Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (22 page)

In Egypt, to her credit, as she prepared to face the tornado about to hit the monarchy, Diana was able to find calm in the eye of the storm. She knew that everyone who worked with her was also under strain, and she did her best to lighten the mood, insisting that we take time out to ‘de-stress’ ourselves. On the last night of the trip she invited everyone to join her for a swim at the British Ambassador’s pool. All of her staff were there, from baggage master Ron Lewis to her secretary Victoria ‘Ralphie’ Mendham (so nicknamed because she was always decked out in clothes by the designer Ralph Lauren). The tour doctor, Surgeon Commander Robin Clark, Royal Navy, a congenial but rather shy man with a sweep of hair covering his balding scalp, was rather reluctant to strip off and join in the fun, preferring instead to loiter rather precariously at the pool’s edge. For some reason he was wearing a camel suit which, in the searing heat of Cairo, must have been incredibly hot. From the pool, Diana eyed him menacingly.

She swam over to me and said, ‘Ken, is he going to come in for a swim?’ pointing at the unsuspecting Robin.

‘No, I don’t think he is, ma’am,’ I replied.

‘Well, I think he ought to go in in that suit.’

‘I think that would be better coming from you, ma’am, not me.’

She was not giving up that easily.

‘If he agrees to go in in that ridiculous suit, will you help me put him in the water?’ In fact, she had no intention of asking his agreement.

‘As long as I don’t get sued by the Royal Navy, ma’am, it would be a pleasure,’ I said. With that we attacked Robin with a pincer formation and tossed him in the pool head first, his glasses flying off in the process.

What we failed to realise, of course, was that his suit was heavy wool, and by the morning it had shrunk by about a foot all round. Diana, of course, offered to buy the unfortunate man a replacement – and did so.

The Prince and Princess of Wales returned to Britain, and to the echoes of the media-fuelled row over
Diana: Her True Story
. With the prospect of separation looming the Queen summoned them both to a private meeting. They discussed a formal separation, but the Queen urged caution and asked them to go, with their sons, on holiday together one last time and to ‘at least try’. Both agreed, although Diana fully expected a holiday from Hell.

Buoyed by what, for him, had been the success of the previous year’s cruise, especially in giving the pursuing media
the slip, Charles accepted an invitation from John Latsis to use his yacht again, despite criticism of him in the press about accepting free trips. It did not worry the Prince. Since using the Royal Yacht
Britannia
for such frivolity was out of the question, it seemed perfectly acceptable to him that he should make use of a friend’s yacht.

Even before the royal couple and their sons set off, accurate stories about this second sham ‘love-boat cruise’ appeared in the press, which gleefully reported that the couple had been ordered to make a go of their marriage.

The royal ratpack is not for the faint-hearted. This time, they were determined that they would track down their prey and win their stories and photographs. Kent Gavin was in charge of hiring the boat, which he somehow convinced his colleagues from other newspapers was equipped with the latest electronic devices for finding and tracking members of the royal family. As it turned out, just about the only thing it was equipped with was enough drink to have kept the Royal Navy afloat in both world wars. Moreover, with Mr Latsis’s yacht, his money, and his influence in the region, even the ratpack were doomed to failure. In truth, we never even saw them. None the less, our voyage was far from uneventful, although it was perhaps a blessing that what happened on the cruise did so well away from the intrusive gaze of the press.

Diana was in no mood to put on a show in her phony marriage, for the Queen or anyone else. By now the plans she had made for her escape were already bearing fruit. The only voyage she wanted to make was on a straight course away from the royal family. Her attitude and behaviour made the trip, in
the summer of 1992, almost impossible for those, like myself, whose job it was to look after her. A couple of weeks before we were due to sail she suddenly refused point blank to go, and told the Prince she would also stop her sons from joining him on the trip. This infuriated Charles, not least because he was keenly looking forward to a private summer holiday with the sons he adored. The Princess had successfully fired the first salvo. In fact, she had every intention of going on the cruise, but she took considerable pleasure in unsettling her husband.

By this time the Prince and Princess were barely speaking to each other, mustering a civil nod in public being about as far as relations between them went. So the prospect of a ten-day cruise was a dreadful one for all concerned, including the warring couple. The guest list was much the same as the previous year: the Romseys again, this time with their children, ex-King Constantine and ex-Queen Anne-Marie of Greece, and the Ogilvys again. Everyone on board, guests, staff or crew, knew that the Prince and Princess were at loggerheads. This was going to be a stormy voyage, even if the Aegean remained calm.

Initially, however, the Princess was surprisingly restrained. She and the Prince made certain that they saw very little of each other from the moment we set sail. If, as the press was reporting, this trip was designed to rekindle the embers of a dying marriage, it would need a miracle. Yet ironically, the royal party charted a route that they had taken on their honeymoon aboard
Britannia
eleven years earlier, taking in the Greek islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Seas on their ten-day cruise. Winds gusting up to Force g prevented them from sailing into the Aegean and instead the royal party flew
by Queen’s Flight BAe 146 to Aktion, opposite Lefkada in the Ionian Sea, about two hundred miles from Athens, where they joined the yacht.

Despite our fears for the cruise, Colin Trimming and I were consoled by the seemingly endless supply of caviar and vintage Dom Pérignon champagne. Although our assignment was fraught with difficulties, especially as the Princess’s behaviour became increasingly erratic or irrational, there were distinct advantages to being on board the
Alexander
. The royal couple had separate cabins, and did not venture into each other’s territory. Diana suspected that throughout the cruise her husband spent hours on the satellite telephone to his mistress. Her suspicions were well founded. What she would never know, mercifully, was that five years later, after her death, Camilla Parker Bowles would join the Prince aboard the same yacht.

The atmosphere was extremely tense. Diana wanted nothing to do with Charles and even her sons became concerned about their mother’s strange behaviour. On one occasion there was a bad scare when Colin raised the alarm after a real fear that she had jumped overboard. He came to my cabin and told me that the Princess had not been seen for a couple of hours. She was not in her cabin, and no one else had the least idea where she might be. Panic set in. The Prince was informed that his wife had apparently disappeared, and I saw genuine concern on his face. Colin and I conducted a thorough search, and found nothing. I then remembered that Diana had spent some time by the lifeboats, and went to investigate. In one of them, crouched beneath the canvas cover in floods of tears, I found the Princess.
She had been sitting there alone for two hours sobbing. I was immensely relieved – at least she was alive.

After telling the others to call off the search, I spent the next two hours in the lifeboat locked in conversation with the Princess under the cover.

‘Ken, they don’t understand me. He’s on the telephone to the Rottweiler, and everybody knows it. They are all in it with him. They think I’m mad and feel sorry for me, but they have no idea what I am going through,’ she sobbed.

Quite certainly she had a point. Although Diana had been unfaithful too, she at least had the decency not to flaunt her affairs right under her husband’s nose. Hurt and embarrassed, she had every right to feel humiliated and betrayed.

‘If he wants her here, why doesn’t he fly her here and leave me alone? It is a sham, Ken, a total sham. He is only here with me because his mummy has ordered him to. He is pathetic. Pathetic,’ she fumed. She was right in that, too. It was as clear to her as it was to everyone else aboard that the Prince had no intention of even trying to make his wife feel wanted on this trip. Her reaction may have been childish, but in this instance it was entirely justified.

Having worked herself up to a fury, Diana then demanded that I arrange for her to be flown home immediately. She said she was not prepared to stay on the yacht for one second longer than she had to and, as a princess, she insisted that she could do what the bloody hell she liked. This was not the first time that I had had to deal with the Princess’s petulance, nor would it be the last. I reminded her that I was fully aware of who she was and what authority she had. I also reminded her that I was only
alongside her to protect her, not to be shouted at or ordered about like a subordinate, especially as I did not answer to her but to my seniors at Scotland Yard. Diana took the point and apologised, but still insisted that she wanted to get off what she described as a ‘floating hell’.

She devised a plan whereby the captain of the
Alexander
would be instructed to sail to Cyprus, where she would get a helicopter flight to the nearest airport. From there, she said, she would board a cheap flight home, just like the thousands of holidaymakers from Britain enjoying their summer break on the Greek islands. I explained that getting a flight home at this time of year would be nearly impossible – everything would be pre-booked, with the result that it would take several days, at least, to arrange. At this she became furious again, saying that if she wanted excuses she would go to her husband. I tried to reason with her. If she, the most famous and photographed woman in the world were to arrive at Cyprus airport and sit in the departure lounge with hundreds of tourists, then it would be headline news. How on earth would she be able to explain her sudden decision to quit her family cruise? Surely, I said, appealing to her sense of reason, it would be better to tough it out aboard the
Alexander
for just a few more days? Then, with the final throw of the dice, I asked, ‘And what about your sons?’

She paid me the compliment of listening to my arguments. Despite her occasional descents into immaturity, Diana actually had a firm grasp of the real world, even if at times she pretended not to. She knew that to make a show of defiance in front of her two beloved sons would be unforgivable. She was just deeply
frustrated with living a lie and determined to have her freedom, but she realised to make a stand at this moment would send out the wrong signals. In the eyes of the media and the world she would be the quitter, not the wronged wife pushed almost beyond endurance. At last, to my relief, she agreed to remain aboard the yacht for the remainder of the cruise.

That relief must have been written across my face. She burst out laughing, both at my look, and at our situation, a policeman and a princess crouched in conversation in a covered lifeboat.

‘Come on, Ken,’ she said, ‘we’d better get back to the rest of them. Otherwise that bloody husband of mine will be cracking open the champagne, hoping that I did actually jump overboard and he can make that hideous woman his Princess.’ The determined glint was back in her blue eyes.

I knew, however, that we were not completely out of the woods yet. The Princess, although placated, was primed and ready to attack if her husband gave her sufficient reason. The Prince, sensibly, since otherwise he would have caught the full fury of her anger and frustration, ignored his wife’s tantrum; in fact he did not even bother to speak to her that night. With several days of the holiday still to go, however, the rest of the party were living on their nerves.

It was the young princes who, in the end, provided the link with reality that everybody aboard this floating paradise needed. Harry, ever the daredevil, started it. With the
Alexander
at anchor off one of the Greek islands, the fearless boy took it into his head to leap more than thirty feet from the stern of the yacht into the sea below. Laughing as he trod water, he then dared his older brother to join him. William, never one
to shirk a challenge, especially from Harry, followed. Both of them then tried to goad Colin into following them into the sea. It was at times like this that Colin, with magnificent timing, always managed to pull rank on me.

‘In you go, Wharfey,’ he ordered, absolutely deadpan. ‘We can’t have the second and third in line to the throne swimming around down there without protection.’

I looked at him in disbelief. Then, realising that he was serious, I stripped to my shorts, shut my eyes and took the plunge. It was terrifying, and I had visions of smashing against the side of the yacht on the way down. As soon as I hit the water with an almighty splash, the two princes pounced. Harry adopted his usual fighting tactic, aiming below the belt, and when I managed to wrestle him off, his brother was on my shoulders within seconds, trying to grab me round the neck and duck me under the water. Everyone watched from the deck, laughing and shouting encouragement, and a breath of normality seemed to creep back into the atmosphere aboard the
Alexander
.

Even so, the young princes’ leap caused a considerable stir. Prince Charles questioned Colin as to how they had been allowed to get away with it without being stopped. The Princess, however, thought the entire incident was extremely funny and praised her sons for their nerve, perhaps another swipe at her husband. But there were no reprisals. The Prince told his two sons that they were never to do it again and it was soon forgotten. It was a welcome break from the gloomy process of keeping the Prince and Princess apart, and for that most of us were extremely grateful.

Desperate to think of ways of keeping Diana occupied, I arranged a table-tennis competition involving all the party, including the protection officers. The Princess, who could be fiercely competitive, took the tournament extremely seriously, and with a combination of a naturally good eye for the ball and a certain amount of gentle persuasion she reached the final against ex-Queen Anne-Marie of Greece. Fortunately, the elegant former queen had the good grace (as well as the good sense) to lose the match to placate her younger opponent. Everyone, particularly Prince Charles, breathed a sigh of relief when Diana emerged victorious. It put her in a good mood for the rest of the voyage, and all talk of airlifts to an airport in Cyprus evaporated.