Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  * * *

  As her secret romance with Hasnat Khan continued, Diana fantasised about sharing her future with him. She visited Pakistan twice in 1996, ostensibly to see her old friends Jemima and Imran Khan (no relation). She visited Lahore to help raise money for the Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital, founded by Imran in memory of his mother, who had died of cancer. She visited again in July. Another reason for both trips was to persuade Hasnat’s mother, Naheed Khan, that she would make a suitable wife for her son. But Mrs Khan wanted him to marry one of his own Pathan clan. Diana professed an interest in everything Pakistani, burned incense sticks at Kensington Palace, wore kaftans and watched Pakistani videos, much to the bemusement of her staff. In November 1996, the Sunday Mirror published a detailed account of their affair. To appease the media-shy doctor, Diana denied the romance to Richard Kay.

  Diana had, by now, confided in Lord Palumbo. ‘Hasnat Khan is a very honourable man. He seemed a very decent person and she seemed very happy with him.’ She had also told her new friend Lana Marks all about him:

  Emotionally she needed somebody who could give her security, who could help her through this very difficult time when she was breaking up with Prince Charles. This was a gentleman who was very highly educated, very bright, very compassionate with the work that he was doing. He shared many of the same views as Diana, and was an enormous source of strength for her at a difficult time.

  But Marks is not convinced about Diana’s marriage plans.

  Diana told me that Hasnat Khan was wonderful. She had met his family, she had met various of his relatives and she had the greatest respect for him. But in terms of marriage, I really don’t think this was something that Diana would have gone through at all.

  * * *

  Diana owed much of her international reputation as a humanitarian to her early work with AIDS. But she was about to fall out with the man who had organised those first bedside visits, and watched them with such admiration.

  Mike Adler was planning to open a new department of sexually transmitted diseases and wanted the patron of the National AIDS Trust to be at hand. Diana agreed to come:

  The day before her visit I received a message to say that Diana had decided that she was going to bring Aileen Getty with her. Now Aileen Getty was a high-profile American woman with HIV and AIDS and she was travelling around every television and radio studio in the capital talking about it, and she had latched on to Diana.

  The Princess was going to bring Aileen Getty to this visit, and Aileen Getty wanted to bring two or three of her hangers-on. I rang up Jane Atkinson and went bananas down the phone, saying, ‘She can’t just bring all these people in, these are patients that we are dealing with! This is not a zoo! This is not an aquarium!’

  Jane Atkinson had been expecting the call.

  The objective was for Mike to raise the profile of the work that he was doing with AIDS. Then she announced that she was going to take Aileen Getty with her because this was a opportunity to draw attention to the fact that AIDS could also affect women.

  Mike was absolutely furious. He felt that this wasn’t the main part of the issue he was involved with, and that it was hijacking the visit, and he was very angry. He did shout at me down the telephone as to how I could have allowed this. I rang the Princess and she was quite adamant that she was going with Aileen, so I rang Mike back and I said, ‘I think the only thing to do under these circumstances, Mike, is for you to ring her directly.’

  Adler said he would do just that.

  Jane subsequently told me that the phone melted in her hand as I bawled her out. Of course, it wasn’t Jane’s fault. She didn’t know what was going on. About half an hour to go before the event, Diana came on and I said, ‘Ma’am, listen, as far as I am concerned it doesn’t matter to me whether you come or not, OK? It really doesn’t matter. But I am not having you treating us in this way. I am quite happy to call it all off now.’

  She went, ‘Oh, Michael, Michael, you must trust me, it will all be all right,’ so I said, ‘OK, but you do realise the conditions under which you are coming?’

  Anyway, she arrived and we had got the whole thing worked out: Aileen Getty would be taken by one of us, sat at the back of this room while I did a short presentation with Diana sitting in the front. Having sat next to Diana, I got up to do a presentation and Diana beckoned to Aileen Getty, who came from the back of the room to the front and they held hands together the whole time. The only photograph that appeared of Diana was her holding hands with Aileen Getty.

  Not the worst thing a charity patron could do. After all, Aileen Getty’s cause was valuable too. But it wasn’t the reason this particular event had been organised.

  It was just an example of how she lost focus, how she would try sometimes to use an event that was very serious for a completely different agenda, and it was highly inappropriate. We were very bitter about it.

  Here was Diana forgetting the promises that had been made. We were fairly curt with each other. You have to hang on to what is important to you, and what is important to me was the integrity of what I did clinically, and being chairman of a trust.

  And frankly, if people try and misuse the opportunities then it is not worth the candle. Frankly, it is just not worth it.

  * * *

  On 15 July 1996 the decree nisi was announced, followed six weeks later on 28 August by the decree absolute. Diana received a lump-sum payment, estimated at £17 million. But she lost the title ‘Her Royal Highness’.

  Diana blamed the loss of her title for her immediate decision to drop her involvement with a hundred charities, including favourites like the Red Cross and Help the Aged. Jane Atkinson was against it, saying it would look petulant and sulky, but she refused to listen. None of the charities, bar six she kept working with, was informed of her decision until the last minute. Many found out only when the announcement was made public.

  Diana told friends that she wanted to spring-clean her life, cut down her workload, and concentrate on the few charities that most appealed to her. She kept the National AIDS Trust, Victor Adebowale’s Centrepoint, the Royal Marsden NHS Trust, the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, the Leprosy Mission and the English National Ballet. Atkinson waited for the bad press to arrive.

  I don’t think that I ever thought there was a good time to do it. We always knew that it was going to be a negative media story. She tried to do it as a story which would give her some sympathy for losing the HRH title, and it backfired! We all of us knew it wouldn’t work. It seemed like a cold-hearted thing to do, but I think it was done as part of her trying to structure her life after divorce. I can honestly say that I don’t know what the rationalisation in her own mind was. She talked about it as genuinely wanting the charities to feel free, and not be tied to her: she was no longer royal and they should have another royal patron.

  Mike Whitlam was one of those who was dropped.

  I heard [about it] one morning at about eight-thirty in a phone call. She was trying to explain to me that we were not one of the six. She felt she owed it to me to tell me, rather than just get the letter which arrived about ten minutes later. The conversation was very amicable. But I guess I was personally hurt. I was surprised, disappointed, maybe even shocked. Particularly as I felt we had a very good working relationship. And also because the Red Cross was an organisation which she was very close to. She’d been made a vice-president. She had even accepted a role within the International Red Cross making policy. I suppose I had wonderful visions of her being with us for ever.

  In Soho, Adebowale was counting his blessings:

  I think she realised that abandoning Centrepoint wasn’t just abandoning an organisation that was going to do all right anyway because it was a ‘sexy charity’. She realised that if she was to walk away it might affect our future and she didn’t want to see that.

  Centrepoint has always had to struggle to stay financially afloat. We need every penny and her walking away at that point might well have
sunk us. So her being with us meant a lot in every sense, and she knew that. I think that made the decision about Centrepoint just that little more urgent: I should keep this one because they really need me. I think that’s why she stuck with us.

  Despite their recent argument, Mike Adler’s National Aids Trust was also one of the lucky ones, but he didn’t find her taking an increased interest:

  When she kept us as one of the six charities we were delighted. I don’t know why we were one of the chosen few. I imagine it had to do with the fact that she had been involved with us right from the beginning.

  But the moment she dropped it down to six charities was the time, even though we were all very flattered, that she began to disengage. It was very difficult for a charity like mine to rely on her. I think she was confused about what she was meant to be doing – there were so many other things going on in her life. I think she became distracted by that, and it became very difficult to be able to know that she would deliver on things that you would ask her to do.

  For example, if you were trying to arrange a charity concert she would never say yes or no. It was very difficult because when you are trying to do charitable events, there is a long lead into things, and unless you can get her to sign on early on you can’t run things. Towards the end, because you knew getting an answer was going to be difficult, you stopped asking.

  She just found it difficult to focus. That was one thing; the second thing was that I increasingly realised one was getting caught up in her own personal agenda and her own personal confusion.

  To be quite honest, by the end of her life we hardly asked her to do anything. It just wasn’t worth it. It was better to plan to do things knowing that she wouldn’t be there. We began to operate as a charity with a patron but without her.

  * * *

  After a stressful spring, Jane Atkinson was looking forward to another American visit.

  The trip to Chicago to raise money for breast cancer treatment was a great success. We’d overcome the negatives of Harefield, and she and I and her staff worked very hard to make Chicago work for her. She behaved impeccably. She was absolutely wonderful, the Americans loved her, she liked the Americans. It was hard work, but the publicity was great.

  After that, one or two articles appeared about me and her staff, and I’m told that she didn’t like them very much. She felt that it had been a team effort. I was very, very careful, if you read any of the publicity, to say that it was a team effort, and it’s certainly not anything that: I engineered. But she just became distrustful.

  She’d always helped me considerably with background things that I didn’t understand, maybe things that had happened before. And then just suddenly I would ring her and say, ‘Can you explain about this?’ and she would just be unhelpful and say, ‘Well, tch, you should know that!’

  When she resigned the charities, she had already written the press release and discussed how it should be handled. Then later in the day she rang me and was very angry because of the way that the media had treated the story. She felt it had been very negative to her. I explained that I’d only answered the questions in the way that we’d agreed, but she accused me of not doing so. And then one of her friends was on the ten o’clock news saying almost exactly the same things that I’d said. And when I rang the Princess and asked her if she knew that her friend was on the news she said no, she didn’t know. I think her words were, ‘You can’t always stop your friends talking.’

  It was impossible for me to do my job in an environment like that. I thought, Well, that’s it. I can’t continue to function properly as a media adviser, so I ought to resign.

  Diana came to rely on her friends for PR advice. And she had one more triumph to come.

  16

  Miracle in Huambo

  * * *

  Mike, it’s Diana, could you come over for a cup of tea some time soon? I’d like to talk about those landmines again.

  Diana’s ambition to become a roving envoy had so far been thwarted by the government and the Royal Family. Some thought her insufficiently well informed and astute, and some dismissed her as an attention-seeker. Lord Palumbo told her to make the best of it. If ‘she wouldn’t be permitted to roam the world as an ambassador at large’, he said, ‘she should target certain specific issues which would be left up to her.’ So she did.

  Veteran Daily Telegraph man Bill Deedes had been involved with the anti-landmine cause since 1991. Promoted by the arms industry as an effective weapon of defence, millions of landmines had been laid since the Second World War. Very often, when the armies went away, the minefields were left behind, to kill or maim unlucky civilians and make farmland unusable. Now a major effort was under way to clear existing minefields and prevent further mines being laid. It was a difficult issue because powerful interests were opposed to the ban. Deedes appreciated how useful Diana could be to the cause, and how her participation might go some way to fulfilling her ambition.

  The Red Cross was one of the hundred charities that Diana had recently abandoned, but now she called Mike Whitlam and offered to help. He told her that she had to see the plight of landmine victims for herself, and suggested she should visit a country that was clearing up after a war. Inevitably she would bring the world’s attention with her. With luck this might generate some progress on a planned global landmine treaty which had become mired in bureaucracy in several nations that had said in public they supported it, notably Britain, Canada and America.

  At first they planned to go to Cambodia, but with a hostage crisis in progress they were warned off by the Foreign Office. Bosnia was also considered too dangerous. And so Angola was chosen, where it was estimated that fifteen million mines were scattered among a population of twelve million people. A BBC documentary crew asked if they could accompany her. Whitlam said ‘yes please’.

  I was very clear, as was she, that this was going to be a working visit, not an official visit. She was travelling as part of the Red Cross. It was not a Palace or government visit. There was quite a lot of pressure for her to take part in major fund-raising events, such as big dinners in Angola, and we refused. Occasionally, when I wavered, thinking that this might not be a bad idea, she would say, ‘No, Mike, we’ve agreed.’ Then when she wavered and said, ‘Well, maybe I ought to,’ I’d come in. So we worked as quite good support for each other. We wanted to show the destruction and devastation caused by landmines: we didn’t want it to be sidetracked.

  And suddenly, just before Christmas, I had a panic phone call from one of the more senior staff in the Red Cross in Geneva, saying he was extremely worried about this visit. I said, ‘It’s too late, you’ve said yes and it’s all set up.’ I had to fly to Geneva for a whole day of meetings, to reassure people about how we would get round some of the difficulties.

  Diana sought Mike Whitlam’s advice on what clothes to wear, as she did not want to detract from the focus of her tour. ‘I found that highly amusing, as even my wife wouldn’t ask that question of me.’ Chino trousers and an open-necked shirt were his recommendation.

  * * *

  Christina Lamb had been thinking about clothes too, uncomfortably imagining a Princess rubbing tailored shoulders with African amputees. A war reporter for the Sunday Times, Lamb had been asked by a hesitant editor to accompany Diana on this tour. She was a couple of years younger than Diana and remembered having her hair done in the short style with highlights just after the royal wedding. But she had little interest in Diana now, or in the breathless royal revelations that filled most British papers.

  I was very cynical about Diana, but I thought the trip was important because I’d worked a lot as a correspondent covering the issue of landmines in Mozambique and Angola which her trip was meant to highlight. But I just saw it as a big publicity stunt, another chance for her to be photographed in front of victims, looking beautiful.

  Lamb promised her equally sceptical friends that her pen would be sharp and that she wouldn’t be falling for any charm offensive.
r />   * * *

  There was chaos at Heathrow in January 1997 as a small army of cameramen and sound recordists, journalists and photographers all tried to check in stacks of metal boxes and piles of bulging bags alongside Whitlam and Diana. Eventually airline staff took the VIPs around the back. But that was as far as the special treatment went. They were completely surrounded by journalists on the plane. But Diana was buzzing. Always good when focused and fired up, she was her old confident and chatty self.

  They changed planes at Brussels and flew to Luanda. All the way Diana was amending a speech she was due to give on arrival, taking it out, reading it, scribbling on it, pacing up and down the aisle, reading it again and putting it back in her bag.

  Coming down into Luanda, Diana and Whitlam could see the reception party from a thousand feet up: yet more journalists clustered under arc lights and, to Diana’s astonishment, dozens of dignitaries too, all lined up in a receiving line, resplendent in suits, uniforms or national costume.

  And suddenly she said, ‘I’m going to have to change – we’ve got it all wrong.’ And I said, ‘Look, no, we’re running this, this is our visit. We have to set the scene when we arrive.’ ‘OK, you’re in charge,’ she said.

  Christina Lamb was waiting below:

  Luanda airport is completely wrecked. It’s just a sort of shell of a building. There’s not much of a runway and it was extremely hot and dusty. So we were waiting, lots of military around because it was a war zone, and waiting for her to arrive and come down the red carpet. And I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, when she arrived at least wearing very casual clothes. I’d expected her to arrive looking very glamorous. I mean she looked beautiful, but she was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt.