Chapter Twenty-Three ‘Her Genuinely Good Intentions…’
Chapter Twenty-three
‘Her genuinely good intentions…’
‘I do feel jealous of Fergie, sometimes,’ Diana said one day, as we sat alone in the sitting room of her Kensington Palace apartment.
‘Oh, really? Why?’ I asked.
‘Well, she has her father helping her. It must be so nice, having a member of your family working for you – with you – closely by your side.’
I struggled to see how anyone could feel better having Major Ronald Ferguson beside them.
It was wrong to judge someone I had never met, but I did so.
The poor man always came across as pompous, vain, and not at all bright.
He had been asked to leave Eton on academic grounds at a time when that was a very rare call indeed.
It soon became apparent that Diana was not commenting on the Fergusons’ arrangements but was in fact making a hint, trying to establish subtly if I might become more closely involved in her royal life.
I chose to leave the unasked question unanswered. I did not want to openly reject the overture, but I knew I would be of no use to Diana in even a semi-official capacity.
We already had our difficult moments, which might see her not speak to me for weeks – once for months – at a time.
This was Diana’s normal pattern with her close family: the astonishing pressures of her life, and her reactive nature, saw her fall out with each of us fairly regularly.
She was on non-speaks with two of our closest relatives for months before her death, over not very much at all.
(I had taken it upon myself to hide a newspaper article on that theme, written the day before the funeral, when we were all staying at Jane’s house, so the two people would not see it and be hurt by it.) She even had a silent phase with our father: he had said something off the cuff in public, which she interpreted as being critical of her.
With me, the longest silence followed her experiencing a rare outright refusal to one of her requests.
*
‘I’ve heard you’ve got Duch coming to stay for the weekend?’ said my mother, on the phone.
‘Yes – she’s arriving tomorrow morning.’
‘Please don’t let her know I’ve told you this, but she’s going to ask you if she can take the Garden House.’
I thought of the beautiful, three-bedroomed Palladian villa, in Althorp’s park, off the Brington road.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. But please don’t let her have it. It can’t work, her being there, and you two will fall out – and I simply can’t bear you two falling out. It would break my heart.’
I promised my mother I would show resolve, if Diana asked for the place. There were plenty of better houses on the estate for her to have, which would not result in the difficulties that my wise mother foresaw as inevitable.
Diana arrived, and we had lunch. Then, as if it was an idea that had just occurred to her, she said, ‘Carlos, let’s go on a walk! It’d be so lovely…’
And when we exited the House, into the front courtyard, she said, ‘Why don’t we head in that direction?
’ pointing to the hill over which lay the fallow, redundant walled garden that had, in our forefathers’ day, provided the House with fruit, vegetables and flowers.
That, and the house of the head gardener: the Garden House.
I felt a little dread build up but went along with the apparently spontaneous suggestion.
Soon we were sitting on the Garden House lawn, and Diana asked in an absent-minded tone: ‘Who’s living here at the moment, Carlos?’
I mentioned the name of the lady who was the tenant there. Her predecessor in the Garden House had been the actor Peter O’Toole.
‘Could she be moved, Carlos? Please? I’d so love to have the Garden House for me and my sons…’
And in that moment I put my promise to my mother to one side: ‘Yes. I’m sure I can make that happen.’
Almost immediately, I appreciated that my mother had known best. Diana’s protection team liaised with the local police force. I met one of its senior officers for a walk round. He was deeply unhappy.
‘This is a ridiculous plan, I’m afraid, sir,’ he said.
‘Look at it! The house is, what – a hundred yards from the road? Terrorists – paparazzi – lunatics. It’ll be a free-for-all.
Besides, we’ll have to build a security base there’ – he pointed at redundant stables leaning against the park wall – ‘and staff it appropriately to guard the young princes. And we haven’t the budget for that.
Also, where are the royal protection officers going to go?
The house has three small bedrooms. Do the protection team sleep in their cars? Can’t you find her somewhere else?’
Meanwhile, my wife Victoria was chronically unwell with various personal demons, and we had very young children. I knew how great the intrusion was likely to be, and how intolerable it would prove to be to a very vulnerable woman.
Diana had stayed with me at Althorp for the Christmas of 1992. Journalists gathered at both gates throughout her stay, but none had got in the grounds. She still had police protection back then, even though William and Harry were with their father.
Diana was desperately unhappy at being parted from her boys at Christmas for the first time in their lives. As she sat watching them on TV doing their royal duty – going to Sandringham Church – it was awful to witness her tears.
Every time anyone came into or out of the Park in a car, the photographers swarmed around them, making it dangerous to turn on to the public road outside. The main entrance to Althorp is on a perilous corner, and being hemmed in made it more so.
At one point, some friends and I had been in a vehicle entering the Park when a lone paparazzo jumped in beside us, fired off a load of photographs, before jumping out again.
We all felt violated. It was a taste of the disturbing treatment Diana was subjected to regularly, and I worried about visiting it on my young family as a permanent way of life.
A minor impediment for the Garden House plan came in the form of Dudley Poplak, a flamboyant interior designer my mother had used for her London flat. He had gone on to help Diana decorate her marital home in the countryside, Highgrove.
Poplak soon arrived at the Garden House with swathes of fabrics and pots of paint samples, in happy contemplation of his pleasing royal commission.
One afternoon he summoned me to the Garden House and issued me with a list of not so much requests but curt instructions: ‘I will need you to have the estate workforce come here on Monday, at nine, to move these things out, and some of my bits and pieces in.’ It was clear that I was, to him, simply a foreman, there to see he could execute his plans as he saw fit.
I told Diana that, particularly because of the police’s huge reservations about having her and her sons so close to a public road, as well as my concerns for Victoria and our children, and my lesser fears of losing control of my home, the Garden House plan sadly was not going to work out.
It was always the security aspect that mattered by far the most – the rest I could have worked round.
I offered Diana alternatives that the police endorsed, including Wormleighton Manor.
This was the original home to the Spencer family and was the second house on the estate after Althorp.
It had two thousand acres of farmland round it and the perfect police headquarters already in place: the gatehouse to this beautiful red-brick Tudor manor house.
I could not think of anywhere more perfect for Diana and my nephews.
It would have been a wonderful, spoiling, rural retreat that was as safe as could be.
But Diana had set her heart on her Garden House dream, despite its many impracticalities, and she had a tame journalist compose a letter to me, setting out her angry disappointment on her behalf.
When I would not change my mind, because the police would not change their advice, she called me at the Estate Office.
I was in a meeting, so told the office secretary to inform Diana that I would call her back as soon as I was available.
The secretary passed on the message, then surprisingly reappeared: ‘Sorry to interrupt you again, but she said to remind you that “It’s the Princess of Wales” calling you.
’ I was embarrassed for her for trying to pull rank in that way.
It was behaviour so far from the norm that it showed how very upset she was.
This serious rupture between us was in my mind when Diana later sounded me out about my possibly assisting her.
I was clear that I was too independent to work for a member of my family.
I readily accepted that, in the world’s eyes, I was only ever going to be ‘Diana’s brother’: how could it be otherwise, given the unique level of her superstardom?
I was completely at ease with that reality.
But I was never going to be ‘Diana’s employee’.
In any case, I knew that I was not cut out for a courtier’s role. From the age of twelve to fourteen, I had been a Page of Honour to the Queen, twice helping to carry her train at the State Opening of Parliament, before being retired early, because my height made the petite Queen look small.
Besides, my ADHD made lengthy official functions challenging ordeals for me.
Contacts in the Palace kindly agreed to have me quietly removed from the guest list for royal Garden Parties at Buckingham Palace: although these events were delightful in many ways, I knew others would value the chance to go, and they would have deserved their invitation more than me.
During my youth, I had an up-close glimpse into the snobbery and nonsense that burdened many courtiers.
While the Pages’ overseer, Colonel Blair Stewart-Wilson, treated us with the benevolence of a slightly harried schoolmaster, some of those senior to him in the Palace hierarchy showed themselves to be self-absorbed and petty.
Some courtiers, like my brother-in-law, Robert, served the Crown with the national good in mind.
But I saw how the Royal Family could attract into their world those who hoped that they would be treated as special, through association.
While many of my forebears had been delighted and honoured to serve the Crown, I was not cut from the same cloth and times had changed, although not for the Old Guard.
The only time my maternal grandmother, Ruth Fermoy, tore a strip off me was when I was quoted in a newspaper, early in Diana’s marriage, as saying how wonderful it was that my sister, with her clear judgement of character, had seen off so many royal ‘hangers-on’.
‘You will absolutely not say such impertinent things in public,’ she fumed, one evening, in her flat. ‘Diana has “seen off” some very special people, who deserved more thanks and respect than she, or you, will ever appreciate. So, I will hear no more from you on that subject.’
I suspect that my grandmother derived gratifying status from her role in the Queen Mother’s life, and that my comments had struck a bit of a nerve.
Even though I know I would have been a disastrous courtier, being hot-headed, and far too quick to speak my mind, I do regret not finding a middle way between the independent path I kept, and one that might have been helpful to Diana.
I was always keen to help Diana behind the scenes.
In the last years of her life, I assisted her when she secured a major libel victory against Express Newspapers.
I also held a female journalist to account after she wrote an especially spiteful attack on my sister in a society magazine. But I could and should have done more.
When recording my remorse, I find myself returning to a central theme of this book. It sounds blindingly obvious, of course, but nobody expected Diana to die when she was so painfully young.
Like everyone else, I assumed that my sister would live an extremely long life: she always glowed with health.
I remember wondering what she would be like as an elderly figure in the royal firmament – a Queen Mother figure, I felt, who could inspire happiness and goodness in so many, into extreme old age.
Because of this I used to view even the subject of Diana’s death as deeply distasteful.
The BBC contacted me on several occasions, asking if I would film a contribution for the TV obituary of Diana: they keep a frequently updated roster of taped obituaries of key national figures, ready for immediate broadcast. I would be so upset by these approaches that I would berate the BBC producer for being macabre, and stress how there could surely be no need for any such piece to be recorded for decades.
Tragically, Fate had the last laugh on that.
I thought Diana had many decades to go, and I would always be there for support, when and if really needed. There always seemed to be so much time. And then there was none.