Diana: In Pursuit of Love (15 page)

While the Goldsmiths offered lunch and safety, Lord Palumbo and his wife Hayat shared the trappings of their fortune, giving her the use of their private jet, entertaining her at their homes in England and France, and inviting her on board their yacht,
Drumbeat
. They used their considerable connections to assist the Princess; Peter recommending media-relations expert Sir Gordon Reece, a close friend of Margaret Thatcher, to help burnish her image, as well as the venerable lawyer, Lord Mishcon, to advise on her divorce negotiations. It was Hayat, the daughter of a Lebanese newspaper editor, a moderate Shi’ite Muslim, who was assassinated by terrorists, who organized Diana’s first, much treasured trip to Paris, where, with Lucia Flecha de Lima, they spent the weekend shopping and sightseeing. The fact that Lady Palumbo had converted to Roman Catholicism from her Muslim faith gave their friendship an absorbing dimension, given Diana’s own spiritual journey (see Chapter Six). At the same time, the Palumbos’ friendship with Princess Margaret’s former husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, as well as with the Duke and Duchess of York – Peter Palumbo is godfather to their elder daughter, Princess Beatrice – gave Hayat a telling insight and rounded appreciation of the endless intrigues and personalities at court, which someone like Lucia Flecha de Lima could only glimpse from afar. While she disagreed profoundly with Diana’s collaboration with my book – as too did Lucia – she would have understood more clearly than most the demands, constraints and tensions that came with life inside the royal family.

Where the Princess did not find a mother figure was within the royal family itself. Those dreams that she may have cherished, conscious or unconscious, of the Queen Mother or the Queen being some kind of maternal guardian, guiding, nurturing and nourishing her, were quickly dashed. When she raised her concerns about Camilla Parker Bowles before the wedding, the elderly Windsor matriarch suggested that she should not be such a ‘silly girl’, effectively telling her to do her duty. Far from feeling that she could confide in the Queen Mother, Diana was always wary. ‘I don’t really trust her. She comes to ask me about various people’s marriages in this family,’ she said. ‘Can I help and what do I think.’ Years later she ruefully explained to Max Hastings, the historian, author and at the time editor of the
Daily Telegraph
that the Queen Mother was a much tougher proposition than the public understood.

For an emotional, needy young woman, life in a family whose instinctive response to personal matters is silence or an averted gaze – ‘ostriching’ as they themselves call it – was barely tolerable. She saw herself as an outsider; they saw her as a problem, viewing her eating disorder, manifest by her frequent absences from family dinners, as the cause of her marital problems rather than a symptom. They came to see her as ‘a cracked vessel’ who probably needed professional psychiatric care.

David Puttnam was indignant. While conceding that she was a ‘very, very, very hurt girl’, a ‘nutcase’ she was not, he told me: ‘If my daughter, who is the same age as Diana, had got involved with that dysfunctional family and had the same pressures and lack of support it wouldn’t surprise me if she had cracked. One of the things that drove me to real anger was that if I had been her father I would have gone ballistic at her treatment. They had a duty of care to her that was never fulfilled. If you bring somebody into the family they have enormous responsibility.’

While her separation from Prince Charles in 1992 severed many of the bonds between Diana and the rest of the royal family, she was politically astute enough to maintain close links with the Queen. Invariably it was the boys who were her admission ticket into the corridors of power. When they were young she took them
to swim at Buckingham Palace and afterwards for tea with the ‘chief lady’. ‘The Princess also used these opportunities to express loyalty and give assurances about her wish to do no harm either to the institution or to her husband who would inherit it,’ Patrick Jephson wrote. ‘These assurances,’ he added, ‘were not always entirely sincere. To judge from the lack of effective rejoinder, they had also probably been heard too often in the past.’

As far as possible the Princess followed a similar pattern from 1992 onwards, aware of the need to maintain close links with the fountainhead of authority and power, not just for her own sake but for her boys’. Early on she had realized that it would be a one-sided relationship – the Queen very rarely visited her and her children either at Kensington Palace or Highgrove. ‘She never wants to see them [the boys] but they are always there,’ the Princess said in response to a newspaper story claiming that the Queen had complained that Diana had prevented her from seeing her grandchildren. ‘William and Harry go to people who warm to them,’ the Princess said pointedly in one of her interviews with Colthurst. Her overriding aim, as she said frequently, was to do what was best for her boys. ‘The royal family would just like me to disappear into some desert somewhere and leave the children to them. I just won’t do it,’ she told Max Hastings.

Unlike Diana’s chosen mother figures, the Queen exercised genuine control over Diana’s life, from the shape and style of her public duties and decisions about her foreign visits to her relations with the government; and, ultimately, Diana’s eventual title and divorce settlement. While not naturally confrontational, the Queen has long experience in clipping the wings of over-influential subjects, whether politicians or princesses. After the separation, Diana fell to earth on numerous occasions, often after an intervention from Buckingham Palace at the Queen’s behest. According to Vivienne Parry, however, ‘Even though the Queen must have been consulted on many of the things concerning Diana, she [Diana] preferred to believe that it was the Palace grey men who were at fault rather than the Queen herself.’

When two young boys were killed by an IRA bomb planted in Warrington town centre in 1993, for example, the Princess
telephoned Wendy Parry, the mother of one of the victims, Tim, and said that she would dearly love to hug and comfort her at the service. Even though she had left her diary clear to attend the memorial service, she explained that the Duke of Edinburgh was representing the family. When news broke of Diana’s call to Mrs Parry, the Palace made it plain that the Duke was the ‘appropriate choice’. ‘I really had my wrists slapped, it was a monumental cock-up,’ she admitted afterwards, accepting that she had a ‘lot of growing up to do’. The withdrawal of an invitation to give the prestigious Dimbleby Lecture and the decision to veto a proposed visit to Dublin to see the Irish President, Mary Robinson, in September 1993 for ‘security reasons’ impressed on the Princess that her life was not in her own hands. It never changed. In March 1997, on the first anniversary of the Dunblane massacre where a crazed gunman had killed sixteen children and a schoolteacher, she complained that the Palace had prevented her from visiting the Scottish town. ‘I just wanted to comfort those families. I still think of them all the time,’ she said.

While the awestruck reverence which characterized Diana’s early, tense dealings with the Queen modified over time to a dutiful if nervous respect, there was, following the separation, an inevitable wariness on both sides. The confrontation at Windsor Castle over the taped telephone conversation and Prince Philip’s letter-writing campaign following the publication of
Diana: Her True Story
meant that their relations were never trusting or easy. Diana felt a kind of baffled admiration for the Queen, in awe of her quiet stoicism in the face of the mundane treadmill of monarchy, but she was fearful of, if not a little frustrated by, the extensive influence the Monarch wielded over her life. She was quietly infuriated that the Queen, whom she continued rather naively to see as an omnipotent family referee, had not intervened to end her eldest son’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, and always seemed to take his side. Her complaints were endorsed by courtiers from that period. ‘She was wholly sympathetic towards Charles – in fact rather one-eyed in her approach,’ commented one. Diana, however, also frequently grumbled that all too often the Sovereign sat on the fence, never putting a foot wrong because essentially she
never moved her feet. ‘My mother-in-law has been totally supportive but it’s so difficult to get a decision out of her,’ she observed diplomatically. While she could mimic the Queen well, Diana was on less certain ground when it came to assessing her personality. During our interviews the one question Diana stumbled over was about the Queen’s character. ‘Very difficult to answer.’ Over time Diana began to feel ‘pity and sadness’ as she learned to appreciate that the Queen was as much a woman trapped in a gilded cage as she was herself. She articulated that view more clearly in a letter, said to date from October 1996, that she wrote to herself, outlining some of her thoughts about the Queen and the institution she had served for most of her adult life: ‘I just long to hug my mother-in-law, and tell her how deeply I understand what goes on inside her. I understand the isolation, misconception and lies that surround her and feel very strongly
her
disappointment and confusion.’ While these words revealed part of her thinking, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that this rather patronizing attitude masked her confused feelings of powerlessness and inarticulate affection in the presence of an iconic figure whose influence over her life was continuing and considerable.

The sense of perplexity was felt on both sides. The Queen never really tuned into Diana’s complex personality, which was a fact acknowledged by her elderly cousin Lady Kennard, godmother to Prince Andrew, who gave a rare insight into the Monarch’s thinking. ‘The Queen or anybody else would never quite understand what Princess Diana was about,’ she said in a BBC documentary that was officially sanctioned by the Queen. ‘She [Diana] was very damaged – her background and her childhood – and it is very difficult to know.’ The fact that the only letter Diana ever received from the Queen was a formal note in late 1995, requesting that she and Prince Charles should divorce, symbolized the distance and dissonance in their relationship.

While the Princess always tried to build bridges, however unsuccessfully, with her mother-in-law, she made little attempt to accommodate herself with the rest of the family. An icy formality existed between herself and the Queen Mother, whose circle – including her lady-in-waiting, Diana’s grandmother, Ruth, Lady
Fermoy – unreservedly took the side of the Prince of Wales in their marital dispute. Other members of the royal family, whatever their personal misgivings about Prince Charles and his tendency to self-indulgent introspection, were distant or overtly hostile to his estranged wife. Family gatherings – which had always been an ordeal for Diana, bringing on outbreaks of her eating disorder – now had an embarrassing
froideur
. When the Queen invited her to attend the D-Day celebrations with the rest of the royal family in June 1994, for example, her private secretary saw how the Princess was anxious beforehand, nervously adjusting her hat and fretting about what she would say to their hostile ranks. Far from the veteran of countless public engagements, Diana appeared more like a freshman attending her first college dance.

Even when Diana was not present, members of the royal family were very cautious in articulating their opinions when her name came up in conversation. And her name came up with alarming frequency. They did not understand her, found her eccentric and could not handle her temper, her bulimia or her mood swings. ‘The family worry desperately about the damage she is doing,’ one of their number said to a mutual friend.

Shortly after Diana made her famous Time and Space speech, in December 1993, Prince Edward’s then new girlfriend, Sophie Rhys-Jones, now the Countess of Wessex, was caught in the middle of this unspoken conflict between Windsor and Spencer. From the royal family’s perspective, Sophie, the daughter of a retired salesman for a tyre company, was a living rebuke to the Princess of Wales, proof positive that a low-born commoner could rub shoulders quite happily with them. For her part, Sophie had heard many of the horror stories concerning the Princess from Prince Edward, who never disguised his loathing of the media or for those who breach the royal code of silence. So when Sophie, then a public relations executive, met Diana with other members of the royal family for afternoon tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle she was very much on her guard. As the Queen and the rest of the family sat round drinking tea and making polite conversation over sandwiches and small cakes, Diana cupped her face in her hands and silently stared at Edward’s girlfriend. Sophie felt so intimidated
that she walked out of the room – after first asking the Queen’s permission as royal protocol demanded. Away from the Sovereign’s presence, Sophie, unnerved and upset, broke down in tears and was later consoled by Prince Edward.

At subsequent meetings Sophie was always wary. While they chatted briefly on the steps of the church after the marriage of Princess Margaret’s daughter Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones and Daniel Chatto in July 1994, Edward’s girlfriend suspected that Diana had an ulterior motive – that she was subtly trying to engineer a joint picture for the watching photographers. While Sophie’s blonde hair and demure manner regularly earned her comparison with the young Diana, in truth the only similarity was that she could mimic Diana’s voice perfectly. That day the Princess looked sleek, elegant and tanned and, as she was standing a couple of steps above Sophie, she literally towered over her. Edward’s girlfriend, who later admitted that her own choice of outfit was ‘ghastly’. Sophie was sufficiently media-savvy to be aware that any pictorial comparison between the two women would do her few favours so she kept out of the way of the cameras. Whatever Diana’s motives – and at the time she told friends that she liked the new arrival – Sophie’s view was shaped by the royal one, that the Princess was ‘manipulative, cunning and conniving’. ‘She has been brainwashed by the royal family,’ noted a friend. ‘She feels sorry for the way Diana has treated them.’