Diana

While the royal household struggled to keep the lid on the swirling currents surrounding the Wales and York marriages, no one dared warn the Queen of what might happen. The year 1992 would mark the fortieth anniversary of her accession to the throne: the Queen in her Christmas broadcast message to her people, unaware that her family was crumbling around her, chose to emphasize the family theme as she affirmed her determination to serve as their monarch in the years to come: ‘With your prayers and your help, and the love and support of my family, I shall try and help you in the years to come . . .’

The first shock to the family came in the first month of the year. On 15 January the Mail published the photographs of Steve Wyatt and Sarah on holiday with the children which a window cleaner and odd-job man had found on top of the wardrobe in Wyatt’s vacant flat. This time the naïve, long-suffering Prince Andrew, in his father-in-law’s words, ‘hit the roof’. ‘They were only holiday snaps,’ Ronald Ferguson told Lesley Player, ‘but they show that Texan fellow in a basket chair with his arm around her [Sarah] – and the one that really annoyed Andrew was little Beatrice with no clothes on being cuddled by him . . .’² Six days after the publication, Andrew and Sarah agreed to separate and travelled down to Sandringham to tell the Queen of their decision. According to Sarah, the Queen asked them to reconsider and no announcement was made for the time being. According to Sarah’s autobiography she was determined to divorce Andrew in order to escape ‘the Firm’ in which ‘grey man Z’ (Robert Fellowes) had been joined by a new press secretary, ‘grey man X’ (Charles Anson). Without mentioning the developments in her private life which had led her to the decision, she blamed the grey men and their bully-boy tactics. They were determined to oust her and to protect Diana, she said. She did not mention Wyatt, who had left for the United States that month, apparently vowing eternal love, nor did she mention his replacement, another Texan, John Bryan.

Sarah was apparently expecting Diana to follow suit in bolting from the family but it soon became evident that she had no intention of doing so – yet. Perhaps in order to distance herself from the rumours surrounding Sarah, she appears to have been behind the lead in the Daily Mail on 18 March when a front-page ‘exclusive’ by Richard Kay and Andrew Morton declared that ‘the Palace is preparing to announce the separation of the Duke and Duchess of York’. The story precipitated the Palace into action: the following day they did indeed issue a statement that lawyers acting for the Duchess of York had initiated discussions about a formal separation, accompanied by the pious hope that the media would spare the Duke and Duchess and their children ‘any intrusion’. Their hope that the story could be kept quiet until after the General Election campaign then in progress had vanished. Sarah immediately suspected Diana since both Richard Kay and Andrew Morton were close to her and therefore the story must have been prompted by her, possibly to deflect any speculation about her own situation in the run-up to the publication in June of Andrew Morton’s book. A representative of a public relations firm was summoned to Sunninghill Park. He arrived to find only Andrew there: Sarah was upstairs with John Bryan who had now taken over her affairs. They later appeared downstairs together in a state of high excitement. Sarah attacked the man for the bad publicity she had had to endure and indicated that John Bryan would be a more effective adviser. Tempers flared and the Yorks, with another guest, left the room (although it later transpired that they had been listening at the door). There was a scene during which champagne flutes were smashed. Witnesses commented that Andrew seemed to be frightened of Sarah and now hated Diana, his former friend, on his brother’s account.

Diana was intent on her own survival and had no intention of becoming embroiled in her sister-in-law’s self-induced troubles. She distanced herself from Sarah and carried on her own public relations campaign. In February she travelled with Charles on a visit to India which was to feature the famous ‘Princess alone’ photograph of a pensive Diana seated in front of the Taj Mahal, romantic monument to the enduring love of the Mogul Emperor Shah Jehan for his dead wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The impact of the picture showed Diana’s phenomenal public relations skills. In itself, the location of the shot was absolutely normal; it was taken from the only spot to which the authorities would allow media access. Charles himself had sat on the same bench on his visit twelve years before, when he had given a hostage to fortune by saying, ‘One day I would like to bring my wife here.’ At the time, Charles himself was at a meeting for business leaders in Bangalore – the separation of itineraries was normal practice on intercontinental visits such as this. ‘The trouble with these visits,’ said Dickie Arbiter, the couple’s press secretary who accompanied them, ‘[is that] they only last for four days, five at the most, and everybody wants a piece of the action. They are only two people and they can only do so much so they have to split and do what was required of them.’³ The media, aware of Charles’s previous pledge, put their own interpretation on the picture, following the precise line Diana intended. Famously, she followed it up with the cruel ‘kiss that never was’ at a polo match when, as Charles bent towards her to kiss her for a much awaited photo opportunity, she swiftly averted her head at the last moment, so that he was pictured pecking ineptly at her neck. ‘Oh, Come On You Can Do Better Than That, Charles!’ the Mirror admonished.

Such well-publicized images of a marriage in trouble caused consternation at the Palace, where the top officials had already picked up rumours of the Morton book and were desperate to shore up the marriage of the heir to the throne. It was only to get worse. On 29 March, Johnnie Spencer died suddenly of a heart attack in the Humana Hospital Wellington in north London where he had been recovering from mild pneumonia. His death was quite unexpected: Diana, who had visited him with William on 25 March, had left the following day for a family skiing holiday with Charles in Lech. None of the family was with Johnnie when he died, not even Raine who had felt able to go down to Althorp to supervise funding events. Diana, distraught in Lech, prepared to fly home without Charles. On this occasion of her private grief she could not bear the thought of yet another ‘happy families’ act for the media. Charles, his private secretary Richard Aylard and Dickie Arbiter tried to persuade her to go with her husband for the sake of the public image of the Prince and of their marriage. It took a telephone call from the Queen to persuade her to make a joint journey back to England. Even then the couple’s private estrangement was such that, on arrival at Kensington Palace, Charles departed immediately for Highgrove, leaving Diana alone to grieve for her adored father. On 1 April she drove down to Althorp for the funeral at the family church of St Mary the Virgin, Great Brington. Charles flew over by helicopter to join her in the car for the church, maintaining the fiction of a supportive husband. Immediately after lunch, he flew back to London. Following her father’s coffin out of the church with Raine, Diana’s instinctive sympathy caused her to take the first step towards ending the feud with her stepmother. ‘She did a very moving thing at Johnnie’s funeral, Diana,’ a relation who attended said. ‘Raine was on that side and Diana was on this side, and when they left their seats she went over to Raine and held her hand and walked down the church with her. I was very impressed with that because I thought it showed a desire to reconcile everything, and in front of the whole congregation doing that . . . so that it was evident to everybody what she had done. And I thought that was very tender . . . bringing Raine in and not isolating her.’⁴ Frances Shand Kydd did not attend, although she was present – making herself as inconspicuous as possible – at the London memorial service on 19 May.

By then Diana was standing on the edge of the abyss – the pre-publication serialization of the Morton book which would precipitate her isolation from the Royal Family. For some time she had hugged the secret triumphantly as she looked forward to putting her case to her public, exposing Charles and Camilla and revealing the sham of her ‘fairy-tale’ marriage. But, with less than a month to go, she began to be apprehensive of the consequences of what she had done. ‘I was with them going to Expo ’92 in Seville,’ said one of her close aides. ‘She said, “You don’t know what I’ve done.” She was scared, really scared.⁵ I think she was just beginning to realize . . .’ To David Puttnam, former film producer and future Labour peer, she confided, ‘I’ve done something which I may really live to regret . . .’ Sitting next to Puttnam at a dinner meeting of powerful media executives called the Thirty Club at Claridge’s in March, she confessed that she was terrified of the consequences. Puttnam was then governor of the National AIDS Trust of which she became President. ‘Before, she was talking about wanting to do something unusual, big,’ Puttnam recalled, ‘so I arranged for her to address all the media owners, Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black . . . at the Thirty Club . . . she was absolutely terrified, so I coached her through it, we worked out what she would do, we even set it up so that there were some interviews by very, very young interviewers. And she was brilliant, and she knew she was brilliant. The speech about the incidence of AIDS in women was a really “grown up” thing to do.’ It may be that seeing the media power ranked in front of her brought home to her for the first time what she was getting herself into. At dinner, to Puttnam’s surprise, she ‘suddenly started confiding in me how unhappy things were in her marriage. She said “Neither of us has been perfect, but I’ve done a really stupid thing. I have allowed a book to be written. I felt it was a good idea, a way of clearing the air, but now I think it was a very stupid thing that will cause all kinds of terrible trouble”, adding, “I would like to reel the movie back. It is the daftest thing I have ever done.’⁶ On the day the serialization of the Morton book came out, she rang the Waleses’ press secretary Dickie Arbiter in a panic: ‘What do I do?’ ‘You don’t do anything,’ Arbiter replied. ‘Why didn’t you tell me when I first asked you four months ago what help you had given the Morton book? You swore you hadn’t given any.’ And on that day, Diana still repeated, ‘I haven’t given any help.’⁷

By now thoroughly apprehensive, Diana was given an opportunity to demonstrate both her courage in the face of private anxiety and her value as an ambassador of the Royal Family and the British nation with an official visit to Egypt on 10 May. Ironically, as her private secretary Patrick Jephson noted, while the Princess flew out on her official tour in an aircraft paid for by the British taxpayer, the plane was diverted to land the Prince (on his eighth holiday of the year) and a party of friends in Turkey. In yet another example of the Prince’s poor PR, when Diana flew back to London the same plane was forced to double back to Turkey again since the Prince’s plans had not dovetailed with the Princess’s official schedule. Despite a sobbing fit on the plane, possibly induced by apprehension over the Morton book but also perhaps because of the presence of the Prince and his friends off on their holiday, underlining the separateness of their ways, she heroically pulled herself together before the arrival at Cairo. ‘No matter how close she came to the edge of bottling out,’ Jephson wrote, ‘she always produced the last-minute effort of will that could turn imminent disaster into serene triumph.’ Immaculately groomed, she played her part in the arrival ceremony with ‘consummate professionalism, poise and devotion to duty’. ‘I wondered,’ Jephson added, ‘if her opponents really understood the bloody-minded determination of the woman they were seeking to banish into the backwaters of royal life.’⁸ Not only was Diana a huge success with her hosts, President Hosni Mubarak and his wife, but she won the admiration of the travelling press pack, alert for any sign of weakness. A report in the Sunday Times congratulated Diana on her courage. ‘It is a mark of her confidence that even after the recent publicity about her marriage she is prepared to walk into a room of tabloid hacks. The transformation in Diana is quite incredible. Diana will never be a great intellectual but she is a very shrewd sharp woman with amazing strength of character.’⁹

Yet even she had underestimated the bombshell effect of the public revelations of the reality of a marriage – which the majority had firmly believed, or wished to believe, was still the fairy tale of that July day in 1981 – when they were published in the Sunday Times beginning on 7 June 1992. The book told of Diana’s psychological problems, the bulimia, self-mutilation and depression – including the Sandringham suicide attempt that never was. Charles’s infidelity with Camilla and his unkindness to Diana were similarly revealed. The nation as a whole was shocked and angry. There was disillusionment with the Royal Family, and hence the monarchy, which had been building over the antics of Sarah and Diana; with It’s a Royal Knockout; with the Yorks selling pictures of themselves with their babies to Hello!; with Princess Anne’s divorce from Mark Phillips in 1992, accompanied by the rumours of her affair with one of her policemen. Middle England, brought up to regard the Royal Family as role models, ‘ourselves behaving better’, was shaken to the core. The heir to the throne came out worst of all: a cynical adulterer who mistreated his virgin bride and selfishly ignored his children. This last was a recent theme of Diana’s which she had been putting across in the press: James Gilbey quoted her as saying. ‘She thinks he is a bad father, a selfish father; the children have to tie in with whatever he’s doing.’

The representation of Diana as a victim struggling to free herself from the crushing weight of an ultra-traditional family and an adulterous, uncaring husband won her widespread sympathy from the public at large, as she had intended. The trouble about the book from the Royal Family’s point of view was that its essential presentation of Diana as a virgin sacrifice offered up on the altar of the dynasty was near enough to the truth to be believable. At first, however, it was dismissed as a journalistic fabrication. Diana’s repeated denials of collaboration to her brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes, who assured the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Lord McGregor, that she had not been involved, led to his statement condemning the press for ‘dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’. Her friends who had collaborated in the Morton book were accused of betraying Diana by revealing her secrets. A photo opportunity was arranged at the request of Carolyn’s husband, William Bartholomew, who was determined that Diana should be seen publicly supporting his wife.¹⁰ A cousin of the Queen remembered being told by a photographer that Diana herself had telephoned him telling him to be at the Bartholomews’ Fulham house at a precise time.¹¹ Diana’s evident approval of what Carolyn had done and the use of photographs from the Spencer family album gave Morton’s revelations authenticity. One of the contributors, Angela Serota, a friend of Andrew Knight, executive director of News International, told Knight that Diana had indeed authorized her friends to cooperate with Morton.¹² When the Bartholomew photographs appeared, McGregor, who had received Robert Fellowes’ assurances, rang him in Paris, where he was with the Queen, to berate him for deceiving him. Fellowes, who had asked Diana several times if she had been involved and received direct denials from her, had believed her. He was fond of his sister-in-law, whom he had known since childhood, and, being an upright man of Christian principles, had thought it inconceivable that she could have lied to him. He apologized to Lord McGregor and the Press Complaints Commission for misleading them and offered his resignation to the Queen who refused it. The affair greatly damaged Diana’s future relations with her sister and brother-in-law, whom she had lied to and betrayed, making him look ridiculous to his own official circle. She continued to deny that she herself had been responsible for the book or that she had spoken to the author. No one believed her on the first count, although her undoubted responsibility for the second was not to be publicly revealed until Morton published extracts from the tapes after her death.

While Diana had succeeded in her aim of revealing the sham of her marriage and gaining the sympathy of the wider public, the British Establishment and the upper echelons of British society were outraged at what they saw as a betrayal of the Queen and the monarchy on her part. It was the first self-destructive step towards the final parting of the ways. Diana never wanted a divorce; in her heart she still loved Charles to the point of obsession and saw him as her husband. She still hoped that she could have it all: remaining in the Royal Family, keeping her children and her title as Princess of Wales, while keeping a separate court. ‘Diana would never have got out,’ Dickie Arbiter affirmed. But, although at a private meeting with Charles the day after the serialization began they agreed to separate on the grounds of incompatibility, Diana continued to feel a passionate resentment over her treatment, refusing to play an accommodating Queen Alexandra to Charles and Camilla’s Edward VII and Mrs Keppel. Like Sarah Ferguson, she was a child of a modern generation which was not prepared to accept the upper-class conventional marriage in which fidelity and romance did not play a part. But, unlike Sarah Ferguson, who for selfish reasons turned her back on a husband who loved and supported her through all her infidelities and antics, Diana had every reason to complain as the loving, inexperienced bride who had been used and abused by an uncaring, selfish husband incapable of giving her the love she craved, nor even the normal married life she had dreamed of. Moreover, as she saw it – and who is to say she was wrong? – he was backed up by a powerful social set and ultimately by the Palace, who had tried to silence and sideline her.

After the publication of the first instalment of the Morton book, a handful of the Prince’s closest friends, including the Romseys and van Cutsems, felt compelled to tell both the Queen and Prince Philip how stoical they thought the Prince had been through the long trauma of the marriage. Perhaps nudged by this intervention but certainly shocked by the media blitzkrieg surrounding the publication of the book, both the Queen and the Duke, who had been at pains not to take sides, rallied to the Prince; in particular, the Duke wrote a long and sympathetic letter to him in which he praised what he saw as his son’s saint-like fortitude. It was in this atmosphere that the Queen and Prince discussed for the first time whether he should seek a separation from the Princess.¹³

As Charles’s authorized biographer, Dimbleby is well informed and reliable on the Prince’s side of the story, although no official biographer can be entirely impartial. What he did not say, however, is that despite their initial shock at the effect of the book in battering down the wall of confidentiality traditionally surrounding the family, and at Diana’s deviousness in first encouraging it and then concealing its progress, the Queen and Prince Philip were not at heart totally unsympathetic to Diana. The Prince’s first reaction was anger at his daughter-in-law for bringing the situation and its accompanying scandal into the open. With the Morton book, she had ‘destroyed everything’, he wrote to her. Yet the Queen and Prince Philip disapproved of Charles’s adultery with Camilla which, far more than any unreasonable behaviour of Diana’s, had brought scandal on the monarchy. Indeed, at Easter the following year, a courtier was amazed when Charles, who was sitting beside her, exploded in fury at his father: ‘You should have seen the letter he wrote me . . . !’¹⁴ ‘What Charles has done is very wrong,’ Prince Philip wrote in a compassionate letter to his daughter-in-law. Both the Queen and Prince Philip were – and are – strong in their religious feelings and convictions; divorce was abhorrent to them and they hoped above all that it need not come to that, both for the sake of the young princes and the monarchy – ‘the image of a family on the throne’, as Walter Bagehot had put it. It was the Prince’s party at the Palace and in society who undermined Diana by implying or saying publicly, as one certainly did, that Diana was mad – ‘that bad Fermoy blood’. The general Palace view – but not in the Queen’s office – was detestation of Diana for her revelation of family secrets and sympathy for ‘the poor Prince’. The fact that the basis of her story was the truth counted for nothing in the face of her breach of the rules.

Yet, despite everything, the royal show rumbled on: the traditional celebration of the Queen’s official birthday, Trooping the Colour, went ahead with Diana as part of the family party standing on Buckingham Palace balcony for the RAF fly-past as if nothing had happened. Fergie, however, was nowhere to be seen. As the second instalment of the Morton serialization hit the news-stands on 14 June, the family were at Windsor for the racing at Ascot. The following day the Queen and Prince Philip had a meeting with Charles and Diana, during which the subject of divorce was mentioned but rejected. The Queen was led to believe that Diana would stand by Charles and suggested a six-month cooling-off period. Once again Diana was asked if she had collaborated on the book and once again she denied it, in tears. Prince Philip, by her later account, was ‘angry, raging and unpleasant’¹⁵ and later cold-shouldered her in the royal box.¹⁶ On the opening day, as the Queen and the rest of her family drove in open carriages down the course, the disgraced Sarah took her two daughters to wave at their grandmother from the rails. The Queen waved back but inwardly she no doubt despaired at yet another manifestation of what the press now liked to call her ‘dysfunctional’ family. Guests at lunch at the Castle noted that the Queen seemed to be ‘in a pretty bad temper’ and when she did talk to her guests she was less than her usual gracious self. In the royal box after lunch, again, no one dared speak to her.

At the end of June Diana gave yet another demonstration of the crowd-pleasing qualities which made her such a valuable royal asset. On a visit to Belfast (security had been breached by the leaking of her visit the night before), she paid a spectacularly successful visit to the Republican heartland, the Falls Road, the dominion of the IRA. An estimated twenty thousand people came to ‘shout for Diana’. The Morton revelations had evidently made their impact and there was no doubting where the popular sympathies lay. As the Daily Mirror front page put it under a banner headline ‘WE WANT DI!’, frontline Belfast had ‘a message for the Royals’. Even the normally anti-monarchist Dublin press reported sympathetically on the Princess. It was a timely reminder of her popular appeal, and her enemies responded accordingly. On the same day as the papers published ecstatic reports of her success in Northern Ireland, others carried stories that could only have been planted by her enemies, clearly suggesting that the Princess suffered from mental instability.¹⁷

At the end of July both Charles and Diana attended a dinner to celebrate the Queen’s fortieth anniversary on the throne and in August, after a brief, unsatisfactory ‘family holiday’ on millionaire John Latsis’s yacht, they flew up to Balmoral for the annual family holiday. They were all there when, on 20 August, the Daily Mirror published the notorious ‘toe-sucking’ pictures featuring Sarah and her ‘financial adviser’ John Bryan on holiday in the South of France with the two little princesses. Nothing was said when Andrew, forewarned by Sarah, went down to face the younger members of the family at the breakfast table littered with newspapers blaring headlines and explicit photographs. Sarah herself went to face a furious Queen at 9.30. One can only imagine the conversation. While the scandal raged in the press, at Balmoral it was as if nothing had happened. Sarah remained for a further three days, sitting in her usual place beside Andrew. A young member of the family said to a relation, ‘You won’t believe it – nobody said a word. There was Fergie sitting next to Andrew and the topless pictures all over the papers . . .’¹⁸

Four days after the publication of the ‘toe-sucking’ pictures of Sarah and John Bryan, it was Diana’s turn for embarrassment. The Sun published the Squidgygate tapes of the conversations between Diana and James Gilbey on New Year’s Eve 1989 under the heading ‘MY LIFE IS TORTURE’, which not only underlined the deep rift between herself and Charles but her difficulties with the Royal Family in general and, more damagingly, her close relationship with Gilbey. The terms in which she had spoken of the family’s ingratitude and lack of appreciation of her dutiful public efforts – ‘after all I’ve done for this f . . . family’ – were difficult for the Palace to come to terms with. The Sun then alleged that Diana and Hewitt had had a ‘physical relationship’ with no evidence beyond analysis of their ‘body language’ in photographs of them together. Diana suspected a conspiracy to destroy her but there was none beyond the destructive effect of the relentless tabloid circulation war. In these circumstances and after the publication of the Morton book which, however much she may have regretted it, still represented her ‘manifesto’, her protest against the sham of her marriage, it was hardly surprising that she dug in her heels over the projected joint tour of South Korea.

Peter Westmacott, the deputy private secretary to the royal couple, was obliged to do the Korean ‘recce’ as if he were organising a joint visit – which, from his conversation with the Princess, he was convinced would not in fact take place. At Balmoral, the Prince tried to persuade the Princess to change her mind. Even the Queen intervened to advise her daughter-in-law that she ought to go. Finally the Prince told her bluntly that she would have to come up with an explanation of her own for staying behind. At this, the Princess finally relented, saying meekly that as the Queen had asked her to go she would after all accompany him.¹⁹

The resulting tour, as Diana knew it would be, was a public relations disaster. The glum faces of the couple only served to indicate the depths to which the marriage had sunk. There could no longer be any pretence that the situation was salvageable. On the aeroplane returning from Korea, the Prince wrote one of his gloomy, self-pitying letters, recounting his despair that Diana could not be ‘a friend’ to him and how he had been battling the temptation to cancel his engagements: ‘I feel so unsuited to the ghastly business of human intrigue and general nastiness . . . I don’t know what will happen from now on but I dread it. ’²⁰

In contrast, Diana’s subsequent solo visit to Paris on 13 November represented in Jephson’s eyes her ‘apogee’. Greeted with the welcoming message ‘COURAGE PRINCESSE!’, Diana went through the perfectly orchestrated schedule at the peak of her beauty and professionalism, charming President Mitterrand, the French public and the press alike. For Jephson that moment represented Diana at her best. Strengthened by her stand over the Morton book, she had not yet encountered the pitfalls which awaited her bid for independence. ‘To my eyes,’ Morton wrote, ‘knowing what she had already endured and what lay ahead in the immediate future, there was something heroic in her.’

For Diana the endgame of the first phase was near. The final confrontation of the year came in a quarrel over one of Charles’s annual November shooting weekends at Sandringham, planned for the 20th and timed to coincide with an exeat from Ludgrove so that William and Harry could join them. In a last act of defiance, Diana decided not to go and, moreover, to inform Charles that she would be taking the children to see their grandmother, the Queen, at Windsor, or, if she could not stay there, to Highgrove. The Prince metaphorically stamped his foot and threatened her with his authority – he could not be defied in the eyes of his friends. Diana held her ground. His intemperate attitude gave her the excuse she needed to write a defiant letter which, paraphrased, said, more or less: ‘Given the way things are between us I’m not sure I want to subject myself to the company of your friends and I certainly don’t want to subject the boys to the company of your friends given that we both know who might be there . . .’²¹

According to Dimbleby, it had ‘become the custom for the royal couple to invite some sixteen friends to stay for three days of relaxation, shooting, and walking’.²² In practice, the ‘friends’ were all Charles’s, not Diana’s, and by now they had almost no friends in common. Charles’s friends, Diana well knew, would include the inner circle who provided safe houses for his rendezvous with Camilla. As Diana complained to Jephson, ‘They’re all his friends. I’m going to be completely outnumbered.’²³ And as a friend said, ‘She’d been put through this Sandringham ordeal over and over again . . . it was a real little love-in for the Prince’s buddies and his whole household was mobilized to make it an extraordinary expression of his regal position. It was a [Michael] Fawcett production in overdrive, playing King in the Queen’s house . . .’²⁴ Diana’s position, while absolutely understandable as regards her own presence in the house, was less tenable when it came to preventing the boys from seeing their father. Unfortunately, they were her principal weapon and in her rage and distress she was not above using them as pawns in the war with her husband.

Charles’s patience finally snapped. He would not be defied like this in front of his friends, or, as Dimbleby judiciously put it: ‘Unable to see any future in a relationship conducted on these terms, he decided he had no choice but to ask his wife for a legal separation.’²⁵ On 25 November he and Diana met privately at Kensington Palace and agreed to put the matter in the hands of their lawyers. Discussions continued for some weeks over the matters to be agreed, principally arrangements over the children, secondly a financial settlement for her upkeep, and lastly and most controversially, Diana’s future role as a working member of the Royal Family, described, according to Jephson who took part in the negotiations as ‘a semi-detached member of the Royal Family’.

‘It was at about this time,’ Jephson commented with distaste, ‘that the phrase “loose cannon” became popular.’²⁶ The Queen herself, he said, was taking great trouble to remain neutral, but the Prince’s advisers (he did not name them but hinted that they were not his legal ones) seemed determined to thwart Diana’s ambitions to become an independent royal operator, attempting to restrict her use of the Queen’s Flight and the royal train, and downgrading the protocol accorded to her when on official visits. In the end, since the Queen declined to come down on the Prince’s side, Diana got almost everything she wanted in the final negotiations except for the financial settlement which was not agreed until the divorce was finalized in 1996. The only stipulation made by the Queen was that Diana should not represent her abroad. Significantly, in an attempt to promote fairness and bipartisanship between the households and staff of all the Palaces, the Lord Chamberlain circulated a letter impressing on everybody the necessity of understanding for both sides. Whether it actually made any difference to the attitudes in the opposing camps is doubtful but it was useful in emphasizing the neutrality of the Crown (that is, the Queen) in the disputes between the Waleses.

While the first statement was received by Members of Parliament in respectful silence, the Prime Minister’s following words to the effect that ‘there was no reason why the Princess of Wales should not be crowned Queen Consort in due course . . .’ produced a collective gasp. The idea that the Princess of Wales, living apart from her husband and at daggers drawn with him, could still be crowned Queen Consort struck most people as absurd. The idea that the Prince of Wales’s succession was assured as Head of the Church of England, even if constitutionally correct, also required some swallowing. The Archbishop of Canterbury, when officially consulted before the statement, said that for the separation to be widely accepted two important provisos should be met: ‘both parents would have to be seen to maintain close bonds with their children; and extra-marital love affairs that might be brought to public attention would need to be avoided’.²⁷ It would soon become obvious that the Archbishop’s second proviso was very far from being met.