Shadows of a Princess

FIVE (#ulink_8c3f72e6-86a0-5d70-9cb9-faae4e04157e)

DOUBLE TAKE (#ulink_8c3f72e6-86a0-5d70-9cb9-faae4e04157e)

I returned home exhausted and several pounds lighter, not least thanks to an energetic desert stomach bug. The Princess welcomed me back like a wandering stray and wrote me a typically generous note of appreciation. For a day or two I recuperated in the knowledge that I had survived my first tour, which had been generally recognized as a pretty challenging initiation.

Media coverage of the tour had been extensive. Still a novice, I took an immature pride in the glossy magazine stories and the TV special that followed in the days after our return. Somehow, I felt, it would not have been possible without me – which may have been true, but only to a very limited extent.

Not featured in the glossies but of growing interest to tabloid commen-tators was the state of The Marriage. I had seen some of its internal stresses while on tour – however careful the Prince and Princess were to keep their troubles to themselves, being ‘on the road’ always accentuated differences that could be smoothed over more easily at home – and already the media sharks had scented blood in the water. They would not remain hungry for long.

To compensate for the lack of united leadership at the top, the Wales support organization had for some time been making its own arrangements to adapt to the unpalatable truth. Huge amounts of energy were diverted into concealing the real state of the marriage, and still more were expended on structuring our bosses’ public lives to minimize friction between them. It is a tempting but pointless exercise to imagine what more could have been achieved if this energy had been available to support the global influence of a Prince and Princess who were able to work as a team.

My introduction to these realities had occurred during a visit by the Prince and Princess to the Glasgow Garden Festival in my early days in office in May 1988. Not unusually, Their Royal Highnesses had been apart in the days preceding the engagement but obviously had to appear as a couple, if not happily, then at least willingly united when they arrived at the Festival. They therefore made their ways in separate aircraft to what, fortunately, turned out to be a simultaneous rendezvous at Glasgow airport. Logistically this was no mean feat, but, as I came to realize, the Queen’s Flight, the police and the respective staffs were not short of practice in this manoeuvre.

On the flight to Scotland I had been conscious of a heightened tension, but in my happy lack of awareness had ascribed it only to the prospect of an exciting day in the sunshine in front of what were sure to be huge crowds. Later, I came to recognize the nervous giggles interspersed with brooding introversion as characteristic of the Princess’s agitation at the prospect of working with her husband. Also, it was only later that I realized the significance of her frequent trips to the royal loo. ‘Bulimia’ was a word I did not even know how to spell in 1988.

John Riddell was in charge of the engagement. As ever, his charm and studied absent-mindedness produced the intended mood of amused tolerance in the Princess as we arrived in Glasgow. Inside, he must have felt he was defusing a ticking time bomb. In this he was like many senior courtiers who lacked the benefit of regular contact with her – their understandable inclination was to treat her like a beautifully wrapped parcel of unstable Semtex. His only acknowledgement of the unspoken matrimonial drama which waited on the tarmac was to smile reassuringly at her as we left the plane and say, ‘Let’s hope we all reach the end of the day in the same happy mood we started it in!’

In bright sunshine the Prince and Princess met by their aircraft, brushed cheeks for a fraction of a second and climbed into their car. The day was a success. The beautiful weather, happy crowds and grand scale of the event perfectly set off their own professionalism.

They were an unbeatable double act who could anticipate each other’s moves, instinctively work a crowd and betray by neither a word nor a gesture the fact that they would jump back in their separate planes as soon as duty released them. In the brief moments of semi-privacy, however, away from all but the familiar company of their staffs, they might have been on separate engagements. Not a word or a glance passed between them.

Only the atmosphere of relief on the homeward journey, and the veiled references to disaster averted, alerted my novice’s consciousness to the fact that we were playing a game. There was only one rule: nothing must be said to disturb the myth of permanence that was now the marriage’s only certainty.

Competition between the stars of our show was never far below the surface, and set-piece joint events usually brought it into the open. A garden party at Buckingham Palace was the perfect opportunity for some rather pointed sparring. For those of us who saw beyond the myth this was entertaining too, in a painful way.

It was the sort of obligatory event that went into the Princess’s diary automatically, at least twice every year. However much she denied it, I think she secretly rather looked forward to these occasions. The reason was not hard to find. It came to me at the start of one afternoon’s proceedings, as I paraded in my top hat and tails at the edge of the Buckingham Palace lawn along with other members of the Prince and Princess’s senior household. At our backs a lawn the size of a football pitch was crowded with a multicoloured mob of deserving guests from all walks of life throughout the Commonwealth.

Three approximately equal gangways had been carved through this crowd by Beefeaters in full ceremonial dress. The idea was that three royal couples would descend the steps from the Buckingham Palace Bow Room door on to the lawn and split up, one couple per lane. They would then proceed through the crowd at a slow pace towards their reward: tea in a special marquee at the other end of the lawn with members of the diplomatic community.

In effect, it was a time-honoured and rather formal version of the walkabout which I had come to know so well on the streets of provincial Britain. This time, however, the sun was shining, the crowds were all in their Sunday best, if not better, and the Princess was dressed in clothes she might happily have appeared in on Ladies’ Day at Ascot. In other words, despite the formal royal setting and order of events and ceremonies which had changed little since Victoria’s time, here was a chance for the Princess to do what she did best, in front of an audience drawn from those she sometimes saw as her greatest critics, namely other members of the royal family.

Apart from the Queen, who was naturally the symbolic focus of all attention, with her Palace as a backdrop and her Guards band playing her anthem, no one outshone the Princess. She stood statuesquely, slightly to one side, eyes demurely downcast, an object of wonder and curiosity, holding the gaze of several thousand eyes.

She and the Prince decorously descended the steps on to the lawn and the show began. The private secretary bowed, I bowed, we all bowed. The Prince looked grumpy, the Princess looked radiant. Then I detected a wicked edge to the radiance. It came, I was sure, from the certain knowledge that she was about to outshine her husband in public and intended to derive no little amusement from the task.

She winked at me and I fell into step slightly behind her. She took the right-hand side of the lane and the Prince took the left. The Prince’s equerry and I then spent the next 45 minutes striding back and forth ahead of our royal charges, ensuring that some 30 or so preselected guests were hauled to the front of the crowd and made to stand prominently so that they could receive the handshake they had been promised.

We sometimes darted further ahead to where the Queen’s comptroller stood at the confluence of the three lanes, marching back and forth and looking important – something he did very well, except that he glanced at his watch rather too often. He had the tricky task of trying to arrange for the occupants of all three lanes to arrive simultaneously at the door of the tea tent. It was a practically impossible task, because each of the six royal runners had their own technique for working the crowd and their rate of advance was anything but uniform. Nevertheless, he had to try and we had to try to help him.

After a few years of garden parties it dawned on me that there was only one game for the Princess more amusing than putting her husband in the shade for the afternoon, and that was frustrating her equerry’s artful attempts to make her hurry up or slow down in order to fall in with the comptroller’s master plan.

It was hard enough trying to make the Waleses co-ordinate speeds even in their own lane. One year the couple were particularly at odds and their progress had been anything but co-ordinated. With something approaching panic, I watched the Queen finish her lane and start to make her way towards the tea tent. We were going to be very late.

‘You’re going to be very late!’ the comptroller snapped at me and I returned fretfully to my lane, trying to look blasé on the outside while feeling like an incompetent sheepdog on the inside.

I went to explain the problem to the Prince’s equerry. Once again demonstrating that alarming ability which all royal people seemed to possess, the Prince overheard our muttered conversation, taking place some 20 feet behind him. ‘I didn’t know it was a race.’ The words were flung peevishly over his shoulder.

Immediately I relaxed, reminding myself once again of that saying attributed to Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much, and very few things matter at all.’ It was a piece of wisdom I sometimes wished had been carved in illuminated letters 10 feet high across the whole facade of Buckingham Palace. It was a valuable lesson, and one which the Prince had evidently learned many years before, at least in relation to garden parties. I duly received a black look from the comptroller for spoiling the perfection of his arrangements, but he recognized the notorious independent-mindedness of the Waleses and was in any case already thinking about tea; and so, soon afterwards, was I.

Hot on the heels of the garden party came another set-piece event at which the aim of portraying our household as one big happy family came rather closer to success. This was the annual Highgrove staff barbecue. Awnings were pitched on the Highgrove lawn, external caterers were brought in with superior bangers and steaks, and the Prince and Princess vied with each other to play gracious and relaxed host to their hundred or so staff and their guests.

The Princess was in her element. In a casual outfit which looked as though it had come straight from the set of a jeans advert, she worked the crowd as if this were a superior sort of walkabout. Most of the faces were familiar to her, of course. I watched as she adjusted her demeanour according to whether she pigeonholed the person she was speaking to as (1) friendly and therefore deserving proprietorial in-humour, or (2) potentially hostile and therefore marked down for commiserating good humour, on this occasion anyway, or (3) neutral between the two camps. For those in the last category she reserved her most winning smile of all.

Everyone seemed to be hyped up – the employees because their pleasure at feeling they were getting something from the management for free was moderated by the knowledge that they were still under royal surveillance, as they consumed as much food and drink as they decently could. They were also, in many cases, showing off for the benefit of their guests, who were either partners or family. For their part, most of the guests were overawed by being welcomed to Highgrove, which they knew was first and foremost a private residence. The Princess was vigorously marshalling her support and I, for one, was keeping a watchful eye on the progress of her own version of an internal MORI opinion poll. The only person who seemed truly relaxed was the Prince, not least because the event gave him another opportunity to take small groups of reverential employees on guided tours of the gardens which were his consuming interest.

Visiting the house itself on barbecue days was not encouraged, but I had been there often enough before. Engagements that fell on Mondays or Fridays usually began or ended at Highgrove, with an associated trek, inevitably at the worst time of day, along the M4.

It has been said that the Princess disliked Highgrove and my own observations would confirm this, particularly towards the end of the marriage. As has also been said, it was in most ways a typical, comfortable country house with cartoons in the loo, boots in the porch and Jack Russells, it seemed, almost everywhere. It was distinctly more homely than Kensington Palace and certainly, so far as the Princess was concerned, there was no distinction between family and staff areas of the house. When I arrived I might expect to find her perched on the kitchen table, swinging her legs and sharing gossip with the chef, or in the staff hall, listening to the housekeeper’s latest personal crisis.

When the Waleses separated in 1992, the Princess collected all her belongings from the house and quit without much evident regret. No sooner had she gone than comprehensive redecoration took place, together with large-scale purging of the domestic staff. Highgrove then formally became what it had always seemed to be: the Prince’s personal sanctuary and main domestic base. For the Princess’s staff, it became foreign territory overnight. She never returned.

As allegiances in the office and in the country hardened, I found myself firmly in the Princess’s camp. This was not because she was blameless – she could not and did not claim this for herself, as I knew better than most. In fact, she was refreshingly honest about her capacity to run amok in the royal china shop, without ever surrendering her right to do so. ‘Everything’s got to change, Patrick!’ she would say, and I spent a few years trying to translate this aspiration into a reality that was acceptable to the institution and still recognizable to her.

I suppose I supported her because, in the end, she was younger and more naive than her husband was, and ultimately he bore responsibility for what happened in his family. In an organization that had such a highly developed sense of duty, this seemed logical, but I had not even begun to grasp the agony the Prince must have suffered trying to reconcile duty with the demands of the heart. Only now can I hope to have a better understanding of his dilemma.

From this comfortably conceited moral high ground, I felt able in the years that followed to criticize the Prince – if only privately – for failing to break the deadlock with his wife, a move which I knew she would welcome and the country would applaud. As the menace I had seen in him grew in my own mind into a force to be opposed on principle, I believed with righteous zeal that he represented the greater of two pretty unattractive wrongs.

If forced, I would still stand by that assessment, but it is an assessment now tempered by my own experience. All the while I was ministering to the needs of the royal family, I was neglecting those of my own. Ironically, I eventually found myself facing the same doubts about my personal morality for which I had so unhesitatingly condemned the Prince. In my small way, I also faced the opprobrium of observers snug in a moral certainty I could only envy. As my own marriage began to feel the consequences of my strange occupation, I blushed to remember my outrage on behalf of the wronged wife.

Even in what I thought to be the line of duty to the Princess, I cast more than my share of stones at the man I felt was the greater sinner. You may feel, as I do, that it says something about him that he declined to throw them back. Less charitably, you may also feel he had no need, there being plenty of volunteers to undertake such dirty work unbidden on his behalf. Yet in the end it is naive – however superficially justified – to criticize royal people for misdeeds carried out in their name. Being different, if not strictly better than the rest of us, is their raison d’être. Questions of blame also seem to become irrelevant when royalty is concerned for its own survival. All’s fair in love, war and royal service. Many people are attracted to it for that very reason.

As had been proved both at home and in the Gulf, our daily working lives were adapting to the Waleses’ growing estrangement as a matter of professional routine. However, this uncritical acceptance of the facts of life ran into trouble when we had to explain them to others. It was uncomfortable to have to provide for the stark domestic reality behind the public illusion.

One very practical problem arose whenever we were making arrangements for accommodation on overseas tours. We now needed two royal bedrooms. Few hosts were so indelicate as to query this, although raised Embassy eyebrows sometimes had to be stared down. A line suggested for use in these circumstances went something like this: ‘The Prince and Princess often work to different programmes on tour and it makes sense that they – and their immediate personal staff – don’t get in each other’s way when quick turnarounds are required between engagements. This sort of arrangement was perfectly normal for royal people historically and for much the same good reasons. To this day, many couples in the aristocracy organize their sleeping arrangements in the same way. It doesn’t mean they don’t have – and take – the chance to meet intimately when time and inclination coincide.’ In other words, mind your own business – which I, for one, was happy to do. It proved impossible at times.

Apart from the considerable duplication of effort this system dictated, not to mention the restrictions it sometimes placed on the types of accommodation we deemed acceptable, it struck an unwelcome, discordant note among our hosts and anybody else who was taking an interest. I sometimes felt we were arriving with our dirty laundry already on display.

In the mornings they would emerge from separate quarters like boxers from opposing corners of the ring, except that, unlike boxers governed by the bell, they could stage their entrances for effect. Sometimes she would keep him waiting, sometimes vice versa. Tension that might have been safely – if uncomfortably – vented behind closed doors was carried instead into the day’s work, where it could fester.

It was like a secret deformity that our hosts never saw, but which restricted our freedom to programme joint activities while doubling much of the administrative effort. Even something as simple as getting the end-of-tour presentation photographs signed by them both could call upon all Harold Brown’s skills as the behind-the-scenes co-ordinator. Never were his talents as butler/diplomat in greater demand than when he had to preside over divided domestic quarters in an unfamiliar house.

There were benefits as well. One of the unresolved questions in the wake of their divorce was whether the Prince and Princess should have tried harder to ‘make a go of it’. Looking at the situation from a different aspect, the question could be rephrased, ‘How long should you force people to stay together if they want to be apart?’

As I greeted the Princess in the mornings or took my leave at night, I knew the answer in practical if not in philosophical terms. There was absolutely no doubt that, however sadly solitary, her room was a haven of privacy between bouts of exhausting public exposure. Had she been forced to swap the media spotlight by day for a marital battleground by night, I doubt she would have performed her royal duties at all. Since I observed similar feelings in the Prince, it is safe to conclude that, this close to the end of their marriage, the royal double act was a performance best reserved for barely consenting adults in public only.

Other benefits looked attractive at first sight, especially to me as the inexperienced new equerry. On closer inspection, however, they stirred my early suspicion that my boss was anything but a guileless pretty face. These dubious benefits centred on the Princess’s wish to be seen as more popular, approachable, flexible and generally ‘normal’ than her husband. When they were on tour together he was conveniently close by to act as a foil for this desire, much to the uncomfortable advantage of ‘her team’.

As if to underline the contrast with the Prince’s habitually more preoccupied appearance, she would burst from her quarters in the morning radiating popularity, approachability and flexibility to the assembled entourages as we waited to depart for the day’s programme. Usually she would time it so that we had several minutes to bask in the effect and pick up the nonverbal signals with which she indicated who was in favour and who was to be conspicuously ignored.

Her husband’s staff were a favourite target. It was seldom a hardship, however. Her desire to create an impression that contrasted with her husband’s usually made her a welcome visitor to the temporary office. There she might find two of his secretaries wrestling with our primitive portable computers and last-minute amendments to the Prince’s next speech.

‘What is it today – global warming or Shakespeare?’ she would ask with a laugh, perching elegantly on a desk. Then there would be girl-talk about clothes, or the heat, or the hysterically ornate splendour of her quarters. There would always be concerned enquiries about the staff’s accommodation or general morale. Needless to say, I listened to the answers with my heart in my mouth. Any complaint would earn me a raised royal eyebrow. It all helped to prove her point: I care about the workers, even if certain other people are too busy.

She also managed to create the impression that her husband was unpunctual and lacked her enthusiasm for the day’s events. When he emerged and took in the scene, she would chide him with a thin affability. In full view of an audience she had already warmed up, he could do little to express any irritation her teasing provoked.

This often left me feeling queasy. Public point-scoring was one of the most unsettling aspects of the marital deterioration we had to witness, even if I was occasionally a temporary beneficiary. If I was obviously in favour, the resultant inner glow was tempered by the thought that she was just as likely to be trying to make someone else feel bad as to make me feel good. In turn this produced an unhealthy climate in which her praise could not be taken at face value. It also sharpened the sting of her criticism, which was seldom related to the actual gravity of the offence. Praise and criticism of her staff were both ploys she used in the mental game of musical chairs through which she played out her own emotional confusion.

Small wonder, then, that she and the Prince grew to prefer touring separately. The morning nonverbal signals indicating who was in and who was out never entirely vanished, but at least the audience was smaller. Without the need to strike a contrasting attitude to the Prince, the Princess’s actions became a more honest reflection of her own feelings – and she enjoyed herself more, which was good for everyone.