Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (2 page)

It is a truism to say that someone’s death tends to make us view that person through rose-tinted glasses. Certainly I remembered Diana like that for a while, and so, I’m sure, did almost everybody. But she was certainly no saint, as her brother had publicly insisted. She would have laughed her infectious laugh out loud at the very thought of it.

Lord Spencer had said in his eulogy that Diana was every inch a real woman, not some iconised image. True, she loved her image, and hated it when she was not in the newspapers, or when a picture showed what she thought of as her bad side. In fact, she was as vain as are most of us, someone who really cared about what she looked like, and how she appeared to other people. She could laugh at herself, though, something that perhaps showed that, at heart, she had as much humility as vanity. Which is why, in the end, she would not have wanted millions of people – especially the ‘ordinary people’ with whom she empathised so much – to mourn for her.

Before the day of the funeral I had stolen a solitary moment with the Princess, saying my own silent farewell to her as she lay in the Chapel Royal. It was cold. She lay at one end of the chapel in her coffin, her standard – the standard of the Princess of Wales – draped over it. I murmured a prayer, and talked out loud about some of the things we had done, some of the amazing places we had visited and extraordinary people we had spent time with. I remembered our last meeting. For
once she did not answer me in that somewhat high-pitched, slightly affected voice of hers, so often with laughter bubbling near the surface. I shed no tears, nor do I think she would have expected me to. But like millions around the world I was moved by the loss of someone who had, as she had so earnestly wished, ‘made a difference’. Someone who had flown in the face of convention; someone whose very presence could light up a room filled with people close to death; someone who by just touching a man dying of AIDS could completely change our attitude to that terrible disease. Now she was silent, her life ended needlessly, her ready giggle stilled for ever. I had shared much with her during the years when I had served her. Life, I thought, goes on, but I was convinced it would never sparkle in quite the same way again.

In a final irony, as I walked across the park that day, I met a journalist I knew from my days with the Princess, and who had known her well. He was crying his heart out.

‘THIS IS THE THIRTY-SECOND WARNING.’ Giving Diana’s police T security code I spoke quietly and without inflexion into the radio, then returned it to the side of my seat in the Jaguar. We never signalled the arrival of the principal any earlier, as to have done so would have been poor security. Radio calls are easily monitored.

‘Oh Ken, anyone would think the world was about to end.’ The woman in the back of the car always found our procedure amusing. ‘For goodness’ sake, it’s only little old me coming home,’ she added with a girlish tickle in her voice.

Seconds later the dark green Jaguar XJ6 approached the police security barrier and, after being waved through by the constable on duty, swept into Kensington Palace. In the back of the car sat the most famous woman in the world, Diana, Princess of Wales. I always sat in the front, next to her trusted
chauffeur – and my friend – Simon Solari. We were the only people in the car.

Only half an hour earlier, the Princess and I had stepped from Concorde at Heathrow after a flight from Dulles International airport, Washington, DC. Exhilarated, she had hardly been able to sit still in her designated seat, and had talked non-stop about her charity mission to America, during which she had made a friend of the First Lady, Barbara Bush. Indeed, the President himself had delayed a meeting to chat with Diana, and his decision to join them had impressed her. On that trip we had travelled under the names Mr and Mrs Hargreaves, although none of Concorde’s crew had been remotely fooled. At the time she was already beginning to revel in her success as a royal personage – in fact, an international celebrity – in her own right.

Now we were back at Numbers 8 and 9 Kensington Palace, her official London residence. The Prince of Wales, her husband, was not waiting for her inside.

‘Home sweet home,’ Diana sighed, with more than a hint of irony, although without bitterness.

It was just after 10.35 pm on a dark autumn night in 1991, and I had been doing this job for nearly three years. The Princess, however, had been doing hers for nearly ten.

There are not many days when I do not think of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her illuminating smile, her sheer presence, and above all her yearning to live life to the full, have never left me. I am sure I am not the only person to be haunted in this way, although, with each year that passes since her death, fashionable
opinion seems increasingly to insist that our memory of the once vivid woman has become not only more distant, but more uncertain. There is no shortage of commentators who want us to believe that the Diana legend is fading, or even that the substance behind that legend was of little worth.

The Diana I knew was full of fun, almost always in search of laughter, not wallowing in self-pity and tears as she is now so often portrayed. There were, of course, dark clouds in her life, but they would soon pass to allow her nature to shine brightly once again. Yet since her death on 31 August 1997 history has all too often presented a very different – not to say distorted – image of this extraordinary woman. Worse, since 1997, a PR offensive has been waged in some quarters against a dead woman’s memory. Her name has been dragged through the mud, her principles derided, her motives corrupted, and even her sanity questioned. It has been, in my view at least, a vicious and one-sided war, and as in any war, the truth has been the first casualty.

For nearly five years, from 1988 to 1993,1 shadowed the late Princess in my capacity as her Scotland Yard personal protection officer (PPO, or, in layman’s terms, her police bodyguard), during the most traumatic period of her life. For most of that time she was a joy to work with. As her senior protection officer it fell to me to deal with her more sensitive private engagements and public appearances, and my relationship with her was, by the very nature of the job, an extremely close one. Due to the unique position in which I found myself, however, it was inevitable that my duties could not always be clearly defined. Naturally she and I freely discussed all matters affecting her security, but we also
talked openly about her life, including the most intimate aspects of it. Consequently, during my time with her, I was not only her police officer but also a trusted aide and confidant.

While this may seem a conceited view, it has its roots in the nature of my profession: if I had not liked and trusted her, I could not have done my job efficiently, while she would hardly have tolerated a protection officer whom she did not trust. There was an open-door policy between us; my independence, given that I worked not directly for her but for Scotland Yard, meant I could and would always speak freely and truthfully, unlike the army of courtiers employed by her husband, the Prince of Wales, and by the Queen. The uniqueness of my role gave me, I believe, an unrivalled appreciation of the true Diana, the woman behind the public mask.

I am the first officer from Scotland Yard’s elite Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department to publish an insider’s account of service with that department. This may seem an empty claim, but I believe it is a unique story because it was shared with Diana. Most of our experiences were known only to the two of us. I would never have put pen to paper had the Princess been alive today. Since her death, however, I have become increasingly concerned at the way she has been portrayed by the media, by journalists and writers, even those who claim to have known her well. I have come to feel that unless I tell of my years with her as I saw them through my policeman’s eyes, then people now and in the future will receive a corrupt impression of her.

My intention in writing this book is simple – to set the record straight about the woman who herself once claimed that I knew
her better than anyone, and in doing so, to tell the simple truth about one of the most remarkable, complex and alluring public figures of the latter part of the twentieth century.

When l joined the Metropolitan Police service as a special cadet in 1964 at the tender age of sixteen, I never dreamed that I would one day shadow one of the world’s most famous women. A chance meeting with an old friend sent me on a journey that changed my life for ever.

At the age of thirty-four I was already a police inspector, more or less assured of a rapid rise through the hierarchy at Scotland Yard. One evening in the summer of 1986 I arranged to have a quiet drink with Jim Beaton, a clever and experienced officer, who had been honoured with the George Cross for saving Princess Anne, and who had been a chief inspector at Kensington police station when I was a ‘skipper’ (sergeant) there in the late 1960s. I had always trusted him as a colleague, and, I suppose, regarded him as my mentor. He had had a varied and successful career since our days at Kensington together, and had been promoted to the rank of superintendent. He was also the Queen’s personal protection officer. As we sipped glasses of his favoured single-malt whisky, Jim came to the point. In confidence, he told me that his department, Royalty Protection, was looking for a police inspector to take charge of guarding the Queen’s grandchildren, Princes William and Harry, the sons of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and thus heirs to the throne after Prince Charles.

‘It’s time for a change, Ken. You go for it – you have nothing to lose,’ he urged, before adding, ‘I’ll put a word in for you.’

Next morning, with Jim’s endorsement ringing in my ears (and a head that was slightly the worse for wear after the night before), I applied for the job, and a few months later, in November 1986, was appointed to the department.

Until then I had enjoyed a full and varied police career; I had walked the beat, served undercover in both the Vice and Drug Squads as a long-haired, bearded detective, and had even arrested a serial killer. Surely looking after two small children, even if they did have royal blood running through their veins, could not be that difficult? Thinking about it, I found that I was not worried by the prospect of protecting members of the British royal family; after all, it was just a job.

Even so, and although I had had a few brushes with the famous and the infamous during my career, I had the sense to recognise that royalty promised to be very different. Being a police officer in London from the late 1960s to the late 1980s was never dull. As a naive probationer I had been sent to investigate a disturbance in the West End after answering a flashing bluelight signal in the heart of Piccadilly Circus (in those days, the streets were still dotted with black ‘police boxes’, to which every officer had a key, and in which there was a telephone; when an officer was needed to attend a scene a blue light flashed on top of the box nearest the incident). On the other end of the phone was a crusty sergeant of early 1950s vintage, who sent me in search of what he described as ‘an awful noise’. It turned out to be a wonderful, indeed, historic, commotion; The Beatles – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – the greatest pop group of their day, were jamming their hearts out on the roof of the Apple headquarters at 3, Savile
Row in London’s Mayfair. Well, I had been asked to look into the disturbance, so I made my way through the building to the roof where, courtesy of my job, I had a front-row seat among a few of the group’s colleagues and a handful of invited guests. When I approached drummer Ringo Starr, who was the nearest member of the band to me, and asked what was going on, he smiled, handed me a beer – which I handed back – and said in his thick Liverpool accent, ‘Are you all right, mate? Don’t look so worried.’

He then gestured with a drumstick for one of the fixers once again to offer me a drink while he got on with the job in hand of playing the beat for ‘Get Back!’, which eventually reached such a deafening crescendo that it stopped the traffic in the busy street below us. Obviously, I could not accept the drink as I was on duty, but the music was intoxicating enough. The song finished to rousing applause from the fortunate people present. By now I had been joined on the roof by about six or so other police officers; like me, none of them asked The Beatles to desist.

‘Are we free to go now, officer? I promise I’ll come quietly,’ John Lennon said with a wry smile and a wink as he returned to the studio below.

Perhaps my most famous ‘scalp’ – if that is the right word – was that of the British serial killer Dennis Nilsen in February 1983. His was a story that genuinely shocked people and it remained headline news in Britain (where, thankfully, serial killers were and are a rarity) for weeks. He was clinical to the point of coldness in everything he did, and especially in the killing, dismemberment and disposal of the young homosexuals
he invited back to his flat in North London. As is the case in so many crimes, his undoing came by chance. The police were called in after a workman clearing a blockage in his drains made the grisly discovery that the obstruction was caused by human remains. As an inspector at Hornsey police station at the time, I was sent as one of the arresting officers to bring Nilsen in. He was an iceman, unmoved by what he had done and entirely fatalistic about what was happening to him. Then, as we were driving back to the station, with Neilsen handcuffed in the back, silenced but unperturbed by his arrest, still contemplating the magnitude of his crime, he suggested we go back. Persuaded, we turned round. There was more horror to come. Back at his very ordinary house, a huge pot stood on the stove in his very ordinary kitchen. Lifting the lid, I, by now a hardened police officer, was not fully prepared for the sight that greeted me. In the pot was a partly boiled head, half skull, half cooked flesh. Neilsen was eventually given six life sentences, one for each of the murders of which he was convicted, and will live out his life locked behind bars; locked, too, inside his own macabre world.

Neither of these two incidents could be said to have particularly prepared me for the new service I was about to join, however. If I had to try to pinpoint a reason why I joined the roller-coaster business of guarding the British royal family, it would be that, by the early 1980s, I had become thoroughly disillusioned with what was happening on the front line in the Metropolitan Police Service. Having left the Complaints Investigation Bureau, the department that investigates internal police corruption, I was posted to North London in 1982 as a newly promoted inspector. Then, after just a couple of weeks at
Hornsey police station, I was asked to write the divisional action plans for the district, spelling out how we could tackle the key areas of crime. Surprised, and, I must admit, a little flattered, I believed that here was my chance to make a real difference. Frustration soon set in, however, when it became clear that despite being praised for my work, my recommendations were not acted upon. Within two years I joined the District Support Unit, a new ‘people-friendly’ term for the controversial task force, originally known as the SPG (Special Patrol Group), and which later became the Territorial Support Group. I made a number of influential friends, some of them senior officers, and in 1983 I was recommended for promotion to chief inspector, seemingly destined, at least in terms of rank, for higher and greater achievement with the service. My promotion was blocked, however, and after a while I began to get the feeling that someone higher up the so-called ‘police food chain’ did not like my face. Or me.

A few days after I was passed over for promotion, the area I was policing was mobilised to deal with the Broadwater Farm riots, a series of violent and bloody disturbances that brought turmoil to race relations in Britain and changed the face of front-line policing for ever. Broadwater Farm was a run-down housing estate in Tottenham, North London, which was also a hotbed of crime, drugs and violence. The majority of its inhabitants were black working-class people; most were law-abiding, but the estate had virtually become a ‘no-go’ zone, dominated by gangs and drug dealers. In 1985, when the police raided the estate in an attempt to reinstate order, violence erupted among the lawless factions there, and the officers
withdrew. Senior officers then decided that we had to go in behind helmets and riot shields to restore order. During the ensuing battles one of the men on my relief, Police Constable Keith Blakelock, an honest and distinguished officer, was brutally murdered and his body mutilated after he was cut off from other officers by a mob. I was sickened, and grieved both for him and his family. Matters grew worse in the days that followed, and were made worse still by the widespread, lurid and often exaggerated reporting of the media. Infuriated by the way the service pandered to the self-styled ‘community leaders’ who, in the wake of the murder, continued to peddle anti-police propaganda, I resolved to leave the service. What was the point of good, decent human beings putting their lives on the line for others if nothing was going to change? I felt that Keith had died for nothing. If he was not to be defended after death then I did not want to serve any more. The community leaders used Keith’s death as a political platform; his presence on the estate and the fact that he was a police officer as a political football. It was as though it had been his fault that he had been brutally murdered just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and just for doing his job.