Читать книгу Shadows of a Princess - Patrick Jephson - Страница 14
ОглавлениеI returned home exhausted and several pounds lighter, not least thanks to an energetic desert stomach bug. The Princess welcomed me back like a wandering stray and wrote me a typically generous note of appreciation. For a day or two I recuperated in the knowledge that I had survived my first tour, which had been generally recognized as a pretty challenging initiation.
Media coverage of the tour had been extensive. Still a novice, I took an immature pride in the glossy magazine stories and the TV special that followed in the days after our return. Somehow, I felt, it would not have been possible without me – which may have been true, but only to a very limited extent.
Not featured in the glossies but of growing interest to tabloid commen-tators was the state of The Marriage. I had seen some of its internal stresses while on tour – however careful the Prince and Princess were to keep their troubles to themselves, being ‘on the road’ always accentuated differences that could be smoothed over more easily at home – and already the media sharks had scented blood in the water. They would not remain hungry for long.
To compensate for the lack of united leadership at the top, the Wales support organization had for some time been making its own arrangements to adapt to the unpalatable truth. Huge amounts of energy were diverted into concealing the real state of the marriage, and still more were expended on structuring our bosses’ public lives to minimize friction between them. It is a tempting but pointless exercise to imagine what more could have been achieved if this energy had been available to support the global influence of a Prince and Princess who were able to work as a team.
My introduction to these realities had occurred during a visit by the Prince and Princess to the Glasgow Garden Festival in my early days in office in May 1988. Not unusually, Their Royal Highnesses had been apart in the days preceding the engagement but obviously had to appear as a couple, if not happily, then at least willingly united when they arrived at the Festival. They therefore made their ways in separate aircraft to what, fortunately, turned out to be a simultaneous rendezvous at Glasgow airport. Logistically this was no mean feat, but, as I came to realize, the Queen’s Flight, the police and the respective staffs were not short of practice in this manoeuvre.
On the flight to Scotland I had been conscious of a heightened tension, but in my happy lack of awareness had ascribed it only to the prospect of an exciting day in the sunshine in front of what were sure to be huge crowds. Later, I came to recognize the nervous giggles interspersed with brooding introversion as characteristic of the Princess’s agitation at the prospect of working with her husband. Also, it was only later that I realized the significance of her frequent trips to the royal loo. ‘Bulimia’ was a word I did not even know how to spell in 1988.
John Riddell was in charge of the engagement. As ever, his charm and studied absent-mindedness produced the intended mood of amused tolerance in the Princess as we arrived in Glasgow. Inside, he must have felt he was defusing a ticking time bomb. In this he was like many senior courtiers who lacked the benefit of regular contact with her – their understandable inclination was to treat her like a beautifully wrapped parcel of unstable Semtex. His only acknowledgement of the unspoken matrimonial drama which waited on the tarmac was to smile reassuringly at her as we left the plane and say, ‘Let’s hope we all reach the end of the day in the same happy mood we started it in!’
In bright sunshine the Prince and Princess met by their aircraft, brushed cheeks for a fraction of a second and climbed into their car. The day was a success. The beautiful weather, happy crowds and grand scale of the event perfectly set off their own professionalism.
They were an unbeatable double act who could anticipate each other’s moves, instinctively work a crowd and betray by neither a word nor a gesture the fact that they would jump back in their separate planes as soon as duty released them. In the brief moments of semi-privacy, however, away from all but the familiar company of their staffs, they might have been on separate engagements. Not a word or a glance passed between them.
Only the atmosphere of relief on the homeward journey, and the veiled references to disaster averted, alerted my novice’s consciousness to the fact that we were playing a game. There was only one rule: nothing must be said to disturb the myth of permanence that was now the marriage’s only certainty.
Competition between the stars of our show was never far below the surface, and set-piece joint events usually brought it into the open. A garden party at Buckingham Palace was the perfect opportunity for some rather pointed sparring. For those of us who saw beyond the myth this was entertaining too, in a painful way.
It was the sort of obligatory event that went into the Princess’s diary automatically, at least twice every year. However much she denied it, I think she secretly rather looked forward to these occasions. The reason was not hard to find. It came to me at the start of one afternoon’s proceedings, as I paraded in my top hat and tails at the edge of the Buckingham Palace lawn along with other members of the Prince and Princess’s senior household. At our backs a lawn the size of a football pitch was crowded with a multicoloured mob of deserving guests from all walks of life throughout the Commonwealth.
Three approximately equal gangways had been carved through this crowd by Beefeaters in full ceremonial dress. The idea was that three royal couples would descend the steps from the Buckingham Palace Bow Room door on to the lawn and split up, one couple per lane. They would then proceed through the crowd at a slow pace towards their reward: tea in a special marquee at the other end of the lawn with members of the diplomatic community.
In effect, it was a time-honoured and rather formal version of the walkabout which I had come to know so well on the streets of provincial Britain. This time, however, the sun was shining, the crowds were all in their Sunday best, if not better, and the Princess was dressed in clothes she might happily have appeared in on Ladies’ Day at Ascot. In other words, despite the formal royal setting and order of events and ceremonies which had changed little since Victoria’s time, here was a chance for the Princess to do what she did best, in front of an audience drawn from those she sometimes saw as her greatest critics, namely other members of the royal family.
Apart from the Queen, who was naturally the symbolic focus of all attention, with her Palace as a backdrop and her Guards band playing her anthem, no one outshone the Princess. She stood statuesquely, slightly to one side, eyes demurely downcast, an object of wonder and curiosity, holding the gaze of several thousand eyes.
She and the Prince decorously descended the steps on to the lawn and the show began. The private secretary bowed, I bowed, we all bowed. The Prince looked grumpy, the Princess looked radiant. Then I detected a wicked edge to the radiance. It came, I was sure, from the certain knowledge that she was about to outshine her husband in public and intended to derive no little amusement from the task.
She winked at me and I fell into step slightly behind her. She took the right-hand side of the lane and the Prince took the left. The Prince’s equerry and I then spent the next 45 minutes striding back and forth ahead of our royal charges, ensuring that some 30 or so preselected guests were hauled to the front of the crowd and made to stand prominently so that they could receive the handshake they had been promised.
We sometimes darted further ahead to where the Queen’s comptroller stood at the confluence of the three lanes, marching back and forth and looking important – something he did very well, except that he glanced at his watch rather too often. He had the tricky task of trying to arrange for the occupants of all three lanes to arrive simultaneously at the door of the tea tent. It was a practically impossible task, because each of the six royal runners had their own technique for working the crowd and their rate of advance was anything but uniform. Nevertheless, he had to try and we had to try to help him.
After a few years of garden parties it dawned on me that there was only one game for the Princess more amusing than putting her husband in the shade for the afternoon, and that was frustrating her equerry’s artful attempts to make her hurry up or slow down in order to fall in with the comptroller’s master plan.
It was hard enough trying to make the Waleses co-ordinate speeds even in their own lane. One year the couple were particularly at odds and their progress had been anything but co-ordinated. With something approaching panic, I watched the Queen finish her lane and start to make her way towards the tea tent. We were going to be very late.
‘You’re going to be very late!’ the comptroller snapped at me and I returned fretfully to my lane, trying to look blasé on the outside while feeling like an incompetent sheepdog on the inside.
I went to explain the problem to the Prince’s equerry. Once again demonstrating that alarming ability which all royal people seemed to possess, the Prince overheard our muttered conversation, taking place some 20 feet behind him. ‘I didn’t know it was a race.’ The words were flung peevishly over his shoulder.
Immediately I relaxed, reminding myself once again of that saying attributed to Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all.’ It was a piece of wisdom I sometimes wished had been carved in illuminated letters 10 feet high across the whole facade of Buckingham Palace. It was a valuable lesson, and one which the Prince had evidently learned many years before, at least in relation to garden parties. I duly received a black look from the comptroller for spoiling the perfection of his arrangements, but he recognized the notorious independent-mindedness of the Waleses and was in any case already thinking about tea; and so, soon afterwards, was I.
Hot on the heels of the garden party came another set-piece event at which the aim of portraying our household as one big happy family came rather closer to success. This was the annual Highgrove staff barbecue. Awnings were pitched on the Highgrove lawn, external caterers were brought in with superior bangers and steaks, and the Prince and Princess vied with each other to play gracious and relaxed host to their hundred or so staff and their guests.
The Princess was in her element. In a casual outfit which looked as though it had come straight from the set of a jeans advert, she worked the crowd as if this were a superior sort of walkabout. Most of the faces were familiar to her, of course. I watched as she adjusted her demeanour according to whether she pigeonholed the person she was speaking to as (1) friendly and therefore deserving proprietorial in-humour, or (2) potentially hostile and therefore marked down for commiserating good humour, on this occasion anyway, or (3) neutral between the two camps. For those in the last category she reserved her most winning smile of all.
Everyone seemed to be hyped up – the employees because their pleasure at feeling they were getting something from the management for free was moderated by the knowledge that they were still under royal surveillance, as they consumed as much food and drink as they decently could. They were also, in many cases, showing off for the benefit of their guests, who were either partners or family. For their part, most of the guests were overawed by being welcomed to Highgrove, which they knew was first and foremost a private residence. The Princess was vigorously marshalling her support and I, for one, was keeping a watchful eye on the progress of her own version of an internal MORI opinion poll. The only person who seemed truly relaxed was the Prince, not least because the event gave him another opportunity to take small groups of reverential employees on guided tours of the gardens which were his consuming interest.
Visiting the house itself on barbecue days was not encouraged, but I had been there often enough before. Engagements that fell on Mondays or Fridays usually began or ended at Highgrove, with an associated trek, inevitably at the worst time of day, along the M4.
It has been said that the Princess disliked Highgrove and my own observations would confirm this, particularly towards the end of the marriage. As has also been said, it was in most ways a typical, comfortable country house with cartoons in the loo, boots in the porch and Jack Russells, it seemed, almost everywhere. It was distinctly more homely than Kensington Palace and certainly, so far as the Princess was concerned, there was no distinction between family and staff areas of the house. When I arrived I might expect to find her perched on the kitchen table, swinging her legs and sharing gossip with the chef, or in the staff hall, listening to the housekeeper’s latest personal crisis.
When the Waleses separated in 1992, the Princess collected all her belongings from the house and quit without much evident regret. No sooner had she gone than comprehensive redecoration took place, together with large-scale purging of the domestic staff. Highgrove then formally became what it had always seemed to be: the Prince’s personal sanctuary and main domestic base. For the Princess’s staff, it became foreign territory overnight. She never returned.
As allegiances in the office and in the country hardened, I found myself firmly in the Princess’s camp. This was not because she was blameless – she could not and did not claim this for herself, as I knew better than most. In fact, she was refreshingly honest about her capacity to run amok in the royal china shop, without ever surrendering her right to do so. ‘Everything’s got to change, Patrick!’ she would say, and I spent a few years trying to translate this aspiration into a reality that was acceptable to the institution and still recognizable to her.
I suppose I supported her because, in the end, she was younger and more naive than her husband was, and ultimately he bore responsibility for what happened in his family. In an organization that had such a highly developed sense of duty, this seemed logical, but I had not even begun to grasp the agony the Prince must have suffered trying to reconcile duty with the demands of the heart. Only now can I hope to have a better understanding of his dilemma.
From this comfortably conceited moral high ground, I felt able in the years that followed to criticize the Prince – if only privately – for failing to break the deadlock with his wife, a move which I knew she would welcome and the country would applaud. As the menace I had seen in him grew in my own mind into a force to be opposed on principle, I believed with righteous zeal that he represented the greater of two pretty unattractive wrongs.
If forced, I would still stand by that assessment, but it is an assessment now tempered by my own experience. All the while I was ministering to the needs of the royal family, I was neglecting those of my own. Ironically, I eventually found myself facing the same doubts about my personal morality for which I had so unhesitatingly condemned the Prince. In my small way, I also faced the opprobrium of observers snug in a moral certainty I could only envy. As my own marriage began to feel the consequences of my strange occupation, I blushed to remember my outrage on behalf of the wronged wife.
Even in what I thought to be the line of duty to the Princess, I cast more than my share of stones at the man I felt was the greater sinner. You may feel, as I do, that it says something about him that he declined to throw them back. Less charitably, you may also feel he had no need, there being plenty of volunteers to undertake such dirty work unbidden on his behalf. Yet in the end it is naive – however superficially justified – to criticize royal people for misdeeds carried out in their name. Being different, if not strictly better than the rest of us, is their raison d’être. Questions of blame also seem to become irrelevant when royalty is concerned for its own survival. All’s fair in love, war and royal service. Many people are attracted to it for that very reason.
As had been proved both at home and in the Gulf, our daily working lives were adapting to the Waleses’ growing estrangement as a matter of professional routine. However, this uncritical acceptance of the facts of life ran into trouble when we had to explain them to others. It was uncomfortable to have to provide for the stark domestic reality behind the public illusion.
One very practical problem arose whenever we were making arrangements for accommodation on overseas tours. We now needed two royal bedrooms. Few hosts were so indelicate as to query this, although raised Embassy eyebrows sometimes had to be stared down. A line suggested for use in these circumstances went something like this: ‘The Prince and Princess often work to different programmes on tour and it makes sense that they – and their immediate personal staff – don’t get in each other’s way when quick turnarounds are required between engagements. This sort of arrangement was perfectly normal for royal people historically and for much the same good reasons. To this day, many couples in the aristocracy organize their sleeping arrangements in the same way. It doesn’t mean they don’t have – and take – the chance to meet intimately when time and inclination coincide.’ In other words, mind your own business – which I, for one, was happy to do. It proved impossible at times.
Apart from the considerable duplication of effort this system dictated, not to mention the restrictions it sometimes placed on the types of accommodation we deemed acceptable, it struck an unwelcome, discordant note among our hosts and anybody else who was taking an interest. I sometimes felt we were arriving with our dirty laundry already on display.
In the mornings they would emerge from separate quarters like boxers from opposing corners of the ring, except that, unlike boxers governed by the bell, they could stage their entrances for effect. Sometimes she would keep him waiting, sometimes vice versa. Tension that might have been safely – if uncomfortably – vented behind closed doors was carried instead into the day’s work, where it could fester.
It was like a secret deformity that our hosts never saw, but which restricted our freedom to programme joint activities while doubling much of the administrative effort. Even something as simple as getting the end-of-tour presentation photographs signed by them both could call upon all Harold Brown’s skills as the behind-the-scenes co-ordinator. Never were his talents as butler/diplomat in greater demand than when he had to preside over divided domestic quarters in an unfamiliar house.
There were benefits as well. One of the unresolved questions in the wake of their divorce was whether the Prince and Princess should have tried harder to ‘make a go of it’. Looking at the situation from a different aspect, the question could be rephrased, ‘How long should you force people to stay together if they want to be apart?’
As I greeted the Princess in the mornings or took my leave at night, I knew the answer in practical if not in philosophical terms. There was absolutely no doubt that, however sadly solitary, her room was a haven of privacy between bouts of exhausting public exposure. Had she been forced to swap the media spotlight by day for a marital battleground by night, I doubt she would have performed her royal duties at all. Since I observed similar feelings in the Prince, it is safe to conclude that, this close to the end of their marriage, the royal double act was a performance best reserved for barely consenting adults in public only.
Other benefits looked attractive at first sight, especially to me as the inexperienced new equerry. On closer inspection, however, they stirred my early suspicion that my boss was anything but a guileless pretty face. These dubious benefits centred on the Princess’s wish to be seen as more popular, approachable, flexible and generally ‘normal’ than her husband. When they were on tour together he was conveniently close by to act as a foil for this desire, much to the uncomfortable advantage of ‘her team’.
As if to underline the contrast with the Prince’s habitually more preoccupied appearance, she would burst from her quarters in the morning radiating popularity, approachability and flexibility to the assembled entourages as we waited to depart for the day’s programme. Usually she would time it so that we had several minutes to bask in the effect and pick up the nonverbal signals with which she indicated who was in favour and who was to be conspicuously ignored.
Her husband’s staff were a favourite target. It was seldom a hardship, however. Her desire to create an impression that contrasted with her husband’s usually made her a welcome visitor to the temporary office. There she might find two of his secretaries wrestling with our primitive portable computers and last-minute amendments to the Prince’s next speech.
‘What is it today – global warming or Shakespeare?’ she would ask with a laugh, perching elegantly on a desk. Then there would be girl-talk about clothes, or the heat, or the hysterically ornate splendour of her quarters. There would always be concerned enquiries about the staff’s accommodation or general morale. Needless to say, I listened to the answers with my heart in my mouth. Any complaint would earn me a raised royal eyebrow. It all helped to prove her point: I care about the workers, even if certain other people are too busy.
She also managed to create the impression that her husband was unpunctual and lacked her enthusiasm for the day’s events. When he emerged and took in the scene, she would chide him with a thin affability. In full view of an audience she had already warmed up, he could do little to express any irritation her teasing provoked.
This often left me feeling queasy. Public point-scoring was one of the most unsettling aspects of the marital deterioration we had to witness, even if I was occasionally a temporary beneficiary. If I was obviously in favour, the resultant inner glow was tempered by the thought that she was just as likely to be trying to make someone else feel bad as to make me feel good. In turn this produced an unhealthy climate in which her praise could not be taken at face value. It also sharpened the sting of her criticism, which was seldom related to the actual gravity of the offence. Praise and criticism of her staff were both ploys she used in the mental game of musical chairs through which she played out her own emotional confusion.
Small wonder, then, that she and the Prince grew to prefer touring separately. The morning nonverbal signals indicating who was in and who was out never entirely vanished, but at least the audience was smaller. Without the need to strike a contrasting attitude to the Prince, the Princess’s actions became a more honest reflection of her own feelings – and she enjoyed herself more, which was good for everyone.
My first royal tour marked the end of my apprenticeship. There were still mountains of experience to climb. If I served her for a hundred years, I would still have much to learn about the Princess of Wales, and even more about the reactions she sparked in others. At last, however, I had the tour labels on my briefcase; I could swap tall stories with the best of them. Even more importantly, I had shared with the Princess the pressures and prolonged proximity that only foreign tours provide, especially difficult ones, which this definitely had been.
I had passed through a barrier of acceptability – one of many on the twisting and ultimately futile path to royal intimacy. From now on our relationship would be slightly different. She began to see through my mask of deference and I began to see through her saintly image.
The most significant change was the one least discussed. To travel with the Prince and Princess at that time was to learn, inescapably, the truth of their growing estrangement. In the office it had been almost possible to pretend that all was well. On the road in Britain I had been supporting only one half of what was still seen as a formidable double act. There was nothing to stop me arguing – as I did – that press speculation about problems in the marriage was offensive and inaccurate. The whole issue could be ignored in the comforting round of day-to-day business.
This was true no longer. I had arranged the separate accommodation and sweated to ensure the hermetic separation of his and her programmes, required for all but a few joint appearances. In Dubai I had been summoned into the cabin of the Princess’s departing jet to be given a farewell that was effusive and undeniably a pact of loyalty as I stayed behind with the Prince. I had witnessed with naive alarm the small, telltale signs of mutual antipathy that were soon to become public knowledge – averted eyes, defiantly uncoordinated walkabouts, competitive glad-handing.
Eventually, when she was travelling on solo tours, there was a welcome outbreak of informality in the Princess’s attitude towards me. Instead of the large numbers of their joint household who had previously paraded to greet her in the morning, she would find only me waiting at her door. I would be invited in, to steal extra breakfast, hear gossip from her phone calls, answer questions on the day’s business and compliment – or assist with – the choice of outfit. She might try three different outfits before setting off for the day and would ask my opinion on each.
‘Patrick, what d’you think of this hat?’
‘Um … very royal, Ma’am.’
‘Thanks. I’ll change it!’
The same process would operate in reverse in the evening, when she might ask me to pour a glass of champagne and join her in an irreverent postmortem on the people and issues that had made most impression on her over the course of the day.
This was quite nice, as far as it went. I defy anyone employed by royalty not to feel even a fleeting glow of illicit pleasure at being invited to share such intimacies. As I was to discover to my cost, however, centuries of deference had not been built up just to make the important people feel more important. Deference protected the small people too, from royal favour too lightly granted and too quickly withdrawn. So I was wary, even as I joined in what was, after all, just her way of dealing with the demands her job placed on her.
When she had chopped up and disposed of the day’s new players she often returned to a favourite subject: her husband. I once read extracts to her from Philip Ziegler’s biography of Edward VIII, in which the Prince of Wales (as he then was) was described by a contemporary as ‘part child, part genius’. She leapt at the comparison, as she did at many descriptions of her husband in which he appeared as naive, self-indulgent or emotionally immature.
In fairness, these were adjectives she was quite quick to direct at almost any member of the male species, and she was not blind to the Prince’s many virtues, among which she always included a touching vulnerability. When she spoke of him fondly – which admittedly was rare – it was with regret that he allowed his good intentions and good ideas (she stopped short of genius) to be hijacked by unscrupulous hangers-on. It was no surprise that many of her fiercest critics were drawn from these sycophantic ranks.
Even in the terminal stages of the marriage, when she was ready one minute to regard him as a wayward son and the next as her cold-blooded persecutor, I never knew her criticism of him to carry lasting malice. Nor do I doubt that she would have responded with pleasure and secret relief to marital peace overtures. For reasons that became clearer as my knowledge of them grew, however, the Waleses sadly found that they had less to contribute to their marriage than its survival demanded.
Meanwhile romance, in any of its forms, was what the Princess quite reasonably craved. She felt that it was withheld by her husband – deliberately or through incapacity – and therefore she sought and found it elsewhere.
Sometimes she found it in flirtatiousness at work, where her feminine charm was employed with precision and deadly effect. I was not immune to extravagant remarks such as ‘Oh Patrick, you’re the moon and stars to me!’ – even if the sentiment they implied did not seem to last very long.
Sometimes she found it in the supportive but necessarily circumscribed proximity of her personal staff. Any form of physical contact was, of course, unthinkable, but she would sometimes allow us all a playful frisson as we were invited to help her tie her army boots or check an evening gown’s dodgy zip.
With rare but spectacular exceptions, she was very cautious about expressing the aridity of her love life. Sometimes, though, the banter with which the painful subject was made bearable would slip, and in a voice suddenly sad and reflective, she would say, ‘Sex is OK, but sex with love is the best, isn’t it?’ That was quite a tough one to answer.
Although these sources of consolation were safe, they were no real substitute for the pleasures and hazards of a passionate relationship. Instead she developed an ability to experience emotions vicariously, drawing on her existing skills as a shrewd people-watcher and a natural talent to be sympathetic. St Paul’s injunction to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep might have been written for her. Sadly, joy is not an easy emotion to experience at second hand and after an initial expression of pleasure at another’s good fortune, she often found that it left her feeling envious and dissatisfied. This always seemed to be most pronounced in maternity wards. It did not take a genius to work out why.
In addition, she did find some consolation in well-documented liaisons with other men, most notably with James Hewitt, who already rode high in her affections when I joined her staff. He was a regular but discreet visitor to KP, although our paths seldom crossed. Sometimes when I was leaving the red-haired Captain would be arriving, emitting a palpable sense of unease and a nervous but winning smile.
Later, the Princess closely involved me in her attempts – by then – to distance herself from him. I even carried discouraging messages to him at his barracks when he was planning a newspaper revelation about their relationship ‘to put the record straight’ (something, incidentally, which I have never thought possible on practically any subject). In 1989, however, the affair was just one more thing to be ignored, another sign of our unhappy times.
Had I wanted to, I could have found out more and sometimes did, especially over a beer with a detective. I knew, however, that it was more important to be able to deny convincingly knowledge of anything that my boss might later wish she had not done. Being a royal conscience might be a wonderfully self-justifying job, but it would be a short one.
She was paranoid that her affair would be discovered – but only because it would weaken her moral superiority over her husband. She only admitted the affair with Hewitt after it had become public knowledge. After his return from the Gulf War in 1991, the Princess often visited Hewitt at his family home in Devon. She was terrified of being found out and I even warned the police that they might have to lie to cover up for her. I was shocked to hear myself say it, but they just smiled indulgently.
She wistfully imagined a house in the country – an idyllic domestic life for them both, full of children, dogs and horses – but when he became too besotted, she was embarrassed and realized he was a liability in the battle against her husband for public sympathy.
Although I chose to be ignorant at the time, and naive too, it was sadly obvious even to me that these desperate, ill-starred affairs shared Jane Austen’s description of adultery as merely consuming the participants with ‘universal longing’. As I watched her struggle with this longing, but also with conscience, duty and an enduring loyalty to her husband, I sometimes found it hard not to recognize some truth in her generally low opinion of men.
More than once I heard her reproduce a favourite and very second-hand phrase, picked up from TV, I guessed, but no less sincere for that: ‘All men are bastards!’ Sometimes, catching a flicker of reaction on my face, she might add, ‘Sorry, Patrick.’
I began to watch closely how the Princess coped with the strains of her predicament. She was not good at relaxing, although she devoted increasing amounts of time and energy to finding the ‘peace of mind’ she often told me she was searching for. Her luggage was always well stocked with the latest in a seemingly endless catalogue of remedies – for stress, sleeplessness and various unspecified deficiencies, aches and pains. There were numerous varieties of homoeopathic pills, tinctures and oils, all accompanied by scrappy instructions which she would sometimes read aloud to me in search of guidance I could not give.
Aromatherapy was a continuing fascination, which was not surprising given her love of perfumes, flowers and scented candles. Keen to share her belief in its revitalizing qualities, she once gave me some expensively prepared bath oil. It was a kind gesture, even if it did make the bath – and me – smell of Harpic to my uneducated nose.
An army of practitioners went in and out of favour. Among the masseurs, Stephen Twigg was a favourite. She believed that his trademark deep-tissue technique helped to relieve her of conveniently unspecific aches and pains caused by stress.
Colonic irrigation was another popular discovery, thanks to the Duchess of York. The semi-medical procedures and professional intimacy were highly attractive. So too was the skill and sympathy of the eminent Chrissie Fitzgerald, who so dexterously wielded the various tubes and solutions. The attraction, which survived for several years, waned abruptly as Chrissie’s treatment started to be accompanied by doses of robust common sense. Her crime, it appeared, was to be insufficiently sympathetic to the injustices of her royal client’s existence – perhaps because she had witnessed darker shades of the same misfortune further down the social scale. She also did not take kindly to the press attention which the Princess seemed powerless to stop bringing, literally, to her door. Chrissie was dropped abruptly, even brutally, soon afterwards. Others found it easier to keep to their script.
Fitness trainers such as Carolan Brown remained in favour until the Princess’s death, as did relays of astrologers. Some, however, such as psychotherapist Susie Orbach or self-improvement guru Anthony Robbins, found their work less conducive to the quick fix that she craved.
Sympathy and attention rather than reality were what the Princess sought. She paid no more than lip service to the alternative lifestyles on offer and did not embrace the complementary medicine philosophy in the way that her husband did. Nonetheless, if her exploration of her own health needs lacked conviction or direction, her attitude to her therapists did not. Their greatest value was in the attention they lavished on her.
Some became highly influential and coloured her thinking, with unpredictable results. Called upon to speak publicly on health or social issues, she would sometimes show an alarming tendency to recycle advice she had imperfectly understood from one of these unofficial sources. Following the thoughts of a current favourite, she once spoke convincingly of children’s status as ‘miniature adults’ – to the consternation of the patronage involved, which preferred to think of them as anything but.
Quite apart from the frustration it caused her official advisers, this hunger for guidance from dubious sources had a destructive effect on the Princess’s own judgement, a quality she did not lack when she applied herself. She sowed gossip and traded rumour with them and they in turn encouraged a sense of infallibility which undermined her innate sense of self-preservation. A blind belief in her own intuition increasingly became a substitute for balanced analysis, or even plain common sense.
It also undermined her sense of the ridiculous. ‘Do you know,’ she said to me one day in June 1992, ‘my astrologer says my husband will never be king!’ That may have been exactly what she wanted to hear at the time, but it did not appear to alter her husband’s daily routine one jot. Yet she continued to heed her astrologers’ predictions, the more dire the better, particularly where the Prince was concerned. Sure enough, she was rewarded with regular forecasts of helicopter crashes, skiing accidents and other calamities that obstinately refused to befall him – much to her relief, I have no doubt.
Ultimately she lost touch with reality in her restless desire for reassurance. In the last year of her life she was quoted in Le Monde as saying, ‘I don’t need to take advice from anyone. I trust my own instincts.’
The truth was, she consumed advice insatiably and, depending on her mood, she would take it from anyone. Her credulity seemed directly proportional to the thrill factor of whatever prediction she was being invited to believe – which made her pretty much like the rest of us, I reluctantly concluded.
Even so, I thought it important to affect a cheerful cynicism about every latest fad. My light-hearted attitude was intended to acknowledge the need for attention without conceding that she was anything other than physically fit as a fiddle. I never knew her to be genuinely ill for a single day. She kept her side of the pact by allowing – and maybe even welcoming – my theatrical disapproval as she swallowed the latest offerings from her army of alternative practitioners. As a reassuring contrast, I extolled the more traditional merits of hot whisky and a good book as aids to happy slumber. Perhaps sensibly, however, she avoided alcohol.
The real problem was that she had no safe substitute for the wise, supportive and unpaid company which, in the end, was the only medicine she really needed. Underneath the light-heartedness I was worried about her growing tendency to find pseudo-medical excuses for attracting attention and sympathy. She became increasingly indiscriminate in her search for physical remedies for emotional disorders. Complementary cures were freely interspersed with more conventional sleeping pills and stimulants.
The effect of these combinations was anybody’s guess, since no single doctor knew what she was dosing herself with, let alone controlled her intake. Deep-tissue massage and painful vitamin injections also became regular features of pre-tour preparations. Once, in a fit of hypochondria, she wangled an urgent MRI scan. Unsurprisingly, the scan confirmed my own less penetrating diagnosis: she was as fit as a fiddle.
Reassurances and remedies were all to little effect in lonely hotels and guest residences, however. All the pills in the world did not seem able to help then, and she fell back into less esoteric habits. Too often, time spent in her room supposedly relaxing was spent in obsessive phone calls – gossip with girlfriends; gossip and flirting with admirers; gossip and intrigue with palace staff back home; and, on the plus side, laughter and light relief with her children, whom she missed acutely whenever she was abroad without them.
Nothing she took seemed to dull her quick-wittedness, or her quick tongue. Depending on her mood, I found that she could be perceptive and thoughtful with her praise and encouragement, if a little inconsistent. Getting a pat on the back one day did not protect you from being kicked the day after for doing the same thing.
When she was unhappy, her natural suspicion and deviousness took control. Then her verbal skills were employed to hurt and confuse. When roused, she used words like tomahawks and her aim seldom failed. She would know, with a cat’s cunning, when to let you feel the claw in her velvet paw. Like the predator she sometimes was, she would stalk her victim, waiting for his or her attention to be distracted before striking.
Typically, we might be on a train about to arrive at our destination and my mind would be preoccupied with the practical demands of the next few minutes, when she would see her opportunity. Her voice would take on that tone of guileless inconsequentiality that always made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
‘Patrick, you never told me I’d been invited to speak at the Sprained Wrist Association AGM. I know you wouldn’t understand, but people with sprained wrists are excluded by society. I think we ought to make a speech about it.’
The opening volley was designed to saturate my defences. While still distractedly craning out of the window for a telltale sign of red carpet and a press posse, I would subconsciously assess the incoming missiles:
- She has deliberately chosen a bad moment for me. This kind of premeditation always spells trouble. Look out for the second salvo. (My God, I hope she doesn’t know about that business with her new car…)
- She is accusing me of deliberately concealing an invitation from her because I disapprove of it or because I am too lazy to research it. (Both true on occasions, as she probably knows.)
- Why the Sprained Wrist Association, for goodness’ sake? Aha – cherchez a handsome radial osteopath. Extra trouble: she loves to pretend you are jealous.
- Note that I am too insensitive to understand. This means I have missed a recent opportunity to be sympathetic, exacerbated by the fact that, unlike herself and people living with SWS (Sprained Wrist Syndrome), I have no idea what it is like to feel rejected.
- And now ‘we’ have to make a speech. This means a heap of exploratory work with the Department of Health (again) and probably a ruined weekend while I draft the speech (again). The speech will then be rejected because take your pick – she has gone off the osteopath/the Daily Mail says SWS is all in the mind/the astrologer forbids speeches during the current transit of Pluto/the Prince is patron of the Sprained Knee Association and we are making a show of not competing at the moment.
- Worst of all, somebody has snitched on me. How else did she find out about the invitation? Surely not one of the girls in the office … somebody looking through my papers … maybe the butler … the driver … Oh no! So she must know about—
‘Patrick! And when were you going to tell me you’d ruined my new car?’ [CURTAIN]
Of course it helped, always having the last word.
As time passed and I travelled with her more and more, I observed a phenomenon more usually associated with declining politicians and rock stars. The Princess found foreign tours stressful, both physically and mentally, yet she needed the buzz only they could provide. Tours also put her under unusually intense press scrutiny, because the travelling pack had no distractions other than her and the hotel bar, yet she delighted in the unmatched range of exotic and heart-tugging photo opportunities they provided. This persisted even when, as sometimes happened, the resulting press coverage back home was infuriatingly inaccurate and slanted.
When I challenged one of the travelling correspondents with a particularly misleading front-page story bearing his by-line, he genuinely seemed to share my outrage. ‘It’s the editors,’ he protested. ‘They rewrite my stuff to conform with their current line on the War of the Waleses.’
This last remark came back to me later. The Princess’s relations with the media were becoming a subject of growing interest to me, and to the public at large. I had already noticed that both she and her media pursuers had almost made a game out of satisfying their mutual requirement for each other (with truth as the first piece to leave the board), even though at times she would show flashes of resentment at press attention.
It was also dawning on me that there was something in her character which was attracted to this love-hate relationship. It was echoed elsewhere in her life. I often saw it in her attitude to her husband, or his family, or the public duties she did so well, and on each occasion it was the love half of the equation that seemed hardest for her to feel. Time and again, like an untrusting child, she doubted the dependability of the love she was shown. Small wonder, then, that she protected any affection she felt able to give – except to her children – with a portcullis of preconditions.
On a day-to-day basis, our job was to design her programme in such a way that the press had the best possible chance to report her routine public duties favourably, without inconveniencing the organizations she was visiting. If those organizations benefited in the process – and some did in spectacular fashion – then so much the better. On a deeper level, however, a dangerous mutual dependence was certainly growing. The media stimulated the Princess’s appetite for attention, but never satisfied her true requirement for love and security.
This produced some confusing results. You might not readily associate media phobia with the star of Panorama, but it became a daily reality for me. A distressed Princess is famously remembered to have asked, ‘What have the tabloids ever done for me?’ To this plaintively rhetorical question tabloid editors gave rather less rhetorical replies along the lines of, ‘We made you, darlin’!’ And so, in a sense, they had.
Unfortunately, it was not in a sense that gave her any feeling of genuine worth. After all, if being ‘made’ is to have a life as thin as the paper it is printed on, it might make you doubt your very existence. I came to think that the media were a kind of family to her. Theirs was the language of a desensitized childhood – extravagant praise followed by harsh rebuke. Like a child coaxed on to its parent’s lap for comfort, the pain of then being pushed carelessly aside was all the greater for her.
Although I only dimly understood the reasons for the Princess’s childlike temperament, I knew they were deep and traumatic. They left her constantly in need of reassurance. Tragically, she cared less and less whether this reassurance was healthy, or where she found it. For her, words of comfort were even more essential than for the rest of us.
It was one reason why she was so good at dispensing them herself. How often her messages of kindness and encouragement must have seemed a mirror of those she would have liked to receive. Perhaps the most poignant difference was that from her the words were as genuine as she could make them, but those she received were avidly gathered up like flowers on a walkabout, unconditionally and indiscriminately. The words were what mattered, and she cared little whether they had been truly meant, or whether they came from policeman or President, butcher or baker, butler or playboy.
For me, however, especially in those early years, it was enough to know that she had to be jollied along with flattery, humour, gift-wrapped advice and very visible loyalty – especially from men. I had only to master the formula, combined with an alert sense of self-preservation, to see out my brief appointment successfully.
Another thing I noticed about the Princess as my apprenticeship came to an end was her tendency very vocally to dread overseas tours but then, as soon as one was over, to look forward eagerly to the next. Given the many extra stresses and strains imposed by touring, this mystified me.
Then I realized what the attraction was. Travelling press aside, tours provided her with an endless supply of new and interesting supporting casts. She liked foreigners and, of course, the only ones she met abroad were the ones who liked her. In fact, it must have seemed to her that they adored her, unreservedly and unconditionally. They did not read menacing broadsheet newspaper analyses of her waning relevance to the power of the British establishment. They did not stop to consider whether she manipulated London’s popular media. They did not question her sincerity and motives in the way increasingly favoured by her Pharisee critics back home.
It is hard to blame her if, in the end, she preferred the company of enthusiastic foreigners to the wan faces of rain-soaked, provincial England; or the simple gratitude of a limbless Pathan tribesman to the false smiles of London society; or the attentiveness of a playboy lover to the lizard-like watchfulness she felt scouring her from the drawing rooms of Gloucestershire or the smoking rooms of St James’s.
Noticing the quick approval she seemed to attract abroad, I wondered how much of the Princess’s glamour was due to her innate qualities and how much she owed to the status she had acquired on marriage. The answer, I suppose, was an intricate mixture of both. Deprived of one – as she was when she effectively relinquished her royal status towards the end – the other had less chance to shine. Only the unique conjunction of inbred talent and historic opportunity could have created such a phenomenon.
Few film stars survive the transition from big screen to real life without losing some of their glamour on the way. Having been to more than my fair share of film premieres, I can vouch for the fact that in the flesh many actors do look surprisingly unheroic. It is the same with others in public life: to retain the importance we give them, they usually need to be surrounded by the trappings of office.
Royalty is famously no exception to this rule. The history of monarchy is one of clearly visible distinctions between them and us – from Henry VIII’s outsize codpiece to the extra-width gold lace worn on today’s royal uniforms. The necessity visibly to emphasize royal people’s uniquely superior status has kept generations of courtiers happily employed, not least because of the fringe benefits that accumulate for themselves. I will not forget the hot flush of conceit that swept over me as I opened the little Gieves and Hawkes box and out tumbled my first pair of royal cyphers – little silver ‘D’s, one of which I wore with bursting pride on the shoulder of my uniform on the rare occasions when I was still required to dress as a naval officer.
Unlike mere service equerries, the advantage of hereditary leaders is that, wherever they are and whatever they wear, they usually carry the genetic badge of office that marked their ancestors for greatness. This is one of many ways in which they differ from film stars. Nevertheless, even if they could quell a mob with a single Hanoverian glare, royal people still draw comfort and strength from the familiarity of grand surroundings.
The Princess could employ these props to dazzling effect, but her need for them differed subtly from conventional royal practice. For one thing, her inherent gifts created an aura that perfectly complemented her royal status (Ruby Wax remarked that the Princess had ‘charisma you can surf off’). Returning in the royal helicopter to Althorp or her old school, she would gleefully exclaim, ‘This is the way to arrive!’ More often, however, she showed a touching disinterest in the opportunities she had to overawe impressionable people with the accoutrements of her office.
I was reminded of the truth of this one afternoon on a blustery Cambridge railway platform. I had accompanied her on a low-key visit to a drugs project in the city and, not uncommonly, for reasons of economy we were travelling by (very) ordinary train. For some reason I now forget, we were not a very happy band that day. Having given her best for the drugs project and its clientele, the Princess had little bonhomie left over for the detective and me.
Her body language was usually quite unambiguous and we had no difficulty in recognizing that she wanted to be left alone. This was a cue which, in the circumstances, we were rather mischievously happy to take. We retreated as far away as we dared – in my case into the station bookstall – and left her apparently alone among the commuters. Needless to say, we kept her under observation from our places of concealment, so I was able to monitor first her gratifying look of disquiet when she realized she really had shaken us off, and then the reaction of other travellers.
Confronted by what appeared to be the world’s most photographed woman, statuesque in high heels and a pinstripe suit and apparently unattended on their familiar platform, their reflexes were instructive. A few just failed to notice. Rather more noticed but did not want to be seen to have noticed, probably out of a decent desire not to intrude on what was presumably a private appearance. Some backed off to a safe distance and then stared. A surprising number paused, looked her in the eye and nodded different degrees of what was recognizably a bow before continuing their stroll along the platform.
The experience of being almost alone in a public place – and hence almost like an ordinary person – was one she repeated quite frequently. As well as offering a fleeting sense of normality, it did also allow her to enjoy the innocent pleasure of being the object of excited ‘is she or isn’t she?’ whispering among bystanders, most frequently in the Kensington High Street branch of Marks and Spencers where she was a familiar figure, especially in the food hall.
It could be fun. One afternoon the Princess and I were driving to Burleigh. We were in a very unremarkable Ford, with no outriders or visible escort. We needed petrol and she pulled into the next filling station. I did the man’s task with the pump, followed by the man’s other task with the credit card in the shop. By the till two boys were arguing about the identity of the woman in the driver’s seat of the maroon Granada.
‘No it isn’t!’
‘Yes it is!’
‘No it isn’t! It can’t be! She’d ’ave police motorbikes if it was Princess Di!’
‘Don’t you know it’s rude to stare?’ said the man behind the till. Still arguing, they disappeared back to their waiting mother, who was by now also looking rather intrigued by the woman adjusting her make-up in the next-door car.
As I finished paying, the man said, ‘Did anyone ever tell you your friend looks just like Princess Di?’
I followed his gaze back to the car, where the driver had put away her compact and was obviously keen to get back on the road. I furrowed my brow. ‘Now you come to mention it, in this light … I suppose there’s a passing resemblance …’
‘Looks just like her. She could make a fortune on the telly.’
