Diana's Nightmare - The Family (18 page)

The Queen's fondness for Patrick Plunket was something Diana was able to relate to when she formed what could never be anything more than a purely platonic relationship with the art consultant Adrian Ward-Jackson. Introduced to her by Princess Margaret in his one-time role as governor of the Royal Ballet, Ward-Jackson dined regularly with Diana at Kensington Palace. They discussed their work for AIDS-related charities. Diana had become patron of the National AIDS Trust after seeing babies born to HIV-positive mothers in New York, and Adrian helped to run the AIDS Crisis Trust. When his closest friend died of AIDS, Adrian suspected that it was only a matter of time before the virus claimed his own life. Diana's friendship remained constant despite a marked change in his personality when he discovered that he was indeed infected.

His services to the performing arts, most notably Diana's beloved dance, were recognised when he was awarded a CBE in the 1991 New Year's Honours list. Diana made several visits to his home in Great Cumberland Place to comfort him and in August of that year, as he lay dying in the Lindo wing of St Mary's, she broke off her holiday at Balmoral to fly to his bedside. Altogether Diana spent twenty-two hours with the forty-one-year-old art dealer in his final days. She held his hand and recited the Lord's Prayer over his bed with another friend Angela Serota as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He died at one a.m., minutes before she returned to his bedside, but she remained to console his grieving family and did not leave the hospital until eight a.m. Later she sat down and wrote to Angela: 'I reached an inner depth that I would never have thought possible. My view of life has taken another direction and has become more positive and balanced.'

Her private grief overwhelmed her public face at Ward- Jackson's funeral. A gold-and-diamond necklace she wore at his memorial service had been his farewell present to her. He paid £35,000 for the piece and presented it to her on her thirtieth birthday just seven weeks before his death.

WITHIN a few days of Diana's first consultation with Stephen Twigg in December 1988, the therapist was named in a letter sent to the prominent Mayfair-based surveyor Charles Price. The letter purported to link Price's wife, the actress Jean Harrington, with Twigg and furnished details of the latter's address and the car that he drove.

What the informant did not appear to know was that the Prices had split up earlier in the year. Nevertheless, as his divorce proceedings progressed, Charles Price engaged an investigator to make inquiries into the man who was later credited with instigating Diana's voyage of rediscovery. Twigg, or Steve as he liked to be called, was visiting Kensington Palace once a week to massage her near-nude body while he filled her mind with New Age teachings. Unknown to him, he was being followed everywhere he went by a private eye who carried a camera to snap him. The pictures were handed over to Price.

According to the investigator's report, Twigg hailed from Hampshire, had started his working life as a trainee technician in a government food research laboratory and had worked with a motor spares company before becoming a junior tax inspector. He had been married and divorced. What the investigator had not included was that Twigg was fully trained in Swedish and deep-tissue massage, skills he applied to Diana and other eminent clients including Baroness Falkender, former political secretary to the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, along with a coherent philosophy towards health which links the mind and body in the pursuit of well-being.

Diana's therapist shared his philosophical interests with the former Mrs Charles Price along with an ex-directory telephone number which was traced to a block of flats in Castelain Road, Maida Vale. While she was looking for acting roles in Los Angeles, she had allowed Twigg to use her apartment.

The counsellor who was helping the Princess to achieve a new lease of life was truly a man of the world.

'I have told the Prince that I will fire you'

Robert Maxwell

THE revolving door had been a fixture in Fleet Street ever since Caxton fired the first printer's devil. When Wendy Henry spun out of the turnstile at Rupert Murdoch's Wapping HQ, she re-emerged through the revolving front door of his great rival, Robert Maxwell. Ms Henry's editorship at the
News of the World,
making her the first woman to edit a national newspaper in modern times, had been brought to an abrupt halt on 12 December, 1988. Although the paper's weekly circulation had risen to 5.3 million, Murdoch sacked her the day after she ran a story about homosexuals which had an embarrassing royal link. Ever an opportunist, Maxwell stepped in and appointed her the editor of his less successful Sunday tabloid, the
People,
hoping some of Murdoch's readers would follow her to his base at Holborn Circus.

In November 1989, four weeks before he talked about knickers and lavatories in his late-night call to Camilla, an indignant Charles was on the phone to Robert Maxwell. It was not, initially, one of their chummier exchanges. The Prince was very annoyed about a picture of Prince William which Ms Henry had published in the
People
under the headline
The Royal Wee.
The picture showed William, back turned discreetly to the camera, answering a call of nature in Kensington Palace Gardens. It had been taken by Jason Fraser and Maxwell the newspaper publisher had chortled when Ms Henry showed it to him. He had personally approved publication.

'He was very positive about it,' she recalled from her new home in Florida. 'It was a charming picture taken in a public place. Then Maxwell rang me on the Monday to complain and I said, "I think I'd better come and see you". I went up to the ninth floor and saw him in the living room of his suite of offices. He was really nice but he said, "I've had a call from the Prince. I have told the Prince that I will fire you." So he didn't have much alternative did he?' As she disappeared through the revolving door, Maxwell the arbiter of good taste declared that the picture was 'an intrusion into privacy not acceptable to me'.

Neither Maxwell nor Charles knew that, at the time they had spoken, their own privacy was also the subject of intrusion. The newspaper proprietor was the target of a telephone bugging operation by British Intelligence officers, who were taking a keen interest in his subversive activities behind the Iron Curtain.

Treachery was second nature to Maxwell. 'He couldn't shake hands with someone without getting his fingers in their pocket,' said one of his former directors. He trusted no one, sometimes not even himself. With equal impunity, he bugged members of his own family at Headington Hill Hall, his rented mansion near Oxford, and senior executives at Mirror Group headquarters.

'He is a business brigand,' Rupert Murdoch at the time said. 'He almost physically loves the feel of power.'

CHARLES had nothing in common with Maxwell but he was drawn to him just the same. He admired tough men who made millions and got things done through the sheer force of their personalities. One of his heroes was the oil billionaire Dr Armand Hammer, who Diana disliked, and Maxwell, who she detested, was another.

'My aim is to make the world a little better than if I had never lived,' declared Maxwell. It sounded very much like something that Charles had said: 'I would like to leave behind, if I can, in my own small way, a world which is better than I found it.' Maxwell, however, said it first.

'What's he really like to work for?' Charles asked one of Maxwell's editors soon after he took over Mirror Group Newspapers in July 1984. He had consulted Maxwell a year or so earlier about the running of the Prince's Trust. Maxwell nodded sagely and sent Ian, his darkly handsome second son, to work full-time for the Prince. Ian Maxwell described advising young, unemployed applicants on how to start up a business of their own as an 'enriching experience'. In 1992, his younger brother Kevin was charged with theft and conspiracy to defraud and Ian with conspiracy to defraud following the collapse of their father's empire. The charges related to sums totalling more than £200 million.

Maxwell, who had served in the British Army in World War II, winning the MC for bravery in Holland, had courted the royals for years. He was an ardent supporter of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children largely because the Queen and the Queen Mother were patrons and Princess Margaret was president. Considering the patrician brutality Maxwell meted out to his own seven children, it was a cause worthy of his endeavours. His biggest contribution was to sponsor a royal gala premiere of a revised version of
The Nutcracker,
danced by the Royal Ballet, at the Royal Opera House. Maxwell's grandly named British Printing and Communication Corporation sponsored the glittering occasion in December 1984 along with Gerald Ronson's Heron International. In August 1990, Ronson was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment for fraud, false accounting and the theft of £3 million, and fined £5 million in the aftermath of the Guinness share-rigging scandal. Maxwell was lucky to escape charges.

At the Opera House, he beamed down from the Grand Tier, scented with the smell of spiced dried oranges, gingerbread and other Christmas confections, on an audience studded with the kind of titled dignitaries he loathed. Maxwell hated the aristocracy and the feeling was mutual. But he adored the Queen, who sat in the Royal Box with her mother and sister, the royal women in tiaras and evening gowns and accompanied by Prince Philip and Prince Andrew. After the performance, the guests adjourned to the Crush Bar, where Princess Margaret announced that the evening had netted no less than £610,000 for the NSPCC, a record amount for the charity. Maxwell beamed even more broadly as he drank his Moet et Chandon, surrounded by royalty. His ambition was to make himself indispensable to the Queen and, through her son, he was making some headway.

'When William was a toddler, Charles allowed Maxwell to put on a Red Devils air display over Kensington Palace Gardens,' said Margaret Holder, Britain's leading royal researcher. 'He was pictured alongside Maxwell with little William watching the jets fly past. Charles would not allow anyone to be photographed with William at that time. They used to trot him out for photocalls on his birthday and at Christmas and the pictures would go to all the newspapers simultaneously. Charles wanted William's life to be kept private. Yet he allowed Maxwell to use himself, the Prince of Wales, and his son William for this publicity stunt. It indicates that Charles knew Maxwell quite well and there had to be something in it for Charles because he always makes use of people.'

Having established contact, Charles had no hesitation in exploiting the Maxwell connection. 'In 1987, I gave a story to the
Sunday Mirror
saying that some recipients of money from the Prince's Trust were running off with it,' said Ms Holder. 'This infuriated Charles so much that he sent an emissary to see Maxwell who complained that the Prince was very angry and unhappy. Maxwell immediately ordered nice stories about the Trust to be run the following Sunday.'

Charles's obsession with men like Maxwell, a war hero born into poverty in what was then Czechoslovakia, stemmed from his relationship with his father. Prince Philip, Action Man personified long before the term was applied to Charles, had tried to toughen up his son, who tended to be passive and anxious as a child. One reason for this was that Philip frightened him, according to Cecil Beaton, the royal photographer. Beaton noted during a visit to Buckingham Palace that Charles, eleven at the time, behaved 'as if awaiting a clout from behind, or for his father to tweak his ear or pull the tuft of hair at the crown of his head'. Philip took Charles sailing in rough weather and taught him other manly skills. His schooling at Gordonstoun and Timbertop had been as ruggedly inhumane as the public school system would permit. But something was amiss.

An intriguing insight into what the young Charles thought about his father occurred at the London home of the royal author, Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, in the early Seventies. 'He came to a little drinks party I held when I had written a book on Wellington which he was very interested in,' said Her Ladyship. 'He saw a letter which Wellington had written on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. It was, in a sense, unflappable in that Wellington said he thought it would be all right, but in another sense, you could see he was in a very excitable state. There were various crossings-out in the letter and little mistakes he didn't usually make. With great enthusiasm, Prince Charles said his father was just the same: on the surface he was unflappable, but underneath he had very strong feelings. Prince Charles said it in a way I recognised as a son who admired his father. There was no need for him to have said anything. You could say that in twenty years' time everything changed but I don't believe that.'

What Charles really lacked was a killer instinct like the Iron Duke or Robert Maxwell, and it was Mountbatten who was recruited to find it. 'I remember Mountbatten taking Charles shooting,' said an aristrocrat's daughter. 'The beaters sent up wave after wave of pheasants and he had Charles blasting away. It wasn't sport, it was slaughter.' Mountbatten's bloodlust had nothing to do with 'land management', the usual excuse among the upper classes to justify fox hunting and shooting. When he toured India with the Prince of Wales in the Twenties, the two sportsmen went out hunting panthers. The animals they shot had been taken drugged from a local zoo. Lord Louis duly recorded the kill in his diary, along with other prey they had hunted in Australia — kangaroos 'worried to death as they turn up great pathetic eyes at one and never utter a sound', and an emu bludgeoned to death with branches torn from a tree. 'After this, they plucked feathers out and stuck them in their hats,' he wrote.

Charles came to regard Broadlands as his second home and, according to Mountbatten's secretary, John Barratt, Uncle Dickie 'particularly enjoyed having the boy who would one day be King turning to him for counsel'. When an informant came to Fleet Street to sell a story alleging deviant behaviour by Mountbatten, 'Maxwell bought the story and suppressed it', said a Mirror source. It was a small but important favour.