Diana's Nightmare - The Family (33 page)

One who can always be relied upon to make her laugh is the American Du Pont heiress, Sarah Farish, the wife of oil tycoon William Stamps Farish III. The Queen stays at the Farishs' ranch during her trips to attend bloodstock sales in Kentucky. Sarah is reputed to be one of the few people outside the Family permitted to kiss the Queen.

Her Majesty's closest female friend, however, is Myra, Lady Butter, a member of the dynasty who own the famous Luton Hoo estate in Bedfordshire. It was at a winter ball at Luton Hoo in 1891 that Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence, the eldest son of Edward VII, proposed to Princess Mary of Teck. When he died unexpectedly, she married his brother who became George V. The Queen loved the stately home so much that she returned to it each year with Prince Philip to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Prince Charles had once shown an interest in Myra's daughter Sandra, and her son Charlie - nicknamed Balmoral Butter after one of the products from the royal estate's dairy - is a close friend of Prince Andrew.

One year older than the Queen, Myra is a great-niece of Russia's last Tsar, Nicholas II, and her great-great- grandfather was Alexander Pushkin. Behind closed doors she and the Queen are 'Myra' and 'Elizabeth'. In London, the Butters live in Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, a short distance from Buckingham Palace, and their grand Scottish home, Cluniemore at Pitlochry, is only thirty miles from Balmoral.

'Myra is one of the Queen's dearest friends,' confirmed a titled lady of their mutual acquaintance, it is a very, very, very close connection. Myra is partly Russian and has this sort of slanty-eye look like Tally Westminster, the Duchess of Abercorn and Georgina Phillips, the present owner of Luton Hoo. It comes from her mother Zia, the Countess Anastasia Mikhailovna de Torby. She was the daughter of the Grand Duke Michael of Russia and as such was a Romanov, but she lost all her titles as a result of coming here. She married Harold Wernher, heir to the Electrolux and South African gold and diamond mining fortunes as well as Luton Hoo.

'Myra Butter didn't have a title until her husband, Major David Butter, was knighted but she had even dukes eating out of the palm of her hand. She has been a key player for a long time and what she doesn't know ain't worth knowing. When the Queen is at Balmoral, Myra is never far away. She is a very key figure in the Queen's life.' 'WE may change the monarchy but we are not going to lose it,' said the royal historian. 'They are there to de-focus the political scene. Look at the Edinburgh Conference on Maastricht - everyone in the country was talking about Squidgy. Look at the General Election - the main topic of conversation was Fergie's split with Andrew.

'The House of Stuart were the last monarchs who had any real power and they were a very good line as monarchs went. The reason Charles II was allowed to behave so badly was that his excesses were de-focusing. The Fire of London and the Great Plague took place during his reign. The Protestant puritans had built up a powerbase but did little to deal with poverty or bubonic plague.'

After her grandfather, George V, the Queen most admired Victoria among her ancestors. Queen Mary noticed a distinct similarity between Elizabeth as a child and the young Victoria, particularly in their regal bearing. During 1992, Elizabeth was reminded of one of Victoria's most famous utterances. 'Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house,' she had said calmly on being told about reverses in the Boer War. 'We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist.' Stubborn and blinkered to the end, Victoria had a fatal seizure when she was told some more bad news from the front.

The old Queen was far from the paragon of popular myth. 'She was in her old age a dignified but rather commonplace good soul, narrow-minded in her view of things, without taste in art or literature, fond of money, having a certain industry and business capacity in politics, but easily flattered and expecting to be flattered, quite convinced of her own providential position in the world and always ready to do anything to extend and augment it,' wrote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, a distinguished diarist of the period. 'She has been so long accustomed to success that she seems to have imagined that everything she did was wise and right.' This included 'a craze for painting the map Imperial red'.

The nationalist Blunt (no relation) was scathing about the true nature of Victoria's legacy. 'The Queen has left an unknown number of millions, it is said, to her family, but the heir to the Crown (Edward VII) is to have his debts paid by the nation at a time when not a single million has been spared for the famine in India - truly we deserve to follow Spain and Rome and the other empires into the gulf.'

Heart of Darkness,
which Conrad wrote in 1899, two years after the breast-beating of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, was scathingly critical of 'the dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealth, the germs of empire' that had plundered Africa and Asia in the name of colonialism, it was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness,' said Conrad's seafaring hero, Charlie Marlow. 'The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.' The decline of the British Empire started with the death of its longest-serving monarch in 1901.

'Victoria was always presented as a virtuous prude in widow's weeds, but long before that she was a strong-willed and emotional woman,' said the royal historian. 'Her appetite for sex was such that she wore out Albert, who was prone to bouts of depression and self-doubt. Her diaries were so sexually explicit that her daughter Beatrice censored them for public consumption after her death. Victoria was anything but the strait-laced lady she was made out to be. She was the first member of the Royal Family to dance the waltz in public. The waltz was considered very undignified because the partners hold each other close.

'Before her succession, Victoria was kept away from the Court because of its immorality. She stayed at Kensington Palace, which was also a hotbed of plots and intrigue. Albert was appalled at the immorality he found in Buckingham Palace. He drove the nobility and their mistresses out to provide a decent atmosphere in which to raise his children. Unfortunately, his own brother Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, suffered an attack of venereal disease during a visit. The Queen's physician was called to treat him and the word was quickly passed around the Palace. One reason Victoria is reputed to have said lesbianism didn't exist is because of her own experiences with Florence Nightingale. When she retreated to Osborne House, her servant John Brown became very powerful. The Queen is reputed to have become pregnant by him.

'Victoria was only a great queen because of Albert and the Prime Ministers who served during her reign, Melbourne, Gladstone, Peel, Palmerston and Disraeli. Once again, the monarchy was used to de-focus attention from the Industrial Revolution, child prostitution and the slums. The newly emergent middle class styled itself on the home life of our own dear queen as a buffer against Victorian misery.'

'Nothing will happen quickly to change the present monarchy,' said the informed peer. 'One hundred years is quite an acceptable pace of change in this country. One of the qualities that Britain has that other countries find enviable is its extremely leisurely pace of change.' 'Not too fast, not too slow,' was the way Lord Airlie put it. It was precisely this snail's pace that used to infuriate the Prince Albert of his generation, Philip Mountbatten RN.

'Philip was really smitten with Cobina'

Lady Edith Foxwell

ONE of the things, and there were several, that annoyed Diana about Fergie was her good relations with their in-laws. Before her fall from grace, the Duchess of York had been the more favoured daughter-in-law. After August 1992, the competition ceased to matter.

During a long honeymoon period before that, Fergie made strenuous efforts to amuse the Queen and charm Prince Philip. She went riding with Her Majesty at Sandringham and Balmoral, gave her unexpected little gifts and made sure everything was to her liking when she came to afternoon tea at Sunninghill. Her earthy humour strongly appealed to Prince Philip, who had been known to pat a well-rounded bottom in his time. Both grandparents adored the little princesses, Beatrice and Eugenie, who called Philip 'Gramps'. Beatrice shouted it so loudly during a carriage race that he almost lost control of the horses. What annoyed Diana more than anything was that she knew Fergie was ingratiating herself to cover up a massive inferiority complex. Behind their backs, the Duchess referred to Elizabeth and Philip as 'Brenda and Stavros'.

Philip, for one, was less than amused when he found out. Not that the Duke of Edinburgh was a spoilsport. His buddy Frank Sinatra said of him: 'He has what I consider to be the most important attribute in a man - a great sense of humour.' Famed for his ferocious temper and withering scorn, Philip, in fact, has the gift of being able to laugh at a joke at his own expense. When a bust of himself was unveiled, he tweaked its prominent nose and quipped: 'That's me to the life - Schnozzle Mountbatten.' He liked to tell people that, among the fiercely loyal tribesmen of New Guinea, he was known as 'Number One Fella Belong Missus Kween' and when a friend observed that young Prince Charles was 'the image of his father', he replied: 'I know, but perhaps he'll improve with age.'

The one thing that he would not tolerate was any slighting reference to his ancestry. Coming from Fergie, the Stavros jibe hit a very raw nerve. 'I am not a Greek, but I was born in Greece,' he once declared, creating a furore in Athens. He was born at Mon Repos, the family villa on Corfu, the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenburg. His correct surname before he adopted the anglicised Mountbatten was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. He was descended from Danes and Germans. To marry the Queen, he renounced his Greek title and became a British citizen. 'Dig Philip in that particular rib and you get a reaction,' said a friend.

Philip was acutely aware that his father had died as an exile in Monte Carlo, where he drank heavily, lost his money at the tables and took a mistress called Doris. Nor was he any happier about Fergie's nickname for the Queen, Brenda. He knew that Fergie delighted in doing an impersonation of the Queen. But as mimicry was an accepted party piece among the Windsors, this was a less heinous offence.

Diana's personal experience was that her father-in-law could be extremely tetchy if he felt the behaviour of any member of the Firm reflected badly on Her Majesty. She had felt the sharp edge of his tongue after she attended the State Opening of Parliament in November 1984.

For months, Diana had been urging her hairdresser, Kevin Shanley, to change the Diana Cut which had become her trademark.

'I think it's time my hair went up,' she told him.

'I don't think so,' cautioned Shanley. it would make you look old before your time.'

Diana persisted. 'Well, my husband would love to see it up,' she said, 'I really want my hair up for the State Opening of Parliament.'

Shanley refused to carry out her wishes and, to avoid trouble, passed his most famous client over to his colleague, Richard Dalton. The result was a classic chignon, the startling, upswept hairstyle known as the Royal Roll. It caused a sensation, but not the one Diana had anticipated.

As was the custom, the Queen travelled to the Palace of Westminster in the Irish State Coach pulled by four Windsor Greys, a Household Cavalry escort leading the way. The Imperial State Crown, removed from its place among the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London, travelled ahead of her in another coach. There was, however, only one focal point. The TV cameras fixed on Diana's Royal Roll. Inside Westminster, the Queen and Prince Philip moved through the Royal Gallery to the House of Lords. Philip smiled, but he was seething inside.

Invited by Black Rod into the Sovereign's presence, Members of Parliament proceeded two by two to the House of Lords. Since the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Parliamentary vaults had always been thoroughly searched by the Yeoman of the Guard (and, in more recent times, members of the Anti-Terrorist Squad) before this event. Seated on her throne in the Lords, the Queen read the Gracious Speech, which outlined Government policies for the next session of Parliament. None of this pageantry rated headlines the following morning. Nearly every newspaper featured pictures of Diana's new hairstyle while none showed the Queen carrying out her most important constitutional duty. The only explosion was inside the Palace. 'This isn't done,' Philip told his daughter-in-law as soon as he got a chance. 'You don't put on a new hairstyle when we go to these important dos. It's the Queen's day, not yours.'

To make matters worse, the new style was greeted with wails of dismay. No one liked Mr Richard's handiwork. It was called a 'Disaster' and 'Diabolical'. The next time she saw Shanley, Diana told him: 'I won't be doing that again for a number of years.'

If a mere hairstyle could provoke such an outburst from Philip, the Squidgy tapes signalled the final parting of the ways. The Duke's rage towards his daughter-in-law made Diana's position in the Royal Household untenable long before the separation. Philip, according to Andrew Morton, wrote Diana 'an angry letter' to which she replied only after consulting a lawyer. At Royal Ascot, the Duke pointedly ignored his daughter-in-law when she passed him in the royal box. To make the snub more hurtful, Andrew Parker Bowles was invited for afternoon tea on the Queen's instructions.

As the rift between Diana and Philip had turned into a central theme in the overall drama, she took the unprecedented step of issuing a statement through Buckingham Palace more or less exonerating him. The Princess had returned ahead of Charles from the disastrous tour of South Korea, where the Waleses' demeanour was so grim that they were called 'The Glums'. The statement read: