Their first concern, however, was to discover just how badly injured Diana was. Not too badly, they were told – first reports were that she had walked away from the twisted wreckage of the Mercedes virtually unscathed. Prince Charles resolved to travel immediately to France to be at his ex-wife’s side. It was as a flight was being arranged that Robin Janvrin took the call from Paris informing him that the princess was dead. He immediately rang up to Charles and said: ‘Sir, I am very sorry to have to tell you that I’ve just had the ambassador on the phone. The princess died a short time ago.’
The Queen was bewildered and caught up by the mood of suspicion as to what had caused the accident. Her first comment, upon being told of Diana’s death, was to say: ‘Someone must have greased the brakes.’ It was an extraordinary remark for the Queen to make and it astounded her staff when they came to hear of it, which most had by the time the dawn broke over Balmoral’s wooded hills. What she was most probably referring to was the possibility, long mooted, that one of Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed’s many enemies had sworn to get him and had now contrived the killing of his eldest son and the princess he was urging Dodi to marry. The Queen, however, neither repeated nor offered any explanation for her comment, and in the absence of any clarification, her staff chose to see it as an indication of just how shaken she had been by the turbulence of Diana’s life and sudden death.
Nor was she the only one. The whole royal apparatus was thrown into disorder by the news of the crash. Viewed through the opaque window of deference which protected the royal family from the scrutiny of outsiders, the royal household appears a dull but smoothly run business which compensates for its lack of imagination with the security of routine. Schedules are prepared months and sometimes years in advance, and there is not a day when the senior members of the family it serves do not know where they are supposed to be or what they are supposed to be doing, right up to and including the moment of death.
The courtiers who keep these gilded wheels turning reflect the system they serve. They are the only branch of government service in Britain appointed, not by competitive examination, but on personal whim, and its members tend to be of a type – stolid, reliable, upper class, brought up in the public-school ethos of team spirit, of ‘playing the game’ and letting convention do the thinking for them. It is an antiquated, undemocratic organisation based on patronage, and overall it works reasonably well. But it is heavily reliant on precedent and therefore makes no allowance for the unforeseen and the unexpected. That flaw – and it soon proved to be a disastrous one – was ruthlessly exposed by Diana’s death. Before first light on that Sunday morning, the wheels of royal state were starting to rattle loose.
From the mid-eighties onwards, the royal family had been divided into two separate and sometimes antagonistic bureaucratic camps. While the Queen continued to rely on courtiers of the old school, Prince Charles surrounded himself with younger, less hidebound but also less experienced advisers. Given their divergent views as to what the style and role of the monarchy should be, and with each side working to its own set of priorities, conflict was frequent. In the turmoil following Diana’s death, it was inevitable.
Despite or maybe because of her agitation, it had to be business as usual, the Queen decreed, and she asked that everyone should go to church at nearby Crathie that morning. The only people exempted from that royal command were Princes William and Harry. Given the enormity of what had happened, the Queen felt that it was up to them to decide whether they wanted to attend morning service – and face the inevitable battalions of press photographers converging on Balmoral. After a brief discussion between themselves, both boys said they would go.
It was a sorrow-torn period for Diana’s sons. Yet it was noted by the staff that William and Harry showed remarkable resilience in the face of the tragedy. Both boys behaved very much as Diana might have predicted. Harry, always matter of fact, appeared to take the loss in his young stride, while William, on the verge of manhood and very much aware of his royal destiny, made the demanding effort of keeping his emotions to himself.
It would be unwise and terribly unfair to read too much into the princes’ apparent calm. There is no doubt that both were deeply affected by the death of a mother who had poured so much of her emotional energy into their welfare and made herself so central to their young lives. They have spoken of it since, but only recently have they admitted how angry they were that their mother was so viciously and suddenly taken from them. ‘I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of twelve, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions, had a serious effect on not only my personal life, but my work as well,’ Prince Harry said in April 2017.
‘The shock is the biggest thing,’ Prince William confessed at the same time. ‘I still feel it twenty years later. People think shock can’t last that long, but it does. It’s such an unbelievably big moment and it never leaves you. You just learn to deal with it.’
At that time, however, they could see their mother’s weaknesses as well as her strengths, and fifteen-year-old William had become increasingly concerned at the direction in which her life appeared to be heading. They had spent several days that summer with her in the South of France as guests of Mohamed Al-Fayed, who had pulled out all the stops. In his typically flamboyant style, he provided helicopters, yachts and speed boats and even opened a discotheque especially in an effort to impress them. It was all too lavish, too embarrassing, too over-the-top, too ‘foreign’ as they put it, for young men brought up to believe in the virtue of discreet understatement. Diana was lured by the glamour. Her sons, more royal than she realised, were not.
In her determination to ensure that they should enjoy as normal an upbringing as possible, Diana sometimes inadvertently led them in directions which went against their natural inclinations. William, for instance, much preferred the hills of Scotland to the beaches of the Riviera, shooting to waterskiing, the companionship of his school friends to the company of international playboys like Dodi Fayed, and he was starting to find the programme of entertainments his mother insisted on organising for him increasingly irksome. The prospect of spending the next few years in Mohamed’s jet stream did not appeal in the least.
It did not appeal to the royal family either. An off-the-record call was made to the private office of Al-Fayed by Prince Edward, who explained to Mohamed’s sidekick Mark Griffiths that there was concern over the ongoing Harrods sponsorship of the Royal Windsor Horse Show and it couldn’t continue. Harrods was the main sponsor of the show and when Al-Fayed had taken over he had increased the sponsorship and included a carriage driving competition in which Prince Philip competed.
Al-Fayed was then in the power position and sat next to the Queen in the royal box and they presented the prizes to the winners together. The clear and undisguised message from the Palace was that this could no longer happen. Not now Diana was being photographed in the South of France cavorting with Al-Fayed’s son. However, Prince Edward took great care to emphasise that the Diana issue had nothing to do with it, instead saying it was the other matters involving Al-Fayed at the time that might cause the royal family embarrassment. In particular, the ‘cash for questions’ scandal, in which he claimed to have paid various MPs to ask questions in Parliament on his behalf, even though they did not declare the income, was a cause for concern.
Diana fell into Dodi’s arms after a dialogue was opened through the English National Ballet, of which she was patron, and Al-Fayed finally met the princess and befriended her. She liked him – or so she told me. She found his naughty sense of humour and Anglo-Saxon terminology amusing. She had been undecided as to where she would take her boys for their summer holidays when he suggested she avail herself of his St Tropez villa, with its secluded beach and state-of-the-art security. The rest just fell into Dodi’s hands from there.
That all ended on the night of the accident. There was now no chance of an Al-Fayed–royal family link – so much so that instructions were sent to the morgue in Lon
don’s Townmead Road that the two bodies were not to lie side by side when they were brought back from France for the coroner to examine. Dodi’s body arrived first, having been transported by helicopter to Battersea heliport. While the body was examined, officials, police and Al-Fayed’s team waited around nervously. There had been a directive issued to the police that the bodies were not even to be in the mortuary at the same time, so there was huge pressure on the coroner to complete Dodi’s post mortem before Diana’s body arrived. Finally, the hearse carrying Dodi turned slowly out of the gates of the mortuary just as the hearse with Diana turned in.
On that Sunday morning after church, Charles had flown to Paris aboard an aircraft of the Queen’s flight, accompanied by Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes, Sir Robert’s wife, and his press secretary Sandy Henney. Charles had ruled that it would be better if the princes did not accompany him on this mournful mission, and they remained at Balmoral in the care of the Queen and Prince Philip. They also had the company of their favourite cousin Peter Phillips, their father’s old nanny Mabel Anderson, who was also staying at the castle, and Tiggy Legge-Bourke, Prince Charles’s child helper that Diana so disliked.
In her forty-five years on the throne, the Queen had dealt with ten prime ministers, starting with Sir Winston Churchill. She had got on well with some, less well with others, and the new occupant of 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair, fell firmly into the latter category. ‘Too much too quickly’, was her unguarded summary of her current prime minister.
Blair had been at Northolt military airfield in West London to greet the plane bearing Diana’s coffin, draped in a Royal Standard. On the Sunday, he had issued a statement which sounded more American than British in its wording. It read in part: ‘We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief . . . She was a wonderful and warm human being.’ But it was the soundbite in the last sentence that really caught the nation’s attention: Diana, the prime minister declared, was ‘the People’s Princess’. That was the headline in most of the newspapers delivered to the castle on Monday morning and the phrase struck a resounding chord in the hearts and minds of millions who had never even met Diana. They knew little about her other than what they read in the newspapers they professed to disbelieve, yet had come to see her as one of their own.
The Queen was not amused, to put it mildly. She disliked the title ‘People’s Princess’ and the implicit challenge it posed to her position as the Queen of all her people. A traditionalist to the core, she had quickly come to the conclusion that New Labour was no friend of the monarchy or the values she believes it embodies. She distrusted its plans for the reform of the House of Lords and its decision to accommodate homeless people in Admiralty Arch at the other end of the Mall to Buckingham Palace (she called that ‘a publicity stunt’). After her regular Tuesday meetings at the palace with Blair, she would often emerge tut-tutting under her breath. On this morning and in the days to come, her irritation became more sharply focused on the belief that the government was trying to expropriate the princess for its own political ends.
It soon became abundantly clear, however, that it was the government and not the family she had once been a member of that knew best how to deal with Diana in death. In London and borne to power by the biggest electoral victory in Labour’s history, the Blair administration could sense and see what the royal family, out of touch in rural Scotland, could not; they recognised the mass hysteria her demise had caused. Flowers were left in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace and on park lawns in front of Kensington Palace where she had lived. They grew into fields and then into vast savannahs. Trees and lamp-posts were ringed with candles. Notes, teddy bears, gifts, photographs and hand-written verses of poetry were pinned to railings. Churches which had stood virtually empty for years were filled with people on their knees praying for her soul. It was a spectacle that was both childish and moving, part Beatlemania, part national mourning and decidedly un-British. In its spontaneous desire to honour a woman who had died at the side of her playboy lover, a nation that had always prided itself on its self-control and its reserve threw off its restraints and allowed itself to be swept up in a frenzy of lamentation.
By contrast, the royal family demanded the right to be left to grieve for one of their own in privacy. It appeared they wanted to have it both ways. In the mind of the public at large, it was the royal family who had rejected Diana, isolated her, stripped her of her title as Her Royal Highness, leaving her a princess not in her own right but under sufferance and only for as long as she remained unmarried. But the further they had tried to push her into the shadows, the more potent her symbolic status had become. The royal family were dealing with a real person. The public were captivated by an emotional icon and in death Diana was posthumously crowned.
The family, gathered in the seclusion of Balmoral, simply did not understand what was taking place over 500 miles to the south. More damagingly, nor did their senior advisers – at least, not at first. The politics of the street was something they regarded with well-bred disdain. They ignored the ever-more frantic messages they were receiving from London and instead sought refuge in the battered redoubt of precedent.
The funeral, the Queen decided, should be a small, family affair at Windsor, followed by a burial in the graveyard at Frogmore, where successive generations of the royal family, with the exception of the reigning monarch and their consorts, are laid to final rest (since Queen Victoria’s time, kings and queens have been buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor). The Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, agreed. The situation, however, was being torn from their grasp. In London, the crowds of mourners were perilously close to turning into a mob. Their wrath was palpable and growing. They wanted to know why no flag was flying at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, why no royal tributes to the princess had been forthcoming and, above all else, why the royal family had chosen to remain in Scotland instead of returning to the capital to join in the nation’s mourning.
In fact, there was nothing unusual or pernicious in their decision to remain where they were. The royal family traditionally does its grieving in private and in a more devout age their wish to keep their sorrow to themselves would have been treated with quiet respect. There had been no complaints when the royal family had gone into retreat at Balmoral following the deaths of the Duke of Kent in 1942, of the Queen’s glamorous cousin Prince William of Gloucester in 1972, or of Prince Charles’s beloved great-uncle Earl Mountbatten of Burma in 1979. Like Diana, all had died violently: Kent and Gloucester in plane crashes, Mountbatten at the hands of the IRA.
But Diana was different. Her death had changed the rules to such an extent that even the royal family’s attendance at Crathie church on the morning of her death had been criticised. How was it, the swelling army of critics were asking, that they could go to morning service, taking the bereaved Princes William and Harry with them, and show not a glimmer of grief? It was a cruel judgement which either missed or ignored the point that the Windsors are a religious family who find quiet solace in their faith, not in an Oprah Winfrey-style exhibition of public soul-wringing.
A public display of royal grief, however, was exactly what the millions converging on the capital were demanding, and the flag over Buckingham Palace became the symbol of what was now being perceived as the royal family’s cold-hearted indifference. By time-honoured tradition, the only flag that flies over the palace is the Royal Standard and then only when the sovereign is in residence. It never flies at half-mast, even on the death of the sovereign, never mind a semi-detached princess, because the Royal Standard is the symbol of the state and the state is ongoing. As the heralds proclaim: ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’
Such arcane niceties were of no interest and less relevance to the multitude outside the palace gates, whose lamentations soon became a cacophony of abuse aimed at the royal family. To venture among the crowds in the days that followed and hear the insults was to be caught by a swell o
f raw passion which threatened to sweep all before it. Most had been drawn to Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park by the simple wish to share in the communal sense of sorrow, but as the numbers grew, so the ambience shifted and darkened. Young and old, the well-off as well as the dispossessed who had formed Diana’s natural constituency, were asking how the royal family could be so uncaring, so out of touch, so heartless. Her death had turned out to be a catalyst, and resentments that had lain dormant for years came spewing to the surface. A moral audit was being conducted: the royal family was revealed to be deeply into the red and a country that had prided itself on its steadfastness and its stability appeared to be edging to the brink of razing an institution it had been raised to venerate.
By now, the calls to Balmoral had acquired a terrible urgency and the daily bulletins from Prince Charles’s household were becoming increasingly bleak. They reported a growing mood of ‘real hatred’, and urged the prince to try to persuade his parents to order an immediate return to Buckingham Palace.
Reflecting the changing mood, the Queen realised there would have to be a full-blown funeral at Westminster Abbey, so plans were made for a meeting between the Spencer family, Charles’s staff and the Queen’s men. Sir Robin Janvrin remained at Balmoral trying to co-ordinate everything via speakerphone with the palace. There was a disagreement about what role the boys would play at the funeral – if any. The Queen and Philip were opposed to them being involved, as they were in shock. The Spencers’ representatives were saying what they thought the involvement of the boys should be when Philip’s voice came booming over the phone: ‘Stop telling us what to do with those boys! They’ve lost their mother! You’re talking about them as if they are commodities. Have you any idea what they are going through?!’
My Husband and I Page 20
