Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Philip’s letters to Diana were typical of his correspondence overall. They were sympathetic, but unsentimental, direct, but to a purpose. Here is a problem: let’s worry it, let’s unravel it, separate the strands, see if we can’t make sense of them, come closer to a proper understanding of what’s wrong in the hope of being able to do something towards putting it right. He did upbraid her for failing to come to the second meeting with himself and the Queen when they had set aside time for the purpose; he did ask her to look at her own behaviour and acknowledge that there had been faults on both sides; he did remind her that, while Charles was sometimes difficult, she was not always easy. He talked about the canker of jealousy, and the problem of Camilla. He did not condone his son’s ongoing relationship with Camilla – not for a moment – but he did want Diana to at least try to see the situation from Charles’s point of view. Her post-natal depression and her irrational behaviour after Prince William’s birth had not made her easy to live with. Her constant ‘suspicion’ of her husband was wearing. In his letters Philip confronted his daughter-in-law with home truths: he invited her to face the facts. Essentially, he wanted to make Diana think about her marriage, long and hard. And he did. He also made her cry.

  When Diana received the letters she was at her most vulnerable and volatile. As soon as one arrived, she opened it, scanned it, usually burst immediately into tears and then shared it, as soon as possible, with her closest friends. Rosa Monckton, then managing director of Tiffany’s in London, and Lucia Flecha da Lima, wife of the Brazilian Ambassador, were probably Diana’s two closest girlfriends at the time of her death.112 In the aftermath of Diana’s death I had lunch with them and they described to me the ritual of receiving, reading, and replying to the Duke of Edinburgh’s correspondence. ‘When the letters came,’ explained Rosa, ‘they caused excitement and alarm at the same time. Diana was very up and down. Something he said might make her cry, something might make her laugh. She very often got the wrong end of the stick, misinterpreting what he meant.’ ‘We went through each letter, so carefully, thinking about what he said, talking about it, explaining it to her,’ Lucia recalled. ‘We would get into the car and all go to the [Brazilian] Embassy and sit together and read the letters, line by line.’ ‘Then,’ said Rosa, ‘we helped her draft her replies. She took the correspondence very seriously.’ The correspondence continued for more than a year. For a while Philip’s letters, carefully tied together with ribbon, were stored for safe keeping in a box in the Brazilian Ambassador’s safe. ‘They were good letters,’ said Lucia, emphatically. ‘He is a good man.’ Rosa Monckton agreed. ‘Actually, he was pretty wonderful,’ she said to me. ‘All he was trying to do was help. And Diana knew that.’

  According to Paul Burrell, Diana found many of Philip’s letters hard to take, describing them as ‘brutal’. In his book, A Royal Duty, Diana’s butler and much-advertised ‘rock’, maintained that ‘the inherent problem of using Prince Philip as a mediator was that he rarely pulled any punches, and as someone who didn’t understand the princess, he could hardly be expected to know how to handle her personality and temperament’. I think Burrell is wrong. I think Philip did understand his daughter-in-law and, acting in loco parentis, was offering her what she needed: tough love. He accepted that her bulimia was an illness and that consequently she could not always be answerable for her behaviour. He acknowledged that Charles was wrong to have returned to Camilla, but told her that she, too, was wrong to have taken other lovers, and asked her to reflect on why her husband had sought out his old flame. He praised her achievements, but invited her, also, to consider where and when she might have got it wrong. Some of his remarks were undeniably negative, but his underlying message was always positive, and his purpose was practical: to guide her towards the possibility of a reconciliation with her husband. In one letter he even drew up a numbered list of things – activities, interests, people – that the pair of them had in common. I doubt that the trained counsellors from Relate could have done very much more.

  Ultimately, Philip’s mission failed. ‘To be fair,’ says Paul Burrell, ‘Prince Philip did more to save the marriage than Prince Charles.’ Burrell was once a personal footman to the Queen and his then wife, Maria, was the Duke of Edinburgh’s maid. He professes to admire them both, but they certainly remained not at all happy with him. Members of staff who write books about their years in royal service are betraying the trust their former employers once placed in them. Burrell (though not his wife) was disinvited to the Windsor party marking the Duke of Edinburgh’s eightieth birthday in 2001. Diana’s friends Lucia Flecha da Lima and Rosa Monckton, once quite cosy with the Princess’s butler, and ready to stand up for him at his trial, now have no time for him. ‘He was just a servant,’ the ambassador’s wife reminded me, skewering a lettuce leaf over our light lunch at Le Caprice. ‘He opens doors, he closes door, then he goes. He is the butler, he is the servant. We were her friends.’ ‘It’s very sad,’ said Rosa. ‘He shouldn’t have written that book. He shouldn’t have sold his story. He is exploiting Diana now – for money. It’s bad.’

  It got worse. When I first recorded a conversation with Paul Burrell, not long after Diana’s death, he was quite circumspect. He talked of her with enormous affection, but with a certain reserve. He told me how she loved to watch her favourite weepie, Brief Encounter, on the television, feet curled under her on the sofa, box of tissues to hand. She invited him to sit with him to watch, but he wouldn’t. He was the butler, after all. He described her at breakfast time, pressing him to join her at the table to help open the post, but he was reluctant. When I saw him a few years later, the reserve had gone. He now talked of Diana with a frankness and familiarity that felt uncomfortable. He said, ‘I knew she wasn’t pregnant when she died, because of all sorts of things – her menstrual cycle, the pills she was taking …’ He described ‘the privilege of attending to her personally’ in the French hospital, after she was dead, in mawkish detail. He remains devoted to Diana’s memory, but he no longer guards it with the tenderness and discretion that once he did.

  In 2004 Burrell published the paperback of his book about Diana, with an ‘extra chapter’ of hotly touted revelations. The new material prompted the headline in the Daily Mail: ‘Charles “had a deal with Philip to dump Diana in five years”.’ According to Burrell, Diana suspected that Prince Philip had been ‘a collaborating architect in the marriage’s downfall’, that he had given Charles ‘his blessing, with a nudge and a wink, to renew his liaison with Camilla’. Burrell claimed that Diana was told by Charles himself – in the heat of a row – that ‘he had always had his father’s blessing – from the outset of the marriage – to return to Camilla if the Princess did not make him happy’. Diana was capable of saying many things – and different things on different days – but her friends, Rosa Monckton and Lucia Flecha da Lima, are quite clear on this: Diana had great respect and affection for her father-in-law, she trusted him and knew that he wanted only to help. The idea that Prince Philip would have arranged ‘a five year get-out clause’ on his son’s marriage is simply not credible. Philip told Diana, in terms, what he thought of his son’s mistress. ‘I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla,’ he wrote to her, and she believed him.

  Paul Burrell still speaks of the Queen with respect and acknowledges that the Duke of Edinburgh’s intentions towards Diana were essentially well meant, even if Philip ‘wore steelworker’s gloves for a situation that required kid mittens’. He no longer much cares what the rest of the royal establishment thinks of him. He has some cause, of course. In the aftermath of Diana’s death he was arrested, charged, and eventually put on trial at the Old Bailey, accused of stealing three hundred and ten personal items belonging to Diana, Prince Charles, and their children. The case came to trial because, as Burrell put it to me, ‘Charles and the boys had been told by the police that I’d dressed up in Diana’s clothes and already sold some of her stuff in America.’ The case collapsed because,
as the trial was reaching its climax, on 25 October 2002, the Queen and Prince Charles and Prince Philip – travelling by car to St Paul’s Cathedral to attend a memorial service for the victims of the Bali bombings – had a brief conversation in which the Queen, prompted by her husband, told her son that she recalled having had a meeting with Paul Burrell, shortly after Diana’s death, at which Burrell confided to her that he had taken some of Diana’s possessions from Kensington Palace to his home, where he was storing them for safe keeping.

  This revelation – relayed by the Prince to his private secretary, who confirmed it with the Queen and then transmitted it to the proper authorities – established that Burrell had had no intention to deceive. The prosecution case crumbled, no further evidence was offered, and he was found not guilty and released from the dock with words from the judge that must have sounded sweet indeed: ‘Mr Burrell, you are free to go.’

  It was a good day for the butler, but an uncomfortable one for the Queen. For a start, the case that collapsed was ‘Regina v Burrell’ and what brought it to its knees was an intervention from Regina herself. Had Her Majesty really only just recalled her meeting with her former footman? Or had she chosen this moment to mention the matter because she was fearful of what damage might be done if the trial continued and the defence offered evidence about her son and his marriage that might be better left unheard? If her intent was not Machiavellian (and I am happy to accept that it was not), then, at best, the eleventh-hour timing of the Queen’s contribution illustrated all too clearly how little and how poorly mother and son communicated.

  In his book Paul Burrell recalled, in vivid detail, his celebrated meeting with the Queen. It took place in the Queen’s private apartments at Buckingham Palace on Thursday, 19 December 1997, not quite four months after Diana’s death. According to Burrell’s book, the encounter lasted almost three hours and culminated with Her Majesty looking at her former footman over her half-rimmed spectacles and uttering an eerie warning. ‘Be careful, Paul,’ she said, fixing him with a penetrating stare. ‘There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.’

  When, later, I challenged Burrell to tell me what he thought Her Majesty meant by this, he wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me. I told him that it didn’t, to me, sound very much like the Queen’s way of speaking. I told him, too, that the idea of the Queen granting anyone a three-hour audience seemed a bit improbable. He conceded that, perhaps, three hours had been a bit of an exaggeration. ‘It was about 2.30 when the meeting began. She had just finished coffee – her dining room is next to her sitting room. Her personal page said, “Paul, Her Majesty will see you now.” We stood throughout, of course. I can see Her Majesty lifting her feet as we chatted. She does that. She’s used to standing, but she lifts her feet. We talked about much more than Diana. We talked about family problems. Then she said, “I must take the corgis for a walk.” They normally go at 3.30 and she has her tea at five, so it was after 3.30. We must have been talking for at least an hour. She’s a lovely Christian lady. You know, she gets up at six in the morning to go into her private chapel to pray at Christmas and Easter.’

  Paul Burrell’s respect for the Queen and devotion to Diana are not in doubt. He fell completely in love with Diana and, after her death, hoarded her possessions because he could not bear to be parted from her. He said as much in a letter to the Prince of Wales: ‘All I ever wanted to do was “take care” of what I considered to be “my world”.’ I said to Paul, ‘Your trouble was that you fell in love with Diana because Judy Garland was dead.’ He laughed, but I think he understood what I meant. Diana was a star and she was dazzling.

  Diana was a star and that was her strength. From the perspective of the Royal Family, that was her weakness, too. The Queen and Prince Philip were not, for a moment, envious of Diana’s phenomenal popularity with the public (as Charles may well have been), but they were troubled by it. For them, royalty is not about ‘celebrity’ or ‘star quality’, hysterical crowds, or newspaper column inches. It is about duty and service, and providing a thread of continuity that links the past with the future and helps binds communities together, whether it is a local community or the country or the Commonwealth. In one of his letters to Diana, Philip praised her for her good works, but reminded her that being consort to the Prince of Wales ‘involves much more than being a hero with the British people’. More than once, in conversation, the Duke of Edinburgh reminded me that, in the 1950s, he and the Queen were objects of ‘adulation – such adulation – you wouldn’t believe it, you really wouldn’t’. The Queen was ‘the world’s sweetheart’113: hundreds of thousands – no, millions – filled the streets to cheer her. But the Queen did not take it personally. Diana believed in her own publicity. The press used her and she used the press. As the Duke of Edinburgh put it to me, ‘Diana played to the gallery. It is a dangerous game.’

  Prince Philip also reminded me that while Diana did much that was worthwhile, what she did was not unique. For example, early in 1956, in Nigeria, the Queen and Prince Philip, aged twenty-nine and thirty-four, young and oh-so-glamorous, visited a leper colony. They did so, not simply to visit Commonwealth citizens suffering from leprosy, but, more significantly, to allay the widespread, irrational fear that was attached then to any physical contact with the disease. This was a lifetime before Diana – with the same good intentions – got stuck into AIDS. Diana did much that was wonderful, but the way in which she did it was not necessarily the only way in which it might be done. Princess Anne, a loving mother and proactive President of the Save the Children Fund since 1970, says pointedly, ‘The very idea that all children want to be cuddled by a complete stranger I find utterly amazing.’

  The Queen and Prince Philip did not find Diana easy, because she was not easy. They found some of her behaviour frustrating, bewildering, and troublesome, because that is what it was. In his book about the Queen, Graham Turner quoted an unnamed courtier who recalled hearing Her Majesty refer to Diana as ‘that impossible girl’ and ‘quite mad’. Those are phrases the Queen could well have used, and with some justification. The ‘war of the Waleses’ was an unhappy time for all concerned.

  On 9 December 1992 Buckingham Palace announced the formal separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. If the sovereign and her consort hoped for a cessation of hostilities, they were soon disappointed. In the autumn of 1994 Jonathan Dimbleby published his authorised biography of the Prince of Wales. In print, and on television, Charles confessed to his own adultery. In the autumn of 1995 Diana sought her right of reply and gave an interview to Martin Bashir for Panorama. Even today, it remains one of the most watched television programmes in the history of broadcasting. Millions tuned in to see Diana, dewy-eyed, pouring scorn on her husband, confessing to her own adultery, but blaming Charles – and Camilla. She expressed her opinion that Charles would never become King and defined the role she sought for herself. ‘I would like to be queen of people’s hearts,’ she said. Nicholas Soames, a close friend of Prince Charles (and a government minister at the time), said Diana ‘seemed on the edge of paranoia’. The Queen said, ‘Enough is enough.’

  The Queen and the Duke talked it through. Her Majesty consulted the Prime Minister (John Major), the Archbishop of Canterbury (George Carey), her private secretary (Robert Fellowes). She then wrote concisely, but unequivocally, to both the Prince and the Princess, giving it as her decided opinion, supported by her husband, that an early divorce was now desirable. In the event, the Wales’s divorce settlement took many months to negotiate. The Duke of Edinburgh was not amused by reports that his daughter-in-law’s demands included the suggestion that any future children she might have by another husband should bear hereditary titles. The Duke’s view was that, as well as losing her rank as a Royal Highness, Diana should be downgraded from Princess of Wales to Duchess of Cornwall – on the basis, as he put it, that ‘when it’s over it’s over’. ‘I am not vindictive,’ he said to me, emphatically, ‘I am not vindictive.’ In the end,
Diana surrendered her royal status,114 and agreed to be known as ‘Diana, Princess of Wales’, in return for a lump-sum sweetener of £17 million and an annual staff and office allowance of £400,000. And that was that.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t. The worst was yet to be. In the early hours of Sunday, 31 August 1997, the chauffeur-driven Mercedes in which Diana and her current lover, Dodi Fayed, were travelling across Paris at speed, pursued by paparazzi on motorbikes, entered the tunnel at the Place de l’Alma and crashed into a concrete pillar. Diana and Dodi and the driver were all killed. The Queen was at Balmoral, on holiday with her family. At 2 a.m. she was woken with news of the accident. At 3.30 a.m. the British Embassy in Paris confirmed that Diana, Princess of Wales, was dead.

  That day the Queen and Prince Phillip did exactly what anyone who knew them would have expected them to do. They comforted their grandsons in private and, in public, went about their business as usual. They took William and Harry to church with them on that fateful Sunday morning because William and Harry wanted to go, and because the Queen believes that, at times of tribulation, there is no better place to be. Her faith is her rock and doing things much as they have always been done is a practice that, on the whole, has served her well. There is comfort to be had from familiar hymns and prayers. There is solace to be found in form and custom long established, and in doing what you have to do in the way that you normally do it.

  While Prince Charles flew to Paris to accompany Diana’s body on its journey home, the Queen and Prince Philip kept William and Harry at Balmoral, out of harm’s way, out of the public eye. The Queen viewed Diana’s death as a private tragedy for William and Harry. The public displays of grief – worldwide and extraordinary – caught her by surprise. Her instinct and upbringing had taught her – and her generation – that you kept your tears for the pillow. Crying in public was not something the Queen would allow herself, or expect of her children and grandchildren. It is not the royal way. It is neither dignified nor necessary – nor helpful. But, on television, in the first week of September 1997, it seemed the whole world was openly weeping and wailing – and baying for Her Majesty to shed some tears, too.