Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  So the Princess shook hands in chinos, gave her speech and moved on to her hotel. Outside, a bemused Angolan selling chewing gum pulled at Christina Lamb’s sleeve and asked her who the tall blonde lady was.

  The other journalists that were there were all royal hacks who were used to going to Klosters and those kinds of places. They were all, almost without exception, horrified to be in Luanda. They refused to eat the food – they lived on omelettes, because they thought they were safe. They wouldn’t go out at night, and they were kind of not very keen on this new Diana going to difficult places.

  Sun photographer Arthur Edwards thought Angola was the worst place he’d ever been.

  The next day, the hundred-strong party of officials, journalists and charity workers set out for one of the Red Cross health centres. As they left the centre of Luanda, they drove past shanty-towns and markets, crumbling apartment blocks and police barracks.

  It was very hot, it was very dusty. Angola is a completely destroyed country, there’re no roads to speak of, there are flies everywhere, lots of people, amputees walking around, and there’re more amputees per capita than there are anywhere else. And so it’s very traumatic travelling around there.

  Diana asked questions about what she saw. ‘Why are those children playing on that rubbish heap?’ They stopped next to a Red Cross health centre. Sewage ran down the centre of the street. Diana thanked Whitlam for letting her see Angola as it really was, as a worker getting closer to the issue and to the people.

  And, slightly to his surprise, Diana was on top of her subject:

  We were talking about the numbers of landmines there were in various parts of the world; in Angola it was disputed whether there were ten or fifteen million. I said, ‘Don’t forget there are ten million landmines left by the British in the deserts of North Africa.’ To which she promptly replied, ‘Mike, I think you’ll find it’s twenty-three million.’ And she was right.

  * * *

  Diana wanted to visit Cuito, reputed to be the most heavily mined town in Africa. Completely ringed with minefields and largely in ruins, Cuito was an extremely dangerous place. They had planned to go there as part of a trip to nearby Huambo, but when they got to Angola the local Red Cross workers were told it was too hazardous and the government wouldn’t allow it.

  Diana refused to accept the decision. She pestered officials and then raised it with the President’s wife. Whitlam didn’t want to take any serious risks, but she was determined. One of her staff went and checked the town out, while the rest stayed in Luanda. The message came back that it was possible, but difficult, and it meant completely reorganising the schedule.

  The journalists knew nothing about any of this, and when Diana was strongly advised not to take the full entourage into Cuito, she and Whitlam worked on the problem until midnight. They had to find an extra small plane and come up with a strategy to separate the tour into two parties. Eventually the UN offered a flight.

  That same night a political argument broke out in London, where Diana was accused of being a ‘loose cannon’ and a ‘self-publicist’ by Conservative MPs. Whitlam was now trying to deal with two crises at once.

  At about two o’clock in the morning, after being up until midnight sorting the logistics of the Cuito trip, I got a phone call to say there were reports coming out of London about some politicians being highly critical of her taking this particular trip, that she was in conflict with government policy. As it happened, and unusually for me, in this rather grotty hotel I was staying in I had the British government’s policy on landmines next to my bed. I was able to quote from it directly and immediately. I spent the next two or three hours sending messages back to ministers saying, ‘Look, there is no conflict here. Please do something back in London about it.’ The result was that there was a joint statement in London from the Foreign Secretary and from the Ministry of Defence, saying that there was no conflict at all, that what she was saying was in line with both British government and Red Cross policy.

  At 5 a.m. Whitlam went to brief the British ambassador about what had happened overnight. He explained everything to Diana too when she came down at five-thirty to set off. They agreed that she must not be drawn personally into any argument about the MPs’ critical statements. Then there was the Cuito trip to deal with.

  We had two planes, put most of the journalists on one, and a few, the pool crew, on ours. After takeoff they were told that one group were going to Huambo as planned, and the smaller group was coming with us to Cuito, en route.

  I had some explaining to do to some of the journalists. And the pool crew shared their material, so it worked out in the end. But she was a very determined woman, and thank goodness she was because it was one of the highlights of the visit.

  And then suddenly Diana was confronted by the BBC’s Jenny Bond, one of the journalists travelling with the pool crew. She demanded a reaction to the stories coming out of London. Diana fended her off, but was very angry in the Landcruiser afterwards. The BBC crew filmed her questioning Whitlam.

  ‘Why is this being said? Why do people want to do this? What do I have to do?’ She was quite upset about it. And I said, ‘Look, we’ll stick to the line we’ve taken. I’ll deal with it. You just carry on with the visit and do what you have to do.’

  On the trip to Huambo the thinned-down staff did not include a Red Cross interpreter, so Christina Lamb volunteered her services as a Portuguese speaker.

  We arrived in Huambo, which is one of the most devastated towns in Angola. We flew in, and it was quite scary, we flew in a transport plane, landed on this airstrip, bumpy landing. It’s an area where there’s been intense fighting and it’s still a disputed area, so it is right in the centre of the war zone. And we came out of the plane and walked through the town, and you had to walk very carefully, because it was heavily mined, so we were following in the footsteps of an anti-mine engineer.

  So we were walking in a single file and being very careful where we trod. And the town itself is just like a ghost town. It’s strange, the fronts of buildings are there, but there’s nothing behind. So we walked through the main street, and we walked to this small hospital which has nothing – I mean, there’s no equipment. The staff were all very nice and they took us in and they’d clearly done their best to clean up the hospital for their important visitor. But it was very, very basic.

  There were not enough beds, so people were lying on the floor, people in terrible condition. One of the doctors showed us the pharmacy, and there was almost nothing, so few drugs. Then we went into various wards to see people. It was just huts really, with people in makeshift beds.

  These people had no idea who she was, the patients. Because of the war, people had been completely cut off from the outside world. There’s no electricity, no television, no newspapers outside of Luanda. So it’s probably one of the few places she could go to and people really had no idea who she was. They’d never heard of Princess Diana. They just saw her as a sort of beautiful, white lady who appeared, they didn’t really know why. So she went to some of the bedsides, and I actually interpreted for her because I speak Portuguese. I was trying to do my job as a journalist and get into places where I could hear what she was saying.

  We went into one particular ward with children. And there was a little girl who was clearly in a terrible condition. She’d gone to fetch water and had stepped on a mine and basically had her entire insides blown out, and everything was sort of hanging out. It was horrific. And the hospital said that she wouldn’t survive – they were just making her as comfortable as possible. You could see that she probably wouldn’t last, maybe even that day.

  After Diana moved on, I stayed and just asked the girl a few more questions, because I thought I would write about her. And she said to me, ‘Who was that?’ And it was quite hard trying to explain Princess Diana to somebody who didn’t know. And I said, ‘She’s a princess from England, from far away.’ And she said to me, ‘Is she an angel?’ And I found that really moving.
This little girl probably died a few hours after that – I know she died – and it somehow seemed nice that that was the last thing that she saw, this beautiful lady that she thought was an angel.

  * * *

  While she was touring Angola, having just returned from another Caribbean holiday with Victoria Mendham, Diana found a few spare minutes to pursue her secretary over what she deemed to be her share of the cost. Since they had been staying in beachside villas at a cost of £1,200 a night, this came to rather a lot.

  Diana leaving the hospital to make a phone call to Victoria Mendham is perhaps the defining paradox in a story that’s so rich in them.

  How to weigh up and value a life? Not, perhaps, by algebra. A bad act does not cancel out a good one. And some of the greatest philanthropists have been bullies. As Diana was – no, as Diana could be, by the end. But because of Angola, because of Henry Street, she was forgiven. When Diana died, Victoria Mendham volunteered to come in to her old office and help arrange the funeral.

  * * *

  After the hospital Diana was scheduled to walk through a half-cleared minefield. The idea had been conceived when Whitlam had talked to the Halo Trust, the mine clearance team, about what they could show the Princess. They wanted her to see the range of landmines that had to be taken out of the ground and some of the risks that their mine clearance workers took every day.

  All around, young men and women were prodding very carefully into the dusty African soil. Exposed and half-extracted mines were there for her to inspect. In Cuito she had just heard a story about children who were playing on the local football field, which was supposed to have been cleared. Seven were killed when one of them trod on a large mine that had somehow been missed. Mike Whitlam was feeling nervous.

  The Halo Trust guys took over. It’s not a job I would like. They gave her a very full briefing, saying not to move away from them and how to react if she saw anything a bit odd. I think by the end of the briefing she was beginning to wonder whether this was a good idea. But she did it.

  We all walked through this cleared area, to a point where they had almost completed clearing a mine that they’d found. You could see this landmine buried in the ground. I think it had been deactivated. I don’t know – they never told me – but I hope it had been. Then she walked back on her own from the minefield, wearing the visor and the body armour, and this was the shot that the journalists were really looking for, so we all stayed way out of the way.

  One or two journalists, for whatever reason, hadn’t quite got the shot they wanted and jokingly asked her if she’d mind doing it again. And she was quite happy to do this. She realised that this was one of the shots that was really going to make a big impact around the world. So she did the walk a second time.

  When we got back she pressed the button which blew up the mine she’d just seen. It had been wired to explode. And that was one less landmine.

  Immediately after the walk, the journalists switched back to the story coming out of London. Whitlam held an impromptu press conference next to the minefield.

  I remember trying to answer their questions and I was just aware out of the corner of my eye that Diana was creeping closer and closer to the group. Until at one point she just couldn’t hold it any more and she said, ‘I’m here on a humanitarian visit.’

  They were pushing me into saying this was an ill-advised statement, or something along those lines. I said that this seems to me to be somebody making mischief.

  * * *

  Throughout the Angola trip Christina Lamb watched Diana closely, waiting for the caring mask to slip. She noticed that Diana had an eye for a photograph. To that extent her scepticism was confirmed.

  She knew the photo opportunity. I mean, she had an instinct for it. That was fascinating to watch. She would go into a hospital or school and she would immediately spot, you know, the girl with two stumps but amazing, appealing eyes who would look great sat next to her. There is that famous photograph from the Angola trip. It was not a photographer who put Diana with that girl, Diana walked straight over to her. There were many other people there, equally sad victims of the war in Angola and the landmines, but there were few that would have looked so captivating in a photograph as that girl. And she knew.

  And I saw the same thing in another hospital where there was a little boy, a real character, who had lost both his legs, had got artificial legs and was trying to walk and play football. And she spotted him immediately and went over, and you could see that out of the corner of her eye she was looking for the cameras. I didn’t like that at all.

  But Lamb began to see even this as an aspect of an assured professionalism rather than an insatiable hunger for attention. And she hadn’t forgotten the angel story.

  Diana had an incredible empathy with these people. I found it really astonishing because she somehow managed to transmit to them this feeling of really caring about what had happened. It didn’t seem cynical at all once you were actually there with her. And she had this kind of aura about her, which I’ve only seen really I would say with Nelson Mandela – he has the same thing – where he somehow is able to transmit this force of personality and of caring to people.

  I was very impressed. It changed my view of her.

  I spend a lot of time in developing countries, writing about issues that people back here are not very interested in. And it’s very difficult to get people’s interest. Having Princess Diana in the middle of Angola, talking to landmine victims, immediately means that people like my mum and dad, and people back here, would read the story, because they’d see the picture of her.

  * * *

  Christopher Hitchens has a view of Diana’s African trip that doesn’t square with those of the converted sceptics in the Landcruisers.

  I do quite a lot of public lecturing in the United States, and at question time I ask people, ‘Who was the last American to win the Nobel Prize for Peace?’ Americans are very proud of their Nobel Prize winners – it’s like the Olympics for them. And the prize for peace is one of the most respected and it hasn’t been won by very many Americans. And I say, for a clue, that this is in the last two or three years. Nobody knows. Absolutely nobody knows. I’ve never had anyone put their hand up and get the answer right. And I don’t blame you if you don’t know. Do you?

  No. Well, it was Jodie Williams for the landmines campaign, for bringing up the question of landmines and the appalling damage they do to civilians. I then say to the audience, ‘Well, is there anyone here who doesn’t know that Princess Diana once spent a day in Angola, being filmed near a landmine?’ And they have to admit I’ve got them – they all did know that. I say, ‘Well, is this not possibly substituting the phoney for the real thing? Is it not wolfing down the wrapper and throwing the truffle away?’

  * * *

  It may be unfair that Diana attracted more attention than Jodie Williams, but it was important too. Arthur Edwards, who had taken the first photograph of her ever printed, was there in Africa and now took perhaps the most important. And neither Arthur nor his paper would have gone anywhere near Angola for Jodie Williams.

  For eight gruelling days, Diana and Mike Whitlam had hit every news bulletin. The criticism from London only added to coverage that instantly created a wave of interest in the subject, taking the question of the stalled landmines treaty directly into the public arena.

  I can’t think of anybody now who could give such a very simple, global message, and get people to listen, and take notice. Not a single individual. And she did it on that visit, without any question whatsoever. If a politician stands up and does it, then the opposition will start to argue against it. If it’s a religious leader, there’s some other argument against it.

  It raised the profile so that governments really couldn’t escape that, and it certainly helped the Red Cross and a number of other agencies to be able to argue the case for governments to ratify. Without her intervention, it would have been a struggle, I think, to make it happen in Canada.

 
I think, had she lived, this would have been the new way that we’d see Diana working. Whether overseas, or in the UK. She just enjoyed it. She was a natural. I think Diana’s motivation for the landmines campaign was no different from her motivation for many of the other things that she became involved with. She was particularly good at raising issues that were unpopular. She wanted to make a difference. The campaign was a global campaign and needed lifting. She felt she could do something.

  A meeting was due in Canada – a meeting of all the governments that had said they were going to ratify the treaty. In was set for December 1997. Diana was planning to be there.

  * * *

  It’s possible that Hitchens is right, that Diana’s most celebrated good works were the result of a leap on to a rolling bandwagon, an over-rehearsed photograph, a wrapper without the truffle.

  Against that there’s Mike Whitlam, who thinks she changed the world for the better that week in Angola, and Christina Lamb’s glimpse of the same unaffected charisma that had worked its magic down Henry Street. And perhaps real change takes more than the day-to-day slog of activists like Jodie Williams. Perhaps, as Ed Mathews discovered in New York, you have to cut a few deals to get good things done in a bad, sad world.

  Was she an angel? No, of course she wasn’t. She was a woman who was capable of behaving in strikingly unangelic ways, even in Huambo. But at that moment by the bedside, to that dying girl, and for that great cause, Diana was the only angel in town.

  17

  Last Summer

  * * *

  On 1 May 1997 the Labour Party swept the Conservatives out of government after eighteen years. Diana was at a dinner along with businessman Gulu Lalvani, one of several friends who had recently switched political allegiance. He had an invitation to Labour’s late-night victory party at the Festival Hall. Although she was very tempted, Diana felt she should not go with him. Instead he rang her several times from the party to discover her sitting up late, excitedly watching the election results come in.