Prince William (14 page)

Diana's relationship with her family was as volatile as with her friends, and Charles, the 9th Earl, turned her down. He had inherited the £85 million estate with two hundred-odd cottages and farmhouses, but said that he didn't want the media circus that her presence would attract. The real reason only came out in the Burrell trial (of which more later) after her death, when a letter Charles had written to his sister was produced. He had felt hurt, like so many others, that she had cut him out of her life. Friends say she was very upset. The relationship, sadly, was never fully repaired and the boys missed an opportunity to get to know their uncle.

Their country home remained Highgrove, where Tiggy would be in charge. Tiggy was miraculously uncomplicated compared to their parents. She had a healthy, ‘jolly hockey-sticks' approach to most of life's problems and very little sense of self-preservation. Both boys adored her, although the bond is probably closest between her and Harry. She went everywhere with them, on half-term and
summer holidays, on skiing holidays, on trips to join the rest of the Royal Family at Sandringham and Balmoral. She took them to and from school and to and from Kensington Palace. At Highgrove, she helped them load their ponies into trailers and took them to gymkhanas and shows and pony clubs and to polo lessons and to tea with their friends. She took them shopping, rabbit shooting, and drove across the countryside with them after the hunt. They went fishing and climbing and go-karting. She told them jokes and laughed at theirs, watched the same videos and listened to the same music.

Tiggy was never a threat to Diana - a child's love for its mother is as strong a bond as can be found on this earth, however good or bad she may be. Tiggy was simply an affectionate, effusive, demonstrative, confident, overgrown tomboy, who put a hundred and ten per cent into the job she was paid to do and probably would have done it for nothing. If their father told them to go to bed, they would ignore him or wheedle him round. If Tiggy told them to, they would call her a ‘bossy Old Bat' but go. But Diana, with her old insecurities, once again felt threatened. She started a rumour that Tiggy and Prince Charles were having an affair, ‘proof' of which was an innocent, and very public, kiss on the cheek on the ski slopes. It was hardly surprising since he had known Tiggy's parents for most of her life - and she is the sort of generous, big-hearted girl who gives everyone hugs and kisses.

The hate campaign, which involved a series of disturbing messages left on Tiggy's answering machine, culminated at the Lanesborough Hotel in Knightsbridge in 1995. It was the combined staff Christmas lunch party, which the Prince and Princess continued to attend together even after their divorce. Tiggy had recently been in hospital for a minor operation, and before everyone sat down, Diana allegedly sidled up to her and whispered in her ear, ‘So sorry about the baby'. The implication that she'd had an abortion was unmistakable. Tiggy reeled in shock and disbelief and Michael Fawcett, the Prince's valet, took her home, while the party continued in high spirits, ending in a rather drunken crazy-foam fight. No one
seemed to be enjoying it more than Diana. A letter from Tiggy's lawyers arrived four days later, and although she never received the apology she demanded, she let the matter go.

Diana continued to obsess about Tiggy, who in her mind had taken over from Camilla in her ex-husband's affections. She appeared to have come up with the fanciful idea that Camilla was just a smoke screen and that the real woman he loved and wanted to marry was the nanny. When she discovered that Tiggy (now only working part-time since the boys were at school for much of the year) had helped Charles with the invitations to William's confirmation, in March 1997, she went through the roof. She threatened not to go to the service herself if ‘that woman' was going to be there.

What should have been a joyous and spiritually meaningful occasion for Prince William turned out to be another family nightmare.

On arrival at Eton every boy has to sign the school register and state their religious denomination. William was not the first small boy who had to ask his father what denomination he was, although he was the only one who will one day become the church's Supreme Governor. He had been a regular churchgoer all his life and there were weekly chapel services at Ludgrove, as there were at Eton, but, like most small boys, it was a routine he had never thought too much about. Confirmation was another routine he went into with most of the other Anglicans in his year. They all went to classes with the college chaplain, the Reverend T.D. Mullins, but while they were confirmed in College Chapel, he was confirmed separately at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

Sir Laurens van der Post had died a few months earlier, but all five of William's remaining godparents were there, as were the Queen, the Queen Mother and both his parents, who, unusually, arrived for the service in one car with the Prince driving, Diana sitting beside him and William and Harry in the back. After the service, the group posed for an official photograph, and Ian Jones, who was attached to the
Daily Telegraph
and had been photographing the family for nearly ten years, was invited to take it. He was given
three minutes, and owes the success of the picture to the Queen. The seating plan was a delicate matter, which he left to the Palace, but when he looked through the lens of his camera he realised that the second row was standing too far back. As he wrestled with the protocol of addressing several Royal Highnesses, a few Your Majesties and many Lords and Ladies, the Queen looked behind her and said, ‘Come on, come on, all move forward or you'll all be out of focus.' Then turning to Ian she said, ‘You see, I know a thing or two about photography!' It had a wonderfully relaxing effect on the whole group and when Ian was finished, the Queen said, ‘Is that it? That's very good. Snowdon [the professional photographer once married to Princess Margaret] always takes thirty minutes.' It was the first time in four years that the Wales family had posed together – and it was to be the last.

Tradition dictates that the Archbishop of Canterbury presides over all matters spiritual relating to the Royal Family, but Charles, a deeply spiritual man with views that are as firm about religion as they are about everything else, wanted his old friend and Cambridge contemporary, the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres to conduct the service. Unlike Archbishop Carey, Chartres was a traditionalist who, like Charles, abhorred the ‘happy clappy' evangelical wing of the Church and stuck firmly to the sixteenth-century Book of Common Prayer.

Tiggy was not among the forty members of the congregation. The Duke of Edinburgh was excusably away on a foreign tour, but another sad and glaring omission was William's grandmother, Frances Shand Kydd. Diana was going through a phase of not speaking to her mother and had chosen not to invite her; in fact, she was asked to invite forty people and invited no one. When asked why she was not there, Frances had said, ‘I'm not the person to ask. You should ask the offices of William's parents. I don't want to talk about it.' Instead, she placed a notice in the newsletter of Oban Cathedral (she had recently converted to Roman Catholicism), which read, ‘For my grandson William on his confirmation day, love from Granny Frances.'

William's love for his mother would never be diminished; in his eyes she was and remains the perfect mother; but he was not blind to her behaviour and as a teenager beginning to make his own judgements and to step away from the parental yoke, he must have found some of her antics embarrassing and hard to handle, particularly when they caused evident pain to people he loved. He also disliked profoundly the media attention that she courted.

But when it came to choosing who to invite to the Fourth of June, Eton's equivalent of speech day, William asked Tiggy and told his parents that he didn't want them to come. Tiggy arrived with William's friend, William van Cutsem, bearing a wonderful picnic and plenty of drinks.

When it was over, William went home to his mother for half-term, and found her in tears. She was distraught that he wanted Tiggy to be at the Fourth of June and not her, and as was her way, swiftly let the media know her feelings.

A month later, after the end of the summer term, Diana took William and Harry plus their two PPOs – at her request, she no longer had one herself – on holiday to the South of France. She had been invited by Mohamed Al Fayed, the wealthy Egyptian owner of Harrods department store, to spend some time with him and his family in St Tropez. William wasn't thrilled to be going back to that part of the world: they had had a disastrous holiday on the French Riviera the previous summer when they had shared a villa with Fergie, the Duchess of York, and his cousins, Princess Beatrice and Eugenie. The paparazzi were everywhere and William spent most of his time hiding indoors.

Al Fayed promised total privacy. He would collect them from Kensington Palace in his private helicopter, take them to his home in Surrey for lunch with his family, then his private Gulfstream 4 jet would take the entire party to Nice, where they would pick up a private yacht for the last leg of the journey to St Tropez. There they would alternate between his sumptuous villa on the coast, which was closely guarded, and his boats, including the newly acquired £14 million yacht,
Jonikal
.

On the third day Diana was spotted on board Al Fayed's 1912 teak schooner by a paparazzo who sold his picture to a Sunday tabloid. For the rest of the holiday the whole town was crawling with photographers. Their principal interest was the burgeoning romance between Diana and Al Fayed's eldest son, Dodi.

Diana was on the rebound. For two years she had been having an affair with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistan-born heart surgeon, whom she'd met while visiting a friend at the Royal Brompton Hospital. She spent time with him at his small flat in Chelsea and he became a regular visitor to Kensington Palace. Friends say she was very much in love with him and wanted to marry him; she even contemplated converting to Islam and moving to Pakistan. But he ended it just weeks before she went to France. As he told his father, ‘If I married her, our marriage would not last for more than a year. We are culturally so different from each other. She is from Venus and I am from Mars. If it ever happened, it would be like a marriage from two different planets.'

She made a point of introducing him to William, who, like most children of divorced parents, never much enjoyed meeting her lovers. Harry was always more relaxed about it, but William didn't really want to know. According to Diana's friend Rosa Monckton, ‘She told Prince William in particular more than most mothers would have told their children. But she had no choice. She wanted her sons to hear the truth from her, about her life and the people she was seeing, and what they meant to her, rather than read a distorted, exaggerated and frequently untrue version in the tabloid press.'

That same tabloid press, it must be remembered, to which Diana herself incessantly fed stories and most of the time, they compliantly ate out of her hand. She was in regular contact with the
Daily Mail
's good-looking reporter, Richard Kay, ringing him just hours before she died; and she had invited most of the tabloid editors to lunch at KP where she had been hugely indiscreet. On at least one occasion, William joined them.

However, not even Diana was immune to the British delight in
bringing down to size the people they have hoisted onto pedestals. When she went back to St Tropez on her own with Dodi a couple of weeks later and the two were photographed entwined on his father's yacht, it was too much for the commentators.

‘The sight of a paunchy playboy groping a scantily-dressed Diana must appal and humiliate Prince William,' wrote the late Lynda Lee-Potter, doyenne of columnists, in the
Daily Mail
. ‘As the mother of two young sons she ought to have more decorum and sense.'

‘Princess Diana's press relations are now clearly established,' wrote Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher's former press officer, in the
Express
. ‘Any publicity is good publicity … I'm told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains.'

And Chris Hutchins, in the
Sunday Mirror
, wrote, ‘Just when Diana began to believe that her current romance with likeable playboy Dodi Fayed had wiped out her past liaisons, a new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! I must remember to take it up with Diana next time we find ourselves on adjacent running machines at our west London gym.'

Charles, like everyone else at court, was very concerned about Diana's love affair with Dodi. Not because he didn't want her to be happy but because Mohamed Al Fayed was a controversial figure. Long denied British citizenship, he had tried relentlessly to ingratiate himself with the establishment. What could be a better two-fingered salute to them now than to pair his son off with the former Princess of Wales? Or what better trophy to show off to the world than a photograph of him on his yacht with the Queen's grandsons? He didn't keep his delight under a bushel.

William and Harry didn't enjoy their holiday. They hadn't particularly taken to Dodi Fayed, nor cared much for the glitzy lifestyle, and they hated the publicity. William and his mother had a terrible row; Harry got into a spat with Mohamed Al Fayed's youngest son, Omar; and Fayed's heavies had attempted to give their PPOs brown envelopes stuffed with pound notes. The whole trip had been extremely uncomfortable.

It was with huge relief that they flew back to England to spend the remainder of the holidays with their father, their grandparents and other members of the Royal Family. After a lunch for the Queen Mother's ninety-seventh birthday at Clarence House, they joined
Britannia
– a far cry from
Jonikal
– for her last-ever cruise of the Western Isles before being decommissioned. Then it was Balmoral and the peace of the Highlands and a month doing all the countryside things they loved best.