Chapter Twenty-Eight ‘Her Constituency of the Rejected’
Chapter Twenty-eight
‘Her constituency of the rejected’
Tony Blair flatteringly termed my eulogy an ‘absolutely extraordinary oration’ and said he was particularly glad that I had turned a spotlight on Diana’s charitable causes.
He wanted me and my family to know that he was determined that these continue, after her death.
He stressed that such good works in Diana’s memory should not be bogged down in committees, and neither should they be used to subsidize ‘someone else’s work’.
They must be ‘something unique’, to chime with Diana’s individuality and flair.
He felt that there was a ‘debt to Diana’, and that we must work out and ‘say what she must have wanted’.
While the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund had already been set up, Tony Blair said he was going to ‘ask Gordon Brown [his political deputy] to put together a group to carry on’ Diana’s works, and to ‘back up the foundation’.
He asked me to come to Downing Street, to meet him and Brown, so we could discuss things further.
‘Let some good come out of this tragedy. Good that is lasting…’ he said.
‘Let us harness the extraordinary public spirit.’
Blair added that he was sure things had changed with Diana’s death: ‘The monarchy won’t be the same,’ he said.
‘It must react positively…The monarchy must be living today,’ as opposed to in the past. He felt that the Queen having said, in her speech on the eve of the funeral, that ‘lessons must be learnt’, ensured that positive change must surely come from Diana’s loss.
In many ways this charismatic man with a feel for the people was summarizing two key struts of Diana’s legacy: working for the public good and modernizing the monarchy.
Like Diana, he seemed to realize that the Crown could not survive in any meaningful form if it was seen as stuffy and out of touch.
I wondered, after the prime minister’s call: could the Royal Family now realize that Diana had never been their problem, but their protection? For, while she lived, she made the whole archaic outfit that much more interesting and human – and, as a consequence, acceptable.
The jealousy that some in the Royal Family had felt towards Diana was misguided.
Instead of envy, they should have offered gratitude to a woman who entered public life full of sincere good intention, happy to do her bit.
When she surprised the world – and herself – by displaying unimagined gifts, they should have been appreciated and applauded, not denigrated and resented.
*
Sacksful of mail from around the world arrived at Althorp for weeks after the funeral. This was placed in the Ante Room, an upstairs meeting place, and an estimated eighty thousand letters from the public about the eulogy ended up here.
Each was opened and read, and I replied to more than a thousand of them by hand, including all the ones that came from people I knew, or who were clearly close to Diana in any way. Thousands of others received a printed thank you from me. I knew it would be important to Diana that I did this.
Many letters came in from well-known figures. Several celebrities from the entertainment world were particularly grateful that the dangers of the paparazzi, and the lies of the tabloid press, had been addressed from the pulpit by me.
I also received a letter from Alan Clark, a high-profile British politician with a lively private life, in which he wrote:
Dear Boy,
That was a truly wonderful speech. Well done indeed…
But please be very careful now, because with it you will have deeply upset the media and the Royal Family, the two most powerful institutions in the country; and they will now come after you…
On the face of it, the press were keen to look as though Diana’s death had changed them for the better.
The Daily Mail announced, soon after the funeral:
Mail Leads the Way in Banning Paparazzi Pictures:
The proprietor of the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Evening Standard announced last night that his papers will not in future purchase pictures taken by the paparazzi.
Viscount Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc said: ‘In view of Earl Spencer’s strong words and my own sense of outrage, I have instructed my editors no “paparazzi” pictures are to be purchased without my knowledge and consent.’
Viewing mailonline today, it is clear this promise was rather harder to uphold than to make.
The press reaction to my words was vicious. They had been caught cold by my unique opportunity to say things as they were in a forum over which they had no control.
One tabloid editor rang Althorp’s PR lady and asked her to pass on a message: ‘Tell your boss that he made my mother cry with shame at what I do as my profession, and I promise that I will now bring him down.’
The same man would call my own mother, during her declining years, when she was succumbing to a terminal diagnosis. Once, he said to her: ‘I will never forgive your son for what he said. I will go after him till the day I die.’
As I told Sally Bedell Smith, the acclaimed American biographer, in an off-the-record background interview in 1998, another tabloid editor told one of my right-hand men: ‘We knew we helped to kill her, but we didn’t need Spencer to tell the world.’
I had my divorce case due in Cape Town, South Africa, three months after the funeral, and the same tabloid editor told the same man that this event was, for a vengeful press: ‘manna from heaven’.
The tabloids colluded with my estranged wife’s team, combining to overcome South Africa’s laws of privacy relating to matrimonial matters to cover the divorce with dishonest glee.
I had to listen on the first day as twisted versions of the truth were served up in court by Victoria’s counsel, which the press scribbled down, before adding further lies to the accounts that appeared in print.
I passed one journalist in the lobby of the courtroom: ‘How does vengeance feel, you posh cunt?’ he asked. What you’re doing is not vengeance, I thought, it’s lies.
That first night, I went home and heard a message that had been caught on my answerphone.
It was part of a call between Althorp’s manager, who was staying in my Cape Town home, and my PR lady in London.
The former said how traumatized he had been, witnessing what I had been subjected to that day: ‘It was like one of those Second World War films where you’re a prisoner of the Gestapo, forced to watch while your mate has his eye taken out with a bayonet. ’
A week after my annihilation in the press, I was in London, feeling battered, and went out with friends for a drink in a pub in Fulham. The bar went silent as I entered it, and I felt, as press victims tend to, an overwhelming sense of vulnerability.
At the end of the evening, my friends and I exited the pub into the cold winter air, and I realized that going out in public probably was not going to be an option for a while.
People could not be expected to understand what was going on – to realize that I had become a tabloid punchbag for having stood up for my sister. I would have to hunker down till it was the turn of others to get a savaging from the UK press wolfpack.
I had got perhaps 150 yards from the pub when I heard a rough bellow from behind me: ‘Oy!’
I turned round to see a huge Englishman, perhaps thirty-five years old, his generous belly hanging out under a tight sweater unequal to its task. He held a pint in his right hand, and I dreaded what this shaggy man of the people would holler as a follow-up.
‘Top speech, mate!’ he shouted, before turning back inside, sucking at his pint as he went. As would happen repeatedly for a decade or so, at such moments of quirky humour, I thought: ‘I must tell Duch that!’ before reality kicked in, and the finality of her loss sank in once again.
*
Diana’s death occurred at a time when many ordinary readers had to question their part in the tabloids’ worst excesses.
Some realized it was their enjoyment of stolen celebrity images that gave the paparazzi a job in the first place.
While they were ashamed of their role in the tabloid culture, they also wanted to blame those who paid and encouraged the photographers to act so aggressively and dangerously.
George Clooney held the US tabloids to account at this time, posing furious questions to journalists at the Los Angeles offices of the Screen Actors Guild: ‘Princess Di is dead, and who should we see about that? The driver of the car? The paparazzi? Or the magazines and papers who purchased these pictures and made bounty hunters out of photographers?’ Already a star, and the victim of dangerous media intrusion, Clooney continued: ‘If you weren’t hiding behind the profession of journalism, you would be an accomplice to a crime, and you would go to jail. ’
Clooney then took specific aim at those responsible for the National Enquirer: ‘Your cover of your magazine this week says, “Di Can’t Get Enough Sex”.
It’s on the stands still. I also watch as you take your position…
saying as long as there is a market for this, that you are just supplying the goods. ’
That same week, the front page of Globe, another supermarket tabloid, had a photograph of Diana standing with Dodi, and the headline: ‘Di Makes Love!’
As the News of the World editor Phil Hall was honest enough to admit, in an ITV interview a decade after Diana’s death: ‘I felt huge responsibility for what happened, and I think everyone in the media did. If the paparazzi hadn’t been following her the car wouldn’t have been speeding and, you know, the accident may never have happened. ’
But the tabloid press continued their retribution against me for several years, egged on by members of Prince Charles’s household.
Someone who became a friend in later years ran their own small but effective PR agency.
They explained that one of the prince’s right-hand men had come to them frequently, telling them to leak lies about me (and also various of the prince’s relatives) to newspapers.
This had to be done with no royal household fingerprints attached.
Sir David English, a long-serving and all-powerful editor of the Daily Mail, remained a potent figure in the media after his retirement in 1992, and he – particularly close to one of Prince Charles’s key confidants – encouraged his old paper and others to attack me whenever the chance presented itself.
Such prolonged assault from many corners definitely did much damage to whatever reputation I had at home and abroad.
But when things got really grim for me, as they did – I repeatedly contemplated suicide, in the face of the ghastliness of the attacks, only ruling out that option because of my love for my children – I fell back on one thought: Diana had had it much, much worse, and she had kept going.
And I drew further comfort from the fact that, after her death – following years of bullying and lies about her in the papers – the majority of the public had not been persuaded to think differently about her.
They knew who Diana truly was and loved her for it.
I hoped the same people would give me the benefit of the doubt and see that I was receiving ‘payback time’, as one reporter called it to my face.
I went to the White House Correspondents’ Ball in April 1998, on Peter Jennings of ABC News’s table, as the guest of Barbara Walters.
Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s White House Press Secretary, came up to me and asked me to step aside from the crowd.
‘I know you’ve caught a lot of flak for saying what you did,’ he said quietly, ‘but don’t ever doubt that you did the right thing.
You had a unique opportunity to call out the worst parts of the media for doing very bad things.
And you took that opportunity. And by doing so, you achieved something not just for your late sister, but for so many more people – those who have no voice, and who are usually never heard. ’
I hope Diana would be pleased with that thought, and feel I did my bit for her, as best I could – and whatever criticism I caught could never erase the words I spoke on her behalf.