Chapter Fifteen ‘A Very British Girl, Who Transcended Nationality’
Chapter Fifteen
‘A very British girl, who transcended nationality’
Diana being so young, Buckingham Palace’s courtiers stepped in to assist her with her wedding guest list. They told her that, to avoid any of them being tempted to sell any family tales to the tabloids, she should invite all close relatives.
‘But surely not Uncle Georgie?’ she replied.
‘And who might he be?’ asked the courtier.
Diana explained that Georgie was our grandfather’s youngest brother. The black sheep of the Spencer family, Georgie apparently had the distinction of being the only man to be dismissed from the Royal Navy and the Army as an officer.
We children were never allowed to meet Uncle Georgie, but we later found out from those who had that he had a croaky voice – the result of being shot in the windpipe by his commanding officer when caught in bed with this superior’s wife.
Soon after that debacle Uncle Georgie was sat down by the family’s lawyers and offered a large cheque if he swore never to live in Britain again.
He quickly agreed, banked the money and moved – not to some far-away colony, as was intended and assumed, but to the Isle of Man, a short way off the British mainland.
Buckingham Palace decided to add Uncle Georgie to Diana’s side of the guest list, rather than leave him as a worryingly loose cannon.
Having not been invited to anything so formal for some time, and unaware that fashions had changed, he would appear at Diana’s wedding wearing spats, flamboyant footwear that had last been in vogue in the twenties.
A couple of months after Diana’s engagement was announced I received an invitation to Prince Andrew’s twenty-first birthday party.
It was being hosted by the Queen and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle.
I was one of the 650 guests, included at Diana’s suggestion since I hardly knew the birthday boy at all.
The June evening of the party I escaped the drabness of my school boarding house at Eton, walked south across the bridge over the Thames, and continued into Windsor up the hill to the castle entrance.
I had expected a very formal affair but instead entered a 1980s teenager’s party fantasy that had been organized by some of Andrew’s schoolfriends from Gordonstoun.
The nine-hundred-year-old royal residence’s rooms were illuminated as never before.
Psychedelic lights played on the ceilings and walls, while dry ice billowed across the dance floor.
That evening, I met a heavily freckled, exuberant girl of roughly Diana’s age. ‘Carlos, this is Fergie,’ my sister said, introducing me to Sarah Ferguson five years before she married Andrew.
The after-dinner cabaret was performed by Elton John, who sang unaccompanied at his piano for more than an hour.
His set was electrifying. Among the hits that he played so memorably that night was ‘Candle In The Wind’, written for Marilyn Monroe, a global icon who died tragically young, two months after turning thirty-six.
Only much later did I find out the sad tale behind that night of royal birthday celebration for Diana. She had been greatly looking forward to being reunited with Prince Charles, who had returned that day from an official trip to New York.
Diana had dreamt of spending the party at Windsor Castle at her fiancé’s side. But he had shown next to no interest in her, and she – deeply hurt, confused and increasingly concerned – danced with others, including me, instead.
Immediately after that evening of escalating heartbreak, Diana went to see my father. She told him she could not go through with marriage to a man who clearly did not love her. My father was appalled and said it was impossible to pull out of such an enormous commitment at that point.
Maybe he had spent too many years in thrall, and in service, to the Queen to put his duty as a father first. He always adored Diana, but what she was proposing was counter to the code on which he had been brought up, and which he never seemed to question.
He could not agree to her breaking her engagement, and so deeply embarrassing the Royal Family.
The day after Prince Andrew’s party, with her usual impeccable manners, Diana wrote by hand to Elton John, her letter applauding him for his brilliance the previous night.
And so their friendship began, flourishing through a shared outrageous sense of humour, an understanding of extreme celebrity, and similarly bold philanthropic aims. It would last until her death, after which Elton would perform one final act for Diana in front of the world.
*
I missed much of the immediate build-up to the Royal Wedding when heading with three schoolfriends to stay in an apartment near Málaga, the four of us frequenting the bars of Puerto Banús and living the teenage dream – chasing girls and getting up with heavy heads at lunchtime.
It was a shock to return to Wedding Fever England with my hair bleached and face reddened by what I had seen of the Mediterranean sun, particularly when, two nights before the wedding, I had to attend a formal party hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace.
I was warned that the dinner would be attended by many of the royal families of the world, and that I therefore had to be on my best behaviour.
This led to an early moment of farce when an extremely smart middle-aged man approached me, his chest bedecked with medals.
When he began to speak to me, I bowed. He looked taken aback.
‘And what would Sir like to drink?’ he asked.
The man with the regal air was, it turned out, one of the Royal Household’s butlers.
I was told that I was to be seated on Princess Anne’s table at dinner and thought that I must have some conversation to present her with, should she talk to me.
It transpired, to my alarm, that I was actually placed next to Anne, and when she turned my way, I asked, ‘And how did your daughter’s christening go today, Ma’am?
’ I expected her to run away with the happy topic of her baby Zara’s baptism.
But instead she stopped, looked at me witheringly, and asked, ‘Tell me, how’s a christening supposed to go?’ And I, being seventeen and clueless about dinner-party small-talk, turned red and looked at my plate, unable to conjure up a reply.
Across the room, my brother-in-law Neil, whose family were arable farmers in Lincolnshire, found less fallow ground. Placed next to the Crown Princess of Japan, he had an easy conversation about rice cultivation.
It was the luck of the draw that night, whether you were placed next to a royal who was happy to make you feel small, or one who had the grace and manners to look for common ground, wherever it might be found.
The next day I prepared to discharge my one distinct role in the wedding and its build-up.
That evening there was to be a chain of a hundred and one blazing beacons across the land, the first of which was to be lit by Prince Charles in London, where he and Diana were guests of honour at the largest firework display in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century.
I was charged with setting light to the one nearest to Althorp, on a high point near to Little Brington village.
The BBC, who were covering the entirety of the national celebrations that night, told me to prepare a short speech to camera, wishing the couple well while raising a glass to them both. My toast was to be televised live just before I lit the base of the huge bonfire.
I was alone at Althorp earlier that day, nervously thinking about what to say during my TV cameo.
My father had insisted I make public speeches from an early age.
I was only four when he had me open a nearby village hall.
I have a black-and-white photograph of this, my modest oratorial debut.
In it I stand on a table, my grandmother smiling sweetly behind, while my father holds me tight by the ankle so I cannot make a break for freedom.
‘I declare this hall open,’ was all I had to say back then.
For the bonfire, I was asked to go longer, but to keep my offering to under thirty seconds.
My nerves increased after the police informed me that they had received a tip-off that the IRA might try to kill me during my brief moment on screen. They were almost sure this was a hoax, but the threat saw a detachment of armed police deployed round Althorp, wearing blue berets.
The crowd was in festive mood in the summer twilight as I arrived at the bonfire in plenty of time to do my bit as the bride’s brother.
Just before our shot went live, petrol was doused over the bonfire to guarantee the viewers a lively flame.
Some of this splashed, unseen, onto the right arm of my sweater.
After I had made my briefest of speeches on camera, wishing the couple all happiness in their marriage, I stretched forward to light the beacon, and the crowd whooped with delight as flames briefly danced along my arm, before dying out completely.
Onlookers must have thought this was a planned part of the pyrotechnics.
I added to their joy further when, running to a car that was taking me to catch the next train to London, I slipped in a cow pat and ended up flat on my back in the middle of the field.
When I arrived at London’s Euston station, I waited for four hours in a queue for taxis that never came – they were all busy ferrying the crowd to and from the night’s main fireworks extravaganza – before finding a phone box and calling my mother.
Eventually collected by my stepfather, I got to bed in the early hours of Diana’s big day.
In the morning, I shared the guest bathroom in my mother’s flat with John Sutton, the manager of my mother and stepfather’s sheep station near Yass, in New South Wales.
This was where Diana had retreated to six months before, away from the media din, to decide whether to accept Prince Charles’s recent proposal.