Diana: In Pursuit of Love (19 page)

Paradoxically the emotional book-end to her obsession with Camilla came a few weeks after the separation. If the love letters
from Camilla to her husband that she had read in August 1991 had confirmed the intensity of the older woman’s longing for Prince Charles, so the late-night telephone conversation between the Prince and Mrs Parker Bowles, illicitly recorded and broadcast by radio hams and subsequently published in tabloid newspapers in January 1993, was undeniable proof that these feelings were reciprocated. The so-called ‘Camillagate’ tapes were deeply embarrassing for the Prince of Wales, containing as they did distasteful references to his desire to be a sanitary tampon inside his lover (which Diana described as ‘just sick’). More pertinently, the tapes demonstrated just why the Princess had always been the third wheel in their marriage. Amidst her husband’s self-absorption and fretfulness he mused that the whole reason for Camilla’s existence was to validate his own.

‘I’m so proud of you,’ he tells Camilla.

‘Don’t be silly, I’ve never achieved anything,’ she replies.

‘Your great achievement is to love me,’ Prince Charles answers.

In happier circumstances this could have been the Princess herself speaking.

As far as Diana was concerned, while Camillagate was traumatic it was also cathartic, and although she continued to keep track of Camilla’s relationship with her husband, she was no longer totally consumed by thoughts of their affair. ‘She had this torment going on in her head,’ said a close friend. ‘Now she doesn’t care where he is and she isn’t interested and she doesn’t want to know.’ She was now following the ups and downs of the liaison between Camilla and Charles with a kind of disinterested fascination, at times even feeling sorry for Camilla, who had waited so long for her prince who still couldn’t make up his mind about their future together.

Diana felt a little sympathy for her husband too, conscious as she explored her own background in therapy, that his own bleak upbringing had made him the man he was. He had a ‘tricky, very tricky’ relationship with his father. ‘He has to sort out his childhood before he can sort himself out,’ Diana said to a friend. Likewise, as she began to make more public speeches, she began to appreciate the frustrations her husband felt when the press ignored or discarded his words for a picture of her on a shopping trip. ‘He
is so unhappy, he is suicidal,’ she said to Penny Thornton. ‘He has such a struggle that he cannot be taken seriously, he gets really hurt by it and I now understand.’ She herself was so furious when a speech she made to the Red Cross in 1993 was only lightly reported that she tore up a note of explanation from Dickie Arbiter. Even though Arbiter was suspected of being a double agent by both sides because until December 1993 he was working as press secretary for both the Prince and the Princess, he later felt that the relentless war between what Diana called the A team (her side) and the B team (Charles’s side) did scale down after the separation: ‘I think she grew up. The Princess felt a weight had been taken off her shoulders. She was able to lead a life without living a lie, and could do her own thing.’

It was something of an illusion. If not quite all-out war, their armistice had the complexity of an armed truce, mutual suspicion punctuated by sporadic outbreaks of fighting. Both sides had their offices swept for listening devices, the Prince and his acolytes convinced that ‘her side’ were listening to their telephone conversations. Every move was watched with a doubtful beady eye. In November 1993, a month before she announced her decision to retire from public life, for example, Diana had an uncomfortable meeting with her husband who was irritated and fearful that he would catch the flak for her decision. He had, after all, told his circle that he wanted her ‘completely removed from public life’. ‘Charles has been whingeing that he wants the stage for his own; now he’s got it. I’m going to find my own,’ Diana told James Colthurst.

Prince Charles’s decision, early in 1992, to allow the television broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to write his biography, and to make a two-hour ITV television documentary to accompany it, revealed the intricacy of the couple’s relationship. Diana at once began fretting that he was making a ‘huge mistake’, worried that the programme would seriously undermine her position and concerned about the possible effect on the boys. This was somewhat disingenuous given her collaboration in
Diana: Her True Story
. But while her involvement with my book was still effectively camouflaged, she believed the documentary would carry greater
weight as Prince Charles was very publicly involved. For two years the documentary loomed large in her life, her conversations with friends peppered with references to Dimbleby. She was worried that the film, ostensibly to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of her husband’s investiture as the Prince of Wales, would tarnish her reputation and would somehow be to the Prince’s advantage in any negotiations surrounding their marriage.

Before the broadcast Patrick Jephson organized a lunch between the broadcaster and the Princess in the ‘mischievous’ hope that Dimbleby would see the ‘real’ Diana as opposed to the Diana in the stories relayed to him by Charles’s circle. ‘It was my intention to show him that large parts of it were demonstrably false or at least incomplete,’ Jephson wrote in
Shadows of a Princess
. After the lunch Dimbleby wore the dazed look of so many middle-aged men, from newspaper editors to senior politicians, upon whom the Princess had turned her charm. Her magic had worked. Dimbleby departed saying to her private secretary something to the effect that he now doubted the stories he’d been told by the Prince’s side (a contention that Dimbleby has since denied).

While the Princess was often accused of manipulating the media, during this entire episode she deliberately kept a low profile so as to leave the field open for her husband. At the time she was being courted assiduously by the veteran American broadcaster Barbara Walters, as well as by the talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, both of whom Diana eventually invited to lunch at Kensington Palace. She turned down their requests for face-to-face interviews as she did, reluctantly, when ITV producer Mike Brennan discussed an hour-long documentary about her charity work. ‘It was the right pitch at the wrong time,’ commented Brennan. ‘It didn’t help that the Palace continually tried to shunt the project into a siding.’ That year, 1994, the Princess argued, was Charles’s year.

On the night of the historic broadcast, 29 June 1994, the Princess, far from thinking of scoring points over her husband, was a bundle of nerves. She had a long-standing engagement to attend a dinner at the Serpentine Gallery of which she was patron, but would have much preferred to spend the evening on her own inside the four walls of Kensington Palace. ‘How am I going to
get through tonight?’ she asked James Colthurst plaintively. Everything seemed to conspire against her. To her irritation the couturiers Valentino prematurely announced to the world that she would be wearing one of their gowns, so at the last minute she decided to wear something else and picked a flirty little number by Christina Stambolian. (This dress led to accusations from some commentators that she was seeking to upstage the programme about her husband.)

As the Princess strode confidently across the courtyard to shake the hand of her friend Lord Palumbo, few realized the effort of will she was making. In the event, the TV documentary, which in fact focused on the Prince’s working life, was to be remembered only for his confession that he committed adultery and, subsequently, for initiating a debate about his fitness to be king. According to Dickie Arbiter, ‘The programme was a complete whinge, a terrible own goal that not just affected relations between the Prince and Princess, but between St James’s Palace and Buckingham Palace.’

Even though the media praised Diana’s poise while heaping opprobrium on the Prince’s head, there was little satisfaction in her triumph. She witnessed the fallout the very next day when she visited her boys at Ludgrove School and William, referring to the lurid headlines, asked her, ‘Is it true that Daddy never loved you?’ While she explained the statement away as best she could, she felt sufficiently aggrieved to write to Prince Charles’s solicitors complaining about the programme’s effect on the children.

It was noticeable that while Diana had a golden opportunity to drive home her advantage, she chose to blame the Prince’s advisers, notably his private secretary Richard Aylard, for the débâcle rather than her estranged husband. Her magnanimous behaviour was part of a wider perception of a rapprochement between them, sustained by the mixed signals she gave out. She began to speak more favourably about his role as a father – although she and the boys were distinctly unimpressed when he kept them waiting two hours for a family picnic on Sports Day at Ludgrove School in June 1995. One of her friends, the motherly restaurateur Mara Berni, sincerely believed that Diana remained passionate about the Prince
and wanted to effect a reconciliation, dreaming of the day he would come back on bended knee. And on several occasions James Colthurst asked her how she would react if Prince Charles threw his arms around her and told her how well she had done. ‘I would be absolutely shaken and would forgive him,’ was her reply.

These were romantic visions, however, and nothing more.

As a close friend, with whom the Princess often discussed her true feelings for Prince Charles told me, ‘The idea that she was still in love with him was never a plausible scenario. She was humiliated, ashamed, furious and hurt. Anybody in that situation wants the other person to see the light, but it is not the same as loving them. She felt contempt, sorrow and disappointment.’ She only had to think for a moment that this was still the same man who took his own wooden Victorian toilet seat, towels and lavatory paper when he visited friends, and sent memos to hosts about the size and thickness of the sandwiches he required. Even his father, Prince Philip, according to one officially sanctioned biography,
Elizabeth: The Woman and the Queen
by Graham Turner, regarded him as ‘precious and extravagant’. ‘She loved him in an abstract sense but didn’t want to live with him,’ commented one of Diana’s confidantes.

For all the profound differences between the Prince and Princess of Wales, their relations did thaw somewhat where their children were concerned. Even their staff were amazed by the civilized and composed way they arranged the times and dates to see the boys, occasions which were set in stone in their respective diaries. Given the high stakes and her own experience, it took real will-power for Diana to stay on an even keel. On the one hand, she wanted the boys never to feel the guilt or sense of responsibility that she, as a youngster, had experienced over her own parents’ divorce; she was also acutely aware of her mother’s searing experience when she had set her face against Established society. On the other hand, she realized that this was no ordinary divorce battle. Unlike a normal break-up, Diana’s children were both her shield against her enemies, within and without the royal family, and her passport to achieving her wider ambitions. She knew that, as the mother of the future king, she could not be as easily marginalized
as was the Duchess of York, whose daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, were distant from the line of succession. As well as defining her own status, the Princess was utterly conscious of her responsibilities regarding their upbringing. She spoke often and seriously about her role when she was with her former detective, Ken Wharfe. ‘The Princess believed that the preparation of William, and to a lesser extent Harry, for their public roles was her primary duty. She said repeatedly that the boys should be fully aware of what was expected of them but that they should also be allowed to develop as young men.’ Whenever she dreamed of living in a far-off land, she knew in her heart she had to stay at home for the sake of her sons. ‘I do whatever is best for my children,’ she would say primly.

Understandably, where the boys were concerned, the climate could quickly change from thaw to frost, the Princess both jealously guarding their affection and protective of their well-being. Small matters took on a significance that outsiders found difficult to appreciate. So for example when Prince Charles’s valet, Michael Fawcett, arranged the outfitting of the boys at his preferred West End tailors, the Princess’s hackles rose. She was deeply suspicious of this powerful figure who had, as she saw it, an unhealthy influence over her husband. She felt that Fawcett, who could make or break a royal career with a well-chosen word in his master’s ear, was now extending his considerable influence to include her sons, a suspicion confirmed when his understudy, Clive Allen, was appointed part-time valet to Prince William.

While Fawcett’s interference was bad enough, the appointment of a nanny to look after the boys when they were staying with their father, common sense though it was, was deeply hurtful to her and made her bitterly resentful.

For, whatever the gloss and goodwill, the boys were at the epicentre of their struggle. The Princess sincerely and consistently believed that the man she had married, loved and lived with was not a suitable candidate for the throne. She felt that the crown should skip a generation and go directly to Prince William, the living embodiment, as she saw it, of her legacy and testament to her life. It was a view she expressed time and again in private.
‘I am absolutely determined to see William succeed the Queen. I just don’t think Charles should do it,’ she told Max Hastings, a view she reiterated, if somewhat hesitantly, when she made her historic appearance on
Panorama
in November 1995. ‘Because I know the character, I would think that the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him and I don’t know whether he could adapt to that,’ she told the BBC’s presenter, Martin Bashir. Inevitably, the interview, which sent shock waves along the red-carpeted corridors of the royal palaces, was seen as a stinging riposte to Prince Charles’s documentary of the year before. But as remarked before, and as with so much in the Princess’s world, nothing in Dianaland was ever quite as it seemed.