Her Majesty (19 page)

No one can recall a happier start to a state visit than the moment the Queen stepped off the Royal Yacht on to a Cape Town quayside to be greeted by Nelson Mandela on a March morning in 1995. And one of the first acts of Nelson Mandela’s presidency had been to return South Africa to the Commonwealth. It would prove an enduring friendship. The fiftieth anniversaries of D-Day, VE Day and VJ Day were powerful and evocative moments when the Queen and her family were the perfect focal point for a complex range of national and international emotions. ‘We are just war relics,’ the Queen Mother joked to the Queen after their VE Day anniversary appearance, along with Princess Margaret, on the Palace balcony. As Churchill might have said: some war, some relics. These were huge occasions involving millions of people all over the country. Whatever the private domestic problems of the House of Windsor, it was still a phenomenal force for national unity.

But always in the background – and very often in the foreground there were the tensions between the Prince and the Princess of Wales. Equally sensitive was the relationship between the Princess and the institution from which she was obviously detached and yet to which she was also inextricably attached through her sons. ‘The Princess was a political hot potato and several papers were championing her,’ says a former senior official. ‘The Queen needed to be careful, constitutionally, because there was a lot of support for this hot potato.’

Added to that were the tensions between the Queen’s staff at Buckingham Palace and the Prince of Wales’s officials who had set up a fiercely independent operation at St James’s Palace. The Prince’s new team were determined to rebrand their man their way and resented what they regarded as old-school interference from ‘over the road’ at the Queen’s office. As the Prince’s environmental messages became more forceful, his mother’s advisers became more uneasy. Says one: ‘We got a lot of: “If the Prince wants to talk about the environment he will do so and he’ll clear it with the Department of the Environment. So get off our backs. We’re grown-ups. We can deal with the government.” It was that sort of tone.’

It did not take much to resurrect the chilling spectre of the
annus horribilis
. ‘You might have wonderful D-Day or VE Day anniversaries but then along came
Panorama
in 1995,’ says Charles Anson. ‘Suddenly we were right back in there and it raised all those worries again. It took a long time to get rid of that sense of neurosis, a sense that round every corner there’s a problem.’ The Princess of Wales’s interview for BBCI’s
Panorama
in November 1995 was a turning point for the Monarch. Its genesis, the Princess would claim, was an interview granted by the Prince of Wales the year before. In 1994, the Prince had allowed broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to produce a film and a book about his life. Both provided a colourful and compelling account of the unique nature of the Prince’s job. Neither viewer nor reader could be left in any doubt about the depth of his feeling for the people who would, one day, be his subjects, nor for the broad range of causes he had chosen to champion. The entire multimedia exercise was overshadowed, though, by a few seconds in nearly two hours of candid and engaging close-quarters filming. The Prince’s admission that he had remained faithful to the Princess until his marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’ would be the enduring memory in the public consciousness. Some of his advisers had believed that the admission would help to ‘clear the air’ after years of speculation about his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. Instead, it merely moved the speculation to a new, more frantic level, begging the fundamental question: what next? The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were dismayed, not just because of the Prince’s candour on screen. More wounding was the accompanying book which gave the impression that the Prince had endured an unhappy childhood. As the book was serialised in the
Sunday Times
over several weeks, the drip-feed of revelations managed to eclipse everything else the monarchy was attempting to do at the same time, including that long-awaited historic state visit to Russia. At Windsor Castle, the sense of frustration boiled over in public. ‘I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either. Very few members of the family have,’ the Duke of Edinburgh said crisply on the eve of the royal departure for Moscow. The Queen Mother harboured similar reservations. As she would tell Sir Eric Anderson (former Provost of Eton and royal confidant) years later: ‘It’s always a mistake to talk about your marriage.’

The most damaging result of the Dimbleby book/film, however, was that it invited some sort of response from the Princess’s side. Here was her
casus belli
. A year later, amid great secrecy, she prepared her riposte courtesy of the BBC and its
Panorama
programme. This was not to be a profile of her life and work. Whereas the Prince had been very careful to avoid any criticism of his wife in his programme, the Princess’s interview was an extended dissection of her marriage in front of a global television audience. Worse still, she cast doubts on the Prince’s prospects as King. It was time for the Queen to act. Up to this point, the Queen and Prince Philip had gone out of their way to be conciliatory to their daughter-in-law. Now, though, the Sovereign could not stand by. Not
only did she write to the Prince and Princess urging them to seek a divorce but the Palace released a statement to say that she had done so. That way, there would be no funny business by the spin doctors for both parties who had been busy of late. The Queen wanted her position to be absolutely clear. Shortly afterwards, the lawyers went to work and, on 15 July 1996, their divorce was stamped in the High Court, just three months after the Duke and Duchess of York had gone through the same process.

Despite the outward impression of business as usual, the Queen was well aware that the monarchy could not possibly stand still if it was to regain its place in the nation’s affections. However much she disliked change for change’s sake, she was mindful of a popular and oft-quoted Palace mantra, lifted from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel,
The Leopard:
‘If things are going to stay the same, then things are going to have to change.’ After all, a radical Labour government was on the horizon. The creation of the Way Ahead Group, the committee of the senior members of the Royal Family and their officials, was part of this process. Post-
Panorama
, the committee began addressing the most fundamental issues. Nothing was off-limits. A few weeks after the Waleses’ divorce, it convened at Balmoral to discuss issues such as male primogeniture and Catholic succession to the throne. These were matters for governments, not monarchs, to decide but the Queen and her advisers wanted to have clear, considered positions on the matters should they arise instead of being forced into knee-jerk responses by events. Staff in the Private Secretary’s Office were charged with examining every aspect of the monarchy’s work. ‘In a sense, it was an exciting time,’ a member of the team recalls. ‘It took the 1990s for us to ask ourselves: are we doing the right things?’ It also helped to maintain a sense of perspective. Charles Anson describes the mood: ‘Mary Francis [the new arrival who would rise to the position of Deputy Private Secretary] had recently been in a very senior position in the Private Office at Number Ten. She would come to the morning meeting in the Palace and ask: “Why do we spend every morning talking about Fergie?” I thought: “My God, I’ve got sucked into this as well.” It was a wake-up call. We should have been talking about what the monarchy should be doing, not how the Duchess or Diana would be hijacking the media.’

The Queen was adamant that there should be no sense of competition with the Princess. Even so, it was sometimes hard to avoid the impression that the Princess was in competition with the monarchy. In the autumn of 1996, the Queen was due to pay a state visit to Thailand to mark the Golden Jubilee of King Bhumibol. Upon her return, the Prince of Wales was to make important inaugural royal visits to previously
uncharted royal territory across Central Asia. But after the Foreign Office and the Palace had fixed the final plans, the Princess announced that she would attend a charity ball and lunch in Sydney slap bang in the middle of it all. Most of the media opted to go with her. The more conservative elements within the Palace and Parliament became increasingly alarmed as the Princess turned her attention to landmines. At the start of 1997, she was branded a ‘loose cannon’ by a junior defence minister after calling for a world ban on the weapons – and was promptly applauded by the Opposition. Her stance was very popular but, given a clear party political divide on the issue, it was an inappropriate intervention from a member of the Royal Family. Except she was no longer a member of the Royal Family and, following her divorce, was no longer styled ‘Her Royal Highness’. So what exactly was she? What sort of role should be expected of the non-royal mother of the future Sovereign? And what were the appropriate limits to her new non-royal status?

She never had the chance to find an answer. In the early hours of 31 August 1997, she died alongside Dodi Fayed and the French chauffeur who had been driving them through Paris. The following seven days would test the monarchy to the same extent as the whole of 1992. The events of that week – the human tragedy, the hysteria directed against an absentee monarch, the tensions upon the Queen’s return and the resounding finale – have been the subject of extensive court hearings, books, documentaries and even an Oscar-winning film. What has not been heard before is the story of those who were actually on the inside. For more than ten years they have kept their counsel. Even now they remain modest, although they are quietly proud of what was achieved. ‘I was worried. I was worried,’ says Lord Airlie, who, as Lord Chamberlain, was responsible for pulling the entire funeral operation together. ‘It was a very uncomfortable time. The Windsor fire was more difficult because it went on burning in so many different areas whereas, sadly, the funeral arrangements just had to be done. To be quite honest, we hadn’t got time to think of anything else. We just got on and did it.’

The Palace had several carefully prepared blueprints for every sort of royal funeral. Every six months there had been internal rehearsals and military-style exercises for precisely this sort of eventuality. Cut the Royal Household and it would bleed khaki. Except that, once again, the Princess defied all known categories.

‘We didn’t use any files,’ says Lord Airlie. ‘We didn’t look at them. I said, “No.” We started again.’

The man with the blank sheet of paper was Lieutenant Colonel Malcolm Ross, late of the Scots Guards. His official title was Comptroller,
Lord Chamberlain’s Office. In practice, he was the man in charge of all royal ceremonial and pageantry.

‘The Princess was thirty-six years old, no longer a member of the Royal Family but never off the radar,’ says Ross. ‘And because of her immense popularity, we all underestimated everything. The first day was spent getting the Prince of Wales out to Paris and getting the Princess’s body back. And we were in completely uncharted waters because there are certain legal requirements and we had never brought a dead member of the Royal Family back to this country.’

Having repatriated the Princess in royal style, the funeral preparations could begin in earnest. ‘We sat in Buckingham Palace until two in the morning,’ says Ross. ‘I went home to St James’s Palace and there were a thousand or so people kneeling around the Queen Victoria Memorial with candles and it was the most moving thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was an incredible atmosphere – calm and serene. That was before the media got it. Then, of course, the fury started.’

Pent-up public emotion needed a target and an outlet. To begin with, it was directed at the paparazzi who had been pursuing the Princess’s car through Paris. But then it started to be directed at the Royal Family and the Queen herself. The Royal Family were collectively criticised for the fact that Prince William and Prince Harry had been taken to church the morning after their mother’s death, for the fact that the Princess was not mentioned during the service, for the queues to sign books of condolence at St James’s Palace and for the absence of a flag at half-mast above Buckingham Palace. There were explanations. The boys had wanted to go to church. The Church of Scotland service was a matter for the minister. As Tony Blair observes in his memoirs,
A Journey
, the Queen was doing what she felt was right: ‘I knew the Queen would have felt that duty demanded that the normal routine was followed. There would have been no Alastairs [as in Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Press Secretary] in the entourage suggesting that possibly mentioning the tragedy might be sensible. The Queen is a genuine not an artifical person … there is no artifice in how she approaches things.’

The omission of Diana’s name from the service still baffles many. But those who know the Queen would have been equally surprised had a Church of Scotland minister been instructed, at her bidding, to insert specific prayers into his service. As he explained later, he had not mentioned the Princess by name out of concern for her sons. ‘My thinking,’ the Rev Robert Sloan told reporters, ‘was that the children had been wakened just a few hours before and told of their mother’s
death.’ More than a decade after the Princess’s death, the minutiae of that week continue to polarise opinion.

The books of condolence, meanwhile, were an untested innovation; the more that people became aware of their existence, the greater the numbers wanting to sign one. As for the Palace flagpole, it could only fly the Royal Standard – and never at half-mast for anyone, the Queen included. These might have seemed minor points from the detached perspective of Balmoral but they rapidly took on totemic importance for the increasingly emotional crowds in London. Just as the issues of fire damage, tax and marital discord had been conflated into a single crisis in 1992, so these perceived slights took on far deeper significance now: here, said the critics, was proof that those ‘remote royals’ just didn’t care. The problem was compounded by a new phenomenon. The Palace had not been the focal point of twenty-four-hour rolling television news before. Without regular helpings of fresh material to digest, the media beast would continue to regurgitate old information. There was no shortage of people in Kensington Gardens and the Mall to offer opinions. And the more angry they became about a missing flag, the more it occurred to other people that, come to think of it, they, too, were cross about the flag. None of this was lost on those inside the Palace. A senior member of the Metropolitan Police team on duty that week sums up the mood: ‘In the Mall, I saw a Jesus with a crucifix on his back meet a bloke carrying a flagpole with a flag at half-mast on his back. They greeted each other like old friends and it didn’t even look unusual. That was the atmosphere we were dealing with.’ One old member of the Household believes that if the Queen had been at Windsor rather than in the Highlands it would have been a different story. ‘You can feel as if you’re in another world at Balmoral,’ he says. ‘And she was.’