The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor (8 page)

At lunch my father found himself on the Queen’s left-hand side, the judge was on her right, and throughout the first two courses – salmon, followed by braised ham – she addressed not one single word to him. He was beginning to feel more than a little miffed. At the other end of the table he noticed that the Tory MP was in exactly the same situation. He was on the Duke’s left and for two courses had been completely ignored while Philip lavished attention on Sue MacGregor, seated on his right. The two of them looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

But as soon as the pudding arrived the entire table was transformed. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh both turned to the guest on their left and my father basked in the Queen’s full attention for the rest of the lunch. They chatted, he said, like old friends and he was always certain that the key had been horses. On the way to the Palace his office driver, a very keen punter, had told him to ask the Queen whether her horse Height of Fashion was going to win the Oaks. This is precisely what he did and the Queen immediately lit up and explained that the horse’s legs were possibly too long for the Epsom course but that its chances would be decided by whether the horse ran well at Goodwood. Bingo.

Someone should have taken them to one side and said, ‘Make this work. Go out on to that balcony, hold hands, smile and when you come back down, one of you turn to the right, one to the left. Take a mistress, take a lover if you want, but for the sake of the boys, the family and the country, stay together.’ No one seemed to have the long view; Diana was a huge asset. She’d have been in her forties by now; and one of the most interesting women in the world, the best ambassador for this country ever. She could have been UNESCO’s child ambassador … Wherever we went people’s eyes widened – her mannerisms, her dress sense. What else did he want? In that position you’ve got to work together. Someone should have said to the Queen, ‘This is the next generation coming through.’ They should never have let her go.

These are not the words of an outsider who didn’t understand the situation. This is someone who worked for the Prince of Wales before his marriage and for both the Prince and Princess for several years after the marriage. He was a member of the royal household for ten years in all and was loyal, devoted and dedicated. He is now in his early seventies and might still
have been there in some capacity or other had he not been caught in the crossfire of the warring Waleses. He was enormously fond of both the Prince and the Princess and would have wished the greatest personal happiness to them both, but this was not about personal happiness. It couldn’t be. They were not just any couple; they were royal, they had obligations; and his principal concern is for the monarchy.

There is no doubt that he is right. The monarchy was very seriously damaged by the breakdown of that marriage; it destroyed the respect that a great many people instinctively felt for the Royal Family and it paved the way for much of the intolerable media intrusion that has now become a part of their lives. Charles and Diana would not have been the first couple to have lived separate lives under the same roof; they didn’t even have to be under the same roof – they already had a roof each – Charles at Highgrove in the country, Diana at Kensington Palace in London. Aristocratic families have been doing precisely this for generations: staying married for the sake of their children and their estates, and discreetly taking lovers on the side. It should have been possible for the Prince and Princess, but this was such a mismatch, the relationship so volatile, Diana so unpredictable and the handling of it all so inept that in the final analysis bringing the marriage to an end was the lesser of two evils.

Michael Colborne first met the Prince of Wales in the Navy in the early seventies when, fresh out of Dartmouth, Charles had joined his first ship, HMS
Norfolk
, as a sub-lieutenant. Colborne was a non-commissioned officer, fourteen years his senior, unfazed by the HRH tag and quite unafraid to speak his mind. He was a grammar-school boy, with a wife and young son, who had joined the Navy at sixteen and been there all his working life. The two became friends and they would sit up at night, talking over a few drinks; Colborne
would often pull his leg and when they were on shore leave he would show him the sights. This was the first time the Prince had mixed with people from a different social class and he was fascinated by every aspect of Michael’s life; when the Prince left the Navy in 1977 and became a fully-fledged member of the Family Firm he invited Colborne to help set up his office. Officially he was in charge of his financial affairs, but in practice he became the Prince’s right-hand man, and the only member of his staff prepared to tell Charles the truth, however unpalatable it sometimes was. The Prince welcomed his honesty and made him promise that he would never change. ‘If you don’t agree with something, you say so,’ he had told him, but, of course, on those occasions when Colborne had disagreed and said so, there was all hell to pay.

Like his father and grandfather, George VI, the Prince has a terrifying temper that has reduced strong men to tears; it was that which finally drove Michael Colborne away. Lord Mountbatten, the Prince’s great-uncle and mentor, had once said when he was on the point of leaving in the very early days, ‘Bear with him, Michael, please. He doesn’t mean to get at you personally. It’s just that he wants to let off steam and you’re the only person he can lose his temper with. It’s a back-handed compliment really, you know. He needs you.’

The Prince did need him, not least in helping him cope with Diana. The story of Charles and Diana and their marriage has been analysed and written about
ad nauseam
– I have done a fair share of it myself – but I am now about to do it again. This is partly because no book about the monarchy can ignore the significance that that marriage and all the consequences of its failure has had on the institution; and partly because, in my view, despite all the books, articles and documentaries, there is still a profound misconception about the whole sorry tale.

Colborne was one of the first people the Prince told about his proposal to Diana. He was the one who organized flowers to greet her on her return from Australia where she had gone while making up her mind about marriage. The Prince had asked him to send her the biggest, most fragrant bunch of flowers he could find and had handwritten a welcome home note to go with them. They had been delivered by the Prince’s police protection officer, yet years later, when the Princess was talking about her rotten marriage, she threw it out as a sign of his callousness: ‘I came back from Australia,’ she told Andrew Morton. ‘Someone knocks at the door – someone from his office with a bunch of flowers and I knew that they hadn’t come from Charles because there was no note. It was just somebody being very tactful in the office.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Colborne became like a father to Diana in her early years in the Palace, but he could see there was going to be trouble from the start. At nineteen, she was little more than a child when she first arrived, totally unprepared for the life that lay ahead and completely out of her depth. She was a romantic, an innocent, she knew nothing of life or work or relationships. The things she knew about were loss and rejection, the product of her parents’ divorce; and she had been fatally damaged by the experience. She had no self-confidence, no stability, just a desperate need to be loved and wanted; and a determination to get what she wanted.

She wanted the Prince of Wales – she had fallen in love with him – but it was the idea as much as the man she was in love with. In reality she scarcely knew him; and he knew nothing about her because she hadn’t let him. She had presented to him a Diana she knew he would be attracted by; a Diana who shared all of his interests, who loved the country, who was easy, loving, funny and uncomplicated. It was only once the
ring was on her finger and she found herself transported from her all-girl, giggly flat in Fulham to an impersonal suite of rooms in Buckingham Palace, with no one of her own age for company and a fiancé who was always busy, that the real Diana began to emerge. The happy, easy-going girl became moody, wilful and suspicious. The moods swung wildly; one minute she would be laughing and joking, the next she would be kicking the furniture, displaying a terrible temper that Charles had never seen before. It came from nowhere, along with hysterical tears, and could be gone in an instant. She took sudden dislikes to people she had previously appeared to like, accused them of spying on her or being out to get her; she was jealous of friends and ex-girlfriends (not so surprising); she was even jealous of the Prince’s relationship with his mother, and convinced that the Queen was writing about her in the letters and memos she sent her son.

To begin with Diana and Michael Colborne shared an office and she spent many an hour pouring out her heart to him. A more secure, mature nineteen-year-old might have coped, might have had a better understanding of what she was taking on, but Diana had none. She had a romanticized view of marriage and no experience of commitment. When she had encountered difficulty in her life – a school she disliked, a dancing job she didn’t enjoy – she ducked out of it; no one had ever made her do anything she didn’t want to do. With two sets of parents there had never been any real discipline. Discipline: the key to being a member of the Royal Family. She wasn’t marrying the man, she was marrying the job; she was joining the Family Firm, and, as Michael Colborne tried to explain to her, it was a unique way of life.

One weekend she had been at Royal Lodge in Windsor and had decided to go for a walk without telling anyone. All hell broke loose because of the security implications, and on the
Monday morning she told Michael what had happened. She said she didn’t know how she was going to cope.

‘This is going to be your life,’ he had said.

You’re never going to be on your own again. And you’re going to change. In four to five years you’re going to be an absolute bitch, not through any fault of your own, but because of the circumstances in which you live. If you want four boiled eggs for breakfast, you’ll have them. If you want the car brought round to the front door a minute ago, you’ll have it. It’s going to change you. Your life is going to be organized. You open your diary now and you can put down Trooping the Colour, the Cenotaph service, Cowes Week, the Ascots. You can write your diary for five years ahead, ten years, twenty years.

That was the reality. There would be no spontaneity, no last-minute plans, no ducking out of commitments. Her carefree life of being a nobody was over. For a nineteen-year-old that was a terrifying prospect.

Colborne is convinced that if Lord Mountbatten, murdered by the IRA in 1979, had still been alive a year later, Charles and Diana would never have married. He is probably right. Years later, Diana spoke about being the ‘sacrificial lamb’ on the day of her wedding, of how she had wanted to back out of it some weeks before but been told by her sister that it was too late: her face was on the tea towels. If she did have doubts, despite their frank and lengthy conversations she certainly never expressed them to Colborne.

Charles himself had serious doubts about whether he had made the right decision during their engagement, but he kept them to himself. He asked the advice of a number of people – official advisers, friends and family – before he proposed to
Diana, aware that this was no ordinary marriage and that he couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Most people counselled for the marriage, including, significantly, the Queen Mother. She was very keen on the match; Diana was the granddaughter of her friend and lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, and in every sense, on paper, the perfect match. Ruth Fermoy knew it wasn’t; but, socially ambitious for her granddaughter, she chose to keep quiet. Years later in 1993, only a month before she died, the old lady apologized to the Prince of Wales for failing to warn him. Diana, she knew, had been ‘a dishonest and difficult girl’. Her father, who died in 1991, also admitted he had been wrong not to say something.

And so, having taken soundings, Charles went ahead and proposed, knowing that despite the consensus among those he’d spoken to, in his heart of hearts he was still uncertain. ‘It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family,’ he said, ‘but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’ He was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’, he confessed to one friend. To another, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end.’

The fact that, when asked on television on the day of the engagement whether he was in love, he replied ‘Yes, whatever love is’, is irrelevant. It was a very tactless thing to say, hurtful to Diana and bad PR, and he should never have said it; but the truth is this was a marriage where being in love was not the most important ingredient. This was a marriage that had to last – look at the number of ordinary marriages that have fallen apart when the pair stopped being ‘in love’ and discovered that there was nothing else holding them together. Look at the number of innocent children who have suffered
as a result. The Prince’s own thoughts about this, articulated years earlier, have been quoted many times before but they cannot be bettered:

I’ve fallen in love with all sorts of girls and I fully intend to go on doing so, but I’ve made sure I haven’t married the first person I’ve fallen in love with. I think one’s got to be aware of the fact that falling madly in love with someone is not necessarily the starting point to getting married. [Marriage] is basically a very strong friendship … I think you are lucky if you find the person attractive in the physical and the mental sense … To me marriage seems to be the biggest and most responsible step to be taken in one’s life.

Whatever your place in life, when you marry, you are forming a partnership which you hope will last for fifty years. So I’d want to marry someone whose interests I could share. A woman not only marries a man; she marries into a way of life – a job. She’s got to have some knowledge of it, some sense of it, otherwise she wouldn’t have a clue about whether she’s going to like it. If I’m deciding on whom I want to live with for fifty years – well, that’s the last decision on which I want my head to be ruled by my heart.

So what went wrong? Why did Charles allow himself to make what, by the time he walked up the aisle, he knew was the wrong decision? He took advice before he proposed, but once he had asked Diana to marry him the subject was no longer open for discussion. His old friend Nicholas Soames could see disaster ahead; what worried him was the intellectual gulf between them and the fact that they had so little in common. Penny Romsey, wife of his cousin Norton (Lord Romsey), Mountbatten’s grandson, had an additional fear. She thought that Diana was in love with the idea of being a princess and had
very little understanding of what that would involve. Norton agreed with all three observations and had very real fears for the future. He tackled the Prince on several occasions but was firmly told to mind his own business. None of them had the influence over him that Mountbatten had had. Mountbatten was like a father to the Prince – he called him his ‘Honorary Grandfather’ – and although Mountbatten was ambitious on his own behalf and would have dearly loved his own granddaughter to marry Charles, he would have seen that Diana was the wrong person for him to be bound to for fifty years or more. But Mountbatten was dead, and Charles was still consumed by grief, lost without the older man to guide him; and alone.