Prince William (16 page)

Diana's death was perceived as a national tragedy and in a week that saw the most unprecedented (and to some, entirely incomprehensible) outpouring of public grief, the nation, encouraged by the media, wanted to see and hear from the Queen. At every other national disaster, she or a member of her family were the first to visit, the first to offer words of commiseration and comfort, and to be present alongside ordinary people, doing what royals do best, spearheading national sentiment, representing the nation to itself. And yet, in this greatest hour of need, there was no sign of them. And there was no indication that they were as grief-stricken as the rest of the country. In the remoteness of the Scottish Highlands, wrapped up in the needs of two fragile young boys, and pulling together as a family, their antennae for the mood elsewhere in the country were not functioning as they normally do. The Queen, rationally but mistakenly, viewed it as a private tragedy and decided her priority was her grandsons. And in human terms, who is to say she was wrong?

The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, got it right. That Sunday morning he paid a moving tribute to Diana that entirely caught the mood of the nation. His voice cracking with emotion he said, ‘I feel like everyone else in this country. I am utterly devastated. We are a
nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief. It is so deeply painful for us. She was a wonderful and a warm human being. Though her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy, she touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world, with joy and with comfort. She was the people's Princess and that is how she will remain in our hearts and memories for ever.'

Whatever the psychological and sociological explanations for the nation's reaction to Diana's death might be, there was not only grief but also anger on the streets of London. Some of it was directed at the tabloid press, for paying huge sums of money for paparazzi photographs (conveniently forgetting that if the tabloid-reading public didn't buy the tabloids there would be no paparazzi). Some of the anger was directed at the Royal Family, so clearly out of touch and anachronistic in modern Britain; and the rest was directed at Charles. One of his first thoughts on hearing the news of Diana's death was that he would be blamed, and he was right. Had he loved her instead of his mistress, they said, this would never have happened. They would still have been married and Diana would never have been racing through the streets of Paris with Dodi Fayed. Yet at the same time others were leaving tributes to the lovers outside Kensington Palace. ‘To Diana and Dodi, together for ever' was a common message.

While William and Harry had been with their father, Diana had gone back to the South of France and she and Dodi had spent the previous nine days on
Jonikal
. The photographs of them entwined were what had led the columnists in London to sharpen their pens. On their way back to London, they had stopped in Paris for the night, where Dodi's father owned the Ritz hotel, and also an apartment. The accident happened as they were being driven from one to the other. In an attempt to fool the paparazzi, a decoy car had sped away from the front entrance of the hotel, while Dodi and Diana left from the back, but they were soon spotted and a chase ensued.

No blame was ever levelled at Dodi, or even his father, who had provided the car. It was his employee, Henri Paul, the chauffeur,
who had been driving well over the speed limit when he hit the Alma underpass. None of them had been wearing seat belts, and Paul was killed at the wheel. An eighteen-month French judicial investigation concluded that it was he – and not the paparazzi – who was to blame for the crash. He had a cocktail of alcohol, anti-depressants and traces of a tranquillising anti-psychotic drug in his blood and should never have been behind the wheel of a car that night.

In the meantime Mohamed Al Fayed did nothing to stop rumours that the pair were about to announce their engagement – and there were (false) rumours that Diana was pregnant. He also shared his own private theory about the crash with the media. It was, he suggested, a conspiracy cooked up by the Duke of Edinburgh and the British security services to assassinate Diana so that she would not marry Dodi, because such a marriage would have given William, second in line to the throne, a Muslim stepfather. All these allegations and more would be dealt with in subsequent enquiries and inquests.

But for the time being, there was a funeral to be arranged and a public relations disaster to be averted, one which threatened the very existence of the monarchy.

YOU CAN'T READ ABOUT THIS

The family was getting news of the mood in London, and advice from every quarter – politicians, friends, historians and VIPs from all over the world – and the newspapers were screaming at them to come back to the capital: ‘They're up in bloody Scotland' was the common cry, or ‘They should be here. Those children should be here.' The absence of a flag flying at Buckingham Palace became another focus for anger. While flags were flying at half mast all over the country, at the Queen's official London residence there was nothing; just mountains of flowers piling up outside. ‘Show us you care,' demanded the
Express
. ‘Your subjects are suffering, speak to us Ma'am,' said the
Mirror
. ‘Where is our Queen? Where is her flag?' shouted the
Sun
.

It was a problem of protocol. The only flag that flies at Buckingham Palace is the Royal Standard and only then when the sovereign is in residence, and it never flies at half mast because, technically, the sovereign is never dead: the instant one dies, another succeeds – ‘The King is dead, long live the King.'

The people didn't give a damn about protocol. They wanted to see some feeling, some indication that the Royal Family was affected by the death of the Princess. There had been none, and this most elementary of gestures, the lowering of a flag, had not been observed. To the press and to the nation this embodied everything that was irrelevant and out of touch about the monarchy in the 1990s, and stood in stark contrast to the warmth and compassion of the Princess. It caused a furious row internally and in the heat of the moment it was suggested that Sir Robert Fellowes might ‘impale himself on
his own flag staff'. Eventually, the Queen was persuaded and on the Thursday a Union flag was raised to half mast.

While the headlines ranted and the leaders thundered, entire forests were devoted to the saintliness of the Princess, and for those papers that had been attacking her just days before for her antics in the Mediterranean, it involved a dramatic U-turn. ‘She was the butterfly who shone with the light of glamour which illuminated all our lives', said the
Express
; ‘A comet streaked across the sky of public life and entranced the world', said the
Times
, and the
Daily Mail
called her ‘A gem of purest ray serene.'

The Prince of Wales, via Stephen Lamport, was getting graphic updates on what was happening on the streets from Sandy Henney, his Press Secretary. ‘You can't read about this,' she said, ‘you can't even see it on television. There is real hatred building up here, and the public is incensed by your silence.' But, although some were urging him to make a statement, Charles recognised that he was not the one to take the lead. On the Tuesday, the
Daily Mail
headline read, ‘Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt', printed above a photograph of him taken some months before. The Royal Family was appalled and from that morning onwards they stopped putting the newspapers out on display at the Castle. He knew that any public expression of sadness from him would be a red rag to a bull, but as the days went by and the anger mounted, and his mother's advisers still saw no need to put on a public display of emotion, he became more forceful.

He also realised that the boys needed to be prepared for what awaited them when they went back to London – the mountains of flowers and tributes, the crowds, the emotion – and asked Sandy to come up to Balmoral to speak to them, as he often did, when there was something confrontational or difficult to impart. A week or so before, he had asked her up to Birkhall, the Queen Mother's home on the Balmoral estate, where Charles himself often stayed, to speak to William.

The Prince did not, however, ask Sandy to Balmoral in order to talk the boys into walking behind the cortège at the funeral, as
Alastair Campbell claimed in his diaries,
The Blair Years
. The Prime Minister's former spin doctor believes that the Prince was frightened that if he walked without William, he might be attacked by members of the public. His theory is that Sandy persuaded the Princes that their mother would have wanted them to do it. Initially, he said, William's hatred of the media was so great that he refused to talk to anyone about taking part in the funeral, and saw walking as appeasing the media.

‘At no time,' Sandy says, ‘was there ever a question of using the boys as a barrier against possible reaction from the public towards my boss. But there was genuine concern as to what reaction the public might have to the Prince of Wales – and indeed any member of the Royal Family from a highly emotionally (some may say irrationally) charged public. The boys talked about walking with the cortège to close members of their family and only those they trusted, and no one they talked to at that time would ever speak to a third party about what the children said.' I think Mr Campbell might be that third party she's referring to.

Sandy needed to explain to the boys the extraordinary scenes they could expect to see on the streets of London. ‘I was going up and down these queues of people [waiting to sign the books of condolence at St James's Palace],' she remembers, ‘and I couldn't believe what I was hearing, the things they were saying about the Queen and the Duke and the Prince. It was verging on hatred for this family.' She was as loyal an advocate of the institution of monarchy as you could hope to find and like most of the people who have worked for the Prince of Wales, she was devoted to him and passionate about his children.

She took them aside and said, ‘Mummy's death has had the most amazing impact on people. They are really sad because they loved her very, very much and they miss her, and when you go down to London you will see something you will never, ever, see again and it may come as a bit of a shock. But everything you will see is because the public thought so much of your mummy, it is the sign of their grief for your loss. We want you to know about it so
you will be ready for it.' She asked if they wanted to ask any questions and there were many but they were all to do with why she was telling them this, why people were behaving in this way. Harry was the one with the curiosity; William was very quiet and contained.

Later, Sandy was up in the tower at Balmoral, where letters were pouring in by the thousand. ‘Harry arrived with Tiggs and said, “What are you doing?” I explained that all of these people wanted to say how sorry they are that your mummy's dead and that they're thinking of you.

“‘Can I open some?” said Harry, snatching up some envelopes. “Of course you can. Go on, help yourself.”' She was a motherly figure, with no children of her own, but stepchildren, and she was the perfect person for the sensitive task of coaxing the boys out of their shell. She had worked for their father, and known both boys for four years, but because of Diana's suspicion that everyone who worked for ‘the other side' would betray her or let her down, she hadn't had much to do with them. ‘Sad,' says Sandy simply. ‘Our view [meaning Alan Percival, her predecessor] was that if you let one of them down, you let the children down, but more importantly, you let the institution down.'

William was no longer a young boy, but not yet a man; it was a difficult age. He didn't speak to Sandy about his feelings or his mother, and she never saw a tear; he appeared to internalise the grief, just as he had internalised so much in his life already. He never allowed much of himself to be exposed in all the years she worked with him, from the age of eleven to eighteen, and he was always more guarded than his brother. He was always someone who seemed to be dealing with whatever situation arose in his own way.

‘I think he has an innate sense of self-protection,' Sandy says, ‘and wouldn't have answered questions about his mother even if I'd asked him. He'd have been polite. He's a politician that man, he can charm people. If you ask him a personal question he will be as honest as he wants to be but you will never get down, thank
God, into the real root of William, because that's how he protects himself.'

The day the flag appeared on the roof of Buckingham Palace the family ventured out of the gates of Balmoral for the first time since the day of Diana's death. William and Harry expressed a desire to go to church again so the Prince took the opportunity to give them a small taster of what awaited them in London. The funeral was just two days away. There were hundreds of flowers and tributes, but nothing compared to those that had piled up outside Kensington Palace, where there were said to be a million bouquets and goodness knows how many teddy bears and other offerings, 1.5 metres deep in places. There were almost as many outside Buckingham Palace.

About sixty members of the press were waiting outside the gates of Balmoral that day, a crowd for the Highlands, yet they uttered not a single word as the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Peter Phillips (who had flown up to be with his cousins), the Prince of Wales and his sons stepped out of their cars to look at the flowers and the tributes. The only sound to be heard, apart from the clicking of the camera shutters, was the voices of the royal party. It was the first time in the five days since their mother's death that the country had seen Diana's boys. It was a touching scene. All three Princes, father and sons, were visibly moved by what they saw and taken aback by the messages attached to the bouquets.

‘Look at this one, Papa,' said Harry, grabbing hold of his father's hand and tugging him down. ‘Read this one.' Captured on film, the gesture was surprising, if not shocking. The Prince of Wales did seem to have a heart after all. He actually held his son's hand, something no one could ever have imagined before. And he seemed to have aged.