Diana

As the new year of 1997 opened, Diana seemed to be standing on a pinnacle of celebrity which she herself had created, a remarkable achievement for the shy teenager who had captured the Prince of Wales just over fifteen years before. ‘Diana was globally transformed in my view in that last year of her life,’ her friend Richard Kay said. ‘That’s when she became the big figure that she was.’³ At lunch with her in Kensington Palace, Anthony Holden was astounded by the people she knew or had met: ‘She’d just come back from seeing Hillary Clinton in Washington; we talked about that. She’d been to see the Pope; we talked about that. Talked about the Queen Mother. We talked about, you know, the six most famous people in the world, all of whom she had seen in the last month or so.’ They discussed the possibility of her setting up a charitable trust, the idea of which had cropped up at various times in recent years. Then she said: ‘What if I gave you a name? I was speaking the other day to Colin Powell and he strongly advised me not to form a foundation. There are complicated this, you lose control of that, there are tax implications ...’ ‘I was very much struck by the way she said, “If I gave you a name” – we’d already discussed everybody you’d ever heard of – ’⁴ Beyond the celebrities, she had a worldwide public not only for her beauty and charm, but for her compassion for the poor and sick which communicated itself to anyone who saw her. And, as she frequently said, she was determined to use this power to help people.

She had already taken a step which symbolized the sloughing off of her old life, deciding to auction her old wardrobe for charity. The idea had been William’s. He had said, ‘Mummy, you’re running out of cupboard space and you’re not going to wear any of those again, and I really think something should be done with them, and what will you do with them, send them to a charity shop?’ Diana said, ‘No, I can’t do that. They’re too well known, they’re too well photographed, why don’t we make some money for charity out of it?’ When Meredith Etherington-Smith asked William if it had been his idea, ‘He said, “Yes, it was my idea – we don’t want Mummy wearing any of those again” – and he said it rather firmly.’⁵ Some of the clothes were more than ten years old, dating from her earlier, frillier period, before Victor Edelstein had given her a more sophisticated look.

The vehicle was to be a Christie’s sale of the clothes for the benefit of the National AIDS Trust, which included two of her friends, Marguerite Littman and Christopher Balfour, chairman of Christie’s, with whom she had first discussed the project at lunch in July 1996. Meredith Etherington-Smith, then marketing director of Christie’s Worldwide, was to be their representative for the sale, handling all aspects of it, including the cataloguing of each item.

‘Christopher Balfour summoned me one morning and said, “Interesting project for you. The Princess of Wales wants to sell her clothes.” I said, “Don’t be stupid, what are you talking about?” And he said, “She wants to sell her clothes because she’s not going to be wearing kind of big ball dresses any more, she’s got a new life, she wants to sell them in aid of Marguerite’s AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden ... You leg it down to Kensington Palace and meet her ...”’⁶ Wearing her good luck black jacket with starfish buttons, Meredith arrived at the Palace to be met by Burrell, ‘smiling but looking slightly nervy’. He took her coat, asking her to wait. ‘He nips upstairs and I subsequently learned from her that he’d actually gone to say, “She looks all right ...” because she was actually rather nervous, she was as nervous as I was about meeting me for some reason. Apparently I passed muster – I was filtered through by the butler and went up this very grand staircase which was obviously part of the original baroque KP, to see this amazing human being dressed in a white T-shirt and sneakers and a navy blue cardigan, also looking rather nervous ...’

Meredith surmised that Diana was very comfortable in the company of older women. ‘I think possibly, without being too psychotherapeutic about it, because of the lack of a mother ... most of her confidantes apart from Rosa Monckton, were actually older women – Annabel Goldsmith, Elsa, Marguerite – and I think she felt very comfortable, they weren’t competition, they were fun and she could become slightly girly with them without the baggage of “I’m the most beautiful person in the world” ...’ It was decided that Diana should be involved all the time. “It’s going to be partners”,’ Meredith said. ‘“I’ll never do anything and make any decision without referring to you.” ’ ‘There wasn’t one decision that wasn’t discussed with her, faxed to her, okayed by her ... And as a result of that, I worked with her for nine months, pretty much, and we didn’t have one what I call eyelash moment.’ Asked what she meant, Meredith explained: ‘That sort of look, when she kind of retreated into herself and that hair came over the forehead and the head went down and she looked up [through her lashes] ... it was a very nice and fun working partnership.’⁸

Meredith bought a green leather book which Diana filled with the catalogue entries in her big loopy writing. ‘That writing reminds me so much of so many people who were at West Heath ... She was not a stupid Sloane, she was much more perceptive about herself than you would ever think from just looking at the image or reading the press or seeing her on television. I think she was one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Because West Heath was basically knitting for Sloanes when she was there. In my generation we used to laugh at them, we used to say they did O levels in Hamster Husbandry, and I think it was a shame because she had great natural common sense ...’⁹

Meredith realized that it would be wise to keep a certain distance between them. ‘She was a tremendous charmer in the fact that she wanted to draw people into her web and then, having drawn them into the web, when they were totally enslaved by her, then she got bored ... I felt my job was to always be slightly removed ... At the second or third meeting, she said, “You must call me Diana.” I said, “Actually no, I’d be happier with Ma’am, because as far as I’m concerned that’s what you have been and you are ...” Which went down really well. She said, “Come on, call me Diana”, and I said “No”, and a slight distance was maintained. Because she talked about other people, “so and so is getting kind of boring, she’s ringing up the whole time”, I said to her, “Your problem is you are too damn charming and they get completely enthralled by you and have to have the fix”, and she laughed and said, “I suppose you’re right.” And I said, “It’s a weapon isn’t it, charm? You can convert people.” And she said, “You’re quite right, but I haven’t had that many weapons in my life. What you’ve got you use.”’¹⁰

Among other things, they discussed Diana’s campaign against the use of landmines. Diana told Meredith that she had written to the Foreign Office asking them if she could become a roving ambassador – ‘Of course they turned me down ... I’ve decided to do it on my own and I’m going to do it for a cause and the cause is going to be landmines. It’s appalling the damage they do, and no one cares and they just spray them all over the place like ghastly bulbs. At least I can do something good with this kind of presence, you know, the opportunities I have, well, they’re not opportunities, they’re huge open gateways ...’¹¹

she sought to address herself to various issues in the world which were being neglected. There were millions of them [landmines] scattered round the world. They lurked wherever there had been conflict. A few charitable organisations were engaged in locating and lifting them, but it was discouraging as well as dangerous work because more mines were being constantly laid in the wars bedevilling Africa. The manufacturers of these mines represented a huge vested interest, which reduced the chances ... of an international ban ... defence forces in Britain, America and much of Europe saw the mines, properly laid and charted, as legitimate means of defence ...¹²

Diana had been in discussion with Mike Whitlam, head of the British Red Cross, about renewing her work for the organization. The result was a visit in January 1997 to Angola, the scene of prolonged civil war, under the auspices of the Red Cross and with a BBC television crew in attendance to film a documentary to raise money for the British Red Cross Landmines Appeal. Lord Deedes, who had been an advocate of a landmines ban since 1992, travelled with her for the Daily Telegraph, accompanied by mostly unenthusiastic and cynical members of the press corps. Deedes, who had been briefing Diana about landmines on visits to Kensington Palace, paid tribute to the drawing power of Diana’s presence: ‘Nobody took a blind bit of interest in landmines until she came along,’ he said. The journalists, accustomed to accompanying royal visits in daintier surroundings than Angola, were, Deedes said, ‘dismayed’ by the state of the capital, Luanda, with stinking rubbish piled high in the hot streets. Sunday Times reporter Christina Lamb, young but nonetheless a veteran war reporter, had certainly been cynical about Diana in Angola. She was impressed: despite the heat and the smells Diana had come to work and work she did. Angola, said Lamb, was one of the few remaining places in the world where most people had no idea who she was, and therefore it was all the more remarkable to see the effect she had on the amputees she went among. ‘The Red Cross whisked us from one hospital to the next,’ Lamb wrote,

each with ever more horrific scenes of skeletal figures with missing arms, missing legs, and blown off heads – victims of some of the 16m landmines scattered round the country. Many of the injuries were so gruesome I could not bear to look, despite years of Third World reporting. But Diana never turned her head away. Instead, she had something I’d only ever seen before in Nelson Mandela – a kind of aura that made people want to be with her, and a completely natural, straight-from-theheart sense of how to bring hope to those who seemed to us to have little to live for.¹³

Diana insisted on going to Huambo and Cuito where the war had left the countryside infested with mines. The television reporter Sandy Gall described Diana’s action as extremely courageous: he had encountered mines in Afghanistan and knew how dangerous it could be to walk through ‘cleared’ minefields. Just before it was reluctantly agreed to allow her to visit these ‘hellholes’, as Deedes described them, in London two journalists from The Times and the Daily Telegraph had entertained a junior minister, Lord Howe, to lunch. Expressing the usual Establishment view of Diana, he had been critical of her visit and called it political interference – the usual cliché ‘loose cannon’ came up. The minister’s remark caused heightened interest in Diana’s trip: as Deedes put it, ‘if it was causing offence to the Tory Government, that doubled its news value’.¹⁴ Diana’s comment to Deedes when he approached her in private next morning was ‘idiot minister’: to the cameras she insisted more diplomatically that the purpose of her visit was humanitarian and in no way political.

By now, Christina Lamb admitted, the visit had ‘wiped out’ all her past cynicism about Diana. ‘That Lady-with-the-Lamp performance wasn’t just for the cameras,’ she wrote.¹⁵ Once, at a hospital in Huambo when the photographers had all flown back to their air-conditioned hotels to wire their pictures, I watched Diana, unaware that any journalists were still present, sit and hold the hand of Helena Ussova, a seven-year-old who’d had her intestines blown to pieces by a mine. For what seemed an age the pair just sat, no words needed. When Diana finally left, the young girl struggled through her pain to ask me if the beautiful lady was an angel ... At the end of the Angola trip Diana said that the lasting image she’d take away was of that terribly ill young girl.¹⁶

The Angola visit was not the end of Diana’s involvement with landmines that year. In mid-June she spoke at a conference in London on landmines under the auspices of the Mines Advisory Group held at the Royal Geographical Society, chaired by Deedes, who helped her draft her speech. With Mike Whitlam’s advice she had drawn up a chart of landmine sites across the world, marked with red pins, which she kept in a corner of her sitting room at Kensington Palace. She told Deedes they should make another landmines expedition that summer, and, with the cooperation of Norwegian People’s Aid and Landmine Survivors Network (LSN) from Washington, a three-day visit to Bosnia was arranged from 8 to 10 August. The party, which included Bill Deedes and Paul Burrell, by now Diana’s inseparable shadow, flew out on a private jet owned by multimillionaire philanthropist George Soros. On the drive to Sarajevo they were joined by two Americans, Jerry White and Ken Rutherford, who had formed LSN after being maimed by landmines. White had lost one leg, Rutherford both. As the two Americans climbed awkwardly into the back of the Landcruiser, Diana turned round from her front seat to say, ‘You can take your legs off, boys!’ That broke the ice, Burrell recorded; the men had felt that they should keep their artificial limbs on in the presence of royalty.¹⁷ Burrell, the Boswell of the landmines visits, recorded one very significant remark. Landmine victims can recall exactly where and when their accident happened: as they were discussing this, Diana remarked, ‘My accident was on 29 July 1981 ...’¹⁸

Deedes recalled with amusement his memory of Burrell, the protector. ‘We stayed in a brand new hotel in Bosnia, and our rooms were opposite – she was one side of the corridor and I was the other side and I came out of my room in the morning and met Burrell coming out having delivered her breakfast, so I said to him, “Are you going downstairs? Let’s have breakfast together.” He said, “Yes, sure.” I went downstairs, had my breakfast, went up to my room and found Burrell with a chair against her door looking very determined. And I said, “Hi, I thought you were coming to breakfast?” And Burrell said in tones of outrage, “The manager of this hotel burst into her room to ask her whether she approved of it because it’s new.” I said, “That’s very continental, in Paris managers do.” Anyway, he was not pleased, he sat there and said, “I’m staying here until she’s dressed and ready to go out.” That was an indication of the relationship – he was her protector.’¹⁹

On the last day of the visit they toured the ruins of Sarajevo. ‘It had suffered cruelly during the Bosnian war, with mortar bombs falling constantly on the city, and much of the open space had been given over to burial grounds. Diana saw a woman tending her son’s grave in one of the huge cemeteries there, walked up to her and embraced her silently, the two touching each other’s faces with complete empathy.’²⁰ The same scene had taken place previously with a young widow whose husband had been killed by a mine while fishing. ‘There being no interpreter present there could be very little said. What passed between them is beyond reckoning. When we parted, the widow seemed restored to life.’ Diana had the unique gift of silent empathy. Deedes saw the two sides of Diana – ‘All this,’ he said, ‘in the middle of a fling with Dodi Fayed.’²¹ The same Diana who stood quietly embracing the bereaved mother in the Sarajevo cemetery would, within hours, be on the jet giggling with Burrell at the tabloid frenzy over her new affair. Aboard the plane she discussed with Deedes the prospect of attending an Oslo conference on landmines with a view to calling for a ban. ‘Be careful,’ Deedes told her. ‘It’s political.’ ‘I was going to write the speech with her ... saying exactly how to keep out of politics for her but to get the landmine ban.’²² On the plane, Diana made a toast: ‘Here’s to our next country ...’ Cambodia and Vietnam were on the list for October. She never got to Oslo or to Cambodia or Vietnam. It was 10 August 1997 and she had only twenty-one days of life to live. ‘She was only involved with landmines from January 1997 until her death in August,’ Bill Deedes said. ‘And there’s no doubt at all that while she was on the job she woke the world up as nobody else has done.’ In December 1997, in the wake of a surge of opinion after Diana’s death in favour of a ban on landmines, the Ottawa Landmine Accord banning landmines was drawn up, to be signed by forty countries. Mike Whitlam said: ‘They would not have been talking at the Canadian meeting, where they ratified the Convention later that year, had she not gone to Angola. I would stake my life on that. They actually acknowledged what she’d done – at that meeting.’²³

The landmines campaign had given her a new purpose in life; she publicly announced in a speech in May, about eating disorders, that she had finally beaten bulimia. She looked radiantly healthy. Even her physical appearance had changed ‘from a puppy to a gorgeous lady’, as one of her designers, Jacques Azagury, put it. Catherine Walker, who had dressed Diana for much of her adult life, said, ‘the demure phase was over and so was her marriage but what I hadn’t anticipated was how quickly she would change and begin wearing my sexier evening wear ... her looks had changed dramatically since she had first come to see me as a pale, slightly plump, fragile-looking girl. Now she was tanned, fitter, more muscular. She had become a perfectionist, working hard on her body because of the scrutiny it was under and to help keep her sane through her marital upheaval ...’²⁴ In keeping with this free, independent image, her skirts became shorter, her heels higher, the lines of her dresses simpler and sexier. Now outside the royal circle she could wear black for the first time since the disastrous outing in ‘that dress’ at the Guildhall.

‘She was growing up in front of my eyes,’ said Meredith Etherington-Smith, who saw her from September 1996 through to July 1997. ‘It was the most amazing year seeing this person growing up and making choices, really important kind of choices, about landmines, taking that on, being serious about it, being really serious about this [Christie’s] sale. She was professional, she was serious, she was grown up.’ Even Diana’s posture had changed, from the shy upward glance and hunched shoulders, to sitting erect and standing up straight. She was even stopping chewing her nails. Her fingernails, Meredith observed, ‘got better as we went on’. ‘She was generally more confident, she became a different sort of person, less the Princess of Wales and more Diana.’²⁵

One thing she did take seriously was her role first as mother to the boys and second, as Meredith put it, as the Queen Mother of the twenty-first century. ‘Her relationship with the boys was patently a wonderful one ... She was a very good mother.²⁶ I expected them to be more protective of her than they were, and they weren’t, they weren’t mewling and puking and clustering round her. They didn’t have a neurotic relationship. It seemed to me to be perfectly healthy and normal and nice and a great tribute first of all to Diana and secondly to Charles.’²⁷ ‘Constitutional plans – well, she felt her long-distance role was to be the Queen Mother of the twenty-first century, that the influence the Queen Mother had had on her grandchildren in a way, she felt that was the kind of role which in a curious way she had been chosen for and one did feel that there was a bit of divine right entering into this, a little bit of fate. And she felt that William should be a democratic King, that the boys needed to have friends, that they needed to know their generation, they needed to know politicians, not just Tory ones, that they needed to know the Blair children. They needed to be part of contemporary English life, not an English life that was really out of date by the end of the war – and I’m paraphrasing some quite long conversations about this. And her job was to make sure they were released from the glass cage, and that when he did come to the throne, a lot of people would know him, and he wouldn’t be a mystery, wouldn’t be a royal freak, that he would be a person.²⁸ I think that she very much thought she would be a power behind the throne ...’²⁹ Diana emphasized her desire that William should be ‘a very English King’: she felt that her Spencer blood had a lot to contribute. ‘She felt that because of the spider’s web of marital alliances and blood they [the Royal Family] weren’t English. “I come from an English family,” she had said proudly, and “we [the Spencers] are a lot older than they are.” She was very proud of the Duke of Marlborough, for instance.’³⁰

Diana was very anxious that her boys should not become isolated as the previous royal generation had been, as indeed their father had been. That was why she had wanted the boys, and William in particular, to go to Eton because they would have proper friends there and not sycophants. ‘Diana said, “There’s no messing around at Eton about someone being the heir to the throne. If you’re not popular, charming, intelligent, or good at games, you’re not going to rate, are you?” And so William knows a lot of people. And the interesting thing about that she said, “I think they’ll be protection, those friends too. They’ve grown up together and they’ll be protective.” ³¹ And they are. You don’t see grab shots of William that often, and why? Because his friends don’t utter. She’d thought all this through. That’s what I mean by being smart.’³² ‘They had money which they carried and spent and they went shopping. In other words she was trying to provide as normal a life as possible – they could come out from behind the glass window, and that was her great legacy.’

Meredith helped her shape her new modern image, with photographs by Mario Testino. One day she had commented to Diana how much better she looked in real life – without make-up, in jeans and a T-shirt and natural hair. ‘You know you look so much better like that rather than with all the lacquered hair and the make-up. You’ve got wonderful skin, you don’t need to slap all that stuff on. It’s not modern. Jewellery isn’t modern except for one of those little Tiffany diamond crosses – those chokers – for God’s sake!’ A set of photographs in the grand manner had been taken by Snowdon for the sale. ‘They were fine but I wanted much more the girl who walked through the minefields. I wanted the woman I saw who looked amazing and modern. Discussing who should do them, Diana asked Meredith to choose someone she hadn’t worked with before: ‘I want someone new and I want to look how I feel inside. I feel like I belong to the twentieth century now, I really do. I’m doing modern things and I’m trying to lead a modern life, and I’m a single woman and that’s how I want to look.’³³

At the shoot with Testino in a Battersea studio, Diana had enjoyed herself immensely. Afterwards, as they were packing up, with music booming in the background, she started playing around, arm in arm with Mario Testino, imitating Naomi Campbell doing catwalk and Kate Moss doing catwalk. ‘Everyone was screaming with laughter, including her, and she went that amazing rose pink colour [Diana always had blushed easily] and she looked fantastic, so full of energy and life. It was so sweet and so sad when I took the work prints [of the photographs] back and she said, “It was one of the happiest days of my life – and I really mean it.” Looking at them she said, musing, “But these are me. Really, really me.” She also said, “God, I think I look like Marilyn Monroe in those pictures ...”’ She was quite obsessed with Marilyn Monroe, Meredith said, and in one of the pictures she did look like the young Marilyn. She often talked about her, and how she had fought the studio system in Hollywood on her own and won, because they had dumped her and then had to take her back. ‘I think perhaps she felt there was another woman against the world,’ Meredith said. ‘I remember having a conversation about it with her once and her saying that she [Monroe] wasn’t just a blonde fluffy thing, she was smart, and I think she identified with that.’³⁴

Diana still felt beleaguered by court circles. She told Meredith she had ‘a lot of enemies’. ‘That sounds a bit paranoid,’ Meredith replied. ‘No, you know how it works. It’s justification – I’m the baddie.’ ‘Well, all you have to do is to be a goodie, and you are a goodie by the example you set. That’s why landmines – patently you have an enormous sympathy with people less fortunate than you are.’ ‘You call me fortunate?’ ‘I do, actually. I call you fortunate because you have the rest of your life in front of you and you have amazing opportunities to do amazing things ...’ ‘Yes,’ she said, repeating that she had enemies and felt very much on her own sometimes. ‘But you have good friends.’ She replied, ‘Yes. But you try fighting them [the Establishment enemies].’ She was right, of course. It took a great deal of courage to face down her powerful enemies who saw the Establishment threatened by her very existence. Despite her supportive friends in all walks of life, the hostile pressure was very much alive and relentless and ready to pounce when ‘goodie’ Diana fell back into the ways of ‘baddie Diana’. Diana believed that there was an agenda among Camilla and her circle and certain jealous courtiers to paint her as mad and sideline her in public life. ‘They would have preferred her to disappear,’ a friend said; ‘she was deeply inconvenient – and enjoyed being deeply inconvenient.’³⁵

Unfortunately, Diana could not remain ‘goodie’ Diana for long, without tripping up on her needier, more foolish and self-indulgent instincts. She quarrelled with her staff, helpers and ‘star’ friends. She quarrelled with her personal assistant Victoria Mendham, presenting her with her bill at the K Club which represented an astronomical sum for the woman to pay (Prince Charles later settled it). She quarrelled with Martin Bashir, backing out of a book she had contemplated doing with him. Under the terms of her divorce agreement, with its confidentiality clause which did not allow her to discuss her life in royal circles, the huge sums quoted by her potential publisher did not seem realistic. Moreover, it was alleged that Paul Burrell had repeated to her some disobliging comments Bashir had made to him about her. She quarrelled with Gianni Versace and Elton John when she backed out of contributing a foreword she had written to a book of photographs to raise money for John’s AIDS Foundation, because, just after her divorce came through, she became nervous of what the Queen would think when she saw the book’s suggestive images next to pictures of the Royal Family. (She was reconciled with Elton John at Versace’s funeral in Milan on 22 July after the designer’s murder in Miami.)

She did not abandon hopes of Hasnat Khan, nor of her dream of marrying him. In May she flew to Pakistan again on the pretext of helping Imran Khan and his hospital. She intended to meet Hasnat’s parents, his mother in particular, and if possible to convince them that she would be a suitable wife for their son. She persuaded Jemima Khan to go with her and Jimmy Goldsmith to lend them his jet. This was Diana at her most selfish and inconsiderate; Jimmy Goldsmith, as all his close circle knew, was dying, in fact was soon to die, and the last thing a member of his family wanted to do was to leave him and fly to Pakistan. Jimmy apparently told Jemima to go but to have the jet in readiness to leave Pakistan at any moment if necessary. This time Cosima Somerset did not go with her; she had been the victim of one of Diana’s cruelly abrupt breaks, the reason apparently relating to something within the Goldsmith circle.

Diana had done everything she could to get close to Hasnat Khan’s family, visiting his uncle Omar and his English wife Jane at their home in Stratford, and inviting Jane to stay at Kensington Palace. Through them she had made friends with Hasnat’s grandmother, Nanny Appa, and she hoped to follow Jane’s example and win acceptance into the aristocratic Pathan clan. Above all she needed to win acceptance from Hasnat’s mother, the formidable, university-educated Naheed, who had bitter memories of the British when, after Partition, her family had been uprooted from their home in India. In Muslim society the mother is given great respect in the close extended family where arranged marriages are the rule, and each member of the family supports the other, often sharing the same house. Naheed did not approve of Western cultural images and her son, for all his Western ways, at heart shared her cultural beliefs. Although Diana hoped to follow the example of her friend Jemima, who in marrying Imran had converted to Islam and lived in the family complex in Lahore, that marriage was eventually to fail. It was a complicated situation both for Diana and for Hasnat’s parents, anxious to see their son married (two arranged engagements had not led to marriage) but nervous of the consequences where Diana was concerned. Diana was staying with Imran and Jemima in Lahore when she was invited to visit Khan’s family at their Model Town home in Jhelum, some one hundred miles to the north of Lahore, to meet not only Hasnat’s mother and father but also eleven members of his family. She dressed in a blue shalwar kameez which Jemima had had made for her in Lahore, and travelled incognito with two of Hasnat’s sisters in an old black Toyota Corolla to avoid press attention. Nothing was said about marriage during Diana’s visit and Diana appeared sombre as she left, but in the car with one of Hasnat’s sisters she seemed confident that she could continue with her modern life and her campaigns at the same time as being married to Hasnat. On her return she confessed to Imran Khan how much she wanted to marry Hasnat.

The Hasnat Khan relationship continued on and off through the summer. Although he loved her, he continued to be undecided about the prospect of marriage and Diana’s needy behaviour – constant telephone calls, sitting in a car in the street outside his house – following the pattern of her previous affair with Oliver Hoare, unnerved him. When Diana tried the old tactic of jealousy, being seen and photographed with Sikh businessman Gulu Lalvani, he was so angry that he broke off relations with her, not for the first or the last time.

With her private life in turmoil, Diana had her public life to distract her. In late May she had taken William to lunch with the newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair and his family at his official country residence, Chequers, when they had discussed a possible future role for her. Blair, who displayed a unique ability to gauge popular feeling, saw the promotional potential of Diana as other more conventional politicians had not. June was a busy month: on 19 June she was in Washington for a meeting with Hillary Clinton; she then flew to New York to see her idol, Mother Teresa. (She had met her in Rome in February 1992 after visiting her hospice and orphanage in Calcutta on her India trip with Charles. This had greatly inspired her.) They walked hand in hand through the Bronx. Two days later, back in England, she drove herself up to Stratford to see the Omar Khans and eleven members of the family over from Pakistan, including her particular friend, Hasnat’s grandmother, Nanny Appa. Two days after that, on 23 June, she was back in New York for the pre-sale party at Christie’s, flying back before the auction took place on 25 June to avoid the media circus. The sale was a great success: all the dresses sold, for a total of 002

3,258,750; the catalogue sales alone accounted for 003

2.5 million. The top price of 004

222,500 was paid for the ‘White House dress’ by Victor Edelstein which she had worn dancing with John Travolta.

While in New York before the sale on 23 June, Diana had continued her campaign to win over – and perhaps to learn from – powerful women. After seeing Katharine Graham and Hillary Clinton in Washington, she lunched at the fashionable Four Seasons in New York on 23 June with Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue, and the British journalist Tina Brown, then editor of the New Yorker. The lunch had been arranged by Anna Wintour, with whom she had worked on a breast cancer fashion benefit the previous September. Despite her brave talk of her ‘strength’, the joy of giving help to people who needed it and her purpose in life – speaking of the landmines campaign, apparently, with an ‘eerie’ expression in her eyes – Tina Brown perceptively diagnosed ‘the frantic Diana’ lurking beneath the shining surface, so soon to be revealed in her summer antics with Dodi Fayed.

Beneath the glitter of her public life, her worldwide celebrity, the beauty which bewitched everyone she met, she was still insecure and a prey to the sense of rejection which never left her, encapsulated in the failure of her marriage. Out of the limelight, she was lonely, shut up in the gloom of Kensington Palace with the butler and addicted to soaps (Brookside was a favourite). The loneliness struck hardest at weekends when the boys were with their father: ‘I stay in town. If I go out, I keep my eyes down or straight ahead. Wherever I go the press find ways to spy. Often I visit a hospice.’³⁶ Evenings, again, were hard; sometimes accompanied, first by Patrick Jephson, then driven by Burrell, she toured the seedier parts of London, spotting drug dealers or prostitutes to whom she often gave money in an effort to make them go home. The media siege served further to isolate her; to escape them she sometimes went out sitting on the floor of a taxi; from the time she dispensed with her protection in 1994 the hunt was on. Often the paparazzi waiting outside places like her therapist Susie Orbach’s house would shout obscenities at her, ‘spraying her down’, hoping to catch shots of her distress and tears. Her fame and her royalty made it worse; ‘that three-foot royal aura’ around her, which Meredith Etherington-Smith had observed, made her almost unapproachable in an intimate way. At times on private social occasions, such as a dinner party at Taki Theodoracopulos’s house, she seemed almost desperate to make friends, zeroing in on people, reaching out and drawing them in. Then, in order to seem ‘one of the girls’, she would rivet, and sometimes repel, people with her indiscreet talk, ‘inappropriate’, sexual conversation, venomous remarks about former friends, and raucous ‘common’ laugh. She was sadly aware that the baggage of her past would make it difficult to find the Barbara Cartland married life she still yearned for. ‘Who would take me on?’ she said. Yet at times she concluded that she would be better off single, the mother of the future King and the promoter of great causes.

Again, she was alone, even as far as her family was concerned. Sarah McCorquodale was the closest to her and sometimes acted as her lady-in-waiting, but she lived with her family on a large farm in Lincolnshire and therefore was physically distant. Relations with Jane, who lived close by, were awkward: despite Robert Fellowes’ friendly attitude to Diana, he was still the Queen’s principal private secretary and could not afford to take sides. For almost all the past four years, relations with her brother Charles had been tense, first in the misunderstanding over the house and then as a result of an unkind letter written by him in April 1996 referring to Diana’s ‘mental problems’ quoted by a ferociously loyal Paul Burrell.³⁷ In private conversations Charles had made no secret of his opinion that his sister was dangerous to know. The terms of Spencer’s letter were bitter: ‘After years of neglect on both sides, our relationship is the weakest I have with any of my sisters ... perhaps you have more time to notice that we seldom speak ... I will always be there for you ... as a loving brother: albeit one that has, through fifteen years’ absence, rather lost touch – to the extent I have to read Richard Kay to learn that you are coming to Althorp ... I long ago accepted that I was a peripheral part of your life, and that no longer saddens me. Indeed, it’s easier for me and my family to be in that position as I view the consternation and hurt your fickle friendship has caused so many.’ Worst of all, from Diana’s point of view, went on to refer to her ‘illness’ (presumably bulimia) and ‘mental problems’: ‘I fear for you. I know how manipulation and deceit are parts of the illness ... I pray that you are getting appropriate and sympathetic treatment for your mental problems.’³⁸ Recently, however, they had had a rapprochement when Diana had flown to South Africa in March, ostensibly to see her brother but actually in pursuance of her campaign for Hasnat Khan, and to check out the possibilities of South Africa as a place where they could eventually live.

Saddest of all, Diana had not been on speaking terms with her mother since Frances had given an interview to Hello! (for charity) in which she had claimed that the withdrawal of the HRH title did not matter and made other observations to which Diana objected. Diana had not been consulted over the article but in any case their relationship had been difficult after a series of telephone calls in which Frances had criticized Diana’s behaviour specifically with Muslim men. Frances had been convicted of drink-driving the previous year and was in a fragile emotional state. She was so anguished by the breakdown of relations with Diana that she even telephoned William Tallon, the Queen Mother’s page, imploring him to get Diana to speak to her. Diana, as always when she felt she had been betrayed or let down, was implacable and sadly they never spoke again.