me. I was not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. I knew my Palace life would not really have begun until I spoke to her in my own right, rather than just as a job-hunter.
I went home late that night. As I passed KPI looked up the long drive and wondered what was going on behind the lighted windows. It looked cosy enough, but I remembered the Princess’s forced laughter and her clumsy jokes about her in-laws. It did not take a psychologist to see there was a great tension just below the surface.
Her popularity clearly gave her enormous power – I had felt it very strongly when I met her. But, like a toppled pyramid, it seemed an immense weight to rest on just her slim shoulders. Were others helping her carry that weight? Would I?
I already knew the answer to the second question. Even at this early stage I felt a loyalty to the Princess. For all her professional competence and innate nobility, there was an indefinable vulnerability about her that drew from me an unprompted wish to protect her. This developed into a complex mixture of duty and devotion which sometimes took more and sometimes less than the strict professional loyalty required, but which has never entirely disappeared.
As for the first question, I already had the glimmerings of an answer to that too. My observations at lunch in Buckingham Palace had given me a clue. If I felt that I, a junior minion in a junior household, was just tolerated by the old guard, how much more was that true of my boss. If I looked up from my own small patch of red carpet, I could see my experience reflected in that of the Princess, although hers was on a scale as different from mine as a lifetime is from a two-year secondment. Inside the organization of which she was a senior, popular and accomplished partner, she was just tolerated.
Being tolerated was fine, I supposed, but I had expected a degree of supervision, if not actual direction. At times I came to feel that even a measure of interest would have been welcome. Raised in disciplined organizations, I was surprised to discover the extent of the autonomy given to the junior households. Some form of structured, central co-ordination was the Philosopher’s Stone of royal strategic management and endless attempts were – and are – made to discover it. But even the sharpest sorcerer on the PR market is unlikely to work the magic for long. The base material of his potion is a thousand years of royal durability. It is hard, dull and unyielding, not readily open to transformation. It is strong too – but its strength is not the kind you would want to cuddle up to. The best he can hope to create is media gold – a fool’s delight.
Later, as events in the Waleses’ marriage moved from concern to crisis, tolerance became pained aloofness in some cases and outright distaste in others. In the end, however, it was the indifference that caused such harm. Opportunities to alter the downward spiral of events were squandered. Those who could have helped preferred too often to look away or distract themselves with the accustomed routines that had proved an effective bulwark against intrusive reality in the past. I knew and understood why. The need to confront unfamiliar and painfully intimate issues was deeply unwelcome to us courtiers as a class. What I resentfully saw as indifference I eventually realized often masked a genuine concern – and an equally genuine sense of complete impotence in the face of events that constantly defied the rules of familiar experience.
Part of what drove the Princess on to endure and exploit her public duties was her wish to earn the active recognition and approval of the family into which she had married. Sometimes with bitterness, but increasingly with a resigned acceptance, she complained to me that nobody ever told her she was doing a good job.
Oh, the papers praised her to the heavens, but they could knock her down again the next day. The public adored her, but theirs – she thought – was a fickle love, lavished on her hairdo as much as on her soul. In any case, she left it behind with the slam of her car door. Her staff could try to redress the balance, but the line between true praise and toadying was always perilously fine.
It was a cruel irony that the better she did her job, the more she felt resented by some of her in-laws, unable to stomach the idea that she was a channel for emotions they struggled to feel, let alone express. Very well: if she could not please them, she would please herself. Little wonder, then, that she grew to prefer working for her own benefit and, as she saw them, the emotional needs of humanity at large. It might be selfish and it lacked intellectual discipline. It could – and did – expose her to criticism from agents of an older royal order, fearful of the public sentiment (or sentimentality, in their eyes) which she increasingly stirred up. But better that, she thought – even unconsciously – than deny her need for a recognition that accepted her as she really was.
The liberal, compassionate and educated people who are the emerging face of royal authority might at this point feel entitled to a flicker of exasperation. ‘We did everything we could, but she was impossible!’
I can only reply, ‘Yes, you did. And yes, she was.’ But too many people who could have put things right did too little for too long. I will always believe it to be true: the Princess of Wales did not set out to rebel. What in the end was seen as her disaffection was what she did to compensate for a chronic feeling of rejection. Time and again, a small handful of sugarlumps would have been enough to lead this nervous thoroughbred back into the safety of the show ring. When none could be found for her, she set off into the crowd.
The organization I joined in 1988 nonetheless seemed, at least on the surface, to be united in its common aim of serving the Prince and Princess, both of whom for their part seemed equally united in keeping away from public gaze whatever private difficulties their marriage might have been experiencing. Even those well acquainted with the rumours, such as Georgina Howell, writing in the Sunday Times on 18 September 1988, could still reassure themselves that ‘Diana [has decided] as royal women so often have … to make the best of a cool marriage instead of fighting it.’ Ominously she added, ‘… but she lacks romance. The danger is that she may find it.’ Given what was later disclosed to Andrew Morton about the Princess’s love life at the time, this understatement is touching in its innocence. Captain Hewitt had already been on the scene for some time, carrying his own supply of romantic sugarlumps – and self-denial was never her strong point.
That first night, as I inched past the gates of KP in the London traffic, such thoughts were the merest inkling, easily pushed to the back of my mind. In the years that followed, however, they grew from idle speculation to grim reality.
Had I known it, the signs were all there from the beginning.
The Princess’s footsteps sounded hurried. I had been listening to them for about five minutes now, standing in the semi-gloom of the KP hallway. Upstairs, she was preparing for a day of engagements out of London – what we called an ‘awayday’. Her high heels struck a distinctive note as she marched back and forth from her bedroom to the sitting room with, it seemed, several rapid diversions en route. To my nervous ears she was beginning to sound impatient. There was something increasingly agitated about her pacing.
Suddenly I heard a phone ring and there were a few minutes of silence, broken only by the low murmur of her voice. Then the footsteps started again, back to the bedroom, only this time more urgently, as I imagined her checking the time remaining before we were due to leave. She was fanatically punctual.
It was my first ‘real’ day at work – the first day on which I was going out with the Princess. This was my chance to begin to see the world through her eyes, to experience what it was like to be royal, only slightly second-hand.
In a pattern that was repeated a thousand times over the next seven years, I waited in the darkness at the foot of the stairs and listened to her flitting from room to room on the floor above, trying to guess what mood she was in and what sort of day lay ahead of us. The phone call could have been from anybody. The tone of her voice was neutral and I could not catch the words. I hoped whoever it was would not keep her talking – I had already learned enough to know she would be irritated if we started late. Best of all, whoever it was might make her laugh and send us smiling all the way to