Читать книгу Charles: Victim or villain? - Penny Junor - Страница 15

‘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.