Diana: In Pursuit of Love (7 page)

Diana was not the only one considering a future life free of royal constraints. During the summer and autumn of 1991, the Duchess of York was continually beseeching her sister-in-law to jump ship
with her. Not only did her unhappiness encourage further instability in Diana’s marriage, editorially it pushed us to produce the book as quickly as possible. So nervous were we of Fergie’s unbridled influence that publication was brought forward from September, the traditional date for potential bestsellers, to June 1992. The warning signals were coming thick and fast. Just before Christmas 1991 we heard that a very well informed individual had placed a £500,000 bet on the Waleses’ marriage not lasting a year; and in the same month Fergie, who was secretly seeing her lover Steve Wyatt in Texas, asked Diana if she could look after her children, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice when she left the royal family.

Diana was becoming increasingly anxious as she waited for her book to be completed, worried that in the PR war with her husband and the Palace, the enemy were gaining advantage. In late February 1992 she was appalled when a book entitled
Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows
by Lady Colin Campbell was serialized in Britain’s bestselling tabloid, the
Sun
. The book took the view that if there was a problem with the Waleses’ marriage, it was Diana. Worse, it hinted that Diana had romantic attachments to men other than her husband.

The Princess immediately passed on her fury to James Colthurst, who phoned me on the ‘scrambler’. I too was deeply concerned but, as I told James, there was little I could do – the only thing that could remove Lady Colin’s version of events from the front pages of the tabloids would be an even bigger royal story and there were none available (that is, not until my book arrived in June). Colthurst relayed this information to Diana, who to his astonishment instantly provided the blockbuster story we required. She had recently learned that Fergie had visited the Queen to talk about a separation from Prince Andrew; after much discussion the Queen had agreed that a separation was the best option in the circumstances.

When Colthurst passed the story on to me I was dumbfounded. I had not dreamed for a minute that a royal scoop to blow away Lady Colin’s account could ever materialize – but here it was in spades. I duly wrote the front-page story for the
Daily Mail
, which the
Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, later described as ‘inch-perfect’. As we had nail-bitingly hoped, Lady Colin Campbell’s anti-Diana stories were submerged by the new feeding frenzy in the tabloids.

Our main objective, however, was to ensure that the book measured up to Anson’s assessment of the article – that it reflected Diana’s life, both in words and in pictures, as accurately as possible.

As she had promised, in November 1991 the Princess supplied us with several large, red family albums together with a selection of photographs taken by Patrick Demarchelier, which she pulled from a desk drawer in her sitting room. From time to time, however, Diana would get cold feet about the project. For a long while there was a debate between Kensington Palace and the publisher about the proposed title. We thought ‘
Diana: Her True Story
’ the only possible choice, as the book told the story very much from her point of view; Diana, though, nervous that the choice of title would hint at her involvement, wanted it to be called ‘
The True Story
’. Eventually, she was persuaded that her choice, in the circumstances, would have been misleading – but only after she had been secretly shown mock-up covers of the book featuring both versions of the title. She even changed the jacket blurb saying that her wedding day was not, as she had alleged previously, the ‘worst day’ of her life but the most ‘emotionally confusing’.

As each chapter was written, Colthurst would deliver it to the Princess to read; when he was on holiday I cycled, on a Saturday morning, to the Brazilian Embassy, where Diana was seeing her friend, the Ambassador’s wife Lucia Flecha de Lima, to drop off a chapter. She admitted to finding herself by turns moved by her own story and anxious about its content, occasionally deleting material that she thought would implicate her. In fact, many of Diana’s deletions concerned other people or material already in the public domain – a comment to Sarah Ferguson during her first engagement on board HMS
Brazen
to see Prince Andrew; her sister Sarah’s anorexia nervosa, and stories about Camilla Parker Bowles (the deletion of which would have undercut Diana’s case against Camilla) – and once James had pointed this out she agreed to reinstate the material. Time and again, the Princess returned to
the driving imperative behind the book – to allow her voice to be heard clearly.

It was a theme she articulated in a letter she drafted to her father, Earl Spencer, a few days before his final fatal illness in March 1992. In the short note she talked about her involvement with the book and tried to explain her reasons for cooperating so fully. She wrote:

It is a chance for my own self to surface a little rather than be lost in the system. I rather see it as a lifebelt against being drowned and it is terribly important to me . . .

For a few weeks in February 1992, as the final manuscript was being prepared, it looked as though the book would surface with a whimper rather than a bang. Serialization was crucial and both the newspapers we approached, the
Daily Mail
and the
Sunday Times
, turned it down. When Michael O’Mara approached the editor of the
Sunday Times
, Andrew Neil, and briefed him on the book’s contents, Neil’s response was: ‘I think it would be better off in a tabloid.’ In spite of all O’Mara’s arguments, Neil turned the book down out of hand, making it clear that he was simply not interested in serializing royal books. While he ran royal stories, at that time usually written by me, he was still sore about having serialized a previous royal book of mine, a frothy lifestyle tome about the Princess of Wales called
Diana’s Diary
. He had been criticized by both senior editorial executives and some readers for serializing a lightweight book in a heavyweight newspaper and he was not prepared to go down that road again. At the time his judgement was backed by his paper’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch. The outlook was bleak; we needed a reputable newspaper backing the book, otherwise it might easily be dismissed as tittle-tattle and hearsay. In the last throw of the dice, I had a word with Diana’s friend Angela Serota and asked her if she would speak to her friend, and Andrew Neil’s boss, Andrew Knight, chief executive of News International, which owns the
Sunday Times
, and assure him that the book was authentic and came with Diana’s approval.

The last-ditch appeal worked. Just a few hours later, O’Mara received a phone call from Sue Douglas, executive editor of the
Sunday Times
, saying that they were now very interested in looking at the book. She arrived soon after at O’Mara’s office and, after reading the manuscript, made it clear that the paper would like to serialize the book. Within a matter of days a deal was done. Andrew Neil, the man who initially rejected the book, became its staunchest defender, effectively laying his job on the line to support it. However, as the weeks ticked by and speculation about the book’s contents reached fever pitch, even the notoriously pugnacious Andrew Neil began to appreciate the enormity of what he was about to do, realizing that if the individuals who had spoken to me during the course of my research for the book did not stand by their statements he would have to resign. In late May, a few days before serialization was due to begin, he called O’Mara and me into his office at Wapping, in London’s East End, and asked us to provide signed statements from the book’s main witnesses. This we duly did. We had a reciprocal request to make of him: Diana had complained that she had heard that Murdoch himself was gossiping about the contents of the book, which were then secret, at New York dinner parties. This was a cause for considerable concern and we now formally asked Neil if he could prevail upon his boss to keep quiet.

The prospect of Rupert Murdoch himself blowing the gaffe did little to calm Diana’s nerves and she had to have her hand held by the sisterhood, notably Carolyn Bartholomew, Angela Serota and her healer Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, who independently reassured her that the book would, despite the coming upheaval, ultimately be a positive force in her life.

As well as talking to her friends, the Princess was making her own internal preparations for the coming storm. Towards the end, a week before serialization began, she arranged a meeting with the Queen to discuss the possibility of having her own home, staff and money, made independent from the Prince of Wales. In conversations with James Colthurst, the Princess made it clear that the Queen was aware of the problems in her marriage, and had indicated that, if the couple were so unhappy, she felt that there was no reason why the Prince and Princess should be artificially pushed together.

For his part, Prince Charles had already discussed the prospect of a royal separation with the august lawyer, Lord Goodman. While these behind-the-scene manoeuvres were taking place, on the surface, in the face of the mounting flurry of media speculation, the Prince of Wales’s supporters were trying to downplay the book’s potentially explosive contents. When Prince Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard briefed journalists, he told them dismissively: ‘You know Morton – a bit of insight, a bit of invention and the colour of the tablecloth.’

An unguarded comment by Andrew Neil on
Sky News
gave an indication that domestic furnishings did not form a part of
this
royal narrative. A couple of days before the book was serialized for the first time, Neil mentioned that Diana thought that she would never be Queen. Next day it was splashed across two pages of the
Sun
newspaper.

This, however, was nothing compared to when the first extract appeared in the
Sunday Times
on 7 June 1992. The front-page story carried the headline: ‘Diana driven to five suicide bids by “uncaring” Charles’. Underneath was the sub-heading: ‘Marriage collapse led to illness; Princess says she will not be Queen’. It is hard now, some twelve years later, when the narrative of her unhappy life has been accepted as conventional wisdom, to convey the shock, disgust and astonishment that greeted that first instalment. The criticism came from all sectors of society and was severe and unrelenting. I, as the author, suddenly became an object of hatred – to the extent that when I appeared on
This Morning
, hosted by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, in Liverpool one morning in June 1992, security guards patrolled the roof of the building, the car park next door was evacuated, and a helicopter flew me away from the studio because they feared some crazed attempt to attack, even kill, me. A tad extreme, but indicative of the public mood.

Hours before the first serialization appeared in the
Sunday Times,
Rupert Murdoch phoned Andrew Neil from New York to warn him of the coming onslaught from the Establishment. ‘They will try to destroy you,’ he said. ‘Be careful; they are not nice people and you are about to become their number-one enemy.’ He was proved to be absolutely right – the snobbery, class divisions and
instinctive deference to Britain’s ruling elite all came to the fore in the days and weeks following the book’s publication.

The Archbishop of Canterbury warned about the damage to the boys; the Labour politician Peter Mandelson complained that the book was ‘scurrilous’ and that there were ‘no longer any boundaries between fact and fiction’. The former Arts Minister Richard Luce said that the book went beyond the pale of decency and could only serve to undermine the monarchy, while his Tory colleague Sir Nicholas Fairbairn was rather pithier, saying that I should be put in the Tower of London. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who was editor of the
Sunday Telegraph
from 1986 to 1989, declared that Andrew Neil ought to be horsewhipped for serializing the book. Indeed, the media – which in a free society should by its very nature believe in disclosure rather than censorship – were the most damning in their criticism. The
Sunday Telegraph
’s editor Charles Moore said on BBC’s
Newsnight
that journalists should use ‘hypocrisy and concealment’ when writing about the royal family, while Max Hastings, then editor of the
Daily Telegraph
and since knighted, told listeners to
Today
, BBC Radio Four’s flagship morning current-affairs programme, that I was not fit to play a piano in a brothel, dismissing the story as ‘a deluge of rubbish and a farrago of invention’ that lacked a ‘single reliable fact’.

In the rush to condemn, supercilious book reviewers exposed their own class prejudices: Hugh Montgomery Massingberd dismissed me as a ‘tabloid vulgarian from Leeds’, old Etonian Philip Ziegler called me a ‘little hack’ and Lady Longford described the book as ‘Crawfie [the Queen’s former nanny who wrote an anodyne account of royal nursery life] with strychnine’. Even the
Sunday Times
’s sister paper,
The Times
, was unconvinced about the veracity of the book. Its headline ‘Royal book serial provokes distaste’ made clear its disapproval.

During the days that followed, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Lord McGregor, accused the media of an ‘odious exhibition’ and of ‘dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’, although his complaint was not directed at the book. If anything, the reaction to the book’s serialization was proof positive of what Diana had been up against all her adult life.

In the ensuing furore the book was banned by Harrods, major bookshops such as Hatchards in London and James Thin in Edinburgh, supermarkets such as Tesco, and various independent bookshops throughout Britain. ‘We are not stocking that book and we never will,’ declared Philip Foster, owner of a bookstore in Tetbury, near the Waleses’ country home. It is one of the ironies of this whole affair that a biography written and produced with the enthusiastic cooperation of its subject should be piously boycotted on the grounds that it was believed to give an entirely false account of its subject’s life. It became the most banned book in Britain of the 1990s. Even to produce it and bring it into Britain had involved something of an undercover operation. As British printers were nervous about printing the book, it was in the end produced in the far north of Finland and the first consignment was brought into Britain inside a truck also carrying confectionery.