Chapter Twenty-Two ‘A Permanent Quest to Bring Her Down…’
Chapter Twenty-two
‘A permanent quest to bring her down…’
As endless footage online shows, in chilling detail, this was at a time when Diana was very much at the mercy of the paparazzi.
She was pursued in the streets, brought to tears of fear and desperation, as she tried, in the years after her separation from her husband, to live a more independent life.
Typically, when a little dark-haired girl in a white shirt and black skirt approached her during this ugly frenzy, bearing a bouquet, Diana stopped, gave the girl her full focus while thanking her, before resuming her battle through the airport, in search of sanctuary.
In that Spanish airport, as in so many places at this time, the paparazzi continued with their baiting, knowing that the more distraught Diana became, the more marketable their images would be.
Twenty years later her son, William, would say, ‘I sadly remember most of the time [that] she ever cried about anything [it] was to do with press intrusion.’ His childhood memories include photographers not only shouting at his mother, but even spitting at her.
I would encourage those too young to remember what Diana endured during her final, single, years to look at the evidence, online.
Diana’s frequent appearances for, say, classes at her Chelsea gym resulted in such a scrum of freelance photographers that even exiting the premises in her car endangered her.
To head home she would have to turn her vehicle right, while unable to see through the knot of predatory lensmen shoving their cameras into her face.
I used to fear that a terrible accident could take place at such a moment. That is what I was referring to, in my Cape Town speech a few hours after Diana’s death, when I said: ‘I always believed the press would kill her in the end.’ It was only a matter of time.
On one occasion, five months before her death, Diana stopped to demand that one of her most persistent tormentors, paparazzo Brendan Beirne, give her the film in his camera because, she insisted, what he was doing amounted to unlawful conduct under the recently passed Protection from Harassment Act.
When Beirne refused, a passer-by – upset by Diana’s obvious distress – intervened and pinned the paparazzo against the wall till he had relieved him of his camera film.
Beirne played the victim afterwards, saying: ‘I am stunned she [Diana] did not step in and stop it. It was outrageous. She knows I am not a stalker or a threat. I have taken photographs of her for ten years.’ As if having tormented someone for a decade made it okay…
Diana’s critics said at the time that she could have avoided such aggravation if she had remained at home, and had a trainer visit her there. But this would have left her isolated in Kensington Palace. In her new life, she craved more normality.
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‘In the past twelve years,’ Diana told her Headway audience, ‘I can honestly say that one of my greatest pleasures has been my association with people like yourselves. During those years I have met many thousands of wonderful and extraordinary people, both here and around the world. The cared for and the carers…’
She said she had realized, when embarking on royal life, that the media would be interested in her, ‘But,’ she continued, ‘I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become, nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life…’
The time had come, she politely explained, for her to step down from the helm of many of her charities, and to concentrate even more on her sons.
She wanted to give her boys the love and care that they deserved, she said, while also promising to foster in them ‘an appreciation of the tradition into which they were born’.
Diana wrote individually to the key people at each of the hundred or so charities that she was retiring from.
She apologized for the disruption caused by her decision, said how proud she had been to represent them over the years, and assured them of her continued support from afar, as she bowed out as their global champion.
Two days later, on 5 December, I wrote a letter of the strongest support to Diana. As a newspaper correctly, but rather mysteriously, wrote at the time: ‘Diana and her brother often correspond by letter – because of worries about bugged telephones.’
I was writing to applaud my sister for her bold decision. I said how proud I was of all that she had achieved in her public role over the previous dozen years and reminded her of how much happiness she had given those she had helped during that time.
Three months later I was contacted by Tina Weaver, a reporter from the tabloid Today. She claimed to have seen my early December letter to Diana and alleged that in it I had castigated my sister for making so many public appearances since her retirement from royal life.
I told Weaver that I had said no such thing. When challenged to quote from any part of my letter, she was unable to do so.
I pointed out the clear flaw in her assertion. As my letter had been sent two days after Diana made her life-changing speech, it could not possibly have contained criticism of events that had happened several months later. She had no answer to that.
I told her, ‘It was a letter expressing brotherly concerns anyone would have for a sister going through a difficult time, that is all.’ Weaver replied that she was going to go ahead and print her original, baseless allegations anyway.
The front-page splash in next morning’s Today read:
Diana: My Concern for You, by Her Brother
Princess Diana’s brother has written an emotional and intimate letter to his sister warning about her public image.
He said he was concerned she is in danger of damaging her reputation.
…He felt she was making a fool of herself in public appearances since her decision to withdraw from official duties at the end of last year.
He fears she has handled her withdrawal from public life badly and risks losing the support of the people who have given her a higher public rating than any other royal.
Charles, 29, believes that if his big sister intends to keep out of public life, she should do just that rather than be photographed nearly every day…
[Her brother] is extremely fond of her and cannot bear to see her looking at all silly.
Weaver then listed three events at which Diana had been seen in public in recent weeks – all of which had, of course, taken place long after I had sent Diana my supportive letter: at an awards ceremony, where (the journalist alleged) Diana had worn ‘a flirty, thigh-length skirt’; at the launch of a new Virgin Airlines’ aircraft; and at the Royal Opera House when ‘…there were uncontrolled crowd scenes when the princess arrived…wearing high heels and short skirt. Without any bodyguards to protect her, Diana was mobbed by crowds…’
It was hard to see how Diana could be held responsible for her enormous popularity, let alone how undertaking three public appearances in as many months could be problematic.
The answer to that lay in a revealing paragraph at the centre of Weaver’s malicious piece:
As she was surrounded by hundreds of ecstatic well-wishers [at the Royal Opera House], Prince Charles suffered the humiliation of being met by a solitary spectator on a visit to a homeless centre in London.
While most husbands would have been delighted and proud to have married someone who had turned out to be such an asset for him and his royal brand, the prince was always extremely jealous of Diana’s star power.
That much had been clear since the day in Sydney, in 1983, when Diana’s huge popularity with the Australian crowd had riled her husband.
Diana craved his support and approval as – still only twenty-one years old, a new mother, and on her first major overseas tour – she tried to learn how best to perform her royal duties. But she was instead met with an envy that she found perplexing and unfair.
Diana would recall, two years before her death: ‘We’d be going round Australia…
and all you could hear was “Oh, she’s on the other side [of the street].
” Now if you’re a man – like my husband – a proud man, you mind about that if you hear it every day for four weeks.
You feel low about it instead of feeling happy and sharing it. ’
Outside Sydney Opera House, Diana was so upset at her husband’s attitude towards her that she sobbed uncontrollably, in public, for two minutes. Prince Charles wrote to friends at this time, complaining about the ‘obsessed and crazed attention’ that Diana was getting.
This deeply felt resentment was a constant sore in their marriage.
I believe that Weaver’s article was encouraged by someone in the Palace aware of Prince Charles’s bitterness.
It was part of a campaign of attacks in the media to whip Diana till she retreated into the shadows.
As Christopher Wilson, one of the prince’s sympathizers in the press wrote at this time: ‘[Prince Charles] wishes her nothing more than permanent oblivion.’
On reading the Today article, I rang Diana to express disgust at what had been written, and to inform her of what had been said when the journalist rang me. We concluded that Weaver had never seen my letter, and agreed on a press statement that I released immediately:
I have spoken to my sister, and we have agreed that [the fabricated story] was just malicious rubbish.
I was very disappointed by the article in Today because I took the trouble to explain to the journalist in question that the letter referred to was in no way critical of my sister. In fact, it was intensely supportive and compassionate and written very soon after her retirement from public life.
There was nothing critical [of Diana] in the letter. It was friendly advice from a brother to a sister who was going through a difficult time, that is all.
Today soon compounded their dishonesty when its Christopher Wilson waded in with:
Charles Spencer says the letter was not criticizing his sister. But however he might want to play it down, the fact is the whole of Diana’s family is concerned about her.
…She is desperately unhappy, and it shows. Once she was the photographers’ darling. She beamed in every picture and her smiling face graced magazines and newspapers the world over. Today, in almost all the pictures we see she is snarling and glum.
He made no mention of the baiting and aggression that Diana was routinely subjected to by the paparazzi.
Other papers joined in. The Sun’s front page the next day carried a huge photograph of Diana, in extreme distress, shouting at a paparazzo to leave her alone, with the headline:
Di’s Fury Over Leaked Letter
The article kicked off with the lie that Diana ‘…rang Earl Spencer in a fury after details of his letter to her were made public’. This, despite my having confirmed to the Sun separately that what I had written to Diana had been ‘intensely supportive and compassionate’.
Next, they devoted a page to the
Two Faces of Tormented Di – Pals’ Fears Over Moods
Three photographs of Diana followed. The first two showed her looking deeply upset – with no mention that they were taken by paparazzi harassing her in the street. The third was of her in public, holding a bouquet of flowers, while smiling calmly.
Princess Diana is becoming a Jekyll and Hyde character, family and close friends fear…at her rare official engagements she maintains a serene, regal image…
But several times recently she has lost her temper with freelance photographers while visiting her favourite haunts during her spare time.
Incredibly, they added: ‘Now she doesn’t have to be a public person, she can express her inner anger. Which is why she explodes at photographers. Afterwards, she knows she’s wrong.’ In fact, Diana knew herself not to be wrong, but to be the victim of appalling abuse.
Tabloid editors claimed that the suffering Diana manifested, when cornered by paparazzi, was proof of mounting psychological instability. They paid for terror-stricken shots of her, then tut-tutted at her tearful, tormented features.
By this stage, Diana was unprotected as she sought to lead a more normal life. Against Scotland Yard’s advice, she had let her two remaining police protection officers go.
Robert Jobson, then royal correspondent of the Daily Express jumped on this: ‘Diana’s decision to disband her royal team of bodyguards speaks volumes for her present state of mind…It is very sad. She is just not the same person. It is as if she is paranoid.’
Diana was ridiculed relentlessly. Even when an elderly couple revealed that she had kindly come to their aid after their car broke down on a busy London street, Diana was presented in some papers as having lost her judgement, and perhaps even her mind, for having been a good Samaritan.
‘Diana has been photographed shopping alone in London, driving on her own to and from [Kensington] Palace, and chatting to strangers’ children,’ wrote one journalist, who would subsequently be arrested for phone-hacking. ‘Basically, she has been all over the place.’
Christopher Wilson alleged, in Today: ‘She walks the streets in a weary attempt to recreate the days of freedom, before her marriage, looking for something she cannot find. It is an empty, echoing hall she has entered, where there is no more applause.’ He backed up his false accusations with comments from a so-called ‘expert’ in celebrities, who said, without having met Diana, that she shared their insatiable thirst for adulation.
Diana and I had lunch together soon after these coordinated assaults, so she could vent her frustrations with the newspaper coverage, and hear my attempts at advice, as well as receive my general encouragement.
While this was one of the many times we met up – even after I moved to South Africa, I see from my diaries that we got together at least six times a year – the papers spun this sighting of us to suit their anti-Diana agenda.
Nigel Dempster – whose reputation as a gossip columnist was for ever tainted by his absolute assertion in early 1981 that Prince Charles was never going to marry Lady Diana Spencer – led his page in the Daily Mail with:
Spencers Heal a Family Rift
As the Princess of Wales made her difficult decision to announce her withdrawal from public duties she was able to call upon the advice of a number of trusted friends and advisers. Missing from the list of those consulted, however, was her brother, Earl Spencer.
Having given credibility to Today newspaper’s lie, he added: ‘There has been speculation that a rift had developed between Charles Spencer and his sister, who have always been understood to have a close and supportive relationship.’