Diana: In Pursuit of Love (21 page)

Hurd made it clear, however, that given her uncertain position inside the royal family, she could not officially represent the nation even though when she visited a foreign country, ostensibly on charity work, the Head of State would invariably request a meeting. ‘As far as I was concerned there was never any question of her having a formal appointment as a roving ambassador,’ he wrote.

While Diana realized that there were formal limits to her ambition under the then Conservative Government, she discovered a greater rapport with the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair, now Prime Minister. As with so much in her life, she established this important political contact by chance. Maggie Rea, a member of her divorce legal team, is a friend of the Blairs and effected an introduction, which led to the Princess and the politician enjoying several unpublicized meetings at the homes of mutual friends from late 1994 and during the two years before the Labour Party’s election victory of 1997. Blair immediately saw the potential in the Princess. ‘Tony was very aware that she had this ability to make a direct connection with people by touching,’ according to an aide. ‘They talked very frankly, there was a real empathy. She was very indiscreet about the royal family and hilarious about Fergie.’ Tony Blair was one of the first political heavyweights to recognize that Diana’s humanitarian ambitions were informed as much by her sense of spiritual mission as by her public duty.

During one of their first meetings, Diana spent most of the evening talking about Alastair Campbell, then Blair’s media spin doctor, who was waiting in a car outside. ‘I’ve got somebody who wants to meet you,’ Blair told Campbell as they were leaving. She was so impressed by the way Campbell was managing the Labour Party’s image that she lightheartedly offered him the job of controlling the media for her.

As with the world of Westminster, she had tried to tame the big beasts in the media jungle herself, but had been badly mauled. She had hosted numerous lunches for editors and senior journalists, wooing both those who supported her and those who seemed never to have a good word to say about her. Most satisfying were those encounters where she managed to bring her ‘enemies’ to heel. Prickly characters like the columnist Paul Johnson and the humorist Auberon Waugh went away singing her praises, their innate scepticism set aside once they saw that she did not take herself too seriously, yet was serious about her purpose and position. At one lunch with the senior editorial staff at the
Sunday Times
, she was quietly amused to find herself intimidating a table full of bright men who behaved for the most part like tongue-tied teenagers. ‘She held the ring in a way inconceivable just a few years before,’ Geordie Greig, now editor of
Tatler
magazine, recollected. The Princess even spoke at a
Literary Review
lunch, organized by Waugh, where she told her delighted audience that she had written a limerick in honour of the occasion, in between, she said wryly, ‘therapy sessions and secret trysts’.

Of course there is no such thing as a free lunch, and, at the lunches she gave at Kensington Palace, the Princess was pursuing her own agenda, frankly discussing her position and her problems with her influential guests. As Stephen Twigg observed, ‘She was trying to create a real relationship with the public by using the media. She knew that the only power against the most powerful family in the land was the balancing power of the public.’

Andrew Neil, formerly the editor of the
Sunday Times
, who supported the publication of
Diana: Her True Story
, which he serialized in his paper, remembered a poised and confident young woman: ‘She was talking about the future of the royal family and she was
making sense.’ By 1995 her attitude to her estranged husband, his family and his mistress was more nuanced than the media caricature of mutual antagonism. When she returned home from her skiing trip in January 1995 to find that Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles had announced their divorce, her reaction surprised Stuart Higgins, editor of the
Sun
. ‘I feel sorry for Camilla,’ she said. ‘The woman has lost almost everything in life and gained . . . what, exactly?’

She was now less overtly confrontational with her husband, as the film maker David Puttnam discovered when he organized a lunch at Claridge’s Hotel for the Princess to meet media big hitters like Alan Yentob, then Controller of BBC One, and Michael Grade, at the time chief executive at Channel Four Television. They were enthusiastic about funding and promoting a Princess of Wales Foundation – a proposal I myself, Stephen Twigg and others had put forward in previous years – but, much as she liked the idea, she did not want to cause yet more conflict with her husband.

Throughout 1995 she could afford to be magnanimous. Her husband’s attempt to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his investiture as the Prince of Wales the previous year had been an unmitigated public relations disaster. The two-and-a-half-hour ITV documentary was, as mentioned in the last chapter, only remembered for Charles’s fleeting confession of adultery while Dimbleby’s weighty biography of the Prince, published in November 1994, painted a picture of a man who had never loved Diana and was forced into marriage by a bullying father. Not only did this portrait upset and offend the Queen and Prince Philip, but numerous courtiers in the senior household at Buckingham Palace, along with senior government figures, including the Prime Minister, John Major, and Douglas Hurd, now felt more kindly disposed towards the Princess of Wales than they had ever been.

All of that year Diana occupied the moral high ground, not just in public popularity but in the skirmishes surrounding her and Charles’s inevitable divorce. This fully justified the ‘wait and see’ policy advocated by her divorce lawyer, Lord Mishcon, a view which accorded entirely with her sentiments that, as Charles had been in love with another throughout their marriage, then it was up to him to ask for a divorce. ‘She has always operated on the
basis that it is not going to be her that causes the crisis because she feels that it would reflect badly on her,’ noted James Gilbey. ‘She has a pathological fear of being blamed.’ On numerous occasions, in conversations with politicians, editors and others, the Princess stressed, rather disingenuously given her secret cooperation with my book and her own extra-marital affairs, that she had not wanted the original separation. She was at pains to point out that she had no plans or appetite for a divorce, not only for her own sake but for that of the children and the nation at large. Close friends like Lucia Flecha de Lima constantly reinforced her instincts. ‘I told her they could lead separate lives but remain married. It was not like an ordinary marriage – she didn’t have to ask him for money, or press his shirts or cook for him,’ Lucia Flecha de Lima told the
Daily Mail
in November 2003.

For her pains, Diana was widely described as ‘manipulative’, a word she hated. The epithet stuck when she was photographed furtively getting into the car of the
Daily Mail
journalist Richard Kay, whom she regularly briefed so that he could write sympathetic stories. This meeting, in the summer of 1994, at the time when the nuisance phone calls to Oliver Hoare were being splashed all over the newspapers, served to undo all the quiet work she had undertaken behind the scenes.

While the Princess prided herself on being media savvy, she never really understood that she could never be the puppeteer when the mass media considered that they were the ones who pulled her strings. ‘Was she Machiavellian?’ asked Stephen Twigg, who went on to answer his own question. ‘No. She wasn’t that skilful at media manipulation. She was regularly desperately unhappy about how she was portrayed in the press. I remember when she came in to see me in floods of tears and complained: “Why can’t they understand that all I want to do is love everybody.” Now that seems a crass statement, but in terms of who and what she was, that’s all she really wanted to do.’

Far from the sophisticated schemer of popular mythology, Diana frequently revealed herself to be rather unworldly and innocent in her dealings with the rest of humanity. Somewhat naively she believed, for instance, that she could have had a role as a
peacemaker in Northern Ireland, as a frequent visitor of the victims of the sectarian bombing campaign over the years. As her friend Vivienne Parry, who helped her regularly with her charity work, remarked, ‘If she had been a Miss World contestant, I am sure she would have said: “I want world peace, I want to end suffering.”’

During 1994 and 1995 the Princess often left Kensington Palace and went to local haunts of the homeless, handing out money, food and advice; according to her butler, she even made it her business to try and help local prostitutes. She gave one woman, who had two children to bring up, money to buy herself a winter coat. On another occasion she threw her fur coat into a skip hoping that a tramp would find it. She was endlessly intrigued to see how the other half lived. In the autumn of 1995, for example, she spent an evening around the seedy King’s Cross area of London in the company of a plain-clothes detective, watching drugs deals, albeit from a safe distance. ‘I feel close to people, whoever they are. That’s why I upset certain circles,’ she told Annick Cojean in an interview, her last ever, for
Le Monde
in August 1997. ‘It’s because I’m much closer to the people at the bottom than the people at the top and the latter won’t forgive me for it.’

This otherworldly quality, Diana’s profound sense of spiritual mission, often dismissed as an interest in New Age mysticism, became more apparent as she explored the religious spectrum in the months and years following her separation. There was speculation that, like her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, Diana might convert to Roman Catholicism. While she enjoyed the bells and smells of High Church, numbered many Catholics among her closest friends, and had discussed the faith with her friend Rosa Monckton’s priest Father Anthony Sutch, in truth she was eager to explore and discuss all creeds and spiritual ideas – with anyone at any time. So she sat cross-legged on the floor with Jimmy Choo, a shoe designer, and discussed his belief in Buddhism; spoke about God and the Devil with her local Kensington parish priest, Father Frank Gelli, over a cup of tea; and about the works of the New Age thinker, Deepak Chopra, whose writings she admired, when she visited another of her friends, the actor Terence Stamp, for a homemade macrobiotic lunch.

‘She was very much into Eastern philosophy,’ recalls the Californian lawyer Richard Greene, who gave the Princess voice coaching during the mid 1990s. ‘She believed in reincarnation and felt that this was her last lifetime, that whatever mission she had, she was going to take care of it during this lifetime. She was on a spiritual mission.’

The Princess, who believed that in a previous lifetime she had been a nun, was thrilled to discover that she shared her spiritual journey with a Spencer ancestor. In the mid-1990s her friend and acupuncturist Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo gave her a pamphlet about her great-great-great-uncle, Father Ignatius Spencer, who is currently being considered for canonization because of his work during the Victorian era to try to unify the Catholic and Protestant churches, not to mention his selfless hard work among the poor and needy. He was ahead of his time. Cast out from his own family for converting to Rome and ridiculed by high society, Father Ignatius was viewed as either a prophetic rebel or a naive misfit as he tried vainly to create a movement for universal Christian unity. His treatment by his family and society together with his work for the sick and the poor, as well as his attempts to cut across religious boundaries, struck a deep chord with the Princess. ‘She felt sympathy for him,’ said Oonagh. ‘She felt a sense of destiny that she was part of a similar line of people. It was the deep soul quality she admired. In his journey she saw something of herself.’

It was a journey Diana had begun as a young girl, feeling that she was different from others. She always felt ‘very detached’, once telling her father that she believed that one day she would have an ambassadorial role. At that time she thought she would be the wife of a diplomat. It would take her many years, though, before she began to realize and release her spiritual promise, restricted as she was by life inside the royal system. It was clear early on in her royal career that, while she conformed impeccably at formal events, she found them constraining and frustrating. ‘From the first day I joined that family, nothing could be done naturally any more,’ she told
Le Monde
in August 1997. Gradually, she began to shed the flummery and protocol, adopting a more hands-on approach, often
literally. A decade earlier, when she shook the hands of an AIDS patient at Middlesex Hospital, Diana began to understand her potency as an international icon. More personally, it proved to her that this path of compassion and caring reflected her inner spirit, a feeling reinforced when she helped nurse her friend Adrian Ward-Jackson, who died of AIDS in 1991. ‘I reached a depth inside which I never imagined possible,’ she wrote to Angela Serota afterwards. ‘My outlook on life has changed its course and become more positive and balanced.’

This gave the Princess the strength to undertake her work for the sick and needy outside her circle; consoling strangers during secret visits to hospices, holding and comforting the dying, gave her a sense of fulfilment. It was an exchange. In her world of doubt, deception and suspicion, where she trusted no one, she found complete integrity and honesty from those about to die. It was sustaining and nourishing. Diana herself said to James Colthurst, ‘I love going round places like Stoke Mandeville Hospital. I’m not so gripped by those getting better. It’s the ones on the way out that I feel a deep need to be with.’ Little wonder that she completely agreed with a friend’s comment that, in other circumstances, she could have been a nurse. ‘I can’t wait to get into it, it’s like a hunger,’ she told her astrologer Felix Lyle in 1991. ‘I’ve opened up – this is an extraordinary path of transformation. This is only the beginning.’