Diana's Nightmare - The Family (45 page)

A week after Buckingham Palace announced the Prince's decision, he also quit as sponsorship manager of the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club, his only paid job at £36,000 a year. 'I assure you that neither of those situations caused me to make the decision, though I doubt whether anyone will believe me,' he said ruefully. 'I didn't sack him,' said Bryan Morrison, boss of the Royal Berkshire. 'He told me he was going for personal reasons. I wouldn't say he didn't need the money - he probably needs it badly. After Ronnie Ferguson, I just want some peace.'

Matters financial seemed to dog the Ferguson family in every venture they undertook. 'Sarah's image is all she has - we consider it absolutely one hundred per cent her biggest asset,' Johnny Bryan told Vicki Woods, editor of
Harpers & Queen,
reverting to his role as financial adviser. Fergie, he explained, was 'the sole and exclusive owner' of a private company called ASB Publishing, it's a company with only one share and the sole shareholder is the Duchess of York,' he said. 'You want to know why it's called ASB Publishing? A! S! B! Andrew! Sarah! Beatrice! That's what it stands for.' When Ms Woods asked if Prince Andrew was a shareholder, Bryan replied: 'I don't think he's actually a shareholder now. I don't really know, frankly. I don't think that's really relevant. Frankly.' Records at Companies House showed that ASB Publishing, which operated from Bryan's rented apartment, had two directors, Johnny Bryan and James Hughes, one of his American associates.

For a while, Johnny Bryan stopped representing the Duchess and it was believed that their relationship might have reached the end. i prefer to maintain a very low profile for the time being,' he said. As in other areas, his idea of what that constituted was something else. 'I went into Annabel's one night during Ascot Week and saw Fergie and Johnny sitting with four others at a big round table,' said Liz Brewer, it was just inside the door and I noticed them because it was supposed to be my table.' Only days before, the Duchess had been holding hands with Andrew, kissing him fondly and telling everyone that he was the most wonderful man in the world.

To enquiries from friends, Fergie insisted: 'Oh no, John is not around any more.' 'She said this to one girlfriend as she was leaving Romenda Lodge,' said a mutual acquaintance, it was reasonably late at night and once outside the door she realised she had left something behind. She went back and slipped in through a side entrance. When she looked through an open door into the drawing room, there was Fergie kissing Johnny Bryan on the sofa. He had been there all the time.'

As with so many things in her life, the image seemed to matter more than the reality. The apparent signs of a reconciliation with Andrew were no more substantial than that.

Fergie's chance to follow Diana into the Work arrived when she was invited to become a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations' High Commission for Refugees, 'I am honoured and delighted to offer not only my support to the cause of refugees but also my help to raise public awareness about their needs,' she said.

'We have been very impressed by the work of Her Royal Highness and her interest in refugees,' said Madame Sylvana Foa, speaking for the High Commission in Geneva. 'We want someone who has a high profile to help the cause and she was an ideal choice. The Duchess has kept her head up despite all her problems and you have to admire her for that.'

'I'm not just going to be a letterhead,' said Fergie, eagerly grasping the chance. 'I am very, very serious about it. But I won't do anything until I have learned the ropes.'

'There's a warmth about Sarah that is unmistakable,' said Christina Dumond, one of her oldest friends, it's such a shame the public has never known it.'

But even before Fergie could fly to Geneva to collect a UN diplomatic passport, flak jacket and sky-blue beret, her enemies intervened to snatch the prize away. Aware that the Queen was anxious to promote Prince Charles and Princess Anne's trips to the Third World, Sir Robert Fellowes made contact with the Foreign Office. Buckingham Palace's most senior official apparently had little difficulty in convincing Douglas Hurd, the Foreign Secretary, that the appointment was not in the Royal Family's best interests.

So much discreet pressure was brought to bear on the UN agency that it did a swift about-turn and promptly dropped the Duchess from its life-saving endeavours. The UN issued a statement making it clear that it had no further plans to involve her in its work. Fergie was busily working on her suntan in the South of France when she heard about the tactical withdrawal. This was the Good Chap style of government in action and once again she was the victim. 'They wanted to ensure that the Duchess did not embarrass the Royal Family either by her unpredictable behaviour or, Heaven forbid, by upstaging them,' said a Whitehall source. 'The attitude is that if she wants to leave Prince Andrew so badly then she should let go of the royal coat-tails as well.'

Fergie's friend and fellow director of the charity Children In Crisis, Theo Ellert, who meets regularly with her at Romenda Lodge, denied that she was 'looking for personal publicity'. Nor was she lazy. 'The Duchess is one of the busiest people in the world,' she said stoutly. 'Most of her holidays are two days squeezed into the middle of a hectic tour. If a nurse is on night duty, the fact that she puts her feet up on a beach afterwards is not criticised. The fact that the Duchess might do the same is called a holiday. She is a very sensitive person and she has been desperately hurt by the insults and nastiness which are continually thrown at her.'

Fergie's natural generosity always seems to rebound unfavourably. When she bought two hundred teddy bears from Harrods for child victims of the war in Bosnia, she found herself on the receiving end yet again. 'They were paid for by the Duchess out of her own money,' said Ms Ellert. 'They went down wonderfully well.' it's a war-torn, war-damaged country,' remarked Dr John Walmsley of Children In Distress, another charity active in the former Yugoslavia. 'A tin of Spam would have been more appropriate.'

Criticism like this infuriates Fergie. 'I'm a serious person,' she maintained, although she knew in her heart that the public had lost its patience. When she labelled herself 'the scapegoat of the Waleses', she couldn't forget that people treated her royal rival with respect and sympathy. Diana had forged such a strong bond with Douglas Hurd that he overruled his own department whenever they misguidedly tried to give Charles preferential treatment over her.

'Every attempt to starve Diana of the oxygen of publicity has failed,' said the Whitehall source, 'and yet the Duchess has been humiliated at every turn. It seems there isn't room on the world stage for two estranged royal wives.'

Not unnaturally, this upset Fergie and she began to resent the way Diana was being idolised even more. She knew that Diana was far from perfect and that her family were just as mixed up as her own. Why, her own father had even courted Diana's mother before they both entered into calamitous marriages.

'You'll cope, I know you can do it'

The Eighth Earl Spencer

THE speed at which Diana drove her red Mercedes northbound on the Ml was indicative of her mood on the morning of 1 April, 1992, the day of her father's funeral. Passing other cars at more than 100 mph in places, the Princess had no need to tell those whose job it was to ensure her safety that she was not merely mournful, but angry. Furthermore, it was not just the 'why my loved one?' variety of anger that went with early grief which was enraging her so. She had left Kensington Palace barely on speaking terms with her husband. Charles had opted for shifting rather than cancelling engagements for the day, clearing a three-hour window in his busy schedule to attend her father's funeral.

It was a bright but bitterly cold morning on which the Spencers gathered in the Northamptonshire village of Great Brington to bid farewell to Johnnie, the illustrious eighth Earl. Television crews, photographers and reporters who had descended the previous day easily outnumbered the local populace lining the route along which the funeral cortege would pass. Their number spilled over into the graveyard of the parish church, St Mary the Virgin. Every available space was filled with the high-tech gadgetry which has become the tools of their trade.

Even above the banter of the newsmen the constant buzzing of mobile telephones could be heard. A group gathered around one familiar Fleet Street royal watcher, kitted out for the job as he considered appropriate in anorak, green field boots and binoculars, and listened intently as he relayed the words being conveyed over his mobile. At the other end of the line was royal spokesman Dickie Arbiter, speaking from his Palace office. The red-faced journalist had attracted the attention of his colleagues by noisily asking Arbiter why Diana had had to drive alone the eighty miles to Althorp House, just a few hundred yards from where this bizarre and impromptu Press conference was being conducted by radio telephone.

He held the instrument away from his ear so that those closest could hear Arbiter explain that it was a very busy day for Prince Charles. In order to attend the funeral at all, His Royal Highness had had to bring forward an eleven a.m. meeting with four or five people and, moreover, he must return to London by mid-afternoon to have tea with the Crown Prince of Bahrain, Sheik Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa.

At the precise moment the oak coffin containing the body of Earl Spencer was being carried into the church where nineteen generations of his family were commemorated, a rumble in the sky distracted the listeners. Cutting short his phone call, the red-faced one peered through his binoculars and reported to his envious and less well-equipped colleagues that the helicopter hovering over Althorp was a bright red aircraft of the Queen's Flight. He was right. The machine, with Charles at the controls, duly landed close to the matching (though not by choice) sports car in which the mourning Diana had driven herself at such high speed from the same London palace.

Within minutes, a procession of limousines bearing the funeral party had left the great house, travelling across meadows on a private single-track road leading to Great Brington and the South door of St Mary's. The cortege was led by Raine, now the dowager countess, riding in the blue Bentley her husband had presented to her. She was accompanied by the new Earl and his Countess, the former Charles Althorp and Victoria Lockwood. Next came a black Rolls-Royce carrying a sombre Prince Charles and a downcast Diana, who now appeared to be fighting back the tears. A third splendid motor bore her sisters, Lady Jane Fellowes and Lady Sarah McCorquodale.

A cold wind whipped around the northern end of the church and the principal mourners did not pause to acknowledge the crowd being held back by uniformed policemen. It was there that Diana - hauntingly beautiful in a black suit and wide-brimmed hat — finally allowed the first tear to fall just as the organist sounded the opening strains of 'The Lord is My Shepherd'. It was not until a lone trumpeter from Johnnie Spencer's old regiment, the Scots Dragoon Guards, played a lament that she allowed herself to return the glances of her assembled relatives. The family of the man at her side cared little for these people. This was, in many respects, a family at war and her in-laws knew it.

When, as a much younger child, Prince William had shown signs of being hyperactive, the Queen had worried that the problem might be more serious and deep-rooted. His grandmother's fears were ungrounded.

Relieved that she had spared her young sons the ordeal of attending the funeral, Diana looked around from her seat in the choir stalls at the faces in the nave of the church. This was indeed a troubled family, particularly on her mother's side. Her favourite uncle Edmund, the Lord Fermoy, had shot himself at his 700-acre estate, Eddington House, close to the Berkshire town of Hungerford. The forty-five-year-old former steeplechase rider, who had taken it upon himself to vouch for Diana's virginity at the time of her engagement, had suffered a long period of depression prior to his tragic death in August, 1984 - the month before she gave birth to Harry.

Despite an apparently happy marriage to the former Lavinia Pitman (of the shorthand family), His Lordship had taken to seeking affection at the Wigmore Club.

A few days before Fermoy's suicide, friends were invited to shoot pheasant at his home. 'When we arrived, his two boys, both prep school age, were playing Space Invaders but they came out to do the beating,' said one of the party, it was only a rough shoot and quite relaxed until we went inside to lunch. It became very sticky because I noticed that Lord Fermoy wasn't joining in the conversation. He just wouldn't speak and you could tell something was wrong.' Whatever it was that troubled him, Lord Fermoy ended his own life on a bed of straw in the stables, a servant finding his pyjama-clad body.

The same year tragedy struck the family again when Anthony Berry, the Conservative MP married to Diana's Aunt Mary, was killed in the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel at Brighton which was intended to assassinate the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. No one had needed to tell Diana that the hapless marriage of her mother's sister was all but over when the tragedy occurred. It came as no surprise to her when Rheinhold Bartz, married to the Berrys' eldest daughter Alexandra, later declared: 'Mary had already given him his marching orders. He never forgave her for making a fool of him - perhaps that's why he started drinking too much. Just a month before his death he was disqualified for drink driving.'

Aunt Mary's marital fortunes fared no better when she tried again — and again. Her second husband Denis Gulgan joined a silent monastic order soon after she instructed him to leave her house four years after he had made her his bride. Groom number three, Michael Gunningham, was given his marching orders as he shaved on the morning after they had dined with the Queen of Denmark. Gunningham subsequently tried to kill himself with a drugs overdose at Broadfield Hall Farm, their home in Hertfordshire, but as a
cri de coeur,
his bid was unsuccessful in all respects, for he neither ended his misery nor won back his wife's affections.