Diana: In Pursuit of Love (25 page)

If the Princess came to see Fawcett as the fourth wheel in her marriage, once she and her husband had separated, and Fawcett, of course, had remained firmly by Prince Charles’s side, she clearly felt that she need not make any show of friendliness towards him. After he had come to collect the Prince’s personal effects from Kensington Palace, Diana apparently ordered the locks to be changed. As a former member of her staff, who regarded Fawcett as an ‘affable and charming character’, told me, ‘She didn’t trust him. She knew that everything she said would go back to the Prince.’

While the Princess was irked by Fawcett’s power over the Prince’s household and distrusted him deeply, she resented him less than she did Alexandra ‘Tiggy’ Legge-Bourke, daughter of a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Royal, who was appointed as nanny and companion for the boys. It was Tiggy’s job to entertain William and Harry and organize diversions for them when they stayed with
their father, but Diana saw things differently, feeling that Tiggy was usurping her most treasured and valued role, as the boys’ mother. Certainly, staff at Kensington Palace knew they were in for a bad day if there was a flattering photograph of Tiggy in the newspapers. A picture of Charles embracing Tiggy at Harry’s school, stories about how she had lost weight to please the Prince, her admission that, like Diana, she had nurtured a schoolgirl crush on the heir to the throne, and unguarded comments from her that the boys saw her as a surrogate mother, set tongues wagging and Diana’s imagination racing. According to a friend of Tiggy’s, quoted in the
Sunday Times
in January 1996, Tiggy, who grew up on a 6,000-acre estate in Wales, claimed that she gave the princes ‘what they need at this stage – fresh air, a rifle and a horse. [Diana] gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’

The Princess was so sensitive to Tiggy’s involvement in her sons’ lives that she sent a note to her husband asking him to clarify the scope and extent of her duties. Staff at Kensington Palace knew that the trickiest phone call of the day was when Tiggy rang with details of the boys’ movements. As the Princess refused to speak to her, Paul Burrell had to relay messages back and forth.

Undoubtedly, Tiggy’s involvement with her children triggered profound feelings of insecurity in Diana, making her feel vulnerable and cornered. Over the years, her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, had seen her behaviour pattern at close quarters and observed that, ‘As always, when forced on to the defensive, the Princess protected herself by lashing out. It mattered very little who was in the firing line.’

This was the scarred, suspicious landscape inhabited by the Princess, a bipolar world where she was celebrated one minute, consumed by plots the next; her home both a refuge and an open prison, into which male friends had to be smuggled to avoid prying eyes.

It had become a fact of her royal life, the climate becoming more malignant before the separation as Charles and Diana were consumed by the war of the Waleses. When they parted in 1992, their antagonism was recast in a different form, Diana’s qualms and
concerns fed by the fact that there were now officially two separate camps. From the autumn of 1995 there was a distinct transformation in her behaviour. Even though, as discussed in the previous chapter, she occupied the moral high ground in relation to Prince Charles, enjoyed a consensus of support inside and outside the Palace, was expertly exercising her dominion on the world stage and, after meeting Hasnat Khan, seemed to have found the love of her life, she was a woman living in fear.

Before the year was out, she genuinely believed that her life was in danger – so much so that she considered fleeing the country for safety and sanctuary in America. Patrick Jephson saw at first hand drastic changes in the Princess’s demeanour. ‘Her paranoia had reached new heights,’ he wrote of this desperate time in the autumn of 1995. ‘She saw plots everywhere.’

Diana was obsessed by the conviction that her apartment was bugged; she claimed to Jephson that an unknown and unseen assailant had fired a random shot at her in Hyde Park in broad daylight, and she suspected that the brake linings of her car had been tampered with at the behest of Prince Charles. Eventually she wrote a letter as ‘insurance’ to that effect. Most grotesquely, the Princess made a remark in public to Tiggy Legge-Bourke that implied that the nanny had had an abortion and furthermore that the baby had been Prince Charles’s. It was a wholly unfounded and deeply hurtful allegation.

At the time Jephson thought that Diana must be going mad, her fears the figments of an overheated imagination. Either that, he wrote in the
Evening Standard
in January 2004, or by voicing these fears and assessing if he was taking them seriously, she was setting him the most twisted of ‘loyalty tests’ at a time when he was considering resigning. Yet, even with the benefit of hindsight, he now admitted that he could think of few examples of paranoid, even irrational, behaviour from her during the eight years he was by her side.

Since her death, the critical few months before she recorded her famous BBC interview in November 1995 have served to redefine her in the popular imagination as a tragic if unstable combination of drama queen and mentally flawed princess. This view played
into the hands of those, mostly Prince Charles’s supporters, who have always argued that she was beautiful but bonkers.

So was she mad or did she have evidence from credible sources to back up her allegations? The short but surprising answer is that she believed she had compelling proof, which she had, in the circumstances, to take seriously. Throughout 1995 she had been hearing all kinds of rumours about Prince Charles’s relationship with Tiggy Legge-Bourke and had for some months believed that her estranged husband had loosened his ties with his long-time mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, and was now intimate with the boys’ nanny. Emotionally, Diana was not particularly perturbed by this turn of events. As friends to whom she confided her thoughts told me, ‘She was more curious than hurt. She genuinely thought that she was having an affair with Prince Charles and that Tiggy occupied a place once held by Camilla. She had “known” about this for a long time. At this time in her life she was no longer obsessed by Camilla, so it was more a case of sniggering about it than worrying about what to do next.’ If anything, Diana was more bothered about the impact on her children than on her husband, or for that matter herself.

None the less, it niggled, worming away at her sense of place and security. Hints and allusions in the media – which, for example, made much of an affectionate peck on the cheek on the ski slopes at Klosters, and at Sports Day at Prince Harry’s school in June 1995, as well as headlines like one in the
Mail on Sunday
: ‘Why do my teenage sons need a voluptuous young nanny to look after them?’ – invited the public, and the Princess, to read much more into the relationship than actually existed.

Newspaper tittle-tattle and unsubstantiated conjecture from within her circle was one thing, however – detailed information from credible sources outside the royal court was quite another.

During the summer and autumn of 1995, Diana was told by apparently reliable sources that Tiggy had twice seen her gynaecologist, which had resulted in two separate stays in hospital for medical procedures that autumn. It seems that the same reliable sources also led her to believe that Tiggy had undergone a termination. As the Princess thought that her estranged husband
and Tiggy were having an affair, she now accepted as fact that Tiggy had aborted Prince Charles’s baby. Trusting in the veracity of her sources, Diana approached Tiggy during a staff Christmas party at the Lanesborough Hotel in London, in December 1995, and made the now notorious remark: ‘So sorry to hear about the baby.’

Tiggy was so taken aback by this vindictive utterance that she had to be helped from the room by Charles’s valet, Michael Fawcett. Later her solicitor wrote to Diana’s lawyers demanding a retraction of the ‘false allegations’. The horrified consensus of opinion was articulated by royal biographer Brian Hoey: ‘She is showing signs of paranoia. This is very, very nasty.’

An internal inquiry into the matter, undertaken by the Queen’s private secretary Sir Robert Fellowes, confirmed the accuracy of Diana’s source regarding Tiggy’s medical history – she had indeed seen her gynaecologist and gone to hospital during the period in question – but it was for ‘women’s problems’ rather than the malicious conclusion Diana had been led to believe. When Diana gave Sir Robert the specific date of the alleged abortion, he checked it to discover that on the day in question, Tiggy had been at Highgrove with the young princes. In a handwritten note, he urged Diana to withdraw her allegations saying that she had got the whole thing ‘dreadfully wrong’. Even so, it seems that Diana never did apologize.

Until Sir Robert’s intervention, however, the Princess sincerely believed the truth of the information she had been given. She felt that her husband was demeaning himself but she could understand it. Jaundiced as she was by Prince Charles’s behaviour, and contemptuous and suspicious of his court, nothing could have prepared Diana for the story she stumbled across in October and November 1995. This was the allegation made by a junior servant employed by Prince Charles that he had twice been raped by a member of Charles’s staff. More than that, he was to claim that he had encountered Prince Charles with a servant when he served him breakfast in his bedroom suite.

These seemingly preposterous allegations were made by an orderly in Prince Charles’s household called George Smith, when the Princess visited him in the private Priory clinic in south-west
London, where he was being treated for alcoholism. Diana, who often visited sick royal staff in hospital, had a soft spot for the former Welsh Guardsman whom she called Gorgeous George. Endlessly cheery and obliging, George Smith had fitted well into the royal household after he joined in 1987, his sunny disposition earning him the affection of the Princess of Wales and numerous members of staff, particularly the girls in the office. (Diana might have been less well disposed towards him had she known that her husband entrusted him with the organization of his clandestine meetings with Camilla.) Beneath the merry banter, though, Smith was a damaged character, severely traumatized by his experiences when he served in the Falklands conflict, and going through a particularly bitter divorce. A weak individual, he was easily manipulated and often drowned his troubles in drink. In November 1995, distressed and wayward, he voluntarily checked in to the Priory clinic, after a stay at the Prince’s Highgrove estate in late October had failed to ease his psychological problems.

As with other members of staff who had been taken ill – Vic Fletcher, the Yeoman of the Silver Pantry, Diana’s former bodyguard Graham Smith, who eventually succumbed to cancer, and even Charles’s former valet Ken Stronach, who had suffered spinal problems – Diana made it her business to visit Smith in hospital to cheer him up. ‘You will get over this – I have been through worse,’ she said, alluding to his alcoholism – and, presumably, her bulimia. There may have been another motive for her visit. Smith, who was in an extremely disturbed and distressed state, had made allegations about a senior member of Prince Charles’s staff to at least one other member of the royal household. So when she visited him at the Priory with her secretary Victoria Mendham, he spilled out a horrifying story. It appears that he told the Princess that the real reason for his change of character was that in 1989, and then again in 1995, a member of the Prince of Wales’s staff had raped him after plying him with drink. It is not clear whether at this first meeting he also confided an even more startling story – that he had witnessed an incident involving Prince Charlers and a servant as Smith prepared to serve breakfast. Certainly at subsequent meetings at Kensington Palace and his home in Twickenham, he
unburdened himself of this extraordinary, scarcely believable tale to the Princess who, according to Smith’s account, seemed ‘shocked’.

Although she tried to calm him, she left the clinic troubled and concerned about him, and even more worried about her own well-being. It seemed to her that she was gathering too many dangerous and damaging secrets for her own good. She was so alarmed that in early 1996 she made a tape recording of Smith’s allegations both as an insurance policy and as independent evidence of the seemingly debauched if unbelievable goings-on in the court of Prince Charles.

At this time, in October and November 1995, the Princess was, as Jephson observed, fearful of being watched and, ultimately, afraid for her safety. To her it seemed quite plausible that some attempt should be made on her life – perhaps by tampering with her car so that she might be involved in an accident. So when, that year, the Princess, according to Simone Simmons, had a minor accident in her car when her brakes failed while she was driving home from the Hale Clinic in Marylebone, she was understandably uneasy. While mechanics at her garage confirmed that the cause was simple mechanical failure, Diana was not convinced and took it to a different garage to be checked over.

In a letter that she apparently entrusted to her butler, Diana wrote of her suspicions of a plot to kill her:

I am sitting here at my desk today in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high. This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry.

The existence of this note and Prince Charles’s alleged involvement in any plot was only revealed after the inquest into Diana’s death was announced in January 2004. The letter was, claimed Paul Burrell, written in October 1996 – just ten months before her death – and given to him for safekeeping. There has been considerable debate about when the letter was written – friends suspect it was in October 1995 – for, by October 1996, Diana had left behind
the anxieties of previous years, and was facing different issues and challenges. ‘I saw her three times in October and each time she was in very good spirits and there was no great bitterness towards the Prince of Wales,’ Rosa Monckton declared, while Richard Kay bumped into her in a restaurant and described her as being in ‘sparkling form’ sitting joking with her mother.