Diana

Patrick Jephson, who joined the Princess’s staff in January 1988, serving first as equerry to the Princess and then as her private secretary, was surprised to find the apartment smaller and gloomier than he had expected. Despite the wide lawns and trees of the surrounding Kensington Gardens, the Waleses’ apartment was dark and viewless, tucked away in the heart of the palace complex. There was virtually no privacy: ‘Everybody could hear everybody else,’ Jephson wrote. ‘If you needed to get away from someone there was just not enough space.’² Most of the time the house was deathly quiet: the Prince and Princess were usually out and the staff retreated to their places behind the scenes. Outside the sun might be shining, the birds singing and children playing, but inside the apartment there was an historic silence and not enough light. ‘If you sent the staff home, closed the curtains and forgot to turn on all the lights, no amount of TV channels, loud music or ringing telephones could keep the darkness at bay,’ Jephson recalled.³ For Diana, despite its convenience in the heart of London, ‘KP’ was to be less a home than a prison.

She had cooperated over the decoration with Dudley Poplak, who was recommended by her mother and who had also been working with her on the redecoration of Highgrove. The decoration was a mixture of grand and contemporary: the seventeenth-century entrance hall, with its impressive staircase and baroque plaster ceiling (destroyed by a bomb during the Second World War, and subsequently restored), was carpeted in green and grey patterned with the Prince of Wales feathers, a theme emphasized throughout the house. On the first floor the reception rooms, the drawing and dining rooms were furnished either with wedding presents or furniture and paintings, and a tapestry from the Royal Collections, including a Veronese, The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine.

Diana and Charles had studies on the same floor. Diana’s sitting room was feminine in dusty pink and grey-blue, with a pink sofa and, in a window alcove beside her desk, her school tuck box, stencilled D. Spencer, in which she kept her most private possessions. The room was a grown-up version of a teenager’s room, with soft toys and cushions with slogans like ‘Good girls go to heaven – bad girls go everywhere’, and children’s school paintings on the walls. Every surface was crammed with photographs, enamel boxes, porcelain figurines. It was cheerful, girlish and very cluttered, smelling deliciously of her favourite flowers, lilies, potpourri and scented candles.

Charles’s more masculine room housed a box-kennel for his cherished yellow Labrador, Harvey, and on his desk a photograph of himself with his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, and the wry, or perhaps even defiant, inscription in Charles’s handwriting: ‘I was not born to follow in my father’s footsteps.’ In the master bedroom, the 7-foot 6-inch oak bed from his apartment at Buckingham Palace presented the poignant, even somewhat pathetic spectacle of the couple’s toy animals ranged upon it: Charles’s worn teddy, which he took everywhere with him and was tucked up in the bed at night by his valet, and Diana’s ‘family’ from Park House, overflowing from the bed to shelves. It would be unkind to put too much emphasis on this attachment to childhood toys but it is hard to imagine such a collection featuring in the bedroom of, say, a Wall Street banker and his socialite wife.

Highgrove had been decorated by Diana and Poplak far more to her taste than Charles’s. A royal relation described Diana and Poplak’s schemes as ‘terrible, like a sort of Trust House Forte idea of a modern princess’s drawing room ... three new magazines on this low table and the day’s newspapers on that, I mean awful’.⁴ It was to Highgrove (Kensington Palace was not yet ready) that Charles and Diana had returned after their Balmoral honeymoon. According to Stephen Barry, Charles had not seen the house since before the wedding: now the Princess, ‘very excited, led him round, showing him every room. “Are you pleased?” she kept asking him. You could tell from his expression that he was. “He likes it,” she said to me triumphantly. “And it’s my dream house now.”’⁵ Yet Diana came to hate Highgrove, which became more Charles’s house than hers; where he spent days hunting in the winter, playing polo in the summer and mixing with his horsey friends, while Bolehyde Manor, the Parker Bowleses’ house, was in menacing proximity. Immediately after the separation, Charles, whose taste was more discriminating than Diana’s, substituted his own style and that of his chosen decorator, Robert Kime, for hers. Although it had been their first shared home, Diana used to say that it was never her ‘cup of tea’. For Charles it had always been his ideal house; he had chosen it himself instead of Chevening, the splendid eighteenth-century house in Kent which had been allotted as his official residence. His excuse to the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, for abandoning Chevening was that it was too far away from his properties in the Duchy of Cornwall. The real reason, however, was that Highgrove was in the heart of ‘horse country’ and convenient for the Prince’s two favourite sporting activities, polo and hunting. It was also conveniently close to the home of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles. At Highgrove Charles could fulfil his cherished dream of creating a splendid garden which he had begun with the expert advice of a circle of grand gardening ladies including Molly, Marchioness of Salisbury, and Rosemary Verey.

‘Horsey’ people were anathema to Diana, who was spiralling into deep post-natal depression after the birth of William. She was twenty-one that July but no one – not even her family – thought to give her a twenty-first birthday party. A new friend came to lunch, Sarah Ferguson, whom Diana had met at the Cowdray Park polo two years before when Charles first made his advances and who was soon to become very much a part of Diana’s life when she married Prince Andrew four years later. Charles, however, did arrange a candlelit picnic dinner at the Queen’s House at Kew for their first wedding anniversary. At Balmoral that autumn, she became sicker and thinner, the scenes of screaming, crying and throwing things more frequent. Charles worried but he did not understand post-natal depression. No one in the Royal Family recognized either that or her bulimia.

Bulimia nervosa, as it is called, is an eating disorder where people have a cycle of binge eating and purging by vomiting; they can have a binge – purge cycle which occurs at least twice a week for three months or more. Its cause is not fully understood but it may develop owing to a combination of emotional, physical and social triggers. It can be caused by low self-esteem, which certainly characterized Diana, or mood problems, especially depression, from which she was suffering after the birth of William. Finally, it can be due to a specific emotionally upsetting event such as abusive family relationships. Later, the doctor who treated Diana attributed her bulimia directly to her problems with Charles and it became noticeably worse in surroundings with unhappy memories or in difficult situations, such as family gatherings at Sandringham and Balmoral. The general feeling in the royal circle was that Diana was ‘an extremely tiresome girl’, ‘basically a bad character . . . [with] flaws in her character’ and that they had ‘no patience with all this about being sick’.⁶ Diana in her desperate depression became, as even her own staff admitted, ‘very unpredictable’. By her own account she began to mutilate herself in an attempt to focus Charles’s attention on her: the ‘cutting’ cannot have been very severe as she was so often seen wearing low-cut, sleeveless evening dresses and no scars were ever evident. But, as a result of these episodes, in mid-October he took her down to London again for psychiatric treatment. The analysts, as is their wont, probed Diana’s family background, blaming everything on her ‘broken home’, which was hardly helpful in the circumstances.⁷ While the Prince ordered his friends to say nothing (despite writing letters in which he told of his difficulties with his wife), the public nature of some of Diana’s erratic behaviour made it inevitable that the rumour machine would start up. The most glaring instance came at a major royal public occasion, the British Legion Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall on 13 November 1982, always attended by the senior members of the Royal Family.

That evening, before leaving, Charles and Diana had a major row which resulted in Diana’s refusing to go. He left without her but she then had a change of heart and determined to go after all, despite her staff warning her that it was now too late and she would arrive at the Albert Hall after the Queen, an unpardonable breach of protocol. Diana paid no attention and turned up, causing a commotion as a seat had to be found for her, and there she sat, clearly continuing the row with Charles in public view. Anne Robinson, editing the Sunday Mirror that weekend, put James Whitaker on to the story – ‘James, I want you to find out why Princess Diana is looking as awful as she is. She behaved awfully at the Albert Hall and she looks f------- awful. She’s so thin. Go and find out.’ Whitaker rang his main contact, Sarah McCorquodale, who confirmed that the family were very concerned over Diana’s loss of weight. ‘We think she could be anorexic . . .’ Robinson ran the story, and the result was a major complaint from the Palace which cost her her job.

Among the media curiosity to know the truth of what was going on was at fever pitch. Nigel Dempster, probably the best connected of the gossip-columnist diarists to the circles in which Charles’s friends moved, having at first rubbished the rival journalist’s report, then appeared on US television to denounce Diana as a ‘fiend’ and a ‘monster’, claiming that she was ‘very much ruling the roost’ and that Charles was ‘desperately unhappy’. He later asserted that he had the information ‘straight from one of Prince Charles’s staff’. With tongue firmly in cheek, Auberon Waugh headlined a piece ‘GOSSIP COLUMNIST ATTACKS PRINCESS FAIRYTALE . NATION RISES IN ANGER’. Cracking the crystal through which an adoring public gazed at the fairy-tale couple was not welcomed. Just after the birth of Prince William, Victoria Glendinning, reviewing a selection of royal books, quoted Robert Lacey as saying, ‘it is important to us that the magic does not die’, adding, ‘and that is why we hope the fairy story will end in the proper way and that the Princess of Wales and her Prince and their son will live happily ever after’. The trouble, however, as the acute Lacey pointed out, was that Charles got ‘the woman “we” wanted’. As far as the press was concerned, however, though no one wanted to believe the reports of cracks in the marriage, the ‘fairy tale’, which was still the image the general public cherished, had turned into a soap opera which was more like the current American favourites Dynasty and Dallas in which skulduggery, infidelity and doubledealing were the norm.

‘At the point at which there began to be more hard and fast evidence, her weeping in public, that kind of incident, cancelling going to places at the last minute, him turning up alone when she had been expected . . . the whispers became more insistent that it [the marriage] was indeed going down,’ said a well-known media analyst. ‘And the press loved this because it was a drama, and it was a drama in which . . . because of the nature of the Palace’s press relations which is “never admit, never deny”, you more or less could get away with anything ... You could actually schedule a news story on Di which would be inevitably a story about some difficulty in the marriage – some hint at what’s been happening this weekend, he’s been at Highgrove or she’s been at Highgrove and he hasn’t or she hasn’t . . . the royal rat pack began to feed off each other [as to] who could outdo the next one with a more outrageous claim . . .’⁸

Media comment only increased Diana’s unhappiness and the pressure on her. She devoured the news, almost living her life by proxy through the press. The Times and Telegraph were the papers officially delivered to her but copies of the tabloids found their way to her via the back stairs. Consciousness of growing criticism of her within royal circles and especially from Charles’s friends, added to the hostile comment in some of the newspapers, drove her to despair. Ruth Fermoy, always reflecting court opinions, told Roy Strong in March 1982 that Diana ‘had a lot to learn’ about royal life,⁹ opening herself further to Archbishop Runcie: ‘Ruth was very distressed with Diana’s behaviour,’ the Archbishop recalled. ‘She [Ruth] was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’d seen him grow up, loved him like all the women of the court do, and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.’¹⁰ Charles, while still sympathetic, remained baffled by Diana’s illness. Out hunting in March 1983, he turned to two lady companions and asked them: ‘Have you ever been very, very sick? I don’t understand it and my mother doesn’t either ...’¹¹

One might wonder why – considering Diana’s family were worried about her weight loss and that Sarah and her mother had had first-hand experience of Sarah’s eating disorder – none of her family came forward to help her. Frances Shand Kydd had been curiously absent from her daughter’s life for two years following the wedding. Diana had been upset by Frances’s disclosures about her marriage break-up to the author Gordon Honeycombe, and Frances had made some curious statements to the Daily Mail, putting a favourable spin on her absence from her daughter’s life: ‘I am a firm believer in maternal redundancy,’ she said. ‘When daughters marry they set up a new home and they don’t want mother-in-law hanging around. They should be free to make their own decisions and maybe to make their own mistakes.’ This begged the question: Frances was Diana’s mother, not her mother-in-law, but her absence from her daughter’s life was confirmed by one of the Waleses’ officials: ‘After the wedding, she sort of disappeared,’ he said. Diana’s sister Jane was in the awkward position of being married to the Queen’s assistant private secretary, which involved having to tread carefully where the Waleses were concerned; she was a level-headed woman who was not much moved by Diana’s more dramatic performances. She went round to check on Diana and found marks on her chest. Sarah, who was closer to Diana, had her own married life on a farm in Lincolnshire and, in any case, often found it wiser to keep her distance from Diana. Her brother Charles was away most of the time, at Eton and then Oxford. Johnnie Spencer, according to an entry in the visitors’ book, had been one of the first visitors to the new apartment at Kensington Palace, but the sales of Althorp treasures which had begun shortly after Johnnie’s recovery from illness were a further source of controversy between Raine and his children. News of the sales had led to much criticism in the press. According to The Times in December 1982 the Spencers had sold £2 million worth of art which they claimed was to pay the costs of refurbishing Althorp, but in September of that year they had bought three houses in Bognor Regis, which cast some doubt on their claim.

Yet, as with all depressive illnesses, there were periods of light among the clouds: in September, Diana had been well enough to attend the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco who had died of injuries sustained in a car crash. Diana had greatly admired Grace, feeling a sense of empathy with her as another outsider who had married into a ruling family, and whose marriage also had not turned out the fairy tale it had initially been thought to be. ‘I remember meeting Princess Grace and how wonderful and serene she was,’ Diana recalled of the evening she had worn ‘that dress’, ‘but there was troubled water under her, I saw that.’¹² Charles’s initial reaction when told she had wanted to go to the funeral in Monaco had been negative: it would be the first time she officially represented the Royal Family on a solo engagement. Diana, however, had been determined to go and on her own initiative written to the Queen about it and obtained her agreement. One of Diana’s staff who accompanied her to Monaco later told a television programme, ‘She was absolutely brilliant. She came into her own. And on the aircraft back she burst into tears with exhaustion. She asked “Will Charles be there to meet us?” We looked at her big eyes looking out of the window in expectation. She said, “There’s one police car.” That meant Charles wasn’t coming.’ Another remembered, ‘She rang up and asked me “Have you seen the papers?” I said, “You were absolutely brilliant, Ma’am.” She said, “Thanks for saying that because nobody at Balmoral has mentioned it.”’¹³ ‘It was always important to Diana to feel appreciated from an early age,’ her brother Charles said in a television interview after her death; ‘she was childlike, wanting approval – “Am I doing OK?” ’

The couple’s joint tour of Australia in March 1983, accompanied by William, and New Zealand, was a pivotal moment in the marriage. Outwardly it was a glorious success but behind the scenes people travelling on the tour noticed ‘little tensions’ between them. It was the beginning of worldwide ‘Di-mania’. Instead of seven photographers being there, there were seventy. Before there was one from each paper and a couple of freelances. Now they were coming from France, Germany, America and Japan. One hundred thousand people turned out to see them in Brisbane. ‘The police are concerned about an element of hysteria that has become evident among the huge crowds that have turned out to see the Royal couple in the New South Wales cities of Sydney, Newcastle and Maitland over the past 48 hours,’ a newspaper reported. A security officer told the reporter: ‘We haven’t seen this in royal tours here before. It is more akin to Beatlemania.’ The adulation of the crowds at first terrified and then empowered Diana. This was something she could do, and do well. It was a part she was born to play.

It was the first time a hint was seen of Prince Charles’s jealousy of Diana’s huge appeal to the crowds, which was to be an increasingly divisive factor in the couple’s relationship. Although he concealed it nobly and even joked about it, it was nonetheless humiliating for a man who since childhood had been the centre of attention wherever he went, to be upstaged by his wife, a novice on royal occasions. It was not pleasant to hear the crowds groaning, ‘Oh, we’ve got old Big Ears’, when they saw he was going to be on their side of the walkabout, or to hear the hysterical screams for ‘Lady Di’. The scale of the adulation of his wife worried him. ‘How can anyone, let alone a twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?’ he wrote to a friend.¹⁴ Diana, according to a letter seen by Dimbleby, wrote that her black moods had vanished and that she felt ashamed of the way she had been behaving in the past. Now, she said, she only thought of Charles and the job. Alone together with William at the sheep station where they left him with his nanny, Charles wrote to Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem, ‘. . . we were extremely happy there whenever we were allowed to escape. The great joy is that we were totally alone together . . .’¹⁵ At the same time he pondered glumly on the nature of the public’s reaction to them, which was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. ‘Maybe the wedding, because it was so well done and because it made such a wonderful, almost Hollywood-style film, has distorted people’s view of things? Whatever the case it frightens me and I know for a fact that it petrifies Diana.’¹⁶ Petrified at times, maybe, but also excited by the scale of the public’s approval of her: Diana had discovered her great gift for satisfying people’s expectations, communicating with them, lifting their spirits. Her rapport with ordinary people in public and in private was to be an enormous source of strength and comfort to her. There was no doubt about her media status: a Spanish magazine covered the tour under the headline ‘THE FRONT PAGE GIRL’, while Tatler dubbed her ‘Number one, indisputable brand leader’. Their subsequent seventeen-day tour of Canada was also a huge media success, particularly for Diana: one newspaper described how journalists lavished particular attention on Diana, ‘gorging themselves on her fresh good looks and her fetching ways’. Another paper, the Ottawa Citizen, referred to Charles as an ‘also-ran’.

‘I think they were happy, they had William out there, a sort of family enclave,’ a member of staff recalled. ‘But one was aware of little tensions. He couldn’t understand that people wanted to see her. He couldn’t understand that they wanted to see a beautiful woman rather than a man in a suit. And that was really sad, actually. It was so unnecessary because together they were absolute dynamite. But one was just aware of a sort of petulance in him and she, I think, found it very difficult, knowing how to cope with that. And she was quite emotional at that time, there were tears . . . she didn’t understand and it was all very stressful . . .’¹⁷ Things, however, were to go from bad to worse, and Charles’s resentment at his wife’s popularity began to poison their relationship. His puzzlement at people’s reaction to her was palpable, as he once said to a friend: ‘Why do they love her so much? All she ever did was to say “yes” to me . . .’¹⁸

Consciousness that she was a real success boosted Diana’s still fragile confidence. While she had confessed to the wife of a Nova Scotia editor that ‘the wolf-pack-like British tabloid press’ still upset her – ‘When they write something horrible I get a horrible feeling right here,’ she said, pointing to her chest, ‘and I don’t want to go outside’ – she told the Premier of Newfoundland that she felt she was doing her job as Princess of Wales ‘better now than I previously did’. Like many others before him, Premier Peckford was struck by ‘her really soft spot for people who are sick and disabled,’ he said. ‘She almost cried when she was told that little boy who had presented her with a bouquet was blind.’ Worldwide adulation for Diana continued to grow: one British magazine dubbed her ‘Royal Superstar’: according to a recent American poll she was ‘the most popular woman in the world’. Paris-Match said that she was more popular in France than even Brigitte Bardot, while the editor of Ladies Home Journal proclaimed, ‘without a doubt she is the greatest media personality of the decade. One comes along every ten years – Jackie, Liz Taylor and now Diana.’ Excessive press attention was by now inevitable: pictures of Diana sold newspapers and magazines. Popular women’s magazines such as Woman and Woman’s Own reported sales increased by up to forty thousand in weeks when Diana featured on the cover. One editor said that his sales dropped by 15 per cent when she was not on the cover. ‘She’s the one that’s news, the one they want to see. We often think, for heaven’s sake we’ve had her on for the last seven months, let’s try someone else. It doesn’t work.’

Between the two tours the couple had travelled on 30 April via private jet, lent them by Armand Hammer, from Los Angeles to the Bahamas to spend ten days at the Romseys’ villa. Long-lens photographs published in a Spanish magazine showed Charles and Diana on a beach – happy and playful with each other, walking hand in hand: on one occasion the Prince hefted her over his shoulder to dump her in the water. ‘The Prince, away from protocol, reveals himself as truly in love with Diana’ the caption ran. Back in England for their second wedding anniversary, the couple publicly demonstrated their affection: ‘They looked more like they were on honeymoon,’ said a spectator.

But there was a downside to this public success and apparent happiness – the private difficulties. Prince Charles’s friends lined up to denigrate Diana. While they were not aware, or did not recognize, that the marriage still had a chance, they seemed to think they should encourage the Prince to regret it. Charles’s complaining letters had their effect. None of them, however, appeared to realize that, in encouraging Charles to feel that his marriage was hopeless, they were setting him on a course which might endanger the monarchy. It now seems incredible that these people, in order to curry favour or to maintain their influence with the Prince, should have actually attempted to undermine his marriage. One might ask oneself what they were trying to achieve.

Leaked stories began to appear, bolstering Dempster’s claim that Diana was a ‘fiend’ and a ‘monster’. Diana, according to the stories, was responsible for an exodus of staff and a dog. The first to go was Stephen Barry, the much indulged valet, who was intuitive enough to recognize that his reign and influence over Charles would end with the Prince’s marriage. Most of the staff believed that she did ‘winkle’ Barry out of his position: ‘he was keeping the Prince way back in the Dark Ages,’ said one, ‘she wanted to drift him into the present. Stephen . . . one of his great claims to fame was that he kept the Prince of Wales in the top worst dressed list for years and kept himself in the best . . .’ On the honeymoon at Craigowan, Barry was completely insouciant as far as his duties were concerned. ‘There’s Stephen, Sunday morning, whacking great gin and tonic, radio under one arm, all the papers under the other. “Darling, I’m just off to do a little heavy pressing . . .” Three hours later he’s snoring his head off,’ one member of staff remembered.¹⁹ Diana was no fool where domestic staff were concerned and Barry himself recognized that his happy years of getting away with everything with the indulgence of the Prince of Wales would soon be over. He jumped before he was pushed.

Alan Fisher, whom Charles and Diana had met at Althorp where he was acting as extra butler when they were staying there for a big party, also left. It was rumoured that he did not like Diana, but it was also said that, having worked in the past for people like the Windsors and Bing Crosby, he did not like the way things were done at Highgrove and Kensington Palace. The unkindest accusation concerned Harvey, the Prince’s beloved yellow Labrador, who had been bred by the Queen and accompanied Charles everywhere. The rumour ran that Diana had banished Harvey as she had some of Charles’s friends. In fact, Harvey was old and incontinent, his hind legs dragged behind him and he was no longer capable of getting up the stairs. He was given to the Prince’s comptroller, Colonel Creasy, to look after.

The saddest departure was that of Oliver Everett, who had acted as the Princess’s private secretary and aide from before her wedding. Charming, highly educated and a skilful polo player, Everett had given up a promising diplomatic career to answer the Prince’s call ‘to look after Diana’. At first they had got on well, joking and chatting in the light-hearted manner which Diana enjoyed in her relations with her staff. Suddenly, in a way which was, sadly, to become characteristic of her, she turned against him for some perceived although totally minor offence. She demanded that Charles tell him to go, and go he did at the end of 1983. It was evident that the Royal Family and household thought he had been badly treated, since he was subsequently given the desirable post of royal librarian at Windsor.

The resignations of Edward Adeane and Michael Colborne were both unfairly attributed to Diana. Adeane, a top libel lawyer with a first-class brain and a dry wit, managed to get on with Diana although as personalities they were worlds apart. He was shocked when, working on the preparations for the Australian tour, he discovered that the future Queen of England did not know the name of the capital of Australia. ²⁰ Adeane was seriously taken aback when, after the birth of William, he was told to give up his early morning meeting with Charles because Diana insisted that William’s father should spend some time in the nursery with his son. That was not at all how things had been in Adeane’s father’s time.

Yet it was the Prince, not the Princess, who prompted Adeane’s departure. Adeane appreciated the conscientious way Diana dealt with her paperwork, in contrast to the confusion of her husband’s handling of his office affairs. The Prince, said a former member of his staff, ‘was a muddler and liked it like that so that he could blame other people, throw up his hands and say “Oh, the office!”’ Edward Adeane, who had been brought up in the tradition of his father, the Queen’s private secretary, had become increasingly annoyed with the confusion, the Prince’s habit of taking the advice of the last person he had seen, of refusing to listen to Adeane’s and taking private initiatives of which his private secretary was unaware until it was too late to stop him. The last straw for the private secretary was the Prince’s notorious speech on 30 May 1984 given at Hampton Court Palace at a dinner in honour of the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, when he compared the new design for the wing of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’, and launched an attack on modern architecture and architects. Edward Adeane had vehemently opposed the Prince’s plan for his speech: it was not only insulting to his hosts, the architectural profession, but pre-empted the judgement of the public inquiry on the development which was then in progress. While he attempted to persuade the Prince against the speech even in the car going down to Hampton Court, he did not know that Charles had already leaked the text to The Times and the Guardian for publication the next day.²¹ Adeane resigned six months later after yet another row.

Michael Colborne’s resignation was partly prompted, it was rumoured, by the snobbery of the household, who could not envisage a grammar school boy with the title of Comptroller of the Prince’s Household. Whatever the truth of that, a root cause of Colborne’s going was the increasing difficulty he experienced in treading the tightrope between Prince and Princess. ‘I couldn’t look after two,’ he said. ‘I mean, he wanted me to do one thing and she wanted me to do another so I thought the best thing was to get out while the going was good. And I resigned in the April [1984] but didn’t get out till the December because they kept asking me to change my mind, to stay on and do this and that.’ The last straw for Colborne, as it had been for Adeane, was the behaviour of the increasingly edgy and jealous Prince on the April trip to Canada which followed the couple’s Australian tour in 1983. Colborne had spent the afternoon with Diana at her request while Charles went about his official business. When Charles returned, he flew into one of his towering, shouting rages, accusing Colborne of neglecting him for Diana. Outside the door, hearing everything that had gone on, was a sobbing Diana. The Prince took her in his arms, but the damage had been done. Diana was aware of the resentment eating away at her husband, but there was nothing she could do about it.

For Colborne, who had borne the brunt of the Prince’s tirades many times before, this was a row too far. ‘I get an inner gut feeling when things are going to change,’ Colborne said. ‘I had ten wonderful years.’ Members of the Queen’s household, aware that Colborne was one of the few people whom Diana listened to and trusted, attempted to dissuade him. The effect of the resignations of both Adeane and Colborne was to diminish the numbers of people who could genuinely be called impartial in the Prince’s office.

Diana’s unattainable desire to have her husband all to herself, and his early willingness to do anything to please her and to avoid the constant rows, did result in the distancing of some of Charles’s closest friends. Nicholas Soames, who for years had been accustomed to speak to him on the telephone at least once a week, heard nothing from the Prince for two and a half years. It goes without saying that the Parker Bowleses’ and the Tryons did not receive invitations, a point which Diana had made very clear by crossing them off the list for the wedding breakfast in 1981. The Romseys, Brabournes and Palmer-Tomkinsons also found themselves blacklisted: Charles had let drop during one of their rows that Norton Romsey had advised him not to marry Diana. According to a royal relation, Diana crossed every single woman of Charles’s previous acquaintance off their mutual Christmas card list.

Camilla’s family and Charles’s close friends were very upset when he ceased to get in touch with them. Not only were they genuinely fond of him but they also basked in the glow which surrounds royal access. ‘I think they were a little put out that they didn’t see him and gone were the close contacts and everything else,’ a neighbour said.²² Charles’s friends – and Camilla’s – were the country house set, the owners of great houses like Bowood in Wiltshire, Chatsworth in Derbyshire, families with resonant names like Shelburne and Willoughby de Broke. Diana was offending a powerful network reaching from the country to the court and she would not easily be forgiven. In social terms, despite being Princess of Wales and a Spencer, she had no comparable network of her own. Stories of her possessiveness were bandied round by the exiles, no doubt giving rise to the ‘fiend’ and ‘monster’ accusations. The mantra was that Diana was a scheming girl who had set her cap at Charles and got him, that she was ‘a really nasty person’, or at best an unhappy one. She was ‘impossible to live with – the reason why so many staff had left’. Her treatment of Prince Charles had been cruel and domineering from the start. One friend recalled when the couple came to have a drink during their engagement period: Diana had left her engagement ring in another room and peremptorily ordered Charles to go and fetch it. The visiting couple had initially applauded her firmness with the Prince: ‘at the time I thought this was good news but later it turned out not to be at all . . .’ Diana, they said, ‘tortured’ Prince Charles, saying, ‘No one wants to see you, they all want to see me’, and, ‘You’ll never be King, no one wants you to be King.’ Charles’s riposte, according to Diana, would be, ‘They only come to see you because you’re married to me.’²³ When Diana’s uncle Lord Fermoy, of whom she was very fond, shot himself in August 1984 after a long struggle against depression, the tragedy strengthened comments about ‘bad Fermoy blood’: Frances was a bolter, her sister Mary a recluse and Fermoy himself a depressive. Diana was, therefore, ‘tainted’. Much was made of Ruth Fermoy quoting a school report on Diana describing her as ‘the most scheming little girl I have ever met’.

While this last may have carried an element of truth, and it could indeed be said that Diana’s desire that Charles ‘should give up everything’ for her was totally unrealistic, considering that he had official duties and responsibilities as Prince of Wales and was a spoilt bachelor already set in his ways to boot, the evidence is that, although she undoubtedly treated him badly when in one of her moods, she still loved him far more than he ever loved her. ‘Prince Charles was so self-centred that he couldn’t handle the situation with Diana when she behaved erratically [but] she was besotted with him and always put him first,’ a member of their staff said. ‘The Princess was very much in love with him – romantically so and at the same time rather afraid of him.’²⁴ The irony of the situation was that she was terrified of losing Charles and, above all, of his going back to Camilla, but her tormented behaviour only succeeded in turning him away from her. At some point, probably in 1983, Charles and Camilla began to get in touch again. Diana believed that Camilla had never gone away and that she had always kept in touch.

The allegation that Diana ‘dominated’ Charles was described as nonsense by Andrew Neil, then editor of the Sunday Times, who, with Charles Douglas-Home, editor of The Times and Diana’s first cousin, lunched with the couple at Kensington Palace in April 1984. ‘It was clear the royal couple had very little in common,’ wrote Neil. ‘Charles roamed far and wide on the issues of the day ... Diana played little part in the conversation . . . Charles made no attempt to involve her.’²⁵ ‘The Princess would consult Prince Charles on everything and he liked that,’ a member of staff said. ‘She was very anxious to get everything right.’²⁶

then between William and Harry being born it is total darkness. I can’t remember much, I’ve blotted it out, it was such pain. However, Harry appeared by a miracle. We were very, very close to each other the six weeks before Harry was born, the closest we’ve ever, ever been and ever will be. Then suddenly as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain. I knew Harry was going to be a boy because I saw the scan. Charles always wanted a girl. I knew Harry was a boy and I didn’t tell him. Harry arrived, Harry had red hair, Harry was a boy. [His] first comment was ‘Oh God, it’s a boy’, second comment, ‘and he’s even got red hair’. Something inside me closed off. By then I knew he had gone back to his lady . . .²⁷