzherbert and then denied that it had happened. With him and his brothers (and uncles and forebears) one shocking affair whetted the appetite for another until the Prince’s own career culminated in an orgy of scandal when he barred his estranged Queen, Caroline, from his coronation. If Charles and Diana had done every scandalous thing that rumour imagined they might have done, they could not remotely have matched the children of George III. The Georgian public loved their glimpses of the caricatured hedonism and debauchery that was supposed to go on behind aristocratic screens. And in the 1990s the public reaction was very similar. A voracious appetite for sex stories about the royals had developed. People expected to see ever more lurid and partisan accounts of their lives delivered up for their entertainment. Just the thing to make the train ride home pass a little quicker.

  * * *

  After a lousy summer, 1994 got even worse. The phone pest story was hard evidence of the kind of abnormal behaviour that her husband’s friends had been telling Jonathan Dimbleby about. Right on cue, Dimbleby’s book came out, accompanied by a much-advertised serialisation in the Sunday Times. The next blow was Princess in Love, the book written by journalist Anna Pasternak, based on her interviews with James Hewitt.

  A year before Diana had seemed serene and unassailable. Now every bookstore and newspaper was full of stories of her adultery, her mental instability and her bizarre relationship with Oliver Hoare.

  Hewitt’s tempters became his tormentors. The same men who had spent three years trying to get him to speak now turned on him for doing so, giving him his first taste of headlines like ‘Britain’s Biggest Bounder’ and ‘Love Rat and Cad’, while at the same time publishing lengthy extracts from Pasternak’s book. The Sun’s ‘Eight-Page Special on the Book that Betrayed Diana’ revealed They Did It at Althorp’, ‘They Did It in the Bathroom’ and ‘She Begged to Do It on Dartmoor’.

  Hewitt soon became one of the tabloids’ favourite caricatures, a heartless ladies’ man in uniform who seduced a vulnerable young princess; a scoundrel who kissed and told. It was a parody of the true history of their relationship – and especially its early years – but it was widely believed.

  People do not know the history of events. What has been suggested in the press is not the truth [and] in many instances it’s a lie. I did not kiss and tell. That is a fallacy. Yes, I was paid for an interview. I regret that very much. The fact that I did it at all I regret and it was a mistake. And I’m sorry, very, very, very sorry, for that.

  I don’t think it’s damaged anybody particularly other than myself. So people can rest assured that that’s the case . . . I damaged myself and I’ve been paying the price.

  Despite all their years of closeness, Diana and Hewitt were now estranged. Joseph Sanders heard her complain about him many times.

  Diana told me that her relationship with James Hewitt had ended because she didn’t want to see him any more. Diana changed her number and he had to phone up on the switchboard. I was there on one occasion when he phoned and she just refused to take the call.

  She had great difficulty when she finished a relationship. Instead of meeting somebody and saying, ‘I don’t think we ought to see each other any more, this is goodbye,’ having a meal with them, or doing it in a pleasant way, she literally would not speak to them from one day to the next. So they didn’t know where they were. One minute they’d been on very friendly terms and the next minute they couldn’t speak to her.

  How to find trust in an echo chamber? Diana found it difficult to maintain confidence in other people – a problem amplified by friends or advisers eager to question another’s loyalty. Trust rarely existed in her marriage. With Hewitt it was present in the early years, underpinned by secrecy and regular personal contact. But once the parties were geographically separated, and once the press was after the story, it was easy for both to suspect the actions of the other.

  How much she loved me I don’t know . . . She said she did, but who knows exactly what one individual is really thinking?

  * * *

  Fierce perjury laws mean that courtroom cross-examination by London’s be
wigged QCs can easily lead the unwary into further legal trouble. This thought preoccupied Diana’s friends as she prepared to go to court in her privacy case against the Daily Mirror over the illicit gym photos. The Mirror had selected Geoffrey Robertson, QC, one of the most aggressive courtroom performers in town, to represent it. Robertson’s team had been doing their research and had dug up many recent occasions when supposedly private events had been photographed with the Princess’s help. They had also investigated rumours of other relationships between Diana and men she had met at the same gym.

  Diana thought this was meaningless. She was a single woman now. If she chose to have lovers, it was no one’s business but her own. But those advising her believed that, after the Oliver Hoare disaster, further disclosures about her sex life would not look good in court, especially if they involved other married men.

  Joseph Sanders played a central role in this affair.

  I don’t think she realised what she had coming. I told her very strongly that she really should not go into the witness box, and be cross-examined by Geoffrey Robertson, who is a brilliant QC. He would have asked her very relevant questions about her past affairs, the men that she’d been out with, and it would have been very, very embarrassing.

  He would’ve asked her how many times she went to the gym, who she’d met at the gym, whether she’d had a cup of coffee with them, whether she’d had more than a cup of coffee with them. And these were very difficult questions to answer truthfully. And any answers that she gave would have had her in great difficulties.

  So I spoke to the chief executive of the Mirror, and arranged a meeting.