Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (13 page)

Prince Charles is not a bad man, but in this instance his treatment of his wife, and especially his willingness to allow her to be humiliated virtually in public, was unforgivable. The fact that he and Mrs Parker Bowles had been privately conducting an adulterous affair was irrelevant. What tore the Princess in
two, wrecking her emotionally, was their readiness to humble her publicly without apparent remorse. From that moment Camilla became ‘the Rottweiler’ – Diana’s nickname from then on replacing her usual euphemisms like ‘that woman’ and ‘his lady’. More importantly, however, Diana now knew, once and for all, that her marriage was over. After that close encounter her references to Camilla became fewer. It was not that she had given up what she privately called ‘the struggle’, just that she no longer had the stomach for it.

‘Ken, there comes a time when you just don’t care any more. That time has come. I just don’t care any more,’ she said. From the absolute calm of her manner, I knew that she meant it.

PERHAPS THE FUNNIEST (to me anyway) display of expensive bad taste on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island was an open-air lavatory built out of chunks of rock. I stood inside it, for a moment wondering what a celebrity visitor like, say, Robert De Niro had thought as he sat there watching cruise liners go past. (Probably, ‘You looking at me?’) And many of the world’s celebrities have stayed on this tiny speck in the British Virgin Islands, which its owner proudly boasts is unlike any other holiday destination in the world (and at somewhere in the region of $52,500 (£34,300) for seven days in 1989, telephone calls not included, one would hope not). For Necker Island has, it seems, magic powers. According to the blurb issued to those lucky enough to stay there, the island isn’t pretty, it’s ‘enchanting’, and its millionaire – if not billionaire – guests don’t come for a holiday, but to ‘rejuvenate
mind, body and spirit’. Branson visited the island in the late 1970s, and bought it for roughly £200,000 ($306,000) in the 1980s, at which time it was not much more than a mosquito-infested atoll. So when, in 1989, the Virgin tycoon offered the Princess the chance to take a holiday on the island (free of cost, too) she leapt at the opportunity. At times of crisis Diana loved to escape to the sun with her children and, by this point in her life, without her husband.

A part of my job was to try to find her suitable private sanctuaries away from prying eyes. It was almost an impossible task, although we did achieve it on one or two occasions. A photograph of a bikini-clad Diana on a beach was worth thousands of pounds to the almost ever-present paparazzi, and such shots were deemed essential to Fleet Street’s picture editors and their syndication departments, as well as to the foreign media. Finding the Princess was big business and big money. I had experienced the frenzied chase for the Diana holiday picture before, when she and Prince Charles had stayed in Majorca as the guests of King Juan Carlos of Spain.

Having spent a miserable Christmas at Sandringham, Diana decided to take Branson up on his generous offer for her to greet the New Year of 1989 on his private island after he had personally guaranteed her privacy. Prince Charles, of course, was not included. He probably would not have come even if he had been, but in any case he chose to stay with the rest of the royal family at Sandringham.

For this, the first of our two trips to Necker, the Princess brought her mother Frances, her sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes, and their children,
five in all, and her own two sons. She had provided herself with a perfect excuse for the trip by saying that she wanted to spend some time with her mother and sisters, but in reality she was desperate to escape the ice-cold reception she was getting at Sandringham from her husband’s family. As the boat bringing us from nearby Tortola neared Necker, and the island’s beautiful white beaches came into view, the entire party seemed to breathe a simultaneous sigh of relief. The boys, alive with anticipation, could not wait to explore.

The unassuming billionaire was there to welcome the Princess and the rest of her party as we stepped on to the island. Then, more than a decade ago [at the time of writing], it would normally then have cost $7,500 (£5,000) per day for the privilege of staying on the island, so Branson’s gift of a holiday to Diana was an extremely generous one.

Necker was not quite what I had expected. The Great House, the main accommodation, struck me as being a cross between the lobby of a luxury hotel and a Surrey barn conversion. Inside, a snooker table had pride of place beneath a Balinese-style beamed ceiling. There were some stylish touches, like an outdoor claw-foot bathtub, giant beanbags and fridges stuffed with champagne specially produced for Necker Island. For guests for whom being on a private island just isn’t private enough, there were separate cottages built in South-East Asian pagoda style and each equipped with a meditation room, presumably to allow the hugely wealthy to play at being ascetic, Buddhist monks. There was also a gym and a swimming pool, as well as four exclusive beaches, with a speedboat and several jet-skis at the guests’ disposal.

Not only had Branson refused to accept payment for Diana’s quite large party, but he had instructed his staff to spare nothing to make her stay perfect. As an example, a few weeks before we left, one of his assistants had telephoned me and asked what food I liked; my preferred ‘colour, region and grape variety’ of wine, and whether there were any books or records I particularly wanted. On the island itself, the staff were equally impressive, and obliging to a fault. I am sure that if the Princess had said she wanted freshly caught shark for supper, then one of the staff would have donned a wetsuit and set off to spear one single-handedly. On our first evening our host held a magnificent lobster barbecue. As soft Caribbean music played and we watched the sun setting, Diana was in paradise. And so, I have to say, was I.

While Diana and her family sunbathed on the beach and William, Harry and their five cousins romped around, I addressed my first official task, which was to liaise with officers from the local police force and senior officials from the British Virgin Islands. I told them that above all the Princess and her family wanted privacy, and both assured us they would do their best to secure it, insisting that nobody would be allowed to sail within a mile of the island’s shores. Even without the official backup, however, Necker was a protection officer’s dream. As the Princess and the royal party wallowed under heavenly blue skies, the rest of the world was kept firmly away. There were no inhabitants on the island – other than the guests – and access was mainly by boat, from Virgin Gorda. Even most of the staff came ashore every morning by boat and left each evening after dinner. If anything unexpected were
to happen all I had to do was to summon a helicopter from Tortola and we could escape.

Graham Smith had accompanied Diana on the first trip, but by January 1990, when we made a second visit, he had been struck down with the throat cancer that eventually killed him, and although he was in remission, he was no longer fit for protection duties. Diana was desperately worried; she had somehow convinced herself that the stress of guarding her had led to Graham’s illness. She hoped the holiday would at least help to revive his spirits. On the first trip to Necker, both Graham and I had jointly headed up security. Although we had been able to keep the flight details secret – for the press couldn’t follow if they didn’t know where Diana was – I felt certain that she would leak details of our destination. True, she insisted that, ‘All I want is peace and quiet and to be with my boys,’ but I knew that she felt that this was just too good a PR opportunity to miss.

Sure enough, it was not long before our peace was broken. Scores of press photographers arrived at the airport on Tortola hungry for pictures of the Princess in a bikini. Round one went to the local police, who promptly confiscated a number of cameras as soon as the press men arrived. But snatching a few cameras from the least experienced photographers at the airport, and other measures like banning flights over Necker and barring boats within a seven-mile radius of the island, were never going to deter the paparazzi and the elite of Fleet Street’s royal correspondents. Within days Diana’s haven was besieged by little boats bobbing around on the sea, filled with photographers desperate for pictures. Although some long-lens
shots were taken and sent around the world, the effectiveness of the security measures limited the intrusion, to grateful sighs from royal party and protection officers alike. The following year they were back with a vengeance; better equipped and more determined than ever, and with the benefit of what they had learned from the Princess’s first trip.

In the years since her death, it seems that Diana has increasingly been written out of history. So it is easy to forget that at the beginning of 1990 hers was the only story that mattered in Fleet Street. Editors, apparently, wanted nothing other than to fill their pages with the latest news of her. Pictures and stories about Diana sold millions of newspapers; circulation soared and that kept journalists and photographers in jobs, which is all that most of them really cared about. The royal reporting teams of the British tabloid press, nicknamed the ‘Royal Ratpack’, were tough and talented journalists. In particular, James Whitaker [who died in 2012] and Kent Gavin of the
Daily Mirror
, and Arthur Edwards and Harry Arnold [d. 2014] of
The Sun
, lived and breathed their work. Yet they were reasonable men, and despite the very different nature of our respective jobs, we tended to get along, and even to enjoy a measure of mutual respect.

In March 1990 the Prince and Princess had just returned from an official visit to Nigeria and Cameroon. Exhausted, Diana had arranged it so that she had no more engagements until the end of April. She had also arranged another trip to Necker, once again through the generosity of Richard Branson. For her it was the perfect escape and she was buoyant with excitement at the thought of spending time with her sons away
from the Prince. What she had not foreseen, however, was that her decision to take a pre-Easter break on the island, once again without Charles, would send Fleet Street into a frenzy. It became headline news. Charles was blamed, even though it was Diana who had arranged the solo holiday. He chose instead to spend the time in the Scottish Highlands, thereby accidentally emphasising the gulf between the couple. The tabloids unfairly lambasted him as a bad father. One headline screamed: ‘This Is Your Father – he’s hardly seen the boys since Xmas’, while a second read: ‘Another Holiday Apart! They’ll be forgetting what Dad looks like’. The accompanying articles labelled the Prince an absent father and reported that he had seen his sons for only two days in the previous two months. (In fact, it was three days).

For this visit to Necker, Diana had decided to play Cupid to her brother, then still Viscount Althorp, and his wife of a few months, Victoria, inviting them both along for a surprise second honeymoon. Once again, William and Harry, her mother and sisters, with their children, also joined her at the hideaway. I headed up the security team alone, for although Graham Smith was in the seventeen-strong party, he was there this time as the Princess’s guest. She knew that he was seriously ill, and hoped that sun and relaxation might help his recovery. It was good for me to have Graham around, too, because I knew that this year the paparazzi were determined to win their prized pictures. With so much in the British press about the holiday before we left, there was not the remotest chance of keeping the trip a secret.

Within hours of our arrival the press and paparazzi were
back. A small armada appeared on the horizon, with more than sixty journalists and photographers packed into chartered boats of all shapes and sizes, cameras primed and at the ready. Diana was furious, almost incandescent with rage. ‘How did they know we were here?’ she demanded. Then added, bitterly, ‘Someone must have told them.’ When I suggested that it would not have taken much working out, as the Princess was known to have a penchant for exotic islands in the Caribbean (especially if her holidays there were gratis) she flashed me one of her stony stares. She was not in any mood to see the funny side.

The presence of the journalists and paparazzi, albeit offshore, irritated her and the rest of the party enormously. No matter how much I urged them to try to put it out of their minds, assuring them that I would make sure that it would not affect their security, the Princess became obsessed with the problem. She kept saying, not very helpfully, that I should ‘do something’ about it. She also insisted that the media were frightening her sons. I was not at all surprised, for she had filled the young princes’ heads with a great deal of nonsense about the press, telling them that they were all ‘bad, bad men’, with the result that her sons’ reaction to journalists and photographers was all too predictable. (She was not altogether unhypocritical in this. She would later maintain a friendship with the
Daily Mail
journalist Richard Kay, and it was she herself who secretly selected Andrew Morton, once a royal correspondent on the
Daily Star
, to write the book that would, in the end, help her to escape from her marriage.)

I weighed up the odds. There were three other protection officers and myself against the crack troops of the world’s
press. Even Custer had better odds than this, I thought. There was also Smudger – Graham Smith – and although he was a sick man, and was not there officially, I took a lead from him. He and I agreed that we had to be proactive. The media knew exactly where we were, and since they weren’t going to go away until they got what they wanted, we had to try and strike a deal, or pack up and abandon the holiday.

Once again, Diana had not brought any staff with her. So, without the luxury of a private secretary or a press secretary, it was left to me to deal with the problem. Until then, no one had really ever had to face such a situation before. In the past, royal holidays had either been taken within the almost fortress-like royal estates, like Sandringham or Balmoral, or as the guests of foreign royalty, as when the Prince and Princess had stayed in Majorca. A combination of the large numbers of encroaching journalists and photographers, the absence of any effective means of deterring them, the Princess’s ill-humour about the whole business, and my own desire not to see the holiday cut short, meant that I was going to have to act as a sort of press liaison officer.

I could have told the Princess that this was not really my problem. She had decided to come to this island for a holiday; she knew perfectly well that she was always going to be open to press intrusion wherever she went and whatever she did. I might have added that my job was simply to ensure her safety, and that although the presence of the media was an irritation, it did not present a major breach of security But I did not.

After talking over the situation with Smudger, I decided to arrange to meet some of the senior Fleet Street journalists to
see if, between us, we could broker a deal in a bid not only to restrain the more intrusive hacks, but to clip the wings of the rogue elements among the foreign paparazzi, who tended to be a law unto themselves.