Diana's Nightmare - The Family (4 page)

Georgina Howell, however, added a more political element to the equation: 'The Princess has become the recipient of an establishment backlash in the United Kingdom, the reaction of powerful and aristocratic sections of society that recognise — whatever the extent of her acquiescence in the book that exposed the state of the Waleses' marriage - that she has rocked the system that supports them. Over dinner tables on country estates, her one-time tendency to bulimia is being used to stamp her as hysterical and unstable.'

These words appeared in the American edition of
Vogue
, hardly a forum of radical dissent. But its very publication showed that the media were taking sides in a global propaganda war. Nor is Ms Howell's view an aberration. 'The establishment', a term coined by the writer Henry Fairlie to define a phenomenon peculiar to the British class system, consists of aristocrats, political grandees and their Civil Service mandarins, senior figures in academia, the Church and law enforcement, and top military brass. They are the country's unelected rulers, its real lords and masters. At their centre is the Queen, not only constitutional Head of State, but also head of the judiciary, the armed forces and the Church of England. Unaccountable to Parliament, and thus immune from any electoral censure, the establishment orbits around the monarch. In times of trouble, their sole objective is to defend the sovereign. 'Defence of the Realm' justifies just about anything.

Any fears that people in high places might have had about Diana reached fever pitch when it was revealed that she had taken an interest in Catholicism, 'the Church of Rome', as Buckingham Palace prefers to call it. Strenuous denials failed to shake the belief that Diana might convert. Many of her best friends were Catholics, including James Gilbey and the Honourable Rosa Monckton, who introduced her to Father Antony Sutch at a Belgravia dinner party. The Benedictine monk said that the Princess was 'looking for an answer' but the Palace replied frostily: 'There is no question of the Princess of Wales moving in the direction of the Church of Rome.' In fact, Father Sutch was just one in a succession of doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, theologians, spiritualists and astrologers she had sought to help her.

Charles's friendship with Camilla had been only the first shock-wave to hit Diana even before the wedding at St Paul's Cathedral in July 1981. Day by day, she discovered new and painful secrets about Charles and the Family until the situation became unbearable not only for the Princess but also for her husband. Life with Charles, she told James Gilbey, was 'just so difficult, so complicated.' While she was 'doing God's work on earth,' Diana believed that Charles, his mistress and the Highgrove Set had contrived to drive her away.

One insoluble problem between them was that Charles resented finding himself consigned to a walk-on role whenever he and Diana stepped out. 'I used to like Prince Charles, but I went off him,' said Mike Lawn, the award-winning royal photographer. 'He used to have quite a good sense of humour, but it disappeared when Diana started to get all the attention and he just became the Man in the Grey Suit. Men in grey suits make very boring pictures. The only time he comes alive is when we get him in a hot country and he puts on a tropical outfit. Even then, he was no match for the Princess once she started to happen. When Diana was around, he didn't exist and he knew it.'

When Diana discovered the depth of the feeling against her at Highgrove, she turned to her brother for support. 'He is a very quick-tempered young man who dotes on his sister,' said an American friend. 'Her distress made him furious. It was Charlie Althorp's unseen hand that guided many of Diana's actions.'

At the time of the Royal Wedding, Diana's father, the eighth Lord Spencer, had said tearfully: 'I've lost her. She's gone and she won't be back.' Later, he was heard to mutter: 'Poor, poor Diana. It's too, too awful.' He had tried to smooth out some of the difficulties by discussing them with his monarch. At Sandringham, he ventured to tell the Queen: 'Diana is a very single-minded girl.' 'The Princess of Wales,' Her Majesty corrected him, 'is a very stubborn woman.'

Quality or defect, Diana's determination to live life her way was to become her saving grace. Part of her obstinacy, she tried to explain to a friend, was due to a powerful sense of destiny; a deeply held conviction that she had been placed on earth for a purpose. 'I know this sounds crazy,' she said, 'but I've lived before.' Diana believed implicitly that, since her father's death in March 1992, he was still guiding her from the spirit world. Through an Irish medium, Diana contacted him during seances set up in the privacy of London hotels. The medium, Mrs Betty Palko, claimed that Earl Spencer had appeared before her while Diana was present and she relayed messages between them.

For so long isolated by the rest of the Royal Family, Diana had been stranded on a pinnacle which, nevertheless, left her with enough room to manoeuvre. Far from diminishing her standing, the separation from Prince Charles - and thereby the family that had propelled her to such heights - added to Diana's public following. That children and the poor had taken her to their hearts, while showing deep dissatisfaction with the wealth and privilege of her husband and his family, was a paradox even members of Her Majesty's secretariat found perplexing. Diana understood her appeal better than anyone else and she had learned to use it. 'I understand people's suffering, people's pain, more than you will ever know,' she told a bishop, it's not only AIDS, it's anyone who suffers.'

Her understanding of the political game she was playing was illustrated perfectly during a private trip she made to the Kingdom of Nepal. She arrived just as previously unpublished parts of the Squidgy Tapes were published, including this incriminating exchange:

Diana: I don't want to get pregnant.

Gilbey: Darling, that's not going to happen, all right?

Diana: Yeah.

Gilbey: Don't think like that. It's not going to happen, darling, you won't get pregnant.

Diana: I watched EastEnders today. One of the main characters had a baby. They thought it was by her husband. It was by another man.

Gilbey: Squidgy, kiss me. Oh God!

Diana was unfazed. She was received in the 'kingdom on the roof of the world' like a living goddess. 'Wreathed in marigolds and cornflowers, she moves on to be greeted by Crown Prince Dipendra and the prime minister,' recorded Georgina Howell. 'Head and shoulders above the crowd, she swims briefly into focus, the most famous woman in the world, the honey-coloured hair and skin, the demure sweep of eyelashes, the swoony, brilliant gaze familiar from a billion photographs.' If Squidgy were on her mind, she chose to ignore it by throwing herself into what she called 'the Work'. In a mountain village, she visited a mud hut that served as home to a Nepalese family. There was no electricity, water or sanitation. 'I'll never complain again,' she vowed. On a visit to a leprosy mission, she stroked diseased limbs with her bare hands. When she sat on a leper's bed and touched his stumps, she was fully aware of the cameras clicking behind her. She knew the pictures would be compared with the one taken a few days earlier of Prince Charles carrying a polo trophy in Mexico.

'The Princess has helped show that leprosy is not a curse from God but an illness like any other and one that can be treated,' said Dr Des Suares, who showed Diana around the Red Cross leprosy mission. What he did not know was that it was helping the Princess just as much. 'If you want to be like me, you have got to suffer,' she had told James Gilbey. 'And then you get what you deserve - perhaps.'

'I met Diana at a Press reception in Kathmandu and she was totally mistress of the situation,' said Georgina Howell. 'She worked the room independently and she was perfectly capable of dealing with anything that was thrown at her. You have to give her credit for having changed and matured and grown a lot not only wiser but a lot more manipulative. We talked about the Work and it is absolutely, genuinely close to her heart. There's no question about it. She has turned into a modern woman in the most triumphant and delightful way. It's tragic for the royals that she's no longer in their midst because she would have been a very valuable ally.'

Diana saw the Work as neither callous nor cynical despite suggestions that it was both. Her mentor was not the Queen or her own mother Frances Shand Kydd, but Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whom Diana was fond of quoting. She told a story about a nun who asked to be excused from her duties helping the poor 'because I have flu and the day is so hot'. 'Better to burn in this world than the next,' Mother Teresa replied. This statement incited Diana to pronounce: 'I will never cancel an engagement again because I have a cold.'

The Work showed Diana many sides of life, including case studies of marital infidelity at Relate, the marriage guidance service. Dressed in an inexpensive jumper and skirt, and wearing little make-up, Diana had turned up with eight others to learn how Relate works. She was already patron of the organisation but she was anxious to become a counsellor as well.

It was, she reasoned, a fair exchange: Relate needed her name and she needed their experience. Her staff were surprised. This, after all, was the same Diana who had exasperated them during the earlier years of her marriage by refusing even to read briefing notes before official engagements.

Her fellow pupils at the Relate headquarters in Rugby saw how much she was prepared to give in dealing with unhappy personal relationships. 'Even princesses cry,' she told a woman who accused her of not understanding misery. Diana had known what she faced when she volunteered her services but she also recognised something within herself: that the very suffering of others drove her on. The pain of an AIDS victim, the craving of a drug addict and the desperation of the homeless all served to distract her from a husband she could not stand and courtiers who would crush her if they could.

'When I see suffering that is where I want to be, doing what I can,' the Princess said after comforting a dying AIDS patient and his family at a hospital in South London. The comment had its effect on her detractors at the Palace and finally stopped their efforts to steer her away from what they saw as 'the inappropriate AIDS issue'. Diana had made her point.
She
would decide which causes she supported - not her husband's advisers.

She had long since made the discovery that showing concern for others made her own troubles pale into insignificance. As she put it to the Duchess of York: 'The best way to deal with low self-esteem is to do something estimable.' At the height of her bulimia, Diana had such an uncontrollable temper that she could wreck a bedroom in a tantrum. Wise counselling had taught her that this was no way for a young mother to behave, let alone a princess. So losing herself in the troubles of others was both a useful and therapeutic solution and Diana applied it with remarkable success.

As a result, organisers of the charities she supported found that she was far from just a decorative figurehead designed to attract donations. They saw in her a woman who not only wanted to become involved in the policy-making that affected those who were helped but also one who
needed
to make contact with the sufferers: to get her hands dirty when necessary. Starting from a basic belief in the causes with which she empathised, Diana made a decision to get involved and then followed through with direct action. Either that, she was told, or her self-obsession could cost her her life.

Eleven years at the top had taught Diana not only how to handle fame but how to use it against the forces that wished to drive her into oblivion. 'On that day (in January) when the boys went back to school and Diana walked back into Kensington Palace alone for the first time, she rang me,' said a friend. 'She said she knew what people would be thinking and what the papers would be saying — that she was weeping and in a desperate state of loneliness. Well, I can tell you that she was really happy on that day. She felt free and she sat down to plan - not the rest of her life in some dramatic fashion, but the next few months for herself. She was free of the husband she had loathed and out of the deal whereby she had to make sure she was pleasing his family every waking moment. Do you know she even got a ticking-off once for going to San Lorenzo so often? For goodness sake, she only eats there about once a month, but the way Prince Philip went on about it being a place for show business hangers-on, you'd think she was putting in nightly appearances at a house of ill-repute.'

One of the earliest pieces of advice Earl Spencer had given his youngest daughter was never to bear a resentment. He told her: 'Resentments kill everything in their path.' So, Diana might have pointed out, does adultery. Even the Prince's most loyal supporters had to concede that she had a point about Camilla.

Diana was once grateful to the brigadier's wife for having positively vetted her as a potential royal. But her annoyance at supposedly discovering that her husband's double C-engraved cuff links stood for 'Charles and Camilla' turned to anger when the other woman's photograph allegedly fell out of his diary. The fate of the marriage was sealed when she heard him whispering sweet nothings into a portable telephone from his bathtub, her friends claimed.

To the outside world, Diana might be the clichéd 'caring princess and loving mother'. But inside Buckingham Palace she was regarded as a neurotic woman who held a dangerous weapon. The courtiers knew she could rock the monarchy again by suing for divorce — and that she had the ammunition in the Camillagate tape. None of the Queen's advisers could deny that the recording of Charles's passionate utterances to Camilla were as good as an admission of adultery. To Diana, his intimate expressions demonstrated that he was as besotted by Camilla as he ever had been before their marriage. 'He makes my life real, real torture,' she confided to James Gilbey. It is hard for outsiders to realise how difficult Diana's dealings with the Royal Family have been since all the animosity became public,' said her confidante. 'But however hard the Highgrove Set try to woo Prince William, Diana will ensure that they can never match the love that he and his little brother get from their mother.' Her enemies might make slighting references to Diana's lack of academic achievement and, curiously, she had encouraged this view. 'I'm as thick as a plank,' she would say. 'Brain the size of a pea I've got.' Somewhere along the line, however, she had learned joined-up thinking and it showed. For the first time in history, a royal matriarch-in-waiting was shaping the future of the monarchy from outside the future monarch's bedchamber. Ironically, her nightmare has become the bedrock of the power she wields today.