Prince William (10 page)

This nurturing environment is particularly valuable when home life is volatile. As Simon explains, ‘The continuity offers wonderful stability for the few from broken homes. They know where they are, they come back every Sunday with everybody else. They haven't got the concern about what's going on at home because they can immerse themselves in what's going on here. It can be easier to be here than at home with all the anguish.'

It was, as one child remarked, ‘Like having a giant sleepover.'

There is certainly no shortage of fun things to do. The school has a nine-hole golf course, cricket pitches and practice nets, football pitches, squash courts, Eton fives courts, four tennis courts and a swimming pool. There is a music block, a sports hall, and the old milking parlour houses ceramics, art and carpentry. The pupils make camps and dens in the woods, and in the summer sleep out occasionally on the golf course and have sing-songs around the camp fire. For budding horticulturalists, there are little plots where each boy can grow his own flowers or vegetables. And to remind the boys that there is a world outside, newspapers are delivered daily and current affairs discussed every morning with a test every Saturday. There were many occasions during those years when the Barbers had to pretend the papers hadn't been delivered – they didn't want William to see the stories of Charles and Diana's failing marriage that filled the front pages.

One memorable story involved William himself. A group of boys had been playing around on the putting green when one of them swung his club and accidentally hit William on the head. He was briefly concussed and, according to one of the boys, he fell to the ground with blood pouring from a gash in his head. His detective went into a spin. The last bit of the story is certainly true. The school nurse carried William to the main building and planned to take him to the sanatorium and send for the doctor. His PPO stepped in and insisted that an ambulance be called, which it duly was, and William was taken to the local Accident and Emergency Department at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. Diana was having lunch at San Lorenzo, one of her favourite restaurants
in London, when she heard the news; Charles was at Highgrove and said of that moment, ‘My heart went cold.' Both of them dashed down the motorway to meet at the hospital. By the time they arrived, William was sitting up in bed looking one hundred per cent. ‘He was chatting away,' said Charles. ‘Then I knew he was going to be all right.'

The doctors, however, were more guarded, and decided to transfer him to a special brain unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Diana travelled with William in the ambulance; Charles followed in his Aston Martin, which his mother had given him as a twenty-first birthday present and which William borrowed on the day of his wedding.

Tests showed that William had a depressed fracture of the skull, and later that evening he had an operation to relieve the pressure on his brain and to check for bone splinters. Diana stayed at the hospital and held his hand as he went under the general anaesthetic. Charles, having been assured by the surgeons that there was no need for him to stay, went to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden where he hosted a group of visitors from the European Commission in Brussels. It was a long-standing engagement and he felt, given the surgeon's assurances, it was unnecessary to cancel.

The press didn't see it that way, and Charles was roundly condemned as an uncaring father, while Diana was the saintly mother. To make matters worse, her friend James Gilbey, of whom more anon, let it be known that Diana thought Charles was a bad and selfish father who would give up nothing for his children.

A VERY PUBLIC WAR

The golf club incident was not the only occasion when William found himself in the middle of a marital game of one-upmanship. And it was no coincidence that the public were firmly of the view that Diana was a model mother and Charles a cold and absent father, out of touch with the modern world.

When the boys were with their mother, they were photographed having fun, hurtling down water shoots at funfairs, laughing and looking like ordinary little boys. When their father was in the picture, they were more likely to be looking immaculate in suits and ties at family gatherings, with the Queen and Queen Mother, attending church services or the traditional New Year pheasant shoots. Diana was also seen as the one introducing the boys to the thrill of skiing, knowing when she booked the holiday and alerted the press that Charles would be otherwise engaged.

Both Charles and Diana were avid skiers and he had promised the boys he would take them. He was looking forward to watching them put on their skis for the first time and discover the excitement of the mountains. But there was a disagreement about where to take them. Charles wanted them all to go to Klosters in Switzerland. It was his favourite resort, but it had been the scene of a tragic accident three years earlier when his friend Major Hugh Lindsay was killed by an avalanche that narrowly missed the Prince and badly injured Patti Palmer-Tomkinson. Diana, understandably, didn't want to go back to a place filled with such terrible memories. Without resolving the impasse, she quietly booked a holiday for herself and the boys, with a few other friends,
in the pretty Austrian resort of Lech during William's half-term in March 1991. The dates clashed with a large shooting party Charles had arranged at Sandringham and he couldn't let down his friends at short notice.

This was not the only time she made plans for the children or changed pre-existing plans. As Patrick Jephson, her Private Secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir,
Shadows of a Princess
, William and Harry's ‘theoretical potential as pawns in the Waleses' game of rivalry was loudly decried on all sides, but it did not stop it happening. The Prince was perhaps slow to recognise the value of being seen to be introducing the boys onto the public stage – or, more likely, he jealously guarded their privacy. His wife, on the other hand, suffered few such inhibitions …'

William's first official public appearance was a prime example. There had been no discussion in advance and no agreement that William would be taken out of school on St David's Day, 1 March 1991, and flown to Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, to attend a service in Llandaff Cathedral. Indeed, the agreement between them was that the children would not be made to undertake public engagements until they were older. But without telling anyone in the Prince's office, Diana quietly organised it.

It would have been a political and public relations disaster for the Prince of Wales's eldest son (and in all probability, the future Prince of Wales) to make his first visit to the principality without his father, yet it was by sheer chance that his Private Secretary discovered the Princess's arrangement. Luckily he was able to reschedule the Prince's day so that it looked like a family outing.

A far greater disaster was looming, which was to upset William more than anything so far and was the beginning of a series of acutely difficult years. During the summer of 1991, when he turned nine, Diana embarked on her life story. Speaking into a tape recorder at Kensington Palace – which found its way, via an intermediary, to the journalist Andrew Morton – she described her marriage. After ten years she wanted the world to know just how unhappy she was, and she wanted the world to know why. The
result was an explosive book which took the Prince and his staff completely by surprise and was as damaging to him, the Queen and the institution of monarchy, as it was hurtful and humiliating.

In the weeks before publication in June 1992,
Diana: Her True Story
was serialised in the
Sunday Times
. The first instalment appeared under the headline, ‘Diana driven to five suicide bids by “uncaring” Charles.' It went on to talk about her bulimia, her husband's indifference towards her, his obsession with his mistress, his shortcomings as a father, and the loneliness and isolation she had felt for so many years, trapped in a loveless marriage within a hostile court and a cold and disapproving Royal Family. The book had a compelling authority and many of the Princess's closest friends and family members were openly quoted and thanked in the acknowledgements. For example:‘James Gilbey explains: “She thinks he is a bad father, a selfish father, the children have to tie in with what he's doing. He will never delay, cancel or change anything which he has sorted out for their benefit. It's a reflection of the way he was brought up and it is history repeating itself. That's why she gets so sad when he is photographed riding with the children at Sandringham. When I spoke to her about it she was literally having to contain her anger because she thought the picture would represent the fact that he was a good father whereas she has the real story.”'

Diana swore she had not been involved, leading Robert Fellowes, the Queen's Private Secretary (also married to Diana's sister, Jane), to appeal to Lord McGregor, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, who issued a tough statement condemning the serialisation as an ‘odious exhibition of journalists dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people's souls in a manner which adds nothing to the legitimate public interest in the situation of the heir to the throne'.

Diana's response was to visit Carolyn Bartholomew, one of the most quoted sources in the book, after first ensuring the press cameras would be there, and put on a very public display of affection for her old flatmate. Robert Fellowes immediately offered his resignation but the Queen refused it.

Several people already suspected Diana was the principal source. Patrick Jephson, for one, had been puzzled by a conversation just before publication when she had asked him whether the charity Turning Point might be able to cope with a sudden donation of some tens of thousands of pounds (her share of the spoils), but he didn't know for sure and his loyalty was to his boss. Also, some obviously well-sourced stories had been appearing in the
Sunday Times
, such as the dismissal of Sir Christopher Airy as Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. Airy had been selected to take over from Sir John Riddell in 1990 but had not been a success. His end came at Highgrove one afternoon when Diana was at the house, and she was one of a handful of people who could have known what happened. When the story ran, the Prince's office was a very unhappy place, with no one knowing who they could trust as various leaked stories appeared in other newspapers.

What puzzled them most was that much of the book was accurate in many respects. There were stories that only Diana and very few others could have known about, and memos leaked that nobody else could have seen. But most of the stories had a spin, which made them not quite as anyone else present remembered.

For example, there was a memo which, according to Morton, Richard Aylard (who took over as Private Secretary when Airy left) had written to the Prince of Wales following the public condemnation of his behaviour when William cracked his skull, encouraging him to be seen in public more frequently with his children. ‘At the conclusion of his missive,' said Morton, ‘he [Aylard] heavily underlined in red ink and printed in bold capitals a single word: “TRY”.'

What really happened was that the Prince had sent Aylard a memo saying William and Harry wanted to do a few things with their father and could Aylard please look in the diary and pick out a few engagements that would be suitable for the boys. Aylard wrote back with three or four suggestions, including a trip to a naval ship, and said that the next step was to speak to the Princess to make sure she was happy with the plans. It would be best, wrote
Aylard, if the Prince could speak to her about it himself. Failing that, he would speak to Patrick Jephson. Charles sent the memo back, annotated in red pen – and he was the only person in the office allowed to use red ink. Against the suggestion that he should speak to his wife, he wrote ‘I will TRY!'

Charles kept a dignified silence, even when he knew for certain that Diana had been involved in the book. He didn't attempt to defend himself or correct the facts. Despite all the years of provocation, he has never publicly criticised Diana. His friends were itching to weigh in on his behalf but he was adamant he wanted none of them to get involved. Some did as he asked, others couldn't bear the sense of injustice. The War of the Waleses was under way and the newspapers delighted in it as their circulations rose, particularly those Diana was personally briefing. She was a master tactician, oblivious, or so it seemed, to the effect it had on her children, particularly on William, who was old enough to take in what was going on.

There was only so much the Barbers could shield William and Harry from, but the boys at Ludgrove did what they do best when their friends were in trouble: they formed a loyal and protective ring around them and kept their minds on other things.

ONE TAPE AFTER ANOTHER

No one imagined that things could get any worse after Morton's book but in just a matter of months the
Sun
newspaper published the transcript of a flirtatious thirty-minute telephone conversation between Diana and James Gilbey. It was rapidly picked up by every other newspaper and media outlet, and the particularly prurient could dial a
Sun
telephone hotline and for 36p a minute, hear the tape for themselves. He called her ‘Darling' fourteen times, and ‘Squidgy' or ‘Squidge' fifty-three times, which led to the scandal being dubbed ‘Squidgygate'. Amongst the endearments Diana talked about how her husband made her life ‘real, real torture', and described a lunch at which the Queen Mother had given her a strange look. ‘It's not hatred, it's sort of interest and pity … I was very bad at lunch and I nearly started blubbing. I just felt really sad and empty and thought, Bloody hell, after all I've done for this fucking family.'

After her sense of triumph with the book (although she did later say she regretted having done it), this was less welcome. However, according to her PPO, Ken Wharf, ‘Diana raised the subject with me in a fairly light-hearted way – the fact that it had reached the front page of a national tabloid newspaper.' She had even listened to the tapes on the
Sun
's hotline. ‘When I asked if it was her, she said, of course it was.' Charles, the boys and the Queen were less amused, and the institution was again brought into disrepute. The recording had been made late at night on New Year's Eve in 1989 when Diana was on a landline at Sandringham and Gilbey in a car parked in Oxfordshire. A radio ham in Oxford picked it up, but
it was always thought the recording might initially have come from GCHQ, MI5's listening post in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.