William and Harry (24 page)

It may have been ten years since her death, but Diana’s memory was still vivid – and not just for the princes but also with the public, who still adored her, and the newspapers, which remained infatu ated with every detail of Diana’s life. The public side, Harry said, was only a very small part of their mother. They liked to remember her without the cameras, when she was ‘just Mummy’, dancing barefoot to Michael Jackson in the drawing room of Kensington Palace and making them laugh with her naughty jokes.

Until now they had had little opportunity to put their own mark on their mother’s memory. There had been calls for a memorial, but the £3 million fountain in Hyde Park opened seven years after her death was at first felt feeble and inadequate. William and Harry had joined their father, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh for the opening, but the fountain had been dogged by controversy. It simply didn’t seem appropriate or fitting to many, including Diana’s friend Vivienne Parry, who was on the committee of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

As if to advertise its failure, the fountain became clogged with leaves and was fenced off as a health and safety hazard. By the end of that first summer it was more of a sputter than the majestic fountain it was intended to be – and subsequently became closer to being.

Having recently turned twenty-five, William was legally entitled to the income accrued on the £6.5 million left to him in his mother’s will. Unusually, Diana’s will had been changed by a variation order granted by the High Court three months after her death, to protect her sons. Essentially the changes meant that they could not access the capital of her £12 million estate until they were thirty, but they could access the interest it had earned without consulting the trustees. It was also agreed that William and Harry would take over the princess’s intellectual property rights, which had been given to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. While William appreciated the work the fund had done, he was determined to give it a serious shake-up. There was a feeling, particularly within the Palace, that Diana’s name, which at one stage had
appeared on margarine packets, had been cheapened and over-commercialised.

‘The boys were wisely kept out of all the rows that were going on, but there were huge problems with Diana’s image,’ recalled Vivienne Parry. ‘Diana’s sister Sarah and Paul Burrell, who was also on the committee, decided to give Flora the rights to use Diana’s signature on their margarine packets. Sarah had actually signed it off even though we were all opposed to it, as was Diana’s mother Frances, who was still alive at the time. Diana’s name was and still is very powerful, and it’s understandable that William and Harry are so protective of their mother’s legacy.’

The concert and memorial were perfect opportunities for the boys to reinvent their mother’s image. It was William and Harry’s first joint charity venture and their most ambitious project to date. The concert, which would take place at the new Wembley Stadium, was to feature twenty-three artists and would be broadcast around the world by the BBC. Everyone remembered the young and vibrant Diana dancing to Duran Duran at Live Aid twenty-two years before. Now the very same band, who had lined up to meet the princess and shake her hand, would be singing for her together with, among others, Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, Supertramp, Lily Allen, Joss Stone and Take That.

William and Harry made the decision early on that it was to be a party for the younger members of the royal family, and while some of Diana’s family were invited, the old guard, including their father, who according to William didn’t know how to pronounce Beyoncé’s name, were not. Although the princes did not have their own private office at this stage, they had a team of aides at the Palace to help them plan the event. Sir Malcolm
Ross, who had coordinated the Queen’s successful golden jubilee celebrations in 2002, was in charge of the operation together with Geoffrey Matthews, the princes’ private secretary, and their personal secretary Helen Asprey. An advisory board of key figures from the music and entertainment industry, including Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast, Andy Cosslett of Intercontinental Hotels Group, Willie Walsh, chief executive of British Airways, Universal Music’s chairman Lucian Grainge, the director of the National Theatre Nicholas Hytner and Sir Tom Shebbeare, director of Prince Charles’s charities, was also created to work alongside the boys’ aunt Lady Sarah McCorquodale. Theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber had also agreed to be involved, and by the New Year plans were well under way. Both William and Harry were kept abreast at every stage of the planning by Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, who travelled around the country with detailed plans of the ever-changing event for the boys to authorise.

William wanted to oversee every last detail, and was given permission to leave his regiment in Dorset to come up to London for regular meetings at Clarence House. According to one senior royal aide who was present, he chaired every meeting with confidence and authority. ‘William was very hands on. He would arrive in meetings totally au fait and up to speed. He had enormous skill, which I was quite taken aback by, and he was incredibly competent. If there was a point he wanted to take further with anyone individually, he would close the meeting, thanking everyone for their time, before asking the person he wanted to speak to if they would stay behind. He got the job done, and we were all very happy with how he handled it.’

With so much hype in the weeks leading up to the concert, it was decided this was the perfect opportunity for the boys to give an international television interview. Given their mother’s popularity in the States, it was suggested that they appear on America’s biggest breakfast programme, NBC’s
Today
, which paid a reported $2.5 million for the exclusive. A year earlier William and Harry had appeared on British television with their father to be interviewed by Ant and Dec for the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the Prince’s Trust. They appeared relaxed as they sat on either side of their father as he spoke about the work of the trust. But this time the spotlight was firmly on them. The footage, as far as NBC was concerned, was worth every dollar.

It was honest and compelling, and William and Harry came across exactly as their mother would have hoped. They were normal; they had girlfriends; they hated the press attention that came with their titles and were uncomfortable with intrusions into their daily lives. If they had not been born princes, William said he would have loved to be ‘some sort of heli pilot working for the UN maybe’, while Harry said he dreamed of being a safari guide in Africa. Harry claimed only the people who actually knew them really understood them. There were questions about Kate Middleton, and William, who had obviously been well briefed ahead of the interview, gave nothing away. He certainly wasn’t prepared to confirm whether she would be coming to the concert.

Sitting on a cream sofa in the drawing room of Clarence House dressed in chinos and open-necked shirts, the brothers took it in turns to answer the questions. In front of the cameras they were relaxed, shared an easy on-screen banter and finished one another’s sentences. There were jokes about Harry having done
nothing in the run-up to the concert, while William claimed to have had all the bright ideas. Their self-deprecation and warmth won them an army of fans. This after all was the first America and the rest of the world had really seen of the boys since they walked behind their mother’s coffin ten years before.

For the first time the boys opened up about Diana’s death and how they had coped without her in their lives. Harry spoke with great candour about his mother and how he was haunted by what had happened in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel on 31 August 1997. ‘For me personally, whatever happened … that night … in that tunnel … no one will ever know. I’m sure people will always think about that the whole time,’ he said. ‘I’ll never stop wondering about that.’

‘Straight after it happened we were always thinking about it,’ added William. ‘Not a day goes by when I don’t think about it once in the day … For us it’s been very slow … It has been a long time.’

Harry talked about the trauma of being continually confronted with images of their mother since her death and his sadness that the tragedy would never be a closed chapter in their lives.

While time had healed the rawest wounds, it was clear that the pain of losing their mother so suddenly and publicly had left a deep scar.

When asked how they coped with life in the goldfish bowl of royalty it was Harry who answered: ‘We know we have certain responsibilities, but within our private life and within certain other parts of our life we want to be as normal as possible. Yes, it’s hard because to a certain respect we will never be normal.’

When on 1 July 2007 Sir Elton John took to the stage at the new Wembley Stadium to introduce William and Harry the applause from the crowd of 63,000 people was thunderous. They had both admitted to being nervous, but as they stood in front of a giant screen illuminated with the letter D, Harry found his confidence. ‘Hello, Wembley,’ he shouted to the crowds. He looked to William and grinned broadly. The day was blessed with fine weather and Elton John opened and closed the concert on a black-lacquered grand piano. There was no rendition of ‘Candle in the Wind’, which he had sung at her funeral; the mood was of celebration, not sadness. The outpouring of grief ten years earlier was a distant memory. There would be no more tears, this was a time for happiness, but as the black and white images of Diana taken by her favourite photographer Mario Testino flickered across the stage, there was no mistaking the emotions she still elicited.

As the cameras focused on the royal box, William and Harry, surrounded by their friends and relatives – among them Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Peter and Zara Phillips and Earl Spencer’s daughters Kitty, Eliza and Katya – beamed with pride. At one
point William raised his arms in the air and started wiggling his hips only to be chastised by his brother. Kate, dressed in a white Issa trench coat, stood two rows behind William and was careful not to meet his eye, although keen-eyed watchers might have read much into her singing along with every word of Take That’s ‘Back for Good’. She had in fact spent the days leading up to the concert sitting at the kitchen table in Clarence House going through the final running order with William and helping him with the speech cards he kept in his blazer pocket throughout the day. It was the first time they had appeared in public together since the news that they were dating again, but Kate wanted the day to be about Harry and William and insisted on sitting with her brother James. Chelsy, who had flown in from Cape Town, was seated on Harry’s right-hand side in the front row. Pretty in a black dress, her blond hair scraped back into a ponytail, they danced together and were inseparable at the VIP party after the show.

Although Palace aides were concerned that the late-night party could send out the wrong message in the run-up to the anniversary of Diana’s death, William and Harry were adamant that they wanted to thank everyone who had been involved with the concert. Event planner and nightclub owner Mark Fuller, who is also a long-serving ambassador of the Prince’s Trust, said it was their way of saying thank you. ‘People were desperate for an invite to the after party, but the boys wanted to keep it intimate and low key. Everyone agreed to help out for free and the boys were incredibly grateful. They made a point of coming and thanking every waitress and kitchen porter before the party started,’ said Fuller, who was in charge of the catering and
helped to look after the star guests. The boys were on their best behaviour, although Harry couldn’t resist sneaking off with Chelsy for a little time to themselves. It had always been William and Harry’s intention that any funds raised from the concert would be split among their charities, and the £1 million that was raised was divided up between eight, which included Sentebale and Centrepoint.

The hour-long memorial service, which was held at the Guards Chapel in the Wellington Barracks on 31 August, was understandably a more sombre affair, and the message was as clear as it was simple: let Diana be celebrated for her life, and let her rest in peace. The candlelit ceremony took place just a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, where back in July 1981 Diana had kissed her prince charming on the balcony in front of adoring crowds. The Right Reverend Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, echoed William and Harry’s pleas for their mother’s memory to be finally laid to rest. In Paris a sea of flowers had been laid above the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, while flowers, cards and poems from members of the public were pinned to the gates of Kensington Palace and Althorp, Diana’s childhood home and final resting place.

But as had been the case for most of Diana’s married life, Camilla unwittingly cast something of a shadow over the memorial service. There was a furore when it was reported that the duchess would be attending. Camilla herself had had misgivings and wanted to stay away, but Charles had insisted she be there. Diana’s close friend Rosa Monckton, who had spent ten days holidaying with the princess shortly before her death, voiced her opposition in an article for the
Mail on Sunday
. ‘I know such
services should be an occasion for forgiveness, but I can’t help feeling Camilla’s attendance is deeply inappropriate.’