Dedication

To Jane

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

1 Death of a Princess

2 A Nation Mourns

3 The Young Prince

4 The Discovery of Diana

5 The Fairytale Fiancée

6 The Honeymoon Period

7 A State of Mind

8 The Offices of a Prince

9 Marriage and the Media: After Morton

10 The Beginning of the End

11 Camillagate

12 Difficulties at Work

13 Organic Highgrove

14 The Prince’s People

15 ‘Mrs PB’

16 Visions of the Monarchy

17 Charles and Camilla

18 Victim or Villain?

Epilogue

Index

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Opinion polls suggest that the reputation of the Prince of Wales is beginning to recover after the emotional turmoil of Diana’s death in August 1997. It had not been good before she died, largely because of his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, but in the days that followed the fatal crash it plumbed new depths, as the nation’s anger at the loss of the Princess it loved so dearly turned on the monarchy and, more particularly, the heir to the throne. When Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, gave his address at her funeral, and said that he would rescue her sons from the clutches of the Royal Family, the nation cheered – literally – as his voice was relayed to those inside and outside Westminster Abbey.

The Prince’s new-found popularity is no doubt gratifying, and has much to do with the way he has been seen to care for his children in the wake of their mother’s death. A significant percentage of the population would even sanction his marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles. However, a popular misconception undermines this growing acceptance: the belief that the Prince always loved Camilla and made no attempt during his years of marriage to Diana to shut his mistress out of his life.

Few would deny that it takes two to make a marriage, and two to break it. Yet millions of people the world over have been led to believe that the Prince of Wales destroyed his marriage, alone and unaided, because of his obsession with Mrs Parker Bowles. In 1992, Andrew Morton told Diana’s story – one side of the story – in a book that brought about the end of the ‘fairytale’ marriage. Diana – Her True Story, which was reissued after Diana’s death and renamed In Her Own Words, gave a picture of Charles and Diana’s life together and the part his mistress had to play in it, which is not quite what those who knew both Charles and Diana best remember.

So far, no one has attempted to tell the complete story. While Diana was alive the Prince would never allow it because he didn’t want to hurt either her or their children. In all their years together and apart, and despite intense provocation, he never spoke ill of her in any way. Now that she is dead Charles is even more determined that he will not defend himself and that history alone shall be his judge. If that means waiting until he is long dead, so be it. He has no qualms about meeting his maker. The evidence to support what really happened – letters, diaries, tapes, medical records, which explain the true nature of the relationship – is under lock and key at the Royal Family Archive at Windsor. One day in the future, when they are released, the whole truth will be told.

In the meantime, a number of his family and friends feel he has suffered enough and believe there should be some attempt to correct at least some of the misconceptions.

Diana said some terrible things about Charles, which she later regretted quite bitterly. Not, however, before millions of people were led to believe that she was taken ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’ into a loveless union, in order to produce an heir for a man who had no intention of honouring his marriage vows. On the strength of Diana’s words, there are many who believe that he carried on an affair with his mistress throughout his marriage, even sleeping with her the night before his wedding and resuming their affair immediately after the honeymoon. They believe Charles was a cold and insensitive husband and a cold and insensitive father, who only now, after Diana’s death, is beginning to show a little affection for his children. Some people even blame Charles for Diana’s death. And, because Diana said so on prime time television, in an interview for ‘Panorama’ in 1995, many believe he is not fit to be king.

It is hard to imagine Prince Charles’s emotions as he walked behind Diana’s cortège that September morning, their sons by his side, bravely fighting back their tears. Never had there been such public outpourings of love and grief for someone so few had ever met. The world had loved her, admired her, worshipped her. He had rejected her, divorced her. Why?

Charles: Victim or Villain? tries to explain what really happened in that marriage; to give a more objective view than Diana’s, and reveal more clearly than ever before the part Camilla Parker Bowles played in it. Not for the sake of the Prince of Wales – who, like Diana, is not entirely blameless – but for the sake of the millions of people who have lived through this royal soap opera and have never had an alternative account of what happened on which to form a judgement for themselves. At the moment there is only Diana’s account, which is flawed and inevitably partial, as even her friends will admit in private.

It is an attempt to describe why Charles married Diana, what life was like for them both, and what went so badly wrong that she felt compelled to tell the world and take very public revenge on her husband. What possessed Charles to confess his infidelity on camera – as he did to Jonathan Dimbleby in a two-and-a-half-hour documentary about his life in June 1994 – and how did he feel when he faced the public after the embarrassment of the Camillagate tapes that exposed his late-night ramblings on the telephone to his mistress?

The two young princes, William and Harry, have lived through it all – the embarrassment, the affairs, the divorce and, finally, the traumatic death of their mother. How are they faring as a family today? What do they think of Mrs Parker Bowles? What is the future likely to hold for them all?

This is a portrait of the Prince of Wales at fifty. A very private man, with a public role, in an intrusive media world. A single parent and future king, a man emotionally handcuffed by his upbringing and damaged by the failure of his marriage. He is a man who inspires great love and loyalty, but a man of contradictions. He can be the greatest company or the most sombre; the kindest, most considerate of human beings or the most selfish. He has warmth and charisma, and a wicked sense of fun but, when he doesn’t get what he wants, a fearsome temper that in fifty years he has never learnt to control. He is a man who cares about the disadvantaged, and the sick and dying, no less than the planet we pass on to future generations and the English we teach our children. A man who is cocooned from the real world, who has butlers and valets, helicopters and fast cars, yet who has seen more deprivation and who understands despair better than most politicians. A man whose life has been given over to duty to the institution he was born into, and who longs to modernise it, but who is thwarted by the very people his wife called ‘the enemy’ – the courtiers who rule royal life – and who must wait for the death of the mother he loves before he can begin his task. He is a man who cares above all else – even above his own happiness – for the future wellbeing of his sons. While they are children he can protect them, but he knows that as they come of age he will be powerless to stop the intrusion, the criticism and pressure that very nearly destroyed him.

ONE

Death of a Princess

‘They tell me there’s been an accident. What’s going on?’ Charles in the early hours of 31 August 1997

The first call alerting the Royal Family to Diana’s accident came through to Sir Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s deputy private secretary, at one o’clock on the morning of Sunday 31 August. He was asleep in his house on the Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire. It was from the British ambassador in Paris, who had only sketchy news. There had been a car crash. Dodi Fayed, it seemed, had been killed, although there was no confirmation yet. The Princess of Wales, who had been travelling with him, was injured but no one knew how badly. Their car had smashed into the support pillars of a tunnel under the Seine. It had been travelling at high speed while trying to escape a group of paparazzi in hot pursuit on motorbikes.

Janvrin immediately telephoned the Queen and the Prince of Wales in their rooms at the castle. He then telephoned the Prince’s assistant private secretary, Nick Archer, who was staying in another house on the estate; also the Queen’s equerry and protection officers. They all agreed to meet in the offices at the castle, where they set up an operations room and manned the phones throughout the night.

Meanwhile, in London, the Prince’s team were being woken and told the news, ironically, by the tabloid press. The first call to Mark Bolland, the Prince’s deputy private secretary, came at 1 a.m. from the News of the World. Having gone to bed at his flat in the City after a very good dinner party, he let the answering machine take the call, and when he heard something about an accident in Paris dismissed it as the usual Saturday night fantasy. It was not until he heard the voice of Stuart Higgins, then editor of the Sun, a paper not published on a Sunday, speaking into the machine ten minutes later, that he realised something very odd was going on and picked up the phone. Higgins had much the same news as the Embassy. The reports were conflicting but it sounded as though Dodi had been killed and Diana injured.

The Prince’s press secretary, Sandy Henney, had also just gone to bed at her home in Surrey, having seen the last guest out after a fortieth birthday party for her sister-in-law. She too was woken by a journalist with a very similar story. The media, getting news directly from the emergency services, were in many ways better informed than the Embassy that night and provided a real service to the Prince’s staff.

Mark Bolland immediately rang Stephen Lamport, the Prince’s private secretary, at his home in west London, then Sandy Henney, and within minutes the phone lines across the capital and between London and Scotland were buzzing.

The Prince telephoned Bolland in London. ‘Robin tells me there’s been an accident. What’s going on?’

He wanted details. Shocked and unable to believe what he was hearing, he asked the same questions over and over again: What had caused the accident? What had Diana been doing in that situation? Who was driving? Where had it happened? Why had it happened? Questions to which, for the time being, there were no answers. They spoke for almost an hour.

There was no more concrete news. Reports one minute said Diana was seriously hurt, and the next suggested she had walked away with superficial injuries.

The Queen was also awake in her suite of rooms next door to her son’s on the first floor of the castle. Her private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, was on holiday in Norfolk, but like the Prince’s staff her own people were in constant touch with one another. The Prince’s private secretary on duty in Scotland was Nick Archer, but it was Stephen Lamport and Mark Bolland in London who were calling the shots.

Bolland telephoned Robin Janvrin to tell him that the Prince would be flying to Paris later that day to visit Diana in hospital, and needed a plane. ‘He’s going,’ he said. ‘This is not a matter for discussion. He is going to see his ex-wife.’

His request did not go down well initially. Was it the right thing to do? wondered Janvrin. An aeroplane of the Queen’s Flight couldn’t be ordered without the Queen’s specific agreement, and that was unlikely to be forthcoming.

‘Okay, fine,’ said Bolland. ‘We’ll take a scheduled flight from Aberdeen.’ The Queen would be irritated, no doubt, that yet again Diana was disrupting everyone’s lives. She had lost patience with Diana long ago, and as the week wore on she was confirmed in her belief that everything to do with her former daughter-in-law was always extraordinarily complicated.

Unbelievably, although the Queen and Prince Charles were just feet away from one another in their separate rooms, divided by paper-thin walls, it was their staff who were discussing the rights and wrongs of asking the Queen’s permission for Charles to use her aeroplane. Never was the true nature of this mother–son relationship more starkly demonstrated. Closely knit though the family appears, there is very little real communication between them. The Prince loves his parents dearly but they don’t talk. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had not known quite how serious the problems with their son’s marriage had been until 1987, when two friends wrote to the Queen, having decided independently and simultaneously that she ought to know what was going on. Their letters landed on her desk on the same day. They had witnessed some odd incidents, like Diana falling down the stairs at Sandringham, and Diana had told them on one occasion that her life with the Prince was impossible because of Mrs Parker Bowles, but they had not discussed the problems with their son.

That Sunday, Charles, William and Harry had all been planning to fly to London. The boys’ summer holiday was almost over and they were due to meet up with their mother, who was flying back from Paris. Diana always had the children for the last few days before they went back to school at the start of a new term, so that she could get everything ready and make sure they had the right kit. The Prince would spend a few days at Highgrove, his home in Gloucestershire, before heading for Provence, in the South of France, his habitual haunt in early September.

The Prince was in no doubt that he wanted to go and see Diana in Paris that morning, but uncertain whether he should take the children. He was worried that her injuries would be too upsetting for them. Clearly no decision could be made until they knew how bad her injuries were. And as the hours crept painfully past, he talked about the Princess, whom he still loved and prayed for every night, despite the failure of their marriage, despite the hurt that had existed between them.

‘I always thought it would end like this,’ he said, ‘with me having to nurse Diana through some terrible injury or illness. I always thought she’d come back to me and I would spend the rest of my time looking after her.’

The walls in Balmoral are so thin that there is no keeping of secrets. One regular visitor says that if you want to have a private conversation you have to put the plug in the wash basin and talk quietly, or it will be all round the castle. Inevitably, with this kind of drama going on, most of the family were by now awake and watching the television or listening to the radio, which was already given over to news of the accident. The Duke of York was staying in the castle at the time, also Princess Anne’s son Peter Phillips, then aged nineteen, two friends of the Queen and Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister. William and Harry were asleep and it became a priority to get their radios out of their bedrooms and the television out of the nursery, to prevent them waking up and switching one of them on.

At about 3.30 a.m., Mark Bolland rang Robin Janvrin again to find out how he was doing with the plane, and whether he had woken up the people at RAF Northolt, in Greater London, where it was based. In the middle of the conversation, at 3.45, they were interrupted by a telephone call that came through from the Embassy in Paris for Janvrin, and he put Bolland on to Nick Archer while he took the call.

‘We can’t muck about with his plane,’ Bolland was saying. ‘Make sure Robin is quite clear what is going to happen …’

‘Oh, Mark, I think we’re going to have a change of plan.’

In the background Archer could hear Robin Janvrin breaking the news to the Prince of Wales on the telephone. ‘Sir, I’m very sorry to have to tell you, I’ve just had the Ambassador on the phone. The Princess died a short time ago.’

The announcement that went out at 4.30 a.m. said she had died at four o’clock. It had actually been earlier.

The Prince immediately rang Mark. ‘Robin has just told me she’s dead, Mark, is this true? What happened? What on earth was she doing there? How could this have happened? They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they? What do I do? What does this mean?’

Mark’s first reaction was to ring Camilla Parker Bowles to tell her that Diana had died, and warn her that she could expect a call at any moment from the Prince, in a state of serious distress. He had rung a number of close friends that night, and Camilla and the Prince had already spoken several times. She was shocked to the core by the news that Diana was dead, and utterly devastated for the boys; also terrified for the Prince, of what would happen to him, what people’s reaction would be.

Diana’s death came as a terrible shock to everyone. All the news had indicated that she had survived the crash, and with some reports having suggested she had walked away from the car, people were totally unprepared. The truth was that she had sustained terrible chest and head injuries. She had lost consciousness very soon after the impact, and never regained it. She had been treated in the wreckage of the Mercedes at the scene for about an hour and was then taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital four miles away, where surgeons had fought for a further two hours to save her life, but in vain. The reaction was total horror and disbelief.

The Prince’s first thought was for the children. Should he wake them and tell them or let them sleep and tell them in the morning? He was absolutely dreading it, and didn’t know what to do for the best. The Queen felt strongly that they should be left to sleep and he took her advice and didn’t wake them up until 7.15. William had had a difficult night’s sleep and had woken many times. He had known, he said, that something awful was going to happen.

The Prince, like Camilla, realised only too well what the public reaction might be, and what the media would say. ‘They’re all going to blame me,’ he said. ‘The world’s going to go completely mad, isn’t it? We’re going to see a reaction that we’ve never seen before. And it could destroy everything. It could destroy the monarchy.’

‘Yes, sir, I think it could,’ said Lamport with brutal honesty. ‘It’s going to be very difficult for your mother, sir. She’s going to have to do things she may not want to do, or feel comfortable doing, but if she doesn’t do them, then that’s the end of it.’

The Queen’s first difficulty was upon her before dawn had broken. The Prince decided he should be the one to go to Paris to collect Diana’s body, but the Queen was against the idea and was strongly supported by her private secretary. The Princess was no longer a member of the Royal Family, argued Sir Robert Fellowes; it would be wrong to make too much fuss.

Robin Janvrin came up with the remark that clinched it. ‘What would you rather, Ma’am,’ he said; ‘that she came back in a Harrods’ van?’ There was no further argument.

Diana’s love affair with Dodi Fayed had been a source of deep concern to everyone at court, not least the Prince of Wales. Not because he resented her happiness – it was his deepest wish that Diana would find happiness – but because he feared it would end in disaster. He feared that Diana was in danger of being used by the al Fayed publicity machine. Dodi’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, the high-profile Egyptian owner of Harrods, was a controversial figure. Long denied British citizenship, he had tried relentlessly to ingratiate himself with the establishment. He had done some inspired matchmaking that summer between his playboy son and the Princess of Wales in the South of France, and had milked it for all it was worth. He had scarcely been out of the news for a month: he had been photographed with William and Harry, the Queen’s grandsons, who had been his guests on board his yacht, and was hoping for the greatest coup of all, to secure the mother of a future king of England as a daughter-in-law.

Dodi was a serious member of the international jet set, a kind and gentle man, but with more money than intellect, and a string of conquests to his name amongst the world’s most beautiful women. While he was busy wooing Diana, another woman thought she was engaged to marry him. He dabbled in the film business, but was essentially financed by his rich father, who denied him nothing. Dodi and Diana did appear to be in love, and may well have gone on to marry had things turned out differently. She would have been the biggest catch in the world for him. He would have provided the wealth she needed, even after her divorce settlement, to finance her enormously expensive lifestyle, and it would have been the ultimate two-fingered gesture to the Royal Family she so despised.

The boys had not enjoyed their holiday on board al Fayed’s yacht. They had not taken to Dodi or his father and had hated the publicity – as a result William had had a terrible row with his mother – and the whole trip had been extremely uncomfortable. And to add insult to injury, at the end of their stay, their two royal protection officers were taken aside by a Fayed aide, and handed a brown envelope each, stuffed with notes. ‘Mr al Fayed would like to thank you for all you have done,’ he said. In a panic, they immediately telephoned Colin Trimming, the Prince’s detective and head of the royal protection squad, and told him what had happened. ‘You’ve got to give it back,’ he said.

‘We’ve tried,’ they said, ‘but we were told that Mr al Fayed would be very upset if we didn’t accept it.’ The money went back.

The mention of Harrods to the Queen was enough to trigger Operation Overlord – the plan, which had been in existence for many years but never previously needed, to return the body of a member of the Royal Family to London. There is a BAe146 plane ear-marked for the purpose, which can be airborne at short notice from RAF Northolt. It had always been thought the Queen Mother might be its first passenger, which given she was then ninety-seven years old was not unreasonable. No one in their wildest dreams could have guessed it would be used for Diana, still so young and beautiful, super-fit and brimming with health and vitality.

The plane left Northolt at 10 a.m. that Sunday morning, bound for Aberdeen, with Stephen Lamport, Mark Bolland and Sandy Henney on board. First stop was RAF Wittering in Rutland, where it collected Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, who lived nearby, and Lady Jane Fellowes. It was Robert Fellowes who had broken the news to Diana’s family, and the Prince had telephoned Sarah to suggest they might like to go with him to collect the body, whereupon Jane had driven up from Norfolk to join her sister. From Wittering they flew to Aberdeen, where they collected the Prince of Wales, and then on to Paris. The Prince had decided this was not a trip for the children and so they stayed at Balmoral with Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who, as the Queen said, ‘by the grace of God’ had just arrived in Scotland ready to take the Princes down to London to meet their mother. She and their cousin Peter Phillips were utterly brilliant with William and Harry that day and for the remainder of the week.

Diana’s sisters spent most of the flight to Paris in tears. The Prince was controlled but clearly very shaken. Stephen Lamport took everyone through what would happen at the other end. There was a possibility, he warned Sarah and Jane, that Mohamed al Fayed might be at the hospital and if he was the Prince would have to speak to him; how did they feel about that? Both sisters were adamant they wanted nothing to do with Mr al Fayed; they didn’t even want to see him.

In the event he wasn’t there. By the time the Prince’s party arrived al Fayed had already taken his son’s body home for prayers in Regent’s Park Mosque, followed by a Muslim burial that night at a cemetery in Woking, Surrey. On arrival at the hospital the Prince was met by President Chirac, who had come in person to express his nation’s great sadness at the death of the Princess.

With protocol observed, the Prince and the two sisters were taken to see Diana’s body. A doctor accompanied them into the small room on the first floor of the hospital, as well as a priest, whom they had specifically asked for. It was a distressing sight for which none of them was adequately prepared. Diana’s body was laid out in a coffin which had been flown to Paris earlier that morning on a Hercules from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. Levertons, the north London family firm of undertakers, were an integral part of Operation Overlord. The Princess had been embalmed and was wearing a dress that her butler, Paul Burrell, had flown out with earlier, but the body that lay so still and cold and empty looked nothing like the Diana they had known. Her head had been badly damaged in the crash and her face was distorted. The Prince told Diana’s sisters how glad he was that he had not taken William and Harry to Paris with him. It would have been much too distressing for them.

They stayed with Diana’s body for seven minutes. Sarah and Jane were sobbing helplessly when they left and were taken to a room for some privacy while they recovered. The Prince was not crying when he came back into the corridor, but it was obvious that he had been, and was visibly very distressed. His eyes were quite red, his face racked with pain. A small crowd was waiting in the corridor, most of them hospital staff, and also a number of men in dark suits. The Prince came out of the door, stopped, closed his eyes and bit his lip. Then after a moment’s pause, while he fought to regain his composure, he set off down the corridor, a private man no longer, to shake hands with the doctors and nurses and thank them for all they had done. As someone watching remarked, ‘He went from human being to Windsor’ – as nearly fifty years of training ensured he would. Duty above all else. When he heard that the parents of the Welsh bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, employed by the al Fayeds, who had been the sole survivor in the accident, were at the hospital, he immediately said he must talk to them.

Moments later the coffin, by now closed and draped with the maroon and yellow of the Royal Standard, was carried out of the room. It was suddenly obvious that the men in dark suits were the undertakers, and without a word needing to be said, everyone in the corridor spontaneously formed two lines and silently bowed their heads as the coffin passed between them and down the stairs into a waiting Renault Espace.

There were thousands of people in the streets outside. The whole of Paris seemed to know who was in the Espace and what was going on. To a man, woman and child they were silent. As the motorcade made its way slowly through the city and out on to the périphérique towards the airport, the people on the pavements bowed their heads in silence, people in street cafés stood up as the cars passed, each one flanked by two large motorbikes on either side, and no one made a sound. The Prince was deeply moved, and in the silence that enveloped the aircraft on the flight home, with everyone wrapped up in their own thoughts and emotions, he said, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful that everybody stood up.’

But if the tribute paid to Diana by the Parisians had been moving, the arrangements that had been made unbeknownst to him for the next stage of her journey enraged him. While Sarah and Jane disappeared into another part of the cabin to have a cigarette, the Prince asked what arrangements had been made after they touched down at Northolt. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, would be there, he knew, also the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Airlie, who is the most senior member of the Queen’s household. He wanted to know how many RAF people would be there to carry the coffin, whether the flowers he had said he wanted had been sorted out, whether there would be a proper hearse to carry the coffin, and where they were planning to take Diana’s body. The answer to that final question was the mortuary in Fulham, commonly used by the Royal Coroner.

‘Who decided that? Nobody asked me. Diana is going to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace. Sort it. I don’t care who has made this decision. She is going to the Chapel Royal.’

Sandy Henney spent much of the remainder of the flight on the plane’s telephone ensuring that the Prince’s instructions were carried out to the last detail.

The decision had almost certainly been made by Robert Fellowes, doing what he imagined the Queen would have wanted, without actually asking her, but his second guessing was not far off the mark. There is no doubt that in the course of the days leading up to Diana’s funeral, the hostility that both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had felt towards their erstwhile daughter-in-law came dangerously close to the surface on several occasions. She had caused nothing but trouble and embarrassment over the years, and here she was, in death, still managing to cause mayhem.

The Prince’s relationship with Diana had been turbulent and troubled and they were no longer man and wife, but Diana was still the mother of his children and, in a way, he still loved her. He wanted her treated with the dignity she deserved. After Sandy’s hasty and heated phone calls from the plane, the plan about the mortuary was changed and it was agreed that the Princess of Wales would be taken to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, just yards from the office they shared so disastrously until their divorce. She was also to have outriders. And while he was at it, her sisters Sarah and Jane were to be given a plane to take them wherever they wanted to go, and if they wanted to go with the body into London first, then so be it. So at the Prince’s bidding, the plane which had brought the Prime Minister from his constituency to Northolt to meet the returning party was kept on hold, but in the end was not required. The sisters accompanied the body into London and chose to make their own ways home.

The plane carrying the coffin touched down at Northolt and taxied out of sight of the reception party, where it came to a halt. One of the crew climbed out and opened up the cargo hatch, and the group onboard listened in silence to the bolts holding the coffin in place being loosened beneath them. The plane then taxied on and came to a halt in front of the airport building where Tony Blair, David Airlie and 150 or so photographers and pressmen were waiting quietly on the tarmac. In silence the coffin was unloaded and carried to the waiting hearse. The only sound to be heard was the Royal Standard flapping in the breeze.

Wrapped in thought, his emotions in turmoil, the Prince of Wales climbed back aboard the aircraft, accompanied by Stephen Lamport, to fly back to Balmoral and be with his grieving sons, while the hearse made its way slowly down the A40 into west London.

It was only then that the real enormity of what had happened began to dawn on the Palace staff. The motorway, the bridges and embankments – and when they ran out, the roads and pavements – were full of cars and people who had come to watch and weep as Diana’s coffin passed by. Tributes had started pouring in from all over the world, and flowers were being laid at the gate of every building with which Diana was associated.

This, they realised, was going to be unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

TWO

A Nation Mourns

‘A girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’

Charles Spencer

In the days following Diana’s death, the future of the monarchy hung perilously in the balance. As the mountain of flowers outside her Kensington Palace home grew ever higher, spreading further and further into the park, the people of Britain, stunned, shocked and numb with grief, looked for someone to blame for their awesome sense of loss.

The national reaction to Diana’s death bordered on hysteria. Few of the people who mourned had ever met the Princess, yet her compassion and vulnerability had touched a chord deep in the public psyche. Everyone grieved for the stranger whom they felt they knew, with a depth of feeling never before shown for a public figure. Months later, counsellors were still treating people who had been unable to come to terms with their grief. In a rather studied tribute, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, called her ‘the people’s Princess’, and it was the perfect epithet: the people felt she cared and spoke for them, and in a curious way she probably took greater comfort from her relationship with strangers than with almost anyone else.

‘I feel like everyone else in this country,’ said Tony Blair. ‘I am utterly devastated. We are a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief. It is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and through the world, with joy and with comfort. She was the people’s Princess and that is how she will remain in our hearts and memories for ever.’

Whatever the psychological and sociological explanations for the nation’s reaction to her death might be, there was not only grief, but also anger on the streets of London – anger directed in very large part at the Royal Family. As Charles had instinctively feared would happen, some went so far as to suggest that he was responsible for her death. Had he loved her instead of his mistress, they said, this would never have happened. They would still have been married and she would never have been in a car racing through the streets of Paris with Dodi Fayed. Yet at the same time others were leaving tributes to both of them outside Kensington and all the other palaces, ‘To Diana and Dodi, together for ever’, and paying eulogies to the man who had brought Diana true love and happiness.

There was also anger at the tabloid press, which encouraged the paparazzi by paying such huge sums of money for photographs and stories. In the weeks before her death, the red-top papers, and some of the broadsheets too, had been full of long-lens photographs of Diana and Dodi canoodling on his father’s yacht in the South of France. Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, had not held back when he heard the news at his home in South Africa. ‘I always believed the press would kill her in the end,’ he said. ‘But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case.’ At that time it was thought the paparazzi were entirely responsible for the accident; and he said that the editors and proprietors of every newspaper which had paid money for intrusive pictures of his sister had ‘blood on their hands’. The public, of course, had not been slow to buy these newspapers, all of which argued a vicious circle of supply and demand. But this was not the time to draw too much attention to hypocrisy.

Strangely, no blame was ever levelled at Dodi, or even his father, who had provided the car they were travelling in, and who also employed the driver, Henri Paul. He had not been the regular driver and, it soon transpired, he had been several times over the drink-driving limit that night. The proper driver had been sent off in a decoy car. It was an elaborate attempt to try to foil the paparazzi, who were all waiting outside the Ritz Hotel, where they had had dinner that night, ready to follow them home. Yet Dodi failed to make the driver slow down, and he was doing well over 100 mph when he ploughed into the underpass. Almost overnight, the paparazzi ceased to be seen as the sole cause of the accident. Afraid that the tables might turn and that, as Henri Paul’s employer, he might find himself liable, Mohamed al Fayed shared his own private theory about the crash with the press. It was, he suggested, a conspiracy cooked up by the Queen and the security services to assassinate Diana so that she would not marry Dodi; such a marriage would have given William, second in line to the throne of England, a Muslim and Egyptian step-father. It was a ludicrous notion invented by a man who had spent the months since his son’s death telling lies about Diana’s last words, which medical evidence suggested could never have been uttered. Yet in the spring of 1998 he was given airtime on ITV to explain why he believed the Queen had murdered Diana and Dodi. His words were picked up not only in Britain but in Egypt, and as a result the Queen’s life is now at risk. Her security arrangements have necessarily been stepped up considerably, so much so that a friend whom she was visiting recently said over dinner, ‘Ma’am, I thought things were supposed to be better with the IRA these days.’

‘No,’ the Queen replied. ‘They think there’s a good chance I’m going to be killed by a Muslim.’

The Queen would no doubt have been horrified by a marriage between Diana and Dodi, and William and Harry no less appalled. And they would not have been alone. Millions of people were shocked by the overtly sexual nature of the relationship, which Diana seemed to be flaunting so brazenly to the press. No one was labouring under the illusion that she was still the shy, blushing innocent Princess. Her various well-documented affairs had put an end to that. Apart from the much publicised revelations about James Hewitt, she had been publicly blamed by the wife of rugby player Will Carling for destroying their marriage. In his autobiograpy, published in October 1998, Carling was coy about the relationship, saying, ‘I was attracted to her but I never made a pass at her. To be honest, if I had had a sexual relationship with her I wouldn’t say I had. I don’t think that would be right.’ At the time, however, he boasted quite openly to his friends about the sexual nature of his relationship with Diana.

The press was becoming increasingly critical of Diana’s conduct. She had subjected her boys to Dodi and, worse still, to his father, and she was paying the price.

‘The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William …’ wrote Lynda Lee-Potter in the Daily Mail on 27 August. ‘As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense.’

‘Princess Diana’s press relations are now clearly established,’ wrote Bernard Ingham for the 31 August edition of the Express. ‘Any publicity is good publicity … I’m told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains.’

On the same day, Chris Hutchins wrote in the Sunday Mirror, ‘Just when Diana began to believe that her current romance with likeable playboy Dodi Fayed had wiped out her past liaisons, a new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! I must remember to take it up with Diana next time we find ourselves on adjacent running machines at our west London gym.’

But then, suddenly, the music stopped and, as in the party game, all those who were still moving were caught out. Overnight, Diana found instant beatification; pity those columnists who had committed their thoughts to print on the Saturday afternoon, little knowing that their target would be a saint by the time their words hit the streets on Sunday.

‘She was the butterfly who shone with the light of glamour which illuminated all our lives,’ wrote Ross Benson in the Express; ‘A beacon of light has been extinguished,’ said Lady Thatcher, the former Prime Minister; ‘A comet streaked across the sky of public life and entranced the world,’ wrote Simon Jenkins in The Times; and Paul Johnson in the Daily Mail called her ‘A gem of purest ray serene.’

Her love affair with Dodi was given new status: she had found ‘true love at last’, and the couple may very well have been on the brink of announcing their engagement. It was a week of instant judgements and media saturation, and while one pundit after another filled the airwaves or the column inches on the loss to the nation, the nation itself displayed its distress on the streets of every town and city. People of all ages and from all walks of life wept openly and clasped one another for comfort. They queued, in some places for hours, to sign books of condolence, and in many instances people sat down and wrote in the books for half an hour. In London, they pilgrimaged from one royal palace to another to lay flowers with messages to Diana and Dodi.

Meanwhile the Royal Family sat, stoic and silent, in Scotland, and the nation’s anger grew. It was assumed they didn’t care about the nation’s grief. If they had cared – the received wisdom went – they would have come to London to be with the people. There had been no statement about Diana’s death, so it was assumed they didn’t care about that either. Instead, it was business as usual. That the family had even gone to church on the morning of Diana’s death – just hours after hearing the news – and taken the boys with them, and that there was not so much as a quivering lower lip to be seen, provoked more outrage. What further proof could there be that everything the Princess had said about this cold, heartless family she had married into was absolutely true?

Yet in the privacy of their own home there had been plenty of tears. The Prince of Wales is an emotional man, and does cry, but he was brought up to keep emotion of all sorts to himself: a characteristic which, in a less touchy-feely, emotionally transparent society, was never questioned. Indeed, to keep one’s grief to oneself was a sign of strength. Yet in 1997 it was taken as a sign of insensitivity. It is not a cold heartless family, as close friends know, but it is rare for anyone outside that charmed inner circle to see a display of either emotion or affection.

In a more religious age, taking a grief-stricken family to church would have been seen as the natural thing to do. In the material nineties it was seen as insensitive and unfeeling. In fact, they had gone to church that Sunday before Charles set out for Paris because Prince William had specifically said that he would like to ‘talk to Mummy’. It was a week in which the children were given choices about everything, when their needs came before public relations. Church has always been a central part of the family routine and in the emotional turmoil of that Sunday, the familiarity, routine and permanence of a church service was comforting to them all.

God is very much a part of the Prince’s life and his thinking and philosophy. He doesn’t wear it on his sleeve, but he is a sincere believer that having a spiritual dimension to life, having faith of some sort or another – whether it is in God, Mohammed, Buddha or anyone else – is important to the human soul. He also believes that religious and cultural diversity is a real strength, and fears for Scotland and Wales breaking away from the rest of the UK for much the same reason.

His own choice of religion is Prayer Book Church of England, and he is a regular churchgoer no matter where he is. When he is at Highgrove on a Sunday, he will attend one of five village churches run by Chris Mulholland, vicar of the neighbouring village of Leighterton, who holds services in rotation. He has boycotted Tetbury Church ever since the vicar, John Hawthorne, denounced the Prince in the pages of most national newspapers for his adultery with Mrs Parker Bowles. It did not endear him to the Prince, particularly as Charles had given his support to a number of Tetbury Church fundraising initiatives.

Among the Prince’s great loves are old churches – an enthusiasm he discovered he shared with Matthew Butler, his assistant private secretary, who introduced him to one or two he had never seen before. Fitting an old church or two into the schedule at the end of a day was a great treat for the Prince and when, at the end of his secondment, Matthew returned to his career in business and was awarded an MVO, he chose to receive it in Cardiff Castle, which was unusual for someone used to working in London and who lived in Tetbury. ‘Matthew, what are you doing here?’ asked the Prince as he ceremoniously handed over the medal. He explained that having organised the Prince’s twenty-fifth anniversary tour of Wales it seemed more appropriate than Buckingham Palace. ‘Oh, I suppose so,’ said the Prince, then, suddenly lighting up, ‘Matthew, I saw this wonderful church the other day …’

Of the churches they visited together, there was one in Staunton Harold in Leicestershire which the Prince found particularly poignant. It had been built by Sir Robert Shirley, Baronet, a Royalist, and ancestor of the present Earl Ferrers, during the Protectorate in 1653, after the turbulent reign of Charles I. He died of natural causes while imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1656. There was an inscription over the west door, which the Prince seemed to take to heart:

‘All things sacred were throughout the nation either demolished or profaned.’

With his religious conviction running deep, the Prince firmly believes in life after death. He talks about death being ‘the next great journey in our existence’, and is dismayed that as westerners we have become separated from the cycles of Nature, and what they have to teach us. Speaking at a Macmillan Fund anniversary a few years ago, he said, ‘The seasons of the year provided for our ancestors a lesson which could not be ignored; that life is surely followed by death, but also that death can be seen as a doorway to renewed life. In Christianity the message is seen in the mystery of resurrection, and in the picture of Christ as a seed dying in the ground in order to produce the new life that supplies bread, and sustenance.’

The subject of death has fascinated the Prince for a long time. He has suffered great personal loss on a number of occasions – most notably the death of his cousin Prince William of Gloucester in an air crash in 1972, and the brutal murder of Lord Mountbatten, Nicholas Knatchbull and others by the IRA in 1979. Despite the difference in age, his great-uncle Mountbatten was closer to him than anybody else, and the news that he had been suddenly and mercilessly blown to bits by a terrorist bomb while out fishing with his family in Ireland had been completely devastating. Charles was also with his friend Major Hugh Lindsay when he was killed in a horrifying skiing accident in Switzerland in 1988. He has watched friends die, and the children of friends, and visited hospices and hospitals and talked to strangers about their experiences of death, as Diana herself did so sympathetically.

For Charles, death is a mystery and a painful parting, but not something to fear, and Diana had much the same view. She too believed in life after death and frequently consulted mediums and clairvoyants. She was quite certain that her paternal grandmother, Cynthia, Lady Spencer, who had died in 1972 when Diana was a child, kept guard over her in the spirit world.

Balmoral is the Royal Family’s spiritual home, the place where they instinctively feel relaxed and at ease, where they adopt an informality that is not seen in any of the Queen’s other residences. They had stayed there because it was the most sensible place for the boys to be, and that week William and Harry were the top priority. They love Balmoral like the rest of the Royal Family. They love the freedom, the walking, the fishing, the stalking, riding, go-karting; and in that week when their entire world had been turned upside down, they needed the comfort and familiarity of home. Buckingham Palace is little more than the Royal Family’s institutional headquarters, and to have brought the boys to London would have been to imprison them within four walls. At Balmoral they could be certain of some privacy in which to begin to take in the enormity of what had happened, and to prepare for their mother’s funeral and the most traumatic ordeal of their young lives.

Yet in London, the anger was mounting. People wanted a public display of grief. ‘They’re up in bloody Scotland,’ was the common cry. ‘They should be here. Those children should be down here.’

The whole Royal Family was well aware of the negative atmosphere building up in the south. They could see for themselves what was going on in the media and there was also a constant stream of news, views and advice coming in from politicians, friends, historians and VIPs from all over the world. But the Prince recognised it was not for him to take the lead. There was nothing he could usefully say which could have helped anyone. He had brought Diana’s body home from Paris; but if he also made a statement about how very saddened he was by her death, the public would have called him a hypocrite.

The Daily Mail headline on Tuesday morning – ‘Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt’ – only exacerbated the problem. It was an obscene headline over a picture of Charles taken some months before which the newspaper swiftly recognised had been a mis-judgement. The Royal Family was appalled, and from that morning onwards stopped putting the newspapers out on display for everyone to read at Balmoral, as they previously had. It seemed that the Prince’s only option was to keep a low profile and look after his sons, but by the middle of the week, when his mother’s advisers still saw no need to put on a public display of emotion, he became more forceful.

Meanwhile arrangements were underway for the funeral, and once again, there was fierce disagreement between the Prince’s office at St James’s Palace and the Queen’s at Buckingham Palace. Robert Fellowes was in an unenviable position. He was torn between duty to his wife, whom he adored, and his employer. Jane was very deeply distressed by the death of her sister and, like the rest of the Spencer family, had very definite ideas about how Diana’s funeral should be handled. While wanting to respect her wishes, Fellowes also had to think of what was the best course of action for the monarchy. The Spencer family wanted a very small, private funeral, and the Queen, inclined to agree to a minimum of fuss, strongly supported this wish to keep it small and for family only. The Prince, however, felt very strongly that Diana should have nothing less than a full royal funeral at Westminster Abbey, and had told Sarah and Jane on the plane coming back from Paris that he thought it would be impossible to do anything else. Although reluctant at first, once they saw the public reaction they began to realise that this was no family affair; they couldn’t keep it to themselves. There were bitter exchanges between the two camps. Even once a state funeral had been agreed upon, Earl Spencer and Sir Robert Fellowes thought that it should only be Spencers who walked behind the cortège. The Prince disagreed, and the question was not to be resolved until the last minute.

There were yet more rows over who should sit on the Funeral Committee, set up on the day of Diana’s death, chaired by Lord Airlie, the Lord Chamberlain, which met throughout the week in the Chinese Room at Buckingham Palace. The Prince of Wales wanted Downing Street represented on the committee, as did Tony Blair. The Queen didn’t, and it was left to Robin Janvrin to persuade Robert Fellowes that they needed help from Number 10.

As the week progressed, the absence of a flag flying at half mast at Buckingham Palace became another issue, upon which much of the public’s anger and emotion was focused. Outside the Palace, the piles of flowers grew ever more mountainous; flags were flying at half mast all over the country, and yet none of the Queen’s men could reach a decision about Palace protocol. The Royal Standard never flies at half mast over Buckingham Palace because the sovereign is never dead. The minute one dies, he or she is immediately succeeded by another: ‘The King is dead, long live the King.’

This was one occasion, however, where it was clear that the people of Britain didn’t give a damn about protocol. They wanted to see some feeling, some indication that the Royal Family was affected by the death of the Princess, and there appeared to be no such feeling. None of them had spoken publicly, none of them had been seen, and the most elementary of gestures, the lowering of a flag, had not been observed. To the press and to the nation this embodied everything that was irrelevant and out of touch about the monarchy in the nineties, and stood in stark contrast to the warmth and compassion of the Princess, which the public had so admired. It caused a furious row internally and, in the heat of the moment, it was suggested that Sir Robert Fellowes might ‘impale himself on his own flag staff’.

Finally Stephen Lamport spoke to Prince Charles. ‘You’ve got to talk to your mother. You’ve got to make her understand. You’re the only person who can do it.’

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were entirely taken aback by the reaction to Diana’s death, and were not pleased at being told how to behave in order to appease public opinion. The Queen was so often castigated for being a remote mother who always put the country before her children. Now, on the one occasion on which she was putting her grieving grandchildren first, she was being castigated for not being in London when her country needed her. After discussing the matter with David Airlie, the Queen was persuaded that a public sign of grief was required and agreed on the Thursday that a Union Flag would fly at half mast from Buckingham Palace.

That same day the family ventured out of the gates of Balmoral for the first time since the morning of Diana’s death, as a means of gently preparing William and Harry for the funeral that was to be held two days later. The Prince of Wales had asked Sandy Henney, his press secretary, to come and have a chat with them. She had been in London for most of the week and witnessed what was going on there. She had felt the mood, and was one of the many people who had been feeding information up to Scotland all week, saying, ‘You can’t read about this, you can’t even see it on television. There is real hatred building up here, and the public is incensed by your silence.’

She took the children aside. ‘Mummy’s death has had the most amazing impact on people,’ she said. ‘They really miss her, and when you go down to London you will see something you will never ever see again and it may come as a bit of a shock. We want you to know about it so you will be ready for it.’

Flowers had been piling up outside the gates of Balmoral, although in nothing like the quantity at Buckingham Palace, St James’s or Kensington Palace in London. So the following day, when the children expressed the desire to go to church again, the Prince of Wales took the opportunity to give them a taster of what was awaiting them in the capital, and let them walk amongst the bouquets, reading the messages.

About sixty members of the press were waiting outside the gates of Balmoral that day, yet they uttered not a single word as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Peter Phillips, the Prince of Wales, William and Harry climbed out of their cars to look at the flowers and tributes. The only sound to be heard, apart from the clicking of the camera shutters, were the voices of the royal party. Five days after their mother’s death, the country had its first view of the boys, and it was a touching scene. All three Princes, father and sons, were visibly moved by what they saw and taken aback by the messages attached to most bouquets.

‘Look at this one, Papa,’ said Harry, grabbing hold of his father’s hand and pulling him down. ‘Read this one.’

Captured on film, the gesture sent shock waves around the world. The Prince of Wales did seem to have a heart after all. He actually held his son’s hand, something no one could ever have imagined before. He also seemed to have aged.

Of all the criticism Diana threw at the Prince during their bitter war of words and television, that he was unfeeling and cold was the one that hurt him most. It was demonstrably untrue, as anyone who has seen Charles with his children knows very well. Diana knew it too, and later regretted her words.

The sight of the Prince of Wales and his sons did much to soften the public mood, and when the Queen made a surprising live television broadcast that Friday evening before the funeral, the mood softened further. The fact that it was only the second time during her reign that she had broadcast to the nation other than at Christmas – the first being during the Gulf War – made it an additionally impressive gesture.

‘Since last Sunday’s dreadful news we have seen, throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana’s death.

‘We have all been trying in our different ways to cope. It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger – and concern for all who remain.

‘We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.

‘First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.

‘I admired and respected her – for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys.

‘This week at Balmoral, we have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.

‘No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her, but felt they knew her, will remember her.

‘I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.’

The Queen’s words were delivered in the nick of time.

The decision about who should walk behind the cortège was not made until the very last moment. The Prince of Wales wanted to walk as a mark of respect to the Princess, who despite everything had been his wife for fifteen years, and he wanted his sons to walk too. He felt intuitively that this was something they should do for their mother and that it would aid the grieving process. Earl Spencer, backed by Sir Robert Fellowes, had been against it. He had wanted to walk behind his sister’s cortège on his own. There was a bitter exchange on the telephone between the Prince and the Earl in which Earl Spencer hung up on the Prince of Wales. Over dinner on the Friday night, when the whole Royal Family was together at Buckingham Palace, the Duke of Edinburgh put an end to the argument by saying that he would walk too. The next morning Earl Spencer was told what was going to happen, and the three men and two boys all walked together.

It was a long walk from St James’s Palace, where they joined the cortège, to Westminster Abbey, with every bite of the lip and tremble of the chin exposed to the world’s media and the millions of people lining the route. Some threw flowers, some cried, some wailed. It was an ordeal that called for huge courage from the boys, and they did their mother – and their nation – proud. They walked slowly and steadily, struggling at times to hold back tears, but their composure never wavered, until they were inside the Abbey, when at times the music, the poetry and the oratory were too much for them. But by then the cameras were off them, forbidden to focus on the family. The boys displayed maturity beyond their years, which touched everyone. It was an ordeal for the Prince too, worrying as he was about whether the boys would be all right, but at the same time knowing that so many of the people weeping for Diana blamed him for her death. Fears that he might have been booed by the crowd were unfounded.

There were millions of people in London that Saturday and many millions more watching all over the world. Many of those in the capital had walked the streets for much of the night, or held candle-lit vigils in the park – even Diana’s mother had been walking quietly amongst the mourners. Some had brought sleeping bags and had been soaked through by torrential rain the afternoon before. They did not care. United in their grief, strangers talked to strangers, as they had seventeen years before, when the Royal Wedding united them in joy.

Earlier in the week, around the royal parks and palaces the atmosphere had not been so good humoured, and felt almost intimidating at times, but by the morning of the funeral, the sun shone gloriously and although emotions were still very raw, there were tears but there was laughter too.

The funeral itself was immensely moving, and a masterpiece of organisation – the British doing what they do best: the precision timing, the military professionalism, the ceremonial pageantry, but mixed with a refreshingly human touch so perfect for Diana. Tony Blair gave a rather ham reading of 1 Corinthians 13, and Elton John sang a specially re-written version of ‘Candle in the Wind’ which left not a dry eye. An American film cameraman outside Kensington Palace, watching on a television monitor, said that in the silence before Elton John began to play, a sudden gust of wind, in an otherwise perfectly still morning, whipped through the millions of flowers laid at the gates, rustling the cellophane wrappings. It then disappeared just as suddenly as it had come, at the very moment Elton hit the opening chords. At the same time a small grey cloud hung over Buckingham Palace, leaving this hardened cameraman distinctly unnerved.

The denouement of the service, which no tabloid editor had been allowed to attend, was Earl Spencer’s tribute to his sister. Grievously insulting to the Royal Family sitting just feet away from him, it was applauded by those within the Abbey and cheered loudly by the thousands listening on the sound relay outside.

‘Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world she was the standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.

‘There is a rush to canonise your memory; there is no need to do so. You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint. Indeed to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on the very core of your being, your wonderfully mischievous sense of humour with a laugh that bent you double.

‘Diana explained to me once that it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected.

‘And here we come to another truth about her. For all the status, the glamour, the applause, Diana remained throughout a very insecure person at heart, almost childlike in her desire to do good for others so she could release herself from deep feelings of unworthiness, of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom.

‘She talked endlessly about getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers. I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling.

‘My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that, of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.

‘She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys William and Harry from a similar fate, and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.

‘And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.’

It was a deeply moving tribute, bravely delivered as the Earl struggled against his own tears. But the last sentence was a shocking kick in the teeth to the Prince of Wales; it was thoroughly insensitive of the Earl to have criticised William and Harry’s father and grandparents – indeed, one half of their relatives – in front of them on the day they buried their mother.

What really offended the Prince, however, was being forced to sit and be lectured about parental responsibility by a man who had a disastrous marriage of his own: four young children, a wife who had been ill-treated for years, and a history of adultery – all of which became very public during a bitter divorce some months later. What is more, Spencer had the gall to bring his latest mistress, Josie Borain, to the funeral. She sat beside him in the Abbey and accompanied him – on the royal train with the Prince of Wales – to the Spencer family home in Northamptonshire, Althorp, for Diana’s interment immediately afterwards. Diana was buried on an island in the middle of a lake in the grounds, not in the family crypt as she had requested. It was thought that the small village churchyard would be unable to cope with the number of people that might come to visit her grave.

Charles Spencer and Diana had not been particularly close in recent years. The relationship had been up and down, as it was with most of her family. She was particularly upset that after her divorce her brother told her she could not have a particular cottage she wanted to move into on the Althorp estate. Charles, who had inherited Althorp after their father’s death in 1991, said she couldn’t have the cottage she wanted because it was near the gates of the estate and he was worried about the media interest she would attract. He had offered her others to choose from but Diana had set her heart on this particular cottage and felt badly let down.

Ironically, in burying Diana on the island, the Earl has turned the estate into a Mecca. He has created a museum in memory of his sister in the old stable block at Althorp, where all the hundreds of books of condolence, her dresses and various other bits of memorabilia are housed, and where videos of her, both as a child and a Princess, play constantly throughout the day. Visitors are taken around a small section of the house and then herded out to the lake, and to the shrine to the Princess that has been built on the water’s edge. Some of her words are inscribed on it, and some of his from his funeral tribute.

There is a rumour, however, that Diana is not there. A very select group was invited to attend the burial, and many people believe that her body is actually in the family crypt at the churchyard in the village of Great Brington, alongside the remains of her father, the eighth Earl, and the grandmother she so adored, Cynthia Spencer, who had been her guide, she always felt, in the spirit world.

THREE

The Young Prince

‘I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls …’

Charles

Nothing could have been further from the truth than the Daily Mail’s claim that Charles had wept ‘bitter tears of guilt’ as he walked the lonely moors in the immediate hours after Diana’s death. He wept bitterly for the loss of the girl he had once loved, whose life had been so sad, he wept bitterly for his children, whose grief he knew would be unimaginable. He was terrified about having to break the news to them. But there was no guilt, either about Diana’s death or about his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. He knew that he was not responsible in any way for what had happened in that Parisian tunnel. Although he had failed, he knew that he had done everything in his power to make his marriage to Diana work; and he knew that no headline writer could ever begin to understand the reasons why.

If the Prince of Wales felt at all guilty, it was because of all the emotions he felt about Diana’s death, the principal one was relief. Relief that the pain and the suffering was now over, that his children would no longer be torn in opposite directions, confused and upset by their mother’s bizarre behaviour, and that he would no longer be spied upon – she had always tried to find out what he was doing, who he was seeing, where he was going – but be free to get on with his life. He wept bitterly because of the sheer tragedy of it all. Their life together had begun with such promise and such joy, but had ended in such acrimony and anger. But mostly he wept for William and Harry, whose lives would never be the same again, who would never have the comforting arms of their mother around them and who would carry that loss for the rest of their lives. No one, he knew, would ever be able to take away their pain.

He understood. He knew the numbing, hopeless, gnawing emptiness of grief. He had known it when Lord Mountbatten was murdered. Learning to make sense of living without this mainstay in his life had seemed impossible. How much worse for William and Harry, still so young and vulnerable, to lose their mother.

So he cried for them, and he cried for his failure to help Diana. He had tried desperately, but she had been beyond any help he had been able to provide. And he cried for the failure of his marriage – as he had done many times before. He cried for all the people they had let down, and for all the lost hopes that they both had cherished in the early days, to create a secure, happy and loving home for each other and their children.

He had wanted this, just as much as she had. They had both passionately believed in the importance of family. He wanted Diana to be the person with whom he might share his life and interests, who could be friend, companion and lover. Sadly, neither he nor Diana knew what a happy home was. Neither of them had grown up with a normal loving relationship to observe, on which they might base theirs; and both were crippled by low self-esteem and lack of confidence, and a desperate need to be loved.

By 1980 the pressure on the Prince of Wales to find a wife had been intense. Guessing who it might be had been an international obsession during the seventies, which reached the height of absurdity one summer’s day when the Daily Express announced his imminent engagement to Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg, whom he had never even met. Dubbed Action Man, Charles cut a very dashing figure, particularly on the polo field, and he had had a string of attractive girlfriends, some suitably aristocratic, others glamorous and highly unsuitable starlets. The press followed every romance with fascination, especially the French and German magazines, and it was they who began the long-lens paparazzi style of photography that came to make everyone’s life such a misery.

The Prince had never been short of pretty female company, but he was always handicapped because of his position. No one ever behaved normally in his company, and there was always a danger that he was attractive to women for no better reason than because they wanted to be seen with the Prince of Wales. When this was the case he was never the best person to spot it. He had always been shy and awkward and, with little opportunity to gain experience, he was ignorant about women and how to treat them. He had been to ordinary schools and university, and he had done a spell in the Navy, but most of his life had been spent in a rarefied atmosphere. With a handful of exceptions, men and women alike bowed and curtsied when they met him and called him ‘sir’. Even Diana called him ‘sir’ until they were engaged. It is as much a mark of respect for the title as it is for the individual, but it is enough to keep a very strong barrier between him and the real world.

Charles would take girlfriends to watch him play polo at Smiths Lawn, or he would take them to the opera or the ballet and bring them home to his apartment at Buckingham Palace for supper afterwards. But there was little room for spontaneity, and certainly none for privacy. He couldn’t even be alone with them in his car. Ever since a gunman ambushed Princess Anne as she was being driven down the Mall in 1974, security for all the family has been tight – and on any journey there will be a detective in the car and a backup car behind. The Prince’s staff would make the arrangements and girls were usually brought to wherever he happened to be, which understandably made encounters awkward and forced. And if the formality didn’t kill a burgeoning relationship, then the other hazard of dating the Prince of Wales – being splashed all over the gossip columns – usually did.

Lord Mountbatten had encouraged Charles to take girlfriends to his Hampshire estate – he was a great believer that the Prince should ‘sow his wild oats’ before settling down – and Broadlands afforded greater privacy (as well as the chance for Mountbatten to vet the latest conquest), but it was still an unhappy situation, and one from which most suitable girls ran a mile. Far more relaxing, Charles discovered, was the company of married women. There was no pressure on him, no expectation from them, and best of all the press left him alone. This was how he became so friendly with Camilla Parker Bowles, although she was only one of several he was close to.

He had first got to know Camilla Shand, as she then was, in 1972, when he was in the Navy. She was single at the time, but she had been going out with Andrew Parker Bowles for six years. He was a cavalry officer, nine years older than her, and hugely attractive, but hopelessly faithless. He had swept her off her feet when she was just eighteen – as he swept many girls before and since, including Princess Anne – and she hoped he would marry her, but he took her for granted, and treated her badly, knowing that she would always be there to take him back.

It was while he was stationed in Germany and their relationship was going through an off patch that Camilla and the Prince of Wales had a brief affair in the autumn of 1972. The Prince fell in love with Camilla. She was the most wonderful girl he had ever met. She was pretty and bubbly and laughed easily, and at the same sort of puerile dirty jokes he enjoyed. She loved the Goons and silly voices and put on accents that made him laugh, and she had no pretensions or guile of any sort. She loved horses and hunting, loved watching polo, loved the countryside, and was relaxed and exciting to be with.

He saw a lot of her at the end of that year and fell ever more deeply in love. He even began to think that he might have found someone he could share his life with. To his great joy she seemed to feel the same way about him, but he was only just twenty-four and too reticent to say anything to her – and certainly too reticent to discuss the possibility of any future together. Three weeks before Christmas their time together came to an enforced end. Duty called, and he went off to join the frigate HMS Minerva, as Acting Sub Lieutenant, which was due to set sail for the Caribbean in the New Year, and would keep him away for eight months. Before he left, Camilla came down to have lunch on the ship, once with Lord Mountbatten, with whom she had stayed with Charles at Broadlands, and on another weekend on her own.

By the time Charles came back Camilla had married Andrew Parker Bowles. They had become engaged in March, two months after he set sail, and were married at the Guards Chapel in London in July. This was what she had been waiting seven years for. He was one of the most attractive and desirable men in England and she adored him. When Charles heard of the engagement he was deeply upset. As he wrote to a friend, it seemed particularly cruel that after ‘such a blissful, peaceful and mutually happy relationship’ fate had decreed that it should last no more than six months. ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually.’

Despite the bitter disappointment, he and Camilla remained friends, and during the next seven years, when he was dating other girls with enthusiasm, she was someone he could talk to. When the Parker Bowles’s first child, Tom, was born in 1975, Camilla asked Charles to be his godfather. For many years there was nothing sexual in their relationship, but because they had had such a happy and intimate affair during those six months, there remained a closeness and trust and friendship that was special. He confided in Camilla and spent a lot of time on the telephone to her. They also met at polo, parties and royal gatherings – Andrew Parker Bowles’s mother had been a friend of the Queen and he was distantly related to the Queen Mother. Camilla and her family had also been on the periphery of royalty. Her father, Bruce Shand, was a wealthy wine merchant and businessman, and her mother, Rosalind, a member of the hugely rich Cubitt family – her father was Baron Ashcombe. Camilla’s great-grandmother, Alice Keppel, had been mistress to King Edward VII, who was the Prince’s great-great-grandfather, and Camilla enjoyed the idea of history repeating itself. She and Andrew were frequently invited to stay at Sandringham, Windsor and Balmoral, and Charles went to spend weekends with Camilla and Andrew and the children in Wiltshire. Their daughter Laura was born in 1979.

The friendship only became physical again after Laura’s birth, long after Camilla realised that the philanderer she had pursued for seven years before their marriage had continued in much the same way after marriage. What was so hurtful was that as often as not the women Andrew bedded were friends of hers. As time passed, she spent a lot of time on her own in the country, looking after the children and horses, while Andrew lived in London, where he escorted other women quite openly. Under those circumstances, who was to mind if she had a fling with the Prince of Wales? It was not serious, it couldn’t go anywhere, it was just a bit of fun, and although there were occasional references to Camilla in the satirical magazine Private Eye, and the odd gossip column, it was the Prince’s single starlets that attracted the headlines.

The Duke of Edinburgh disapproved of the playboy image that the Prince was acquiring, and when he passed his thirtieth birthday, and still showed no signs of settling down, told him what he thought. Charles knew it was his duty to provide an heir for the future security and stability of the monarchy, but he wanted to find the right wife and had repeatedly spoken about choosing someone who would know what she was letting herself in for.

‘I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married,’ he once said. ‘[Marriage] is basically a very strong friendship … I think you are lucky if you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense … To me marriage seems to be the biggest and most responsible step to be taken in one’s life.

‘Whatever your place in life, when you marry you are forming a partnership which you hope will last for fifty years. So I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share. A woman not only marries a man; she marries into a way of life – a job. She’s got to have some knowledge of it, some sense of it, otherwise she wouldn’t have a clue about whether she’s going to like it. If I’m deciding on whom I want to live with for fifty years – well, that’s the last decision on which I want my head to be ruled by my heart.’

Despite the girlfriends, the Prince was fundamentally lonely and longed to find someone to share his life with. He wanted to settle down, be domestic, have a garden and dogs and children, and all the things that his friends had. He had spent his life in search of love and reassurance and was dogged by a sense of worthlessness, which his parents had done nothing to help him overcome. They are not demonstrative people, and praise for one another’s achievements is not something that comes naturally in the Royal Family.

Those who have known the family since Charles was a child say that the Queen adores her eldest son, as she adores all her children – there is no doubting the affection – but sadly it is not in her nature to be overtly affectionate. Some remember her sitting him on her knee at afternoon tea when he was small, and playing games with him, but that physical closeness disappeared as he grew older. The Queen inherited the throne when he was three years old on the death of her father, George VI, and her duties as monarch inevitably competed with motherhood, taking her away more than she would have chosen. She made it a rule to be with her children at bath and bedtime, whenever possible, and to be at home during the school holidays, but day to day care was left to much-loved nannies, which was normal in upper-class families of that period. The one time she was away for a sustained period was for the Coronation tour in 1953–54, when she and the Duke of Edinburgh were gone for six months, including Christmas. It was then that Charles saw so much of the Queen Mother and, although the Prince adores his mother, the relationship never developed the real warmth or intimacy that he shares with his grandmother.

Even on the night Diana died, when his mother was on the other side of a thin partition wall, he sat and talked and worried not with her, but with his friends and his advisers. When he thought Diana was injured and was undecided about whether to get on a plane and go to Paris, he didn’t ask his mother’s advice, he asked his private secretary; and in the arranging of the plane, his advisers spoke to her advisers. This is no ordinary mother–son relationship: Charles has been in awe of her all his life and, even at fifty, is still delighted beyond reason when she compliments him on something she has noticed he has done well.

His father is equally loving and proud of his eldest son, but no less sparing in showing it. He was rough with Charles as a child and witnesses say he frequently reduced the boy to tears. Charles was a sensitive, shy and uncertain little boy, in contrast to his sister Anne, who was tough and sure of herself and could do no wrong. The Duke probably thought this kind of treatment would make a man of Charles, but it only served to undermine his confidence still further. Charles was frightened of his father, and desperate for his approval, but try as he might to please him, he seldom could.

There are not many men of fifty, with independent means, who are still trying so hard to please their parents – certainly not men with the kind of physical courage that the Prince of Wales indisputably has. But the family that Charles was born into is not like any other family in Britain and he was conditioned to accept, without question, a way of life that normal people would find quite intolerable. Duty to Queen and country comes before any other consideration. Charles is never entirely alone: a detective is within earshot twenty-four hours a day. He never goes anywhere without someone knowing. He has no privacy, therefore, and is dependent upon the discretion of the men who shadow him.

There is no heart to the family: it is a business, an institution, and participation is not an option, it is duty. There is very little communication between members of the family. When there is, it is often by memo, or via private secretaries. And, except for holidays and ceremonial fixtures, there is very little contact between them. Their lives are run to a formula, from which there is no deviation or spontaneity, and the formality with which the Queen runs her household is from another age.

Apart from the companionship, which he craved, Charles had no need for a wife. His life was ordered: his meals were cooked; his clothes bought, laundered and laid out for him; his every whim catered for; his friends numerous, understanding and sufficiently fawning; his office compliant; his love life exciting; and his sporting activities and holidays strategically organised from one year to the next to fit in around official fixtures, functions and the call of duty. He had houses in the country and convenient apartments at Buckingham Palace; he had horses, dogs and cars, and a fleet of royal helicopters, planes and trains, not to mention the royal yacht at his disposal, plus holiday homes in all the places he most liked to be. He only had to click his fingers and what he wanted arrived or was fixed. The only benefit a wife could bring, which he could get nowhere else, was an heir.

By an accident of birth the Prince of Wales was cursed with a life in which his waking hours are mapped out six months in advance, and there are fixtures in his diary which will be there on the same day every year for the rest of his life. He is surrounded by people who tell him what they think he wants to hear; he is paraded like a performing poodle on high days and holidays, and his every twitch and grunt recorded and analysed by the tabloid press. His right to exist is debated regularly, as though he had some say in the matter, and his character and physique considered fair game for whoever fancies taking a passing punch. This is how it has been since he was three years old, when his mother became Queen.

He is an uneasy mix of old and new, half expecting the deference, service and lifestyle of another era, and half wanting to be a modern man of the people in an egalitarian age. But he is hampered by being kept at one remove from the life modern man leads. Diana had one huge advantage over the Prince: she did understand how the other half lived, because she had grown up in the real world. The Prince, try as he might, has never been given a chance. He has wanted to meet people in their own environment, but he is always cushioned. Try as he might to empathise, he will never know what it is like to queue for hours in a hospital casualty department or have petty bureaucrats be rude to him. He will never be elbowed out of the way in the rush for the first bus to appear in twenty minutes, know the frustrations of a train being cancelled, or have to hang around an overcrowded airport lounge. And if it starts to rain, someone will appear with an umbrella to keep him dry.

When he was forty minutes late for an Order of the Bath ceremony at Westminster Abbey with the Queen not long ago, he was incandescent with rage. The helicopter had been unable to land at Highgrove because of fog, so he was told to drive to RAF Lyneham nearby, only to discover that the fog was just as bad and the helicopter couldn’t land there either. There was no alternative but to drive all the way to London, which made him late. Some unfortunate person had got it wrong, and he hit the roof. When his staff once failed to organise his supper menu on the royal train because they had been working exceptionally hard on a very tricky weekend of engagements that had gone like clockwork, he was furious. The chef said he could do him one of three dishes: some salmon, a salad or steak and kidney pie. He petulantly said he didn’t like any of them. When a member of staff once failed to call him ‘sir’ or ‘Your Royal Highness’ – terrified by the experience of meeting the Prince for the first time – he said, ‘Do you think you could ask that chap to call me something when he meets me?’ Friends will say, ‘He only lets people know who he is when they forget,’ but it evidently depends upon what sort of mood he is in, and during the difficult times in his marriage, his moods were highly unpredictable.

Employees see this side of the Prince more than friends, which perhaps makes it all the more reprehensible.

Yet at other times he is relaxed and will laugh when things go wrong. A trip to the United World College in Trieste some years ago fell during the transition period between two private secretaries. The one who had done the recce – when the precise details are worked out of where HRH will go, who he will speak to, and how long it will all take – was not the one there on the day. Thus with great élan, but no certainty about where they were going, the Prince and accompanying entourage were led off down an alleyway, only to discover it was a dead end which led to the dustbins. Covered in confusion the party did a swift U-turn and with photographers swarming around them beat a hasty retreat. The incoming private secretary, Major-General Sir Christopher Airy, a highly efficient man, was mortified, but the Prince simply laughed.

He was also amused by an encounter with Chris Eubank, the champion boxer, who had been running a fitness workshop at a Prince’s Trust residential course in Brighton. He was standing at the end of a line-up to meet the Prince and was obviously very nervous, so the private secretary went across to try and calm him down. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘the Prince is very easy to talk to, just enjoy it.’

After they had met, he went up to Eubank to see how it had gone. ‘Yes, of course it was okay,’ said Eubank. ‘I wasn’t frightened. If you’ve been in the ring with Nigel Benn you’re not frightened of the Prince of Wales. So it was absolutely fine.’

The private secretary beat a retreat. A little later Eubank called him back. ‘Anyway, I hope I did the right thing. I called him Mr Windsor. I’m Chris Eubank, so I’m Mr Eubank. He’s Charles Windsor, so he must be Mr Windsor. Right?’

‘Yes,’ said the private secretary, fearing for his profile. ‘That’s absolutely fine.’

Charles does have a sense of humour and a great sense of the absurd, but anyone who knows him well knows how important it is to judge his mood before ever presuming familiarity. His children are the exception; they can say and do what they like to him and if he starts to get testy or pompous about it, they simply tease him out of it. They are sensitive enough, though, to know who not to tease him in front of.

One other person who can stop the Prince taking himself too seriously, and get away with it, is Mrs Parker Bowles; but she too picks her moments and would never embarrass the Prince in front of anyone other than his closest friends. They all acknowledge she has a miraculous effect on him, and whenever invitations to dinner at Highgrove are issued, they desperately hope Camilla will be there. If she is, the evening will be relaxed and good fun, with a great deal of gossip, jokes and giggling. Without her, the Prince is likely to be serious and if he’s feeling down – which without her he often is – he can be fairly leaden company.

Thousands of young people whom he has helped during the course of the last twenty-one years rightly regard him as someone very special: without him they might never have had a chance in life. He has helped when no bank manager would have considered their application – even if they had known how to apply for a loan. He believed in their potential and has put time, thought, effort and money into helping through the Prince’s Trust and its various offshoots. The Prince’s Trust was just the beginning. He has spread himself over a wide range of interests and concerns, and he has done a huge amount of good in his fifty years, much of it unrecognised by the majority of the population. He has exploited his privilege and his position to very good ends, and there is no doubt that he is an extremely sensitive man, who cares desperately and sincerely. Yet he remains intrinsically very selfish and very spoilt.

The problem is that Charles has no social equal, and few people have ever been brave enough over the years to say what needed to be said. There have been a few exceptions, and whenever rebuked for behaving in an inconsiderate manner to someone, the Prince has always been deeply ashamed. On one occasion, speaking at a Queen’s Silver Jubilee Trust dinner, the Prince made some rather barbed remarks about a couple of people in the room who were dragging their feet about taking up one of his ideas. At the end of the evening, Michael Colborne told the Prince he thought he had been unnecessarily harsh on the two individuals. Colborne had known the Prince during his time in the Navy and joined his staff in 1974. He felt so strongly that over the following weekend he sat down and put his feelings on paper, and sent the letter to the Prince, who was by then staying on a Duchy farm. A week later Charles was back at Highgrove, and called Colborne into his office.

‘You know that letter you wrote me?’ he said. ‘Do you know what I did with it? I read it and I screwed it up into a ball and I kicked it round the bedroom.’

‘Oh you did, did you, sir?’ said Colborne with a slight smile. ‘Why was that?’

‘Because unfortunately you were right. I wasn’t very nice to those two men that night.’

FOUR

The Discovery of Diana

‘She was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything.’

Friend of Prince Charles

When Charles first met Diana she was a nondescript schoolgirl of sixteen – his girlfriend’s little sister. He was in the midst of a lengthy and enjoyable relationship with Sarah, and they met at Althorp, where he had been invited to a shoot. Diana was nothing more than a slightly plump, noisy teenager, but he made a profound impression on this particular teenager and Diana secretly set her heart on him then and there and determined that she would become Princess of Wales.

Sarah’s romance with Charles came to an end when she spoke candidly to the press about it, saying, ‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love, whether it was the dustman or the King of England. If he asked me I would turn him down.’ But they remained friends, and the Prince invited Sarah and Diana to his thirtieth birthday party at Buckingham Palace a year later, and a few months after that, in January 1979, they were both invited as guests of the Queen to a shooting weekend at Sandringham. That very weekend, their father, Earl Spencer, had come out of hospital following a brain haemorrhage that very nearly killed him.

Later that year Diana was staying with her sister, Jane Fellowes, in her house at Balmoral to help with Jane’s new baby, while the Royal Family was in residence at the castle. But the first time Charles saw her as anything more than a jolly and bouncy young girl whom he enjoyed taking out from time to time as one of a group to make up numbers was in July 1980, when they were both invited to a weekend party with mutual friends in Sussex. He had just had a dramatic and humiliating bust up with his latest passion, Anna Wallace, and he and Diana were sitting side by side on a hay bale while their hosts prepared a barbecue, when the conversation turned to Mountbatten, who had died the previous August. What Diana said touched the Prince deeply – as she knew it would.

‘You looked so sad when you walked up the aisle at Lord Mountbatten’s funeral,’ she said. ‘It was the most tragic thing I’ve ever seen. My heart bled for you when I watched. I thought, “It’s wrong, you’re lonely – you should be with somebody to look after you.”’

It is ironic that her sensitivity about Lord Mountbatten should have triggered Charles’s interest in Diana as a future bride, for Mountbatten would not have approved of the match. In losing his beloved great-uncle, his ‘Honorary Grandfather’, the Prince had lost his mentor; also, for a considerable time, he had lost his way in life. Mountbatten would have applauded Diana’s sweet nature, her youth, her beauty, her nobility and her virginity; but he would have seen that the pair had too little in common to sustain them through fifty years of marriage. He might also have spotted her acute vulnerability and the damage sustained by her painful start in life, and known that the Prince, with his own vulnerability and insecurity, was not the right man to cope with her needs.

Mountbatten’s murder had an unimaginable impact on the Prince’s life; it knocked him entirely off-balance. As he wrote in his journal on the evening he heard the news, ‘Life has to go on, I suppose, but this afternoon I must confess I wanted it to stop. I felt supremely useless and powerless …

‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life; someone who showed enormous affection, who told me unpleasant things I didn’t particularly want to hear, who gave praise where it was due as well as criticism; someone to whom I knew I could confide anything and from whom I would receive the wisest of counsel and advice.’

Mountbatten had criticised the Prince of Wales, most notably for his selfishness, but he also made him feel he was loved and valued, which neither of his parents had ever been able to do. Where his father had cut the ground from under his feet, Mountbatten had built him up, listened to his doubts and his fears, rebuked him when he felt he had behaved badly, encouraged him, cajoled him, provided a sounding board for his wackier ideas, a shoulder to cry on, and given him some much needed confidence. There was no one else in his life at that time who could do this.

From the time when Charles was so touched by their exchange on the hay bale, to the announcement of their engagement, the romance was brief – less than seven months – and their moments alone were rare, but throughout the course of the relationship, Diana was in charge. She knew what she wanted and she went all out to get it. She had cherished her dream of marrying the Prince since their first meeting three years before, and with great cunning ensured her dream came true. She had always said since she was a small child that when she grew up she was going to be someone special. Her siblings called her ‘Duch’ – because she was determined to be a duchess at the very least. When the opportunity arose, she threw herself at the Prince, quite blatantly and brazenly. Yet it was only the more astute of Charles’s friends who realised what was going on. He didn’t appear to notice. Like most men he was easily flattered, particularly by a pretty young woman who professed great interest in everything he said and did, and manifested great sympathy and understanding for the trials and tribulations of his life. He found her quite intoxicating, and she was willing and amenable to do whatever might please him. She slotted neatly into whatever plans he already had, she talked about her love of the country and of shooting and her interest in taking up horse riding, and she liked his friends. And crucially, she made him laugh. She was fun.

But it was all a sham. Diana didn’t like any of these things. She hated the countryside, had no interest in shooting or horses, or dogs, and she didn’t even really like his friends. She found them old, boring and sycophantic. What she enjoyed was the city. She liked shopping in expensive Knightsbridge department stores, and lunching in smart London restaurants. She liked cinema and pop music.

Diana was a victim, who needed love and attention and constant reassurance – needs she carried to an exaggerated degree from her childhood. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had run away from a violent and unhappy marriage when Diana was six years old and the experience of that loss – her feeling of rejection that followed when her mother disappeared – left deep scars in Diana’s psyche.

Frances Shand Kydd has been unfairly maligned for deserting her children, not least by Mohamed al Fayed when they attended an investigative meeting in Paris in June 1998 about the crash that killed both their children. He lashed out at her, saying, ‘She didn’t give a damn about her daughter … If you leave a child when she’s six years old how can you call yourself a good mother?’

Whatever her qualities as a mother, Frances had every expectation when she left home for good just before Christmas in 1967 that it would be a temporary separation. She intended to sue her husband for divorce on the grounds of cruelty, and it was unthinkable for a mother in these circumstances not to be given custody of young children. Her husband, Johnnie Althorp, who later became the eighth Earl Spencer on his father’s death, was a well-respected, genial, if rather dim, member of the aristocracy. He had been an equerry to George VI, then to Queen Elizabeth II.

Abuse ran in the Spencer family marriages and their thirteen years together had not been happy. To compound her misery, Frances had lost a child, a baby boy called John, born after Jane and Sarah, in January 1960, who only lived for ten hours. Diana was born eighteen months later, and then in May 1964 Frances gave birth to another boy, Charles, the son and heir her husband so badly wanted.

Shortly afterwards she met and fell in love with Peter Shand Kydd, a wealthy married businessman. Their affair broke up both marriages, and Frances seized the opportunity to escape. In the autumn of 1967 she and Johnnie had a trial separation, and at Christmas it became permanent and she left the family home. But her plans to sue for cruelty went badly awry. Shand Kydd’s wife, Janet, sued him for divorce on the grounds of his adultery with Frances. With that proven, Frances had no defence when Johnnie also sued for divorce because of their adultery. The cruelty suit was thrown out, and in the custody proceedings that followed, he brought some of the most influential people in the land to speak up for him – including her own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a considerable snob, who was said to have been appalled that her daughter had run off with a man ‘in trade’ – albeit a millionaire.

As a result, custody of Jane, Sarah, Diana and Charles was given to their father, who employed a string of itinerant nannies to take care of them. Frances was only allowed to have them on specified weekends and parts of the school holidays.

Diana said, ‘It was a very unhappy childhood … Always seeing my mother crying … I remember Mummy crying an awful lot and every Saturday when we went up for weekends, every Saturday night, standard procedure, she would start crying. On Saturday we would both see her crying. “What’s the matter, Mummy?” “Oh, I don’t want you to leave tomorrow.”’

One of Diana’s other early memories was hearing her younger brother Charles sobbing in his bed at the other end of the house from her room, crying for their mother. She understood none of what had gone on between her parents. All she could see, like any small child in a similar situation, was that her mother didn’t want her any more. She told Andrew Morton that she began to think she was a nuisance, and then worked out that because she was born after her dead brother, she must have been a huge disappointment to her parents. ‘Both were crazy to have a son and heir and there comes a third daughter. “What a bore, we’re going to have to try again.” I’ve recognised that now. I’ve been aware of it and now I recognise it and that’s fine. I accept it.’

Rightly or wrongly, Diana felt rejected, worthless and unwanted. Those were the feelings she nursed throughout her childhood and teenage years and, three weeks after her twentieth birthday, took with her into marriage. She was still desperately seeking love and reassurance.

Her mother’s departure was not the end of the trauma in Diana’s young life. In June 1975, shortly before her fourteenth birthday, her paternal grandfather died and her father inherited the title and the ancestral home, Althorp. It meant an upheaval from Norfolk, where she had friends and roots, to Northamptonshire, where she knew no one. Worse still, her father, whom the children had had more or less to themselves for the last eight years, had taken up with a formidable woman, Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, daughter of the romantic novelist, Barbara Cartland, mother of four and former member of Westminster City Council, the London County Council and the Greater London Council. To the children’s horror, the couple were married just over a year later, and the woman one of her friends described as ‘not a person but an experience’ took over Althorp and all who lived in it.

Diana’s education was poor. After prep school at Riddlesworth Hall in Norfolk, she followed her sisters to West Heath, another boarding school in Kent, where she passed no O-Levels, despite two attempts, and left in December 1977 at the age of sixteen. She went from there to finishing school in Switzerland but didn’t enjoy it; she came home after six weeks and refused to go back. She did some brief nannying jobs, learnt to drive, did a short cookery course, and briefly worked as a student teacher at Betti Vacani’s children’s dancing school in Knightsbridge. But that too she gave up. One day she simply didn’t arrive for work, and when she was telephoned and asked what the problem was, she said she had hurt her leg. The truth was that whenever the going got tough, Diana quit. After that she did cleaning jobs for her sister and any friends who wanted their flats vacuuming or their laundry done. She had been obsessively clean and tidy ever since she was a small child. At school she had done far more washing than anyone else. It was the one thing she was prepared to stick at.

On 1 July 1979, her eighteenth birthday, Diana came into money which had been left in trust for the Spencer children by her American great-grandmother, Frances Work, and was encouraged by her mother, as her sisters had been before her, to buy a flat with some of the money. The flat she bought was 60 Coleherne Court, said to have cost £50,000, which she shared initially with two friends. By the time she began seeing the Prince of Wales, she had three flatmates, Carolyn Pride, Virginia Pitman and Anne Bolton; and was working three afternoons a week as an assistant at the Young England Kindergarten in Pimlico, run by the sister of a schoolfriend of Jane.

Diana’s problem was that she had had no discipline in her life. Like so many children of divorced parents, she had been indulged. She was an extremely rich, extremely spoilt young woman, who was used to getting her own way. In marrying the Prince of Wales she was taking on one of the most disciplined ways of life in Britain.

The Prince of Wales was quite besotted by Diana at the time he asked her to marry him, and when she came to Balmoral in the late summer of 1980 everyone fell in love with her. She was a fresh, delightful, funny girl, with a podgy face and pudding basin haircut, who told jokes, had no clothes so borrowed everyone else’s, asked daft questions, knew nothing about anything, and made everyone helpless with laughter. Charles couldn’t believe his luck, that this lovely girl, whom all his friends seemed to find so attractive and engaging, said she loved him.

Charles’s excitement at finding Diana, who seemed to be perfect in every way, was quite touching. In public, the mask behind which he hides is impenetrable. In private, he has never been able to hide his emotions, and since he was a small child, if asked, he has always blurted out everything he is thinking and feeling. He has no guile, and over the years most of these thoughts and emotions have been committed to paper in letters and notes to friends and relations. As his feelings for Diana began to run away with him, his older and wiser friends told him that he should slow down and keep his cool, lest he blow it.

In August 1980, several of Charles’s friends were with him on board the royal yacht Britannia for Cowes Week on the Isle of Wight, the oldest yachting regatta in the world and one of the great events of the social season. He invited Diana, and confided to one of his friends that he had met the girl he intended to marry. Oliver Everett, an assistant private secretary, who had accompanied her to the yacht, returned to his colleagues in the office saying, ‘I think this is serious.’ In September the Prince invited her to Balmoral, again with his friends. By then he was confessing that he was not yet in love with her, but felt that because she was so lovable and warm-hearted, he very soon could be. The friends could see no objection. At nineteen she was younger than most of them by many years, but she was friendly and easy company and most of them warmed to her. She was fun and bubbly, and told Charles how completely at home she was in the country. As one of his friends said, ‘We went walking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … She was a sort of wonderful English school-girl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.’

The Prince taught Diana to fish on the River Dee, and it was while she was out alone with him one afternoon that she was spotted by James Whitaker, at that time royal correspondent of the Daily Star, who had been pursuing Charles for many years to secure the scoop of the decade – the girl who would be Queen – and his tenacity can only be marvelled at. It was a matter of hours before Diana’s name, address and pedigree were all over Fleet Street and her flat in Coleherne Court in Chelsea was under siege by seldom fewer than thirty photographers. They followed her every move, telephoned her at all hours of the day and night, pointed long lenses at her bedroom window from the building opposite, and made her life totally intolerable until the engagement was announced five months later and she was able to move into the sanctuary of Buckingham Palace.

Charles was badly smitten, but his decision to ask Diana to marry him in February was not born out of spontaneity or conviction. It was a pitiful combination of poor communication, media manipulation and pressure that he no longer had the strength to resist. Diana was clearly suitable and in every way might have been tailor made. She came from a family that had been connected to the Royal Family for years, she understood the protocol, she was comfortable around them all. She was sexy, pretty and fun to be with. She was interested in all the things he was interested in, and young enough to fit in with his lifestyle without too much difficulty. The newspapers loved Diana, and the country wanted him to marry her.

It was still early days, but because the media had reached fever pitch – not entirely discouraged by Diana, who developed quite a warm relationship with people like James Whitaker during that time – Charles was forced into making a decision that he was not yet ready to make. Everyone wanted him to find a wife. The pressure from inside and outside the family was intense, and there were not many candidates by the 1980s who fitted the job description. Diana seemed as close to perfect as he had known. She appeared to love him very much, so, hoping for the best, the Prince allowed himself to be led by others.

There was one other decisive factor. It was one of the most inexplicable episodes, which has remained a mystery ever since and probably always will. In November, a story appeared in the Sunday Mirror entitled ‘Love in the Sidings’, which claimed that a blonde woman of Diana’s description had driven from London in the middle of the night, and been secreted on to the royal train for a few hours with the Prince while it was parked at a siding in Wiltshire. She had been telephoned and asked for a comment and said the story was quite untrue. Bob Edwards, the editor, was so convinced it was true that he published anyway, and was shocked by the unprecedented reaction from the Queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea. He demanded a retraction, calling the story ‘total fabrication’. Some years later, Edwards had a Christmas card from his friend Woodrow Wyatt which simply said, ‘It must have been Camilla.’ Camilla and the Prince both say the incident never happened – Camilla has never been on board the royal train – and neither they, nor any of the Prince’s staff who were around at the time have ever been able to get to the bottom of where the story could possibly have come from. The royal train is heavily guarded by British Transport police – it is their big moment – and when it stops overnight, there are patrols walking up and down both sides of the train, men on bridges, cars everywhere, plus a large crew on board. It is inconceivable that anyone could have been smuggled on to the train undetected, and if someone had seen a blonde woman smuggled into the Prince’s compartment, whether Camilla or not, the story would have been out long ago.

However, it was pivotal to Charles and Diana’s relationship, and it would not have been beyond the cunning of Diana to have tipped off the Sunday Mirror herself – nor some years later, consumed with jealousy for Camilla, suggested the blonde was Camilla.

The clear implication from the story was that Diana had slept with the Prince, which cast doubt on her virtue. The fact that the Queen should have been so quick to protect her virtue gave Diana a special status. She had not stepped in to protect any of the other women the Prince had been with. It further fuelled speculation that this one would become his bride.

Diana’s mother wrote to The Times appealing for an end to it all. ‘In recent weeks,’ she wrote, ‘many articles have been labelled “exclusive quotes”, when the plain truth is that my daughter has not spoken the words attributed to her. Fanciful speculation, if it is in good taste, is one thing, but this can be embarrassing. Lies are quite another matter, and by their very nature, hurtful and inexcusable … May I ask the editors of Fleet Street, whether, in the execution of their jobs, they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way? The freedom of the press was granted by law, by public demand, for very good reasons. But when these privileges are abused, can the press command any respect, or expect to be shown any respect?’

Sixty MPs tabled a motion in the House of Commons ‘deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is treated by the media’ and ‘calling upon those responsible to have more concern for individual privacy’. Fleet Street editors met senior members of the Press Council to discuss the situation. It was the first time in its twenty-seven-year history that such an extraordinary meeting had been convened, but it did nothing to stop the harassment.

It was against this background that the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to his son saying that he must make up his mind about Diana. In all the media madness, it was not fair to keep the girl dangling on a string. She had been seen without a chaperone at Balmoral and her reputation was in danger of being tarnished. If he was going to marry her, he should get on and do it; if not, he must end it. The Prince of Wales read the letter as an ultimatum from his father to marry Diana.

Others to whom he has shown the letter believe that the Prince misinterpreted what his father wrote, and that to have laid the ultimate blame for his failed marriage on his bullying father is unfair. There was obviously an ambiguity that was never resolved verbally. The two men did not sit down and talk – indeed, they cannot sit down and talk, which is a great sadness to both.

The Prince was faced with an impossible choice. To ask Diana to marry him before he was quite sure she was the right girl, or to risk letting her go when she was so perfect in so many ways and things were looking so promising.

‘It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family – but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’

He allowed himself to be pushed into a marriage that he was uncertain in his own mind was a good idea. He confessed to one friend that he was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’. To another he said, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.’

He knew he wasn’t in love with her, but he liked her very much, and he knew there was a good chance he would grow to love her. Mountbatten had told him to find a young girl and mould her to his way of life. Wasn’t someone like Diana precisely what he meant? More importantly, given the hysteria that Diana had caused in the media, what other girl would ever dare be seen with him, if this was the likely consequence? Convinced that his father was telling him to marry Diana, he decided to go with that decision and hope for the best.

Had Lord Mountbatten been alive Charles would have turned to him for help; and Mountbatten would in all probability have told him not to marry Diana. Yes, he had a duty to marry, but it was imperative for the Prince of Wales above all people, who could not contemplate divorce, to be quite certain he had found the right woman.

In Mountbatten’s absence, Charles consulted his official advisers, friends and family, most of whom were eager to approve. It is the curse of the Prince of Wales to be surrounded by friends and advisers, most of whom tell him what they think he wants to hear. Few have the courage to say what they think he needs to be told for fear that it might put an end to their friendship or employment. The Queen offered no opinion whatsoever. The Queen Mother, a hugely influential figure within the Royal Family to this day, was strongly in favour of the match. Lady Diana was, after all, the granddaughter of her good friend and lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy. And Ruth, Lady Fermoy, who knew that Diana had emotional problems, which would make the match extremely unwise, failed to speak up.

Two of Charles’s close friends, Nicholas Soames and Penny Romsey, advised against marriage. Soames thought that the pair had too little in common, and saw an intellectual gap of giant proportions. Penny Romsey was similarly worried about the intellectual mismatch, but she was also very concerned that Diana was in love with the notion of being Princess of Wales without any real understanding of what it would involve. Penny told the Prince of her worries some weeks before the engagement, and persuaded her husband Norton, the Prince’s cousin, to do the same. Norton’s principal concern, like that of Nicholas Soames, was the intellectual gulf, which he predicted would lead to silent evenings, resentment and friction. All three were deeply suspicious about the way in which Diana had gone after the Prince so single-mindedly. They had seen how she controlled the relationship. She had wanted the Prince of Wales, she had flirted and flattered and been everything that he wanted, and she had got him. Romsey tackled the Prince on more than one occasion, becoming blunter with every attempt. The Prince didn’t want to hear, and he was angrily told to mind his own business.

Although he often seeks solitude, the Prince has a network of close friends upon whom he is very dependent and confides in, as they do in him. He is a tactile man; and he pours out love and affection to them, both male and female, although he has always tended to be closer to women. He speaks to them on the phone, writes long, soul-baring letters, and asks their opinion on every subject that interests or worries him. He confides far more than is probably wise, and is completely open and honest with them. In return they protect his trust absolutely. It is a tightly knit bunch, mostly older than him, and includes the Palmer-Tomkinsons, the van Cutsems, the Keswicks, the Paravicinis, the Wards, the Romseys, the Brabournes, the Devonshires, the Shelburnes and Nicholas Soames. They wield great influence with the Prince and are fiercely jealous of their friendship. Most of them have plenty of money, which is inherited, and not a great deal of sensitivity about how the other half lives. None of them shares the Prince’s enthusiasm for hunting but they indulge in all the other sporting activities of the British upper classes. They shoot grouse in either Yorkshire or Scotland, from 12 August through to December; shoot pheasant and partridge from October to February, and duck from a month earlier. They fish for salmon on any of the great rivers, mostly in Scotland or Iceland. They have large country houses, which the Prince visits, and in return they enjoy invitations to his family homes, to weekend shooting parties at Sandringham, and stalking and fishing holidays at Balmoral.

The Prince of Wales thought he had found the girl of his dreams, the girl whom the country would find acceptable, and who would be able to share his job and his life. He had not reached this judgement alone. He was not a normal man wanting a normal wife to live a normal life. He had waited a long time to find the right person, and he was now thirty-two years old. It was important for the country that he make the right decision, and he wanted to be reassured by his friends and advisers that he was correct in his selection. But though he canvassed opinion about Diana before he asked her to marry him, and he relied upon friends to bolster his resolve, once she had accepted his proposal, the subject was closed. He had made his decision, and was not receptive to advice, warning or criticism. He was determined that the decision to marry Diana was the right one, and when doubts began to creep into his mind during the five months before the wedding, he kept them to himself.

‘I do believe I am very lucky that someone as special as Diana seems to love me so much,’ he wrote to two of his friends. ‘I am already discovering how nice it is to have someone round to share things with … Other people’s happiness and enthusiasm at the whole thing is also a most “encouraging” element and it makes me so proud that so many people have such admiration and affection for Diana.’

The truth was rather different; but when his friends told him they had serious doubts about the suitability of the match, he refused to listen. When he himself began to have serious doubts about Diana, he refused to talk about it. He went ahead knowing that there was a question mark over the future. To have called off the wedding would have been horrendous and humiliating for everyone, and the headlines and public castigation could only be imagined, but with hindsight, it would have been infinitely less painful and less damaging to everyone concerned, particularly the monarchy, if he had had the courage to do it.

There are some close to the Prince who believe he had a duty at least to have discussed it. A relative goes so far as to say that his failure to do so was his big mistake.

‘In his position he bloody well should have spoken to people because he had to think of the constitutional side as well as the private side. He had chosen Diana with both sides in mind, but equally he needed to think of the consequences for both, if it was going to go wrong.’

FIVE

The Fairytale Fiancée

‘Such exciting news …’

Camilla

The Prince of Wales proposed in early February, just after his annual skiing holiday with the Palmer-Tomkinsons in the Swiss resort of Klosters. He had phoned Diana from Switzerland and told her he had something to ask her when he got back the next day. Knowing full well what the question was likely to be, she laughed when he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ But was not slow to reply, ‘Yeah, okay.’

Then she laughed some more. He was thrilled.

‘You do realise that one day you will be Queen,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I love you so much, I love you so much.’

According to Diana, he then coined that most memorable phrase, ‘Whatever love is’, and ran upstairs to telephone his mother with the news.

Diana rushed back home to tell her flatmates, and they screamed and howled and went for a drive around London with their secret. Meanwhile, the Prince rang a few of his closest confidants to let them know how he had got on, one of whom was Camilla Parker Bowles. Not because she was his lover – that had ended when he started to fall for Diana’s charms – but because she was his best friend, as she is today. She had played a key role in helping and advising Charles in his relationship with Diana. She and Andrew had been at Balmoral in September, and he had taken Diana to spend weekends at their house in Wiltshire several times. They had been racing at Ludlow together from there, when Charles was riding his racehorse, Allibar; he had first taken Diana to see Highgrove while staying with the Parker Bowles; and he and Andrew had been hunting together on a couple of occasions, leaving Diana and Camilla together at home. Camilla had known he was planning to propose to Diana that day and, like so many others, was eager to have a progress report.

The Prince had also told Michael Colborne, secretary to the Prince of Wales’s office, about his marriage plans the day after the proposal. He had come into Colborne’s office in Buckingham Palace, sat down in an armchair and told Michael to shut the door.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said. ‘Other than Her Majesty, and Papa and a few others, nobody knows. This is between you and me. I’ve asked Lady Diana to marry me, and she said yes straight away, but I’ve asked her to think about it and she’s going to Australia to stay with the Shand Kydds. We’ve got a very busy period in front of us and we’ve got a tour coming up …’

Michael was thunderstruck. ‘Congratulations, sir,’ he said.

The Prince smiled. ‘Well, we’ll see what happens.’

Michael Colborne knew the Prince better than most, and was to play an important part in Diana’s early years at court. The two men had met aboard HMS Norfolk when the Prince was a sub-lieutenant and Colborne a non-commissioned officer, and he was one of the few people who were not afraid to tell the Prince what he thought. They struck up a good friendship and, when the Prince left the Navy and needed to set up an office in London, he invited Colborne to join it. Officially in charge of his financial affairs, he became the Prince’s right-hand man, and remained with him for ten years, providing many valuable lessons about what life was like beyond the ocean of privilege in which the Prince swam. He was the only member of his staff at the time who was not in the public school, officer training college or Foreign Office mould, and he viewed all those who were with a healthy disdain. The Prince liked his straightforward approach. In offering Colborne the job he had made him promise that he would never change. ‘If you don’t agree with something, you say so,’ he had said, and over the years Michael had spoken his mind. Charles didn’t always like what he heard and became extremely angry on several memorable occasions, but it was an exceptionally warm relationship nonetheless.

That same day, Diana went to Australia for a holiday with her mother and stepfather, Peter Shand Kydd. As Charles put it, ‘to think if it was all going to be too awful’. For three weeks they hid from the press and kept Diana’s whereabouts such a guarded secret that even the Prince of Wales had difficulty getting through to her when he telephoned.

‘I rang up on one occasion,’ he said in a television interview after the engagement had been announced, ‘and I said, “Can I speak?” And they said, “No, we’re not taking any calls.” So I said, “It’s the Prince of Wales speaking.” “How do I know it’s the Prince of Wales?” was the reply. I said, “You don’t. But I am,” in a rage. And eventually … I mean, I got the number because they were staying somewhere else. They said the phones were tapped or something – which I found highly unlikely …’

When Diana arrived back in London the Prince told Michael Colborne that he wanted the biggest, smelliest bunch of flowers possible delivered to Diana’s flat, and gave him a hand-written note to be delivered with the flowers. Knowing that her flat would be under siege, Colborne telephoned ahead to warn Diana that some flowers were on their way and a very sleepy voice answered the phone. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll look out for them.’

Sergeant Ron Lewis was duly dispatched to deliver the flowers and note to Coleherne Court that morning, but Diana’s memory of the incident was sadly different from the facts. Ten years later she said, ‘I came back from Australia, someone knocks on my door – someone from his office with a bunch of flowers and I knew that they hadn’t come from Charles because there was no note. It was just somebody being very tactful in the office.’

Michael didn’t meet Diana until shortly after she returned from Australia, when the Prince asked him to look after her for the afternoon. She had been to watch Charles ride out his racehorse, Allibar, along the gallops at Lamborne early one morning. He was in training for a race at Chepstow the following weekend, and having completed seven furlongs, they were walking quietly home for breakfast, when Allibar had suddenly collapsed with a massive heart attack and died in his arms. The Prince refused to leave the horse until a vet arrived, and was so distraught that he couldn’t drive. It was his detective, unusually, who drove them back to Highgrove.

It was obvious as soon as the car arrived back at the house that something was wrong, and Diana went into the kitchen with Michael to explain what had happened, while the Prince went off to be alone for a moment. But the treadmill of his life pauses for neither courtship nor grief. That afternoon, a helicopter arrived at two o’clock sharp to take him to an engagement in Swansea. Meanwhile Diana and Michael Colborne went into the drawing room for the first of many lengthy heart-to-hearts. Later, as they wandered around the garden together, Diana told him all about herself, her family, her parents’ divorce, her father’s illness and her stepmother. The relationship between them was cemented. He was struck by how young she was – she had puppy fat and quite ruddy cheeks – and how badly educated. He also realised how little discipline she had had in her life, and wondered if she had any idea what she was taking on. Twenty-seven years her senior, he felt like a father to her and became one of her closest friends in the Palace. They shared an office in the run-up to the wedding and he tried hard to help her understand and prepare her for what lay ahead, but knew it was going to be difficult.

‘Is it all right if I call you Michael, like His Royal Highness does?’ she asked, to which he said, ‘Of course.’

‘Will you call me “Diana”?’

‘No,’ said Colborne. ‘Certainly not. I appreciate what you’ve just said, but if it all works out you’re going to be the Princess of Wales and I’ll have to call you Ma’am then, so we might as well start now.’

Two days later the engagement was officially announced and Diana was swept into the royal system. The idea was to rescue her from the media that had made her life so impossible. She had certainly found the attention extremely frightening at times and was pleased to be rescued. But the effect was to make her lonely and insecure. Buckingham Palace is not a home by any normal standards, and not even members of the Royal Family would describe it as such. Over 200 people work there, from the Lord Chamberlain to the telephone operators who man the switchboard. There was no alternative place to take her, but with hindsight, nobody – least of all her fiancé – had thought through the implications of removing a nineteen-year-old from a flat full of jolly giggly girls and setting her down in a suite of impersonal rooms with no one of her own age for company, and a fiancé who was always busy.

Diana told Andrew Morton that it was during the first week of her engagement that her bulimia started. One of Diana’s flatmates said, ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.’

In fact she was initially treated not for bulimia but for anorexia nervosa, which was the same eating disorder that her sister Sarah had when she first met the Prince of Wales in 1977, shortly after breaking up with a previous boyfriend. Desperate to find ways of encouraging Sarah to eat, her family would refuse to let her speak to the Prince on the telephone unless she put on weight. In the end she sought professional help in a London nursing home, and she recovered.

The two conditions are similar in that the root cause of both disorders is an upset in childhood, but the trigger is some sort of emotional stress in the present, and teenage girls are the most commonly affected. Bulimia involves binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting, whereas anorexics go to ingenious lengths to avoid food. Secrecy is a key element, and also denial. Both result in dangerous weight loss, and a host of related medical problems, and both can be fatal.

Shortly before the engagement Diana started taking the contraceptive pill and, as so many women do, put on a lot of weight. Her reaction was to stop eating, and her weight loss was dramatic. The blue Harrods suit she wore for the engagement photograph was a size fourteen. In the five months to the wedding in July, her waist measurement fell from twenty-nine inches to twenty-three and a half, and it continued to diminish.

Diana’s memory of the events as told to Andrew Morton are repeatedly at odds with what others remember. Her first night at Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s London home, is a case in point. She told Morton that there was no one there to welcome her. In fact, she had dinner that evening with both the Queen Mother and the Prince of Wales, and the next day moved to Buckingham Palace, where she was greeted with open arms by many of the Queen’s household who had known Diana and her family for years. A particular friend was Lady Susan Hussey, a lady-in-waiting, who had known Diana all her life, and in the coming months spent hour upon hour with her. She had a son almost exactly the same age as Diana, and was like a mother to her. She thought Diana was quite adorable, and was thrilled for the Prince whom she also adored. She and Diana went shopping for clothes together and prepared for the wedding and talked about all Diana’s hopes and fears.

There were others in the Palace whom Diana loved in those early days and who were deeply fond of her. Lt.Col. Blair Stewart-Wilson, the deputy master of the household, was one, whom Diana kissed on the station platform on her wedding day to his utter confusion; Sir Johnny Johnston in the Lord Chamberlain’s office another, and Sir William Heseltine, the Queen’s deputy private secretary. She used to go into their offices and sit on their desks and talk to them, or invite them to lunch or to drinks. And she was forever popping in to see the ladies-in-waiting and the helpers who had been taken on to deal with everything that needed to be organised for the wedding. She would pop in to chat or to giggle about some extraordinary present that had arrived, or to show off clothes that she had bought. Her sister Jane was with her a lot, her mother too, and she frequently met friends for lunch. Yet she said she was unhappy and lonely.

One of Diana’s fears at that time, which she often talked about, was the Prince’s former girlfriends. Charles had made no secret to Diana of his previous love affairs, and possibly with his fatal compulsion to tell the whole truth when half would be kinder or more sensible, he told Diana everything. He had never experienced jealousy himself, and had no understanding of how a young girl might feel, knowing that he had loved other women, particularly those who were still friends that he saw regularly. It didn’t cross his mind that there might be a problem. From her perspective, at nineteen with precious little education, no accomplishments, no sense of style and no knowledge of the world, they were grown up, clever, smart and sophisticated, and they made Diana feel desperately insecure. One of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting had also married a man much older than herself when she was nineteen, and she and others repeatedly told Diana she must forget about these other women. Yes, of course the Prince had had girlfriends and some quite serious relationships in his time, which at thirty-two years old was to be expected; and yes, they were older and more sophisticated than she was, but the Prince hadn’t married any of them – the one he wanted to marry was her.

Jealousy and insecurity nonetheless gnawed away at her. She was even jealous of the Prince’s relationship with his mother. He put letters and memos that came from the Queen into a safe to ensure no one could copy or steal them. He had always done it as a matter of course, but Diana was suspicious that the Queen was writing about her and that Charles was deliberately keeping it from her. ‘Why don’t you just ask me about the things that are worrying you?’ Charles would say, but she never would. When she arrived at Clarence House there was a letter waiting on her bed from Camilla Parker Bowles. It was dated two days previously and said, ‘Such exciting news about the engagement. Do let’s have lunch soon when the Prince of Wales goes to Australia and New Zealand. He’s going to be away for three weeks. I’d love to see the ring. Lots of love, Camilla.’ It was a friendly note sent with the best of intentions. She and Diana had seen a lot of each other during the previous few months, and Camilla thought they were friends. She thought Diana was young, but good fun, as most of his friends did.

Diana told Andrew Morton she thought ‘Wow’ and organised lunch, ‘bearing in mind that I was so immature, I didn’t know about jealousy or depressions or anything like that … So we had lunch. Very tricky indeed. She said, “You are not going to hunt, are you?” I said, “On what?” She said, “Horse. You are not going to hunt when you go and live at Highgrove, are you?” I said, “No.” She said, “I just wanted to know,” and I thought as far as she was concerned that was her communication route. Still too immature to understand all the messages coming my way.’

Camilla remembers the lunch as being entirely friendly. Diana was extremely excited, showed off her ring with glee.

Camilla had been one of the girlfriends the Prince of Wales had told Diana about, and Diana had made him give her a solemn promise that there was no longer anyone else in his life, and that there would never be any other women in his life. He had happily given his promise on both counts. His mistake was thinking this was all he needed to say. He was telling the truth – he intended to be entirely monogamous – and as a man of honour, he expected Diana to accept his word as the truth. Similarly, as a man of honour, when Diana asked him whether he still loved Camilla he said ‘yes’, which was also the truth. Camilla was very special to him, but so were a number of other women. He loved and still loves them all, and no doubt always will.

The Prince of Wales is a thinker and a philosopher, a spiritual and religious man, and love to him bears little relationship to the two-dimensional ‘love’ discussed on the pages of romantic novels and women’s magazines. This is why he used that dreadful phrase ‘whatever love means’ when asked by a television reporter about his feelings for Diana on the day of his engagement. He is too honest for his own good; he can’t give the simple answer that everyone is waiting for, because for him the matter is not simple.

It didn’t occur to him that a white lie would have been kinder. He didn’t put himself into Diana’s position, didn’t ask himself how this nineteen-year-old girl might be feeling or whether she might need greater reassurance. Most young people are intrinsically jealous, and the notion that someone can love more than one person without diminishing their feelings for another only comes with age and experience. For an intelligent man, there are astonishing gaps in his awareness.

What he didn’t realise at the time was that Diana was a particularly vulnerable nineteen-year-old, with an abnormally pronounced sense of suspicion and insecurity, and a strong feeling that people were conspiring against her. This had not been apparent during their courtship, but immediately after the engagement was announced the Prince sensed a change in Diana which he didn’t understand. Where before she had been so happy and easygoing, she became moody and wilful. She displayed a terrible temper, which he had never seen before; it came from nowhere, along with hysterical tears, and could be gone as quickly as it came. She suddenly turned against people she had appeared to like and said they were out to get her, to undermine her, or spy on her.

He was not the only one to notice the change and to be worried about her. But Charles put it down to nerves and the stress she had been under during the past few months, which he assumed would all disappear once the wedding was behind them.

Diana hated being left alone. She wanted the Prince to be with her all the time and couldn’t understand why his work had to take precedence over their being together. His days then, as now, were a relentless round of public engagements, meetings, paper work and sporting commitments from early in the morning until late at night, often taking him out of London. Almost immediately after the engagement was announced, he left on a tour of Australia, which had been fixed long before, and there was a very tearful and loving farewell at the airport.

During Charles’s various absences Diana was looked after by whichever members of his staff were not accompanying him. The Prince’s private secretary at that time was the Hon. Edward Adeane, a brilliant barrister, Eton and Cambridge educated, whose father and grandfather had been private secretaries before him. The Prince’s assistant private secretary, Francis Cornish, came from the Foreign Office. His predecessor, Oliver Everett, was also ex-Foreign Office and had returned there in 1980, but was invited back specifically to help Diana before the wedding, and afterwards became her official private secretary. It was an intellectually high-powered team, who were all at least twice her age. Sympathetic as they might have been, and flattered by her charm and giggly girlishness, they had no idea of how to handle someone so young, whose experience and education were so severely limited. They were astonished when, for example, she asked where Dorset was, or confessed she didn’t know the capital of Australia.

Diana had no inhibitions about her ignorance and laughed such moments off carelessly, but it was an awkward situation for them all. Socially, she had much in common with the private secretaries, but she found their intellect threatening. She was more comfortable with Michael Colborne, a former grammar school boy, whose office she shared. He could see how lost she was and would spend hours talking to her, which was all she wanted to do. The Prince’s staff were not prepared for this. They would never have expected to sit and idly chatter with the Prince, and found it hard to do so with Diana. He was the Boss, and the relationship between employer and employees was always strictly professional. They expected it to be the same with Lady Diana Spencer.

But Diana was scarcely more than a child. She had never employed anyone in her life. She had never had much of a job, never worked in an office. She had no idea what was expected of her and no idea of what she was taking on in marrying into the Royal Family. Her concept of what lay before her was little more than a romantic notion.

Like thousands of girls of a similar age, who devoured Barbara Cartland novels and soap operas on television, she had no interest in a career. All she wanted was to be loved, looked after, have babies and live happily ever after. She thought she had found a man who would provide all of this and more. In the excitement and thrill of the chase she had visualised none of the reality.

She could be forgiven. There had been no Princess of Wales for over seventy years – when the future George V was created Prince of Wales in 1901 and his wife, Princess May of Teck, became Princess – and there was no job specification to guide either Diana or her courtiers. There was no one she could consult who had experience of her predicament. No commoner had married into the Royal Family at such a senior level this century, not even the Queen Mother. Her husband became George VI, but at the time of their marriage he was Duke of York, and only second in line to the throne.

Several people did try to give Diana some help, Michael Colborne and Susan Hussey amongst them, but Diana was not altogether receptive. She didn’t want to be told what to do and when. In the past when she had not wanted to do something, with the indulgence of divorced parents, she had never been coerced. Accepting the discipline of royal life did not come easily.

The Family and their courtiers all took what they did so much for granted, they assumed that, being a Spencer, Diana would have no problems and would know what to expect. She was, after all, a member of one of the most aristocratic families in Britain and had lived from the age of thirteen in one of the most traditionally run stately homes in England. Her brother is the Queen’s godson, one of her sisters is the Duke of Kent’s goddaughter. Her father had been equerry to the Queen. Both her grandmothers had been ladies-in-waiting to the Queen Mother; and both the Spencers and the Fermoys had been close friends of the Royal Family for several generations. It was not an unreasonable assumption that Diana would know what royal life was all about. That was partly why she had seemed so tailor-made for the role. But she was lost, and no one realised.

When she went to spend the weekend at Royal Lodge at Windsor, for example, no one had thought to tell her that if she wanted to go out for a walk in the Great Park she had to tell someone where she was going. She returned to find the whole place in turmoil, alarms going and her policeman on the verge of heart failure. The following Monday morning she told Colborne what had happened and said she didn’t know how she was going to cope.

‘This is going to be your life,’ he said. ‘You’re never going to be on your own again. And you’re going to change. In four to five years you’re going to be an absolute bitch, not through any fault of your own, but because of the circumstances in which you live. If you want four boiled eggs for breakfast, you’ll have them. If you want the car brought round to the front door a minute ago, you’ll have it. It’s going to change you. Your life is going to be organised. You open your diary now and you can put down Trooping the Colour, the Cenotaph service, Cowes Week, the Ascots. You can write your diary for five years ahead, ten years, twenty years.’

Gradually the truth began to dawn and Diana recognised that what he was saying was true, and from that moment she began to look increasingly apprehensive. But she was on a giant roller coaster with the wedding just weeks away and preparations to be made before then. There were also presents to be acknowledged and people thanked. They were pouring into Michael Colborne’s office from all over the world, and Diana wrote most of the thank you letters herself, in her distinctive large, rounded hand.

One Friday afternoon, about two weeks before the wedding, a package was delivered to the Privy Purse door, which the footman brought up to Michael Colborne’s office. He opened it and found a number of things he had ordered on the Prince’s behalf to give as gifts to various friends. The Prince has always been a great giver of presents, particularly jewellery, as a means of thanking people. Amongst various pieces, one of which was for Dale, Lady Tryon, and another for Lady Susan Keswick, and another for Lady Cecil Cameron – all good friends – was a bracelet for Camilla Parker Bowles. It was a gold chain with a blue enamel plate, engraved with the initials GF. They stood for Girl Friday, which was the Prince’s nickname for Camilla.

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