Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (8 page)

Pushed reluctantly into the limelight, there was nothing I could do except take a deep breath and sing one of my personal favourites (‘Myself When Young’ from
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
, arranged by Lisa Lehmann). To add to my embarrassment, however, Queen Sophia arrived at the pool midway through my rendition, my first (although as it turned out, not my only) Royal Command performance. My considerable efforts – by now I was scarlet from the heat, the exertion and the embarrassment – earned polite applause from my audience, followed by an equally polite call for an encore which I tactfully declined. Hot and breathless, I said my goodbyes and left the royal presences, the Princess by now chatting amiably with her hostess. As I walked away, however, I caught Diana’s eye, at which she mouthed the words ‘Thank you’ to me, and smiled. Making my way back to my hotel room to the sound of cicadas and the rustle of bougainvillea in the warm breeze, I could not help laughing about my mercurial new principal. So this is what it is really like to be protection officer to the most famous woman in the world, I thought.

If nothing else, my solo effort that afternoon brought a result that I could never normally have hoped for. The Princess had
seemed captivated by my interest in music. She said that she was fascinated by opera, which she said stirred her emotionally, but admitted that she did not fully understand it. Enthused, I spoke of my own passion for the art and, that evening, gave her a copy of
Understanding Opera
, which she devoured. Moreover, my performance had led her and Queen Sophia into discussing their mutual love of music, and their admiration for the great opera singers. As a result, the Queen invited us to go to see José Carreras perform on the following day, the first time the singer had appeared in public since his recovery from leukaemia. The Princess joked that, after listening to my effort, it would be a real privilege to hear another great tenor. Horrified by this comparison, I pointed out rather woodenly that I was actually a baritone.

Next day, 15 August, the Princess and I, with Queen Sophia, her sister, and the queen’s aide, flew in the King’s private jet to Barcelona, leaving Prince Charles behind. After landing, our car formed part of a huge convoy, mainly of police, which first took us to a village on the outskirts of the city, where we visited a friend of the Queen in a very small house overlooking a beautiful square, in which a colourful and elaborately decorated dais had been built. On that makeshift stage, once the niceties were over, the magnificent Montserrat Caballé (whose work became more widely known to the general public after her brilliant rendition of ‘Barcelona’ with the late Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen) performed a series of Puccini arias. It was an exquisite performance. Diana was inspired not only by the singing, but by the spontaneity of the moment; alive with anticipation, she was as enlivened I had ever seen her.
At the end the diva joined us at a reception, during which she and the Princess chatted like old friends.

This, as it turned out, was only the beginning. We returned to the cars and the royal convoy then headed for a castle in Barcelona, where Diana attended another reception (with me, as usual, never more than a pace or two away). It was here that Diana first met the soccer player and England international Gary Lineker. At the time he was the top striker for Barcelona, although he was by no means a typical soccer star. He had considerable natural charm, and the Princess enjoyed flirting with him.

Once the reception was over we walked with Gary to our seats in the auditorium within the castle precincts, where José Carreras was about to start the concert. I have never seen a performance so faultless, nor so professional. If the great tenor had any nerves he did not show them – and this, remember, was his first appearance in public after a long lay-off resulting from his gallant struggle against a terrifying disease. His performance was absolutely astounding and the finale left the audience in a frenzy of appreciation. Eventually, he encored ‘Granada’ five times, with the ecstatic crowd showering him with flowers, so that by the end he was knee deep in rose petals.

After the performance we were escorted to yet another reception, this one held in honour of Carreras. Even without her trademark high heels, Diana towered over him, as she did many of the famous people she met in the course of her royal duties, but his sheer presence commanded the entire room. He exuded a charisma to which she seemed drawn like iron to a magnet. She had obviously studied the book I had given her the
night before, determined not to appear ignorant in front of the great man. She asked him several very astute questions about opera and the art of singing it, and told him that she had been thrilled by his performance of ‘Granada’.

On the return flight back to Palma Diana was elated, bubbling over with the day’s excitements. The gloom of the previous day had dissolved, so that she seemed a completely different person. For someone whose private world was in turmoil and whose life was full of confusion she was, for a few brief hours, wholly inspired.

It may be that our conversation in the Marivent Palace, and the long hours she must have spent turning her problems over in her mind, had determined the Princess on the course she would take, failing marriage or not. Certainly, that autumn, while she and the Prince were at Balmoral, the Queen’s Highland estate in Aberdeenshire, she resolved to make a fresh start. She decided she had let herself down, made too many ‘cock-ups’, as she bluntly called them, and announced privately to me that she was going to take her royal responsibilities much more seriously.

‘I’ve got a job and I’m bloody well going to get on with it,’ she said as I accompanied her on a walk along the River Dee, the great salmon river that runs through the Balmoral estate.

‘It makes me sick,’ she went on. ‘Everybody says I loathe this place’ – looking around at the rolling Scottish countryside, the trees bathed in the browns and rusty orange of autumn – ‘but it’s not the place. I love Scotland. It’s just the pervading atmosphere generated by those Germans [her in-laws] that drains me,’ she said, pointing towards the vast mock castle
that her husband’s great-great-great grandfather, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the Consort of Queen Victoria had designed and built. I knew by then that she invariably went to Balmoral determined to be strong, and returned running on empty, emotionally exhausted by her troubled marriage and the claustrophobia of living with the royal family at close quarters.

I felt there was no doubt that James Hewitt’s role in Diana’s life had Prince Charles’s unspoken agreement. So when the Life Guards officer received an invitation to the Prince’s fortieth birthday party in November 1988, all his fears of being beheaded for the treasonable act of sleeping with the wife of the heir to the British throne seemed to evaporate. Less flippantly, he seemed to feel that his affair was looked on, if not with favour, then at least with acceptance, by those in the royal family who knew about it. He began to relax more, while everyone close to Diana, perhaps even the Prince himself, seemed gratified, if not relieved, by the fact that she appeared to be much more content. Deep down, however, as she told me, she felt that there was something tawdry in the reality that both she and her husband had secret relationships, and for the sake of the country – or at least of the monarchy – they had to continue to live this lie.

For myself, I became quite fond of James. I thought he was a typically nice cavalry officer. After a while, however, he seemed to become troubled by the emotional demands Diana placed upon him. I remember once, during a particularly quiet afternoon at Sheiling Cottage, at least for me, he tried to escape from her.

‘Ken, I need some time off,’ he said. ‘The Princess can be so demanding.’ I smiled but said nothing, wondering just how many men would have given anything to change places with him.

In truth, however, the Princess of Wales’s romance with Captain James Hewitt was already beginning to wane. For despite her lover’s considerable attentions, Diana still craved more in her life. She began to see him less and less, and when he called would blame her work commitments for the long gaps between their meetings. As I have said, she seemed to ignore her own infidelity, but would explode with rage at Charles’s relationship, and once again became obsessed about her husband’s friendship with Camilla Parker Bowles, no matter how discreetly he behaved. I have to say that hypocrisy of this nature was her metier. In Diana’s mind, perversely, there was no contradiction in her behaviour, which gives an insight into her complex character. It was not my place, however, to highlight such sanctimony, although I was perfectly placed to do so, since I, perhaps more than anyone else, knew exactly the nature of her relationships with the handsome young men whose attentions she – naturally – encouraged.

THERE CAN BE NO QUESTION that when they worked together, Charles and Diana generated a prodigious energy. It seemed to those who operated in their slipstream – the Palace hierarchy, their respective staffs, and professional ‘royal watchers’ like writers and journalists – that as the public face of the royal family they were unsurpassable. Sadly, by the late 1980s their joint appearances had become increasingly rare, and I and others close to them could only watch as their personal relationship deteriorated still further. They even instructed their aides to compile their respective diaries in such a way as to restrict their joint engagements to the occasional film première at Leicester Square or such setpiece royal events as the Queen’s Birthday Parade (‘Trooping the Colour’), Royal Ascot, the Garter Ceremony at Windsor, Remembrance Sunday and the annual staff lunch at Christmas. Joint trips abroad also began
to dwindle at around this time as the Princess, honouring the commitment she had made at Balmoral in the autumn of 1988, decided it was time to spread her wings and go solo.

By the beginning of 1989 the battle lines had been clearly drawn up between the two camps, and the Waleses’ household was not a place for the fainthearted. To the outside world everything in the royal garden was rosy. In reality, the flowers had died and the petals long since fallen – all that was left were sharp, uncompromising thorns. The more astute commentators outside royal circles already sensed that something was very wrong with Charles and Diana’s relationship.

Without naming the couples’ respective lovers, even broadsheet newspapers like the
Sunday Times
had already printed articles surmising that Diana, like royal wives throughout history, had accepted the time-honoured royal option of a cool and arranged marriage in which the husband, at least, could largely behave as he wished, provided he were discreet and attended to his royal duties. In effect they were saying that she had settled for a business relationship; in actual fact, however, they were wrong. For Diana, partly schooled as she was in the romantic novels of her step-grandmother, Barbara Cartland, had never stopped believing in the Holy Grail of true love. To her, there was no reason why her husband should behave so coolly and, arguably, even cruelly towards her. Perhaps the romantic Diana was right; but the realists among her inner circle led her to think that to strive for that ideal must inevitably lead to disappointment and pain.

By now the media’s love affair with Diana was also beginning to wane, just as the spice was beginning to go out of her liaison
with her lover, James Hewitt. For some – to me – inexplicable reason Sarah, Duchess of York, had become the new darling of the media. It proved to be a brief interlude, for the honeymoon period could not and did not last, and it was not long before ‘the Redhead’, as Diana called her sister-in-law (Sarah, in return, referred to Diana disparagingly as ‘the Blonde’), fell out of favour too. Her arrival on the scene some three years earlier had been a mixed blessing for the Princess. At first she had regarded the extravert Duchess as an ally and a friend, but their initial closeness dissolved when Diana began to view Sarah as a potential threat to her own popularity. Each woman disliked competition, especially in terms of press coverage, from the other, and both were capable of becoming almost hysterical with rage and frustration if one was thought to have received more, or more favourable, notice in the media than the other. Diana would even purposely arrange extra engagements to clash with the Duchess’s so that she could upstage her rival. As a result, the bad press, mostly about her relationship with Prince Charles, that started to come her way early in 1989 baffled and infuriated the Princess. She could not understand why reporters, many of whom she had come to know on first-name terms, had taken to writing such damning things.

Sometimes she would vent her feelings to me when we were alone together. ‘It’s their job – it’s what they get paid for,’ I would explain, holding back from saying that what the journalists were writing was actually a slightly under-spun version of the truth. If they had printed the real story – affairs, estrangement and all – then all hell would have broken loose. To the public, and to many journalists and commentators,
she was still the glamorous wife of the heir to the throne, the mother of two fine boys, and the most popular member of the royal family, with the possible exception of the Queen Mother. The world did not want to learn that there were feet of clay at the end of those famously elegant legs.

Soon, I knew, it would be impossible to keep the lid on the truth. For the time being, however, as Diana travelled the country, or smiled her way through several overseas tours, the crowds were content to believe in the myth of a princess as happy and fulfilled as she was beautiful. For her part, Diana’s own deepening unhappiness led her to seek solace from those worse off than herself. Despite living in comfort, she empathised with the sick, the poor and the desperate, seeming to draw strength from their pain, and genuinely anxious to share their misfortune. Yet as the more cynical newspaper columnists began to turn on her, the great Diana roadshow, dependent as it was on the media, was in danger of becoming unstuck, with its star turn coming to be regarded as a disaffected woman unable or unwilling to support her hard-working husband.

Diana instinctively knew that she had to transform her public image from fashion clothes horse to charity workhorse if she were to have any chance of winning the publicity war, either against the royal family as a whole, or against individual members, especially Prince Charles and the Duchess of York. More importantly, she knew that reaching out to society’s untouchables was the right thing for her to do, not because it would win her points with the press and public, but because she knew that she could help them – she could, as she herself put it, ‘make a difference’. The change in her was immediately
apparent during the visit she and the Prince made to Indonesia in 1989. Even before the pre-visit security review she had insisted that the official programme should include a visit to a leprosy hospital in Sitanala, on the outskirts of the capital, Jakarta.

The scene that greeted her inside the hospital was hellish, like an Old Testament vision rendered by one of the grimmer Flemish painters of the fifteenth century. It was a place where she found it difficult not to weep, where sufferers lived in the patient acceptance of a terrible, wasting disease, made the more terrible because it is so obvious and so visible.

As others in her entourage reeled away, almost too horrified to look, Diana, a woman born to a life of privilege, seemed to be truly inspired. She instinctively knew that she could help, could focus the world’s attention on a disease that to most people in the West owed more to biblical times than to the twentieth century. She was driven by the photo call, although not in any self-serving way. She knew what the images of her with these tragic victims would achieve.

She was right. The impact was astonishing. Leprosy, until she embraced its cause, was hardly a fashionable concern. Once Diana took up the fight, money poured in to the leprosy charities, such was the impact of her patronage.

The Princess’s success with causes was not reflected in her marriage. As Charles’s behaviour towards her cooled to the point of freezing, so her passion for charity work reached new heights. Journalists, who until then had focused on what she looked like or what she was wearing, began to use the phrase ‘Caring Di’ in their reports.

In March 1989, the Prince and Princess made an official visit to Dubai, one of the small sheikhdoms that together comprise the United Arab Emirates. Tension was already beginning to grow in the Gulf region as Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, rattled his sabre with threats to ‘reclaim’ Iraq’s southern neighbour, Kuwait. Before we left, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had personally advised Prince Charles against playing in a polo match in the desert, which he had originally agreed to do, because MI6 had warned of assassination threats by fanatical Iranians. (The eight-year war between Iran and Iraq had ended the previous year, but many Iranians were angered by the support given to Iraq during that conflict by Western nations, notably America and Britain.) With this backdrop the mood among the royal party was sombre, and Colin Trimming, the Prince’s protection officer and my immediate superior, and I knew that we would have to be especially vigilant. Eventually the Prince pulled out of the match, spending the afternoon kicking his heels in the Sheikh’s heavily guarded palace in the capital, while people who had paid $300 (£200) a head to watch him play voiced their disappointment. The Prince’s decision annoyed his hosts, who accused the British government of overreacting, Dubai’s Minister of Protocol, Humaid Bin Drai, remarking angrily, ‘Your Prince was perfectly safe with us. We discovered no threat to his security. I do not know where the British Government get their information from.’

Whatever their feelings about the polo match, our hosts could not have been more hospitable. When Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Rashid al-Maktoum, heard that the Princess’s scheduled British Airways return flight was delayed by two hours, he
told her that he could not bear to think of her being put to such inconvenience and placed his personal jumbo jet at her disposal to take her home. Within a short time the vast Boeing 747, painted in the red-and-white livery of the Dubai flag, was ready for take-off with, besides the crew, only the Princess, myself, her hairdresser and her press spokesman on board. Thanks to the Sheikh, we arrived back at Heathrow at dawn the following morning. To have hired a jumbo would have cost tens of thousands of pounds, compared to a first-class return ticket which, then, cost $1,482 (£969; and for which the British taxpayer footed the bill).

Although, privately, the Prince and Princess remained at loggerheads, publicly the outward show of togetherness continued. None the less, the situation within their marriage had gone from bad to worse by the time the couple set out on an official tour of Hungary. As it would turn out, Hungary was to be one of their last great acts of togetherness. Amazingly, the press swallowed the Palace spin and focused on how well Charles and Diana appeared to be getting on. That was in public; behind closed doors, however, nothing could have been further from the truth. Perhaps Fleet Street’s finest cynics had been overcome by the history and romance of the setting, and by the tour’s timing. After all, the communist system was collapsing in Russia and all over Eastern Europe, and the beautiful city of Budapest and its artistic people were once again free from authoritarianism. It is even possible that the wonderful romance of the place and the moment had an effect on the Prince and Princess, although I doubt it.

Diana the consummate actress could put on a show; but
Diana the private person could not and would not live a lie. She felt that she was now ready to take centre stage in her own right, to star in her own solo show. It was of no concern to her if this meant that the old stagers, the other senior members of the royal family, suffered by comparison with her glittering star. Indeed, to her, this upstaging of the
ancien régime
made her solo performance all the more rewarding. Such trivialities aside, however, she knew that her public persona carried with it tremendous power, a power that she could harness to help to change the world and the plight of its people for the better.

In any evaluation of the Princess’s achievements, the part she played in focusing the public’s attention on the terrible disease AIDS, promoting awareness, understanding and even compassion, must be among her greatest. With one handshake, she did more to dispel, almost overnight, the myth that the disease can be caught through simply touching a victim than a thousand press conferences given by the most eminent and convincing doctors. Diana knew her power and revelled in it, and, as with leprosy, the struggle to help AIDS sufferers the world over became almost a religion to her. She felt driven to help these people, but it was a risky crusade, for it brought criticism from within ‘the Firm’, as insiders referred to the royal family, and especially its senior members.

I once had to console the Princess as she broke down in tears as we were driving back to Kensington Palace after a meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. She was always very nervous of the Queen. At first, she told me, she had been welcomed into the family, and believed that Her Majesty was a great supporter of hers. For her part, the Queen knew that, if
handled with care, the young Princess was a great asset to the royal family, if not the jewel in its crown, then certainly the sparkle on its diadem. By the time I joined her team, however, Diana had come to be viewed by the Palace as a serious and escalating problem, moving Prince Philip to state his belief that she needed to be handled with care. In truth, she had become a thorn in the side of the monarchy. To put it simply, she outshone or overshadowed the rest of the Firm, including her husband, something that irritated Prince Charles considerably.

So when she embarked on her mission to rid the world of ignorance and prejudice about AIDS, at a time when little was known about the disease by the general public, it seriously worried the Queen and her advisers, according to Diana. Members of the royal family, especially beautiful princesses married to the heir to the throne, should, the Palace felt, steer clear of controversy. Perhaps, in their eyes, becoming the champion of AIDS sufferers was one step too far from the accepted royal duties of smiling at babies or patients in hospitals, visiting old people and schools, opening factories or launching ships, or making royal tours of foreign countries to boost British business interests. AIDS was dangerous territory, and the Palace believed that Diana’s involvement could backfire on the House of Windsor.

It was not unusual for me to have to console a tearful Princess, for she could be highly emotional. This time, however, she said that she had good reason to weep. During their interview, the Queen had apparently told Diana, in no uncertain terms, that although she admired her courage and conviction in confronting and publicising the AIDS issue, she
thought her daughter-in-law was misguided. Drawing on her own years of experience, it would seem that she had warned Diana that she was in danger of letting the cause envelop her, so that she would come to be seen only as the champion of what many people still regarded as a ‘gay plague’.