by Penny Junor
“We agree with their verdicts and are both hugely grateful to each and every one of them for the forbearance they have shown in accepting such significant disruption to their lives over the past six months.” They also thanked the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, for his “unfailing courtesy” and to former bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones—the only survivor—who gave evidence. “Finally, the two of us would like to express our most profound gratitude to all those who fought so desperately to save our mother’s life on that tragic night.”
One of their team, who spent many hours at the inquest, had nothing but praise for Scott Baker. “He was a genius. He was completely even-handed, he didn’t stand any nonsense; he was tough, considerate, straight as a die, analytical. There were a lot of pressures coming in from left and right and he was just very cool. We owe quite a lot to him.
“It would be presumptuous to suggest it was cathartic for the Princes. It was probably cathartic for the country, but she wasn’t the country’s mum; she was their mum.”
Their plans to commemorate their mother were twofold; and although they had help with the organization, the thinking that went into what transpired was entirely theirs. For seven months they oversaw every last detail. The only time either brother had ever before been so demonstrative or adamant about anything was when they chose which regiment they wanted to join. William had successfully passed out of Sandhurst, coincidentally, on the day the inquiry into Diana’s death was published. He followed Harry into the Blues and Royals where, because he was a university graduate, he immediately outranked his little brother—despite being the new boy in the regiment.
They wanted a huge, extended pop concert of music and dance, incorporating all the artists their mother loved most—a kind of people’s concert that would also raise money for charity. It was to be held in the new Wembley Stadium on 1 July 2007, what would have been her forty-sixth birthday. They also wanted a private memorial service to be held on the actual anniversary of her death with, again, her favorite music. Everyone involved remembers those seven months as being a very exciting, buzzy time, including some memorably funny meetings at which the older members of the team would be teased by the brothers for their ignorance of pop and the tables turning when it came to identifying classical music.
In the run-up to the concert they agreed to do two television interviews: one with America’s NBC Today program, the other with Fearne Cotton for the BBC. It seemed they were ready to talk a little bit about their mother and their loss.
“We were left in no doubt that we were the most important thing in her life,” said William, “and then after that there was everyone else, there were all her charities and everything like that and, to me, that’s a really good philosophy—she just loved caring for people and she loved helping.
“We were so lucky to have her as our mother and there’s not a day that goes past when we don’t think about her and miss her influence because she was a massive example to both of us.
“It’s one of those things that is very sad but you learn to deal with it and there are plenty of other people out there who have got the same or worse problems than we’ve had.”
Harry added, “She was a happy, fun, bubbly person who cared for so many people. She’s very much missed by not only us, but by a lot of people and I think that’s all that needs to be said, really.”
“Anything to do with their mother is really tricky,” says a friend. “Any event, like the memorial interview they gave, their sensitivity about being seen to say anything about their mother is very noticeable. ‘Talk about our mother? Oh God, we don’t talk enough about our dad.’ There is no doubt that they love their father, but from everything I’ve seen he is a complex man and difficult to be the son of sometimes, and his reactions to things aren’t always as elevated as we might want them to be. They are very careful of his sensitivities and dance around them a lot.”
Twenty-two thousand five hundred tickets to the concert made available in December 2006 sold out within seventeen minutes. In all, the stadium was filled with 63,000 people when William and Harry went out on to the stage, dressed casually in jeans, jackets and open-necked shirts. Harry started the proceedings. He simply said, “Hello, Wembley!” and the place erupted. People leapt to their feet and stamped and clapped and cheered—as heartily as if he had been one of the rock stars that followed. “This evening is about all that our mother loved in life,” he said. “Her music, her dance, her charities and her family and friends.” And mindful of his troops in Iraq who had just been deployed without him, he added, “I wish I was there with you. I’m sorry I can’t be. To you and everyone on operations we’d both like to say, ‘stay safe.’ ”
It was an evening the like of which had never been staged before. Sir Elton John, who had performed a specially adapted version of “Candle in the Wind” at Diana’s funeral, opened the concert with “Your Song,” followed by Duran Duran, her favorite band, and stars like James Morrison, Lily Allen, Status Quo, Sir Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, Kanye West, P. Diddy and Take That. It was an eclectic mix that lasted six glorious hours. There was music, dance from the English National Ballet, songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, and a comedy sketch from Ricky Gervais—who was left bravely improvising when the next act failed to appear. There were speakers including Sienna Miller and Dennis Hopper, Kiefer Sutherland, Jamie Oliver and David Beckham, who introduced acts and artists, and pre-recorded video tributes from Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And, all the while, iconic black-and-white images of Diana, taken by Mario Testino, looked down on the proceedings from a giant screen at the back of the stage.
After Sir Elton’s closing song, William and Harry returned to the stage for the final word. They had watched the concert from the royal box, surrounded by their cousins and friends—including Chelsy, whose relationship with Harry had been a bit on-off of late, and Kate Middleton, who was back in the fold after a temporary split from William—but no senior members of the Royal Family. They had been banned. William thanked everyone for coming and praised the artists for an “incredible evening. Thank you to all of you who have come here tonight to celebrate our mother’s life. For us this has been the most perfect way to remember her, and this is how she would want to be remembered.”
The concert was broadcast in 140 countries to an audience of around 500 million people and raised a total of £1 million for the Diana Memorial Fund and her five main charities, including Centrepoint, where she had taken both boys as children to meet the homeless, and Sentebale, which William said were “both charities that continue on from our mother’s legacy.”
The memorial service, held on 31 August 2007, was relayed on screens and loudspeakers to those lining the streets, but it was a much more intimate affair, held purposefully at the Guards’ Chapel in St. James’s, which could only take 450 people. This was for family and close friends of their mother’s, plus her godchildren, the bridesmaids and pages from her wedding, a few celebrities, representatives from her charities and a few others who had some personal connection. It was designed as much as anything to bring together their father and his side of the family with the Spencer family—“her blood family”—who had been so divided by Diana’s death. And although it was the time of year when the Royal Family are traditionally all in Scotland, they all came. But the question of where everyone should be seated was extremely sensitive.
“It became hugely complicated,” says a friend, “and William got very fed up even just thinking about it and finally said to his office, ‘Right, that’s it. I’m off. You sort it out.’ They were left trying to deal with Charles via Michael Peat, which was not easy, and at the end of the day it was Harry who sorted it out. He just said, ‘Fuck that,’ picked up the phone, said, ‘I want to speak to my father, put him through.’ And he just said, ‘Right Dad, you’re sitting here, someone else is sitting there, and the reason we’ve done it is blah and blah. All right? Are you happy?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Charles, ‘I suppose so.’ Problem solved.
“William gets quite buttoned up inside and angry about things and often it’s his brother who makes it happen. He’s the sort of ‘Can do, fuck that, let’s just sort it out’ kind of guy. William’s quite complicated and Harry’s not at all complicated. He’s one of the most straightforward people I’ve ever met. Everyone adores him.”
William sat on one side of the altar next to the Queen and with his father and senior members of the Royal Family, and Harry sat on the other side of the altar with the Spencers—Diana’s brother Charles, sisters Sarah and Jane and all their spouses and children.
One person conspicuously absent from the day was Camilla. The Princes had invited her and she had accepted but, just days before the event, Rosa Monckton, one of Diana’s closest friends, and the mother of one of her godchildren, wrote an inflammatory article in the press in which she said Camilla should stay away. “I know such occasions should be an occasion for forgiveness, but I can’t help feeling Camilla’s attendance is deeply inappropriate,” she wrote. Diana would be “astonished” at the presence of the “third person” in the marriage. It had the desired effect and Camilla stayed away. She had intended to go to support Princes William and Harry, she said in a statement, but decided that her attendance “could divert attention from the purpose of the occasion which is to focus on the life and service of Diana.”
The music was central to the day—as it had been central to her life—and it was sublime. They had the chapel’s own choir as well as the choirs from Eton and the Chapel Royal all singing together, and the orchestra from the Royal Academy of Music, of which Diana had been the President. They played Elgar, Mozart, Bach, and Handel, among others, and the first anthem was from The Vespers by Rachmaninov, which Diana used to play to the boys on car journeys. And the choirs sang all Diana’s favorite hymns including “I Vow To Thee My Country,” which she had chosen for her wedding.
William read from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians; Diana’s sister, Sarah, read from JS Hoyland’s poem “The Bridge Is Love”; and Harry, unable to find anything already written that said what he wanted to say, wrote—with his brother’s help—his own intensely moving tribute.
“William and I can separate life into two parts,” he said. “There were those years when we were blessed with the physical presence beside us of both our mother and father.
“And then there are the ten years since our mother’s death. When she was alive we completely took for granted her unrivaled love of life, laughter, fun and folly. She was our guardian, friend and protector.
“She never once allowed her unfaltering love for us to go unspoken or undemonstrated.
“She will always be remembered for her amazing public work. But behind the media glare, to us, just two loving children, she was quite simply the best mother in the world.
“We would say that, wouldn’t we? But we miss her.
“She kissed us last thing at night. Her beaming smile greeted us from school. She laughed hysterically and uncontrollably when sharing something silly she might have said or done that day. She encouraged us when we were nervous or unsure.
“She—like our father—was determined to provide us with a stable and secure childhood.
“To lose a parent so suddenly at such a young age—as others have experienced—is indescribably shocking and sad. It was an event which changed our lives forever, as it must have done for everyone who lost someone that night. [Dodi’s sister, Camilla Fayed was sitting in the congregation.]
“But what is far more important to us now, and into the future, is that we remember our mother as she would have wished to be remembered, as she was—fun-loving, generous, down-to-earth, entirely genuine.
“We both think of her every day. We speak about her and laugh together at all the memories.
“Put simply, she made us, and so many other people, happy. May this be the way that she is remembered.”
It was left to their father’s friend, Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, to give the eulogy in which he articulated the message that William and Harry had hoped both events—the concert and the memorial service—would finally achieve closure. “It’s easy,” he said, “to lose the real person in the image, to insist that all is darkness or all is light. Still, ten years after her tragic death, there are regular reports of ‘fury’ at this or that incident, and the Princess’s memory is used for scoring points.
“Let it end here.
“Let this service mark the point at which we let her rest in peace and dwell on her memory with thanksgiving and compassion.”
A former member of the team remembers the occasion. “People are very protective of Harry for all the obvious reasons, I think, but his bravery and courage in that memorial service when he got up and spoke for him and his brother—it was word perfect, emotionally pitch perfect, and emotionally he held it together. For the younger of the two in front of, genuinely, the watching world. I remember being completely knocked out by it but also thinking that’s Harry, very brave—not just in skiing, combat, rugby, but in being able to take on these challenges.
“I like him enormously. He’s made mistakes, haven’t we all? But they’ve always been very honest mistakes because there’s no calculation and cynicism in him. It’s just his energy and emotion that get him into scrapes sometimes. And those battles with the media were deeply rooted in his experiences after the death of his mother, that’s a reality that will never change, photographers and paparazzi; he and his brother have a very negative view of what they do and that will never change—and, above them, the newspapers who pay them.”
SENTEBALE
The Prince of Wales had made it very clear to both his sons and to everyone in his Household, of which they were still a part, that neither Prince was to start their own charity until they had finished either university, in William’s case, or the military, in Harry’s. There would be patronages to take over from their mother and other members of the family, so establishing their own charity was simply not going to happen.
When nineteen-year-old Harry arrived back from Lesotho, he went head to head with his father. He was adamant that he was going to set up a charity for the forgotten children of that magical kingdom where, according to the local Department of Social Welfare, “Children have to become caretakers of their own relatives. They have to become parents to siblings. They are dropping out of school, exposed to abuse and vulnerable to exploitation, violence, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. People take advantage of their situation. Child labor is on the increase.”
This wasn’t just some fad, and Harry wasn’t planning to start a charity for the sake of it. He had recognized a serious flaw in the charitable system that was allowing these orphans to slip through the net. As Damian West, who’d helped plan the trip, explains, “If you’re a very large organization you have crystal clear rules and regulations about what you can and cannot do and your modus operandi has to be clearly defined, and transparency in accounting, in funding, has to be paramount. So if you have an organization that doesn’t have a bank account, doesn’t have any accounting methods, it doesn’t have the capacity to submit an application for funding because—tick boxes: where is your bank account? who’s going to be managing the fund?—you can’t touch it.” As a result thousands of the children in Lesotho are being cared for by nothing more than the goodwill of their grandparents; and because the grandparents do not have a certificate declaring their care is up to international child-care standards, the large organizations can’t touch them—it’s too much of a reputational risk.
“There is amazing work being done in Lesotho by some of the big organizations, don’t get me wrong, but I think what we identified as a target were the group of children at grassroots level that no one else was able to touch. And when you are dealing with orphaned children, most of whom aren’t even registered, and don’t have a birth certificate… Children are a very sensitive area; it’s a whole new concept to get in and try and assist at this level.
“Harry wen
t to his father and said, ‘I want to start a charity.’ And of course it went right against the rules the Prince of Wales had laid down. He was prepared to stand up to his father. He said, ‘I’m going to do this come hell or high water and nothing’s going to get in the way, even though everyone’s trying to stop me for obvious reasons.’ Harry knew he could help those children and he wanted to help them—he wanted to give something back. He was very aware of his own ability. He’s stood up to his father on various issues but I think this would have been one of the first big challenges. His father adores him so if he delivers a reasonable argument he will be allowed to do what he wants. So the Prince of Wales asked Tom Shebbeare [then Director of the Prince’s Charities] to sort it out. It was Harry, Seeiso, Mark Dyer and me driving this thing; we had no experience of charities, and I think that flustered a few people. Tom was hugely experienced so he held our hand for a lot of it and when the British Red Cross Lesotho Fund was set up he was on the board of that so he could report back progress to the Prince of Wales. Tom was a great ally and always very supportive.
“Harry’s a born leader, absolutely no question, because of the way he handles himself, because of the way he leads by example. He would never ask anyone to do anything he would not do himself first—and that’s why people get behind him and support what he wants to do. He’s not going to be fobbed off, or be told you can’t do this or that. He’s a man on a mission, very driven; he’s got many ideas of what he wants to do and how his influence can help change things and make those things happen. He’s not going to be sitting down with his days; he’s got a lot to do in a short space of time. I saw it in Lesotho; he perhaps should have been concentrating on having fun and enjoying his gap year and taking it easy like most people of his age but he wasn’t. When we got back he said I want to go and do this, instead of, ‘Well that was fun, what a good time,’ it was ‘Let’s get on with it.’ The fun bit was fun, but this was a project. He’s a man who enjoys a project and a challenge. If anyone gets in the way, they have to provide a well-reasoned argument for doing so.”
