Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (17 page)

As an aside, I once had the pleasure of accompanying Princess Margaret home after the State Banquet for the Italian President. It is an occasion indelibly etched on my memory. Diana had left early, but drink was still being taken, while President Cossigia continued an animated conversation with the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.

As it happened, I was on duty for both Diana and Princess Margaret that night, having agreed to stand in for one of my colleagues and escort Margo, as well as Diana, from Kensington Palace and back again once the banquet was over. With Simon Solari driving the Rolls-Royce, I had escorted Diana home and returned for Princess Margaret. The champagne (and, it seemed, every other kind of drink) had flowed freely that evening. Margo, to assist her through the formalities of that lavish occasion, had had rather too much.

She also didn’t want to leave. Eventually two Italian staff managed to prize her free, escort her to the car, and pour her into the back seat. Simon drove very carefully, but even so, she was so drunk that she twice fell into the well between the front and back seats. We eventually arrived outside her apartment at
Kensington Palace, only to find that her butler had gone to bed and the place was in darkness. She, of course, had no key and neither had I.

Becoming desperate, I decided that Griffin, her chauffeur, must have a key. He had a flat in the palace, and I set off to rouse him. At that moment, the fluting voice of the Queen’s sister drifted out of the back of the car.

‘Don’t bother with him,’ she said. ‘He’ll be drunk.’

‘Ken, the flashes are too bright, I can’t see where I’m going,’ the Princess said, with real alarm in her voice, as we stood at the top of the sweeping staircase. She was wearing a magnificent scarlet evening gown and a princess’s ransom in jewellery, and looked a good deal more than a million dollars, but the incessant firing of flashguns from the foot of the stairs had almost blinded her.

It was an evening in October 1990, and Diana was in the process of leaving the Departmental Auditorium in Washington, DC, where she had attended a gala evening in her honour. Velvet ropes slung between stanchions controlled by two liveried footmen had been used to ease her passage through the packed reception, where the great and the good of America’s capital had paid a small fortune just to be in the same room as her. Now she had to negotiate the grand staircase to reach street level – and she didn’t want to do so in an ungainly tangle of scarlet silk and scattered diamonds.

‘Ken, I’m serious. I don’t think I’m going to get down these stairs in one piece,’ she hissed anxiously.

‘Don’t worry, ma’am,’ I said, as I slipped my arm under hers. My American colleague, Lanny Bernier, a security officer
from the State Department detached to assist me in guarding the Princess during her visit, followed my lead. Then, at a nod from me, we literally lifted her up and frogmarched her down the staircase and out of the building.

‘Oh, boys, that was fun,’ she breathed, when we reached the waiting limousine. Then she turned to Bernier and said, ‘Thank you so much,’ the direct look and warm smile immediately winning her another conquest. I then introduced him formally whereupon Lanny turned to her and said, ‘Ma’am, may I tell you something?’

‘Yes, Lanny.’

‘Can I say you’re looking great?’

Diana was a little taken aback at the compliment from this burly officer, but answered him with another wonderful smile. ‘Oh, Ken, he’s so sweet,’ she said as we drove away. On the following day she called Lanny to her suite, and gave him a photograph of herself that she had signed for him.

That was her last engagement of that working visit, and on the following day she and I, travelling as Mr and Mrs Hargreaves, flew back to England by Concorde. The trip to Washington was her first real solo success, and on the flight home she was buzzing with excitement.

Diana loved practical jokes. Still exhilarated after her trip, she was in the mood for fun, and was determined to make a little mischief on the journey from Heathrow to Kensington Palace.

‘Ken, do one of your funny voices,’ she ordered suddenly. Unlike her, I was tired and keen to get home, so I demurred.

‘Oh,
please
, Ken. I am a Princess, you know – I’m not
supposed to beg,’ she pleaded. For some reason, I have always had a knack for mimicry. I looked back at her with one eyebrow raised and playfully replied ‘Oh really, ma’am?’ in a deeply affected accent resembling that of her errant husband.

Diana laughed, then begged me again. ‘Oh, please, Ken, let’s try Richard. He’d be easy pickings.’

This was a trick we would occasionally play on some of her friends. I would call the selected friend, pretending to be somebody else, and leave the mobile phone in the cradle so that everyone in the car could hear as I teased the unsuspecting victim.

In the end, I relented, telling the Princess and Simon to keep absolutely quiet otherwise their voices would be heard. Diana’s chosen victim was Richard Dalton, one of her hairdressers whose speciality was colouring her blonde locks. Richard, who had a salon at Claridges, the luxury hotel in London’s Mayfair, could be a little precious, to say the least.

I dialled his number, and set the telephone down in the cradle. The phone was now ‘hands-free’, and Simon and Diana would be able to hear every word of the conversation relayed through the speaker.

‘Can I speak to Richard Dalton?’ I said, in what I hoped was an educated Boston accent, trying to sound like a deep version of JFK. There was a pause, then a man’s voice said ‘Hello?’ rather impatiently. ‘Is that Dick? Dick Dalton?’ I asked.

‘The name’s Richard,’ he pronounced rather grandly, clearly irritated by my impertinence at abbreviating his forename. ‘Whatever,’ I responded, as Diana and Simon tried to stifle their giggles.

‘Who is this?’ Richard demanded, clearly growing more piqued by the second.

‘It’s Jack, Jack Sveltzer from the
Washington Post
– I’m the beauty fashion editor with the
Post
.’

Richard was deeply unimpressed. ‘So, what do you want?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Well Dick, I understand you don’t like Dick – or being called Dick, that is?’ At this point Diana was practically on the floor of the car, she was laughing so much.

‘No, I don’t like being called Dick, Mr Sveltzer. Now what is this all about?’

‘Well, Dick, don’t let’s worry about names. I deal in beauty – I am the beauty fashion editor, as I’ve said – and I understand you gave Princess Diana a makeover on her hair?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, his tone becoming even more aggressive. ‘What about it?’

‘Well, she has great hair, but when was the last time you did her roots?

At this the Princess exploded with laughter, unable to suppress it any longer.

‘No more, Ken, no more,’ she pleaded, tears of laughter rolling down her face.

‘What’s all that noise?’ Richard demanded, growing increasingly upset.

‘Well, it’s simple, Dick, I am doing a big feature on the Princess, and I am looking at pictures of her showing at least three inches of roots.’

‘This is nonsense!’ he roared.

It was then, fearing that Simon, who was literally shaking
with laughter as he drove, might veer off the road, that I decided to come clean. ‘Richard, it’s Ken!’ I said in my own voice. There was a moment’s silence, followed by a series of expletives as we drove down the motorway towards London. It didn’t seem to matter to Richard when I tried to tell him that the phone was on hands-free and that the Princess could hear every four-letter word uttered.

At Kensington Palace, just as the Princess was about to enter her apartments, I stopped her with a confiding, ‘Ma’am?’

‘Yes, Ken,’ she replied.

‘Don’t forget to get those roots done in the morning.’

She paused for a second, put her hands on her hips and tilted her head to one side as if in royal indignation, before replying, ‘I’ll book an appointment for the both of us, shall I?’

James Hewitt had not spoken to Diana for more than a year when the Princess suddenly called him at his barracks in Germany. British troops stationed there were being mobilised as part of the Allied force preparing, under a UN resolution, to go to the Gulf to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, which Iraqi forces had invaded and taken over in August. She asked if he was going to be sent to the Gulf and he told her that he was. The Princess then asked if she could see him before he went. Hewitt was due back in Britain for his sister’s wedding before flying to Canada for army manoeuvres; after that he would leave for Saudi Arabia, where the Coalition forces were assembling and training. She invited him to stay at Highgrove while he was in the country and he accepted. That night, with her husband, as ever, away from Highgrove while she was there, her romance
with James was rekindled. It was during that weekend that she told him that she was more than ever determined to divorce Prince Charles and walk away from the royal family, echoing what she had told me some months earlier after Charles had broken his arm.

James flew out to Saudi Arabia on 26 December 1990, where he rejoined his squadron of the Life Guards. From then on Diana wrote to him every day, sometimes twice a day, doing her best to be supportive as he prepared to go to war. She also sent him hampers from Fortnum and Mason, the upmarket London department store, and bottles of whisky, which he duly shared among his squadron. She even sent him copies of ‘adult’ magazines like
Playboy, Mayfair
and
Penthouse
through the diplomatic bag, knowing that Saudi Arabia, like most Muslim states, banned publications that carried any hint of promiscuity.

Diana also remained in constant touch with James’s mother, Shirley, and she and I would sometimes drive down to Devon to see her, with one or both of her sons, just for the day. There was another reason for these visits, however, for James used to send his letters to the Princess via his mother and Diana was always desperate to read them. I could understand her concern for her lover, but I again advised her to be cautious about her copious letter-writing. If the letters were to fall into the wrong hands, I said, the true nature of her friendship with Hewitt would become public property. But Diana, in love with the idea of being in love with a war hero, was in no mood to listen, and much less to worry over such trifling considerations.

ON 3 JUNE 1991 I received a bleep from Sergeant Reg Spinney, Prince William’s personal protection officer, while I was lunching with the Princess at one of her favourite restaurants, San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, close to Harrods. The message on the pager’s screen stated that William had been injured in an accident at Ludgrove, the prep school in Berkshire to which he had gone as a boarder when he was eight. The injury was serious. Before telling the Princess I excused myself to her, found a telephone and contacted Reg to find out exactly what the situation was. He told me that William had been struck a serious blow on the head by a golf club wielded by a friend, and had been taken for tests at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading.

Diana went white when I told her. Abandoning lunch, she and I fled the restaurant and set off for Reading, with me
driving and the Princess agonising over the injury to her son. When we arrived at the hospital Prince Charles was already there. William was having a computerised tomography (CT) scan, after which the doctors suggested that he be transferred to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. Off we set again. Diana accompanied William in the ambulance while Charles followed behind in his Aston-Martin. Once there, tests confirmed that William had suffered a serious depressed fracture of the skull, and that there was a real possibility of brain damage. The young prince would have to undergo a difficult operation to pull the depressed bones out and smooth them off. The doctors told his parents that there was no need for both of them to wait in the ward while William was in surgery. To be fair to Prince Charles, Diana made it clear that she did not want him around and he therefore decided, there being nothing else to do but hope for his son’s full recovery, to attend a performance of
Tosca
at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in company with the European and Agricultural Commissioners and a group of Brussels officials. He was to pay dearly for that decision. Next day,
The Sun
’s front-page headline bellowed; ‘What Kind Of A Dad Are You?’ going on to deliver a sententious sermon on the theme that a fractured skull is not a trivial matter. Once again, Charles had made a fatally wrong choice, not only in the eyes of the media, but also in those of his wife, for his decision to put duty before family further divided the couple. The only ray of light in the whole miserable business was that William was quickly on his feet again, without any danger of brain damage.

Adrian Ward Jackson, an art dealer and a Governor of the Royal Ballet, was a great friend of Diana’s. He was also deputy Chairman of the AIDS Crisis Trust, and it was through that charity that they had first met. Tragically, by 1991 he was dying of AIDS, the disease that she had worked so hard to ‘de-demonise’ in the light of the public taboos against it. Diana and Adrian had developed a special relationship over the years, and it is fair to say that he did more than anyone in helping her to launch her public crusade for a better understanding of the disease that he himself was stricken with.

In the spring of 199 I his condition began to deteriorate rapidly, and he was confined to his flat in Mount Street, Mayfair. Angela Serota, wife of Adrian’s close friend Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, and herself a good friend of the Princess, was constantly at his bedside, and I accompanied Diana on her numerous visits there to see her dying friend.

Adrian’s worsening condition added impetus to Diana’s mission to wake up the world to the AIDS crisis. In July she asked the wife of the US President, Barbara Bush, who was in London at the time, to accompany her on a visit to Professor Mike Adler’s AIDS unit at the Middlesex Hospital. Diana saw this as an important milestone. In private, she told me that she always wanted to hug people she visited, not just touch them – something that some cynics now claim was simply a gimmick she employed to raise her own profile. It is an unworthy accusation, for she was genuinely moved by their plight, and desperately anxious to do all she could to alleviate their suffering.

On this visit, the Princess stopped by a man who was sitting,
crying, on the end of his bed. In front of the First Lady, she took him in her arms. Afterwards the man, who told her that he had only a few months to live, said that he sensed a great deal of anger inside her. She listened to his comments intently, but said nothing, although I noted that she did not contradict him.

As we drove away from the hospital Diana was clearly very moved. She was not crying, but I could see that she was close to tears. After a while she found her voice again.

‘I do what is expected of me, Ken – nobody can accuse me of not doing my best. That man said I was angry. Do you think I am angry?’ she asked. Diplomatically, I elected not to answer. She did so for me.

‘Surely it should be the other way round? What have I got to be unhappy about? God, he’s the one who will be dead by Christmas …’

For all the work she did for worthy, and sometimes unpopular or unfashionable, causes, the Princess’s image was starting to slip a little. The media, although in general sympathetic towards her, were no longer treating her like a saint by the beginning of 1991. For some time she had been the darling of the press, a kind of cross between Mother Teresa and a supermodel. It was an image that she enjoyed, but as the whispers and rumours about her disintegrating marriage spread further and further afield, the press, aware that all was not well, focused more and more on the relationship between the Prince and Princess of Wales.

In May 1991, after the unceremonious departure of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s private secretary, the affable Sir Christopher Airy, came the decisive moment when Charles and
Diana’s formal offices separated – a clear signal to anyone well up in Palace circles of the Princess’s intent. Her equerry, Patrick Jephson, took over as her private secretary, while his friend Commander Richard Aylard headed up Charles’s now separate office. From that point Diana was set upon her own distinct and divergent path. Members of both their staffs had to choose to be in either one camp or the other. There was no halfway house. Luckily, the policemen attached to the households did not technically work for the individuals concerned, so for us at least that problem did not arise.

But as the two sides in the ‘War of the Waleses’ drew up battle plans, Diana was inevitably caught in the spotlight, and her image tarnished as a result. By this time it was virtually impossible to hide the truth from the public. On her thirtieth birthday in July the
Daily Mail’s
gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster, broke a story that perfectly summed up the situation. ‘Charles and Diana: Cause For Concern’ ran the headline above Dempster’s piece, which brought consternation to both camps.

What the gossip columnist had written was a detailed and well-sourced account of the row over the plans for the Princess’s birthday, in which he attacked Diana’s petulance in rejecting Prince Charles’s proposals for her birthday celebrations. Yet given the state of their marriage, it is difficult to see how she could have accepted a birthday party which amounted to little more than a publicity stunt.

In releasing details of the row, Prince Charles’s supporters had plunged the knife into Diana in a pre-emptive strike, giving her a birthday present she surely did not deserve. It was the first time the two sides had clashed so publicly. Diana
hit back, using
The Sun
, by claiming that she would be staying in to watch television on her milestone birthday. The gloves were off.

If Charles and his faction wanted a fight, then Diana was ready and willing to give them one. There was by then an agreement that she should not undertake an engagement that might clash with one of Prince Charles’s, especially if he was to make what his people termed a major speech. Technically he had precedence, but Diana was in no mood to bow to him. She therefore told her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, that she had no intention of rearranging an invitation she had received to attend a combined National Aids Trust and National Children’s Bureau conference. To add insult to injury, knowing full well that it would infuriate her husband and his growing army of aides, she agreed to make a speech at the conference. She knew that whatever she had to say would receive far more press attention than Charles’s comments, no matter how worthy. This was the warning shot across the bows, Diana’s way of throwing down the gauntlet. Inevitably, she achieved her objective, leaving Prince Charles and his advisers seething.

Although experience has taught me never to underestimate the British press, it never fails to amaze me how gullible journalists can be. True, some try harder than others to find out what is actually happening behind palace doors, usually to be rewarded with a barrage of abuse from courtiers whose job it is to offer the best possible gloss, and sometimes even to lie, for their employers. Other reporters, seeking an easy life, seem content to swallow the anodyne doses offered by spin doctors and other
aides or spokesmen. Acceptance of this spoon feeding was never more evident than in the British media’s reporting of the Princess’s supposed ‘love cruise’ with Charles in the summer of 1991, at the height of their marital problems. Bizarrely, most of the journalists who penned this ‘love boat’ rubbish knew perfectly well that the Prince and Princess were at loggerheads. Yet some, no doubt to keep in with Palace circles, chose to go into print with Richard Aylard’s rosy briefings about the trip.

After I had accompanied the Princess as she inspected her regiment (the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, later nicknamed, rather cruelly, the ‘Squidgys’), Arthur Edwards of
The Sun
, was plaguing me about the royal couple’s destination, as news of the fact that they were taking a holiday together, with their sons, had leaked out. ‘Is it Majorca? I’ve heard it’s off this year,’ he said.

‘You might be right, Arthur, but I can’t tell you even if you are,’ I insisted.

‘I’ve heard they are going to Italy aboard some Greek billionaire’s yacht, Ken. Is that right?’ he persisted. My silence was enough to make him realise something different was afoot this year. All I could tell him was to follow his instincts.

Fleet Street pooled information. With the notable exception of the
Daily Express
team of photographer Steve Wood and correspondent Ashley Walton, who flew to Majorca on a rumour or a whim, the rest of the hacks headed for the Italian port of Naples. They rightly deduced that the Prince and Princess were taking their holiday aboard the yacht owned by the Greek tycoon John Latsis – as Arthur Edwards had surmised – and that the royal party would board the yacht, the
Alexander
, from a military port, where security would make sure that no journalist or photographer got even close.

The
Alexander
is one of the world’s largest and most luxurious private yachts. Worth more than $45 million (£30 million), the 350-foot yacht was equipped with every possible luxury, including vintage Dom Pérignon seemingly on tap. For Diana, however, the trip was nothing but a chore. The benefit for her was that she had a chance to be with her sons, but most of the other guests on board were people she termed ‘Charles’s cronies’. In this she was being a little unfair, since those who accompanied the Prince and Princess on such a holiday at such a time, given the state of relations between them, deserved a medal, not criticism, even if the guest list did somewhat favour the Prince and his friends. On board were the Queen’s cousin, Princess Alexandra, her husband, the Hon. Sir Angus Ogilvy, and the Prince’s relations and close friends, Lord and Lady Romsey, whom Diana despised because she knew they were also close to Camilla Parker Bowles.

Yet, as with the holiday on Necker the previous year, the Princess had invited Graham Smith to join the cruise. Her former protection officer was very ill by now, and both Diana and I feared the worst. In the event he enjoyed the trip, but within months he would be forced to retire.

In terms of Palace public relations, the cruise was a complete success, the media content to dub it the ‘second honeymoon’. This was laughable, for in reality the couple were at loggerheads the entire time. The Princess, at her most petulant and spoilt, made it clear to everyone that she was unhappy at being cooped up on the yacht with her husband. At the start of the cruise the
press, in hot pursuit, did indeed track the yacht down to a military port in Naples, but the powerful
Alexander
soon disappeared over the horizon, with the press boats falling far behind. The only time the royal party was disturbed again was off the coast of Sardinia, when a local photographer, Massimo Sestini, got lucky and scooped the ratpack. To make matters worse, he had also photographed some of Fleet Street’s finest aboard their chartered speedboat, complete with posing pouches, allegedly looking for the royal love-boat. He promptly sold the shots to a Sunday newspaper, thereby making a number of enemies among the journalists he had snapped.

Diana was at Balmoral when, on 19 August, Angela Serota telephoned to say that the last rites had been administered to Adrian Ward Jackson who was by now gravely ill in St Mary’s Hospital. At once she and I left for London without, as was customary (and expected), asking permission of the Queen, travelling by car as we could not get a flight soon enough. We drove through the night the 550 miles from north-east Scotland to London so she could share Adrian’s last moments. Diana slept most of the way, but spent hours with her friend once we reached the hospital. In the end he clung on to life until 23 August, and Diana, summoned by the faithful Angela, arrived to see him for the last time not long before he died. His death had a profound effect on her, and she dedicated her AIDS Crusade to him, the man who had first inspired her to support the cause.

Out of the blue, I received a call from James Hewitt. He said that he did not know what to do about his relationship with
the Princess, and he wanted my advice. I knew that there was nothing I could do to help him, but I liked the man, so I agreed to meet. He had recently returned from the Gulf and their affair had been briefly rekindled; he stayed at Kensington Palace a couple of times, but, as he told me, the intimacy they had shared in their love letters to and from the front was completely absent in their face-to-face meetings. Now Diana was not answering his calls. He was confused. It was a difficult situation, and although I told him that I could see that he was in a dilemma, I insisted that I was in no position to help. What went on between him and Diana, I reminded him, was their business, and theirs alone. I could not and would not intervene. After the
News of the World
story in March 1991 which exposed their close friendship for the first time, the Princess had wisely decreed that they could not be seen in public together.