Chapter Eighteen ‘Thanking God for the Small Mercies…’ #2
Diana and I fully appreciated that English aristocratic inheritances tended to be much heavier in property than cash.
We also knew many similar families who had had to resort to capital sales so they could plough the proceeds back into the wider estate.
However, Raine was clearly feathering her own nest for when my father was no longer around.
The proceeds of her sales were largely going to her.
Althorp’s housekeepers told us worrying tales of goings-on at the house that showed the art collection was at the mercy of unscrupulous dealers, chosen and partnered by Raine.
These people realized that Raine was greedy, did not care about Althorp’s future or the integrity of its collection, and knew that she exercised total control over my semi-invalid father.
There had been the occasion when Raine and my father had welcomed a Bond Street jeweller to lunch.
This man had arrived at Althorp with a briefcase he opened, over coffee, to reveal that it was full of banknotes.
He said he had a client who was keen to buy a bronze statue that had been in my family for generations for precisely the sum in the briefcase.
My father was dazzled by the cash on show.
Raine, who worked with the dealers in return for side payments, urged him to accept the money, without reference to professional advice, and the briefcase’s contents stayed with my stepmother, while the statue departed Althorp in the jeweller’s car.
There were dozens of similar occasions, and a fifth of the contents of the House would be sold, often at knockdown prices, during Raine’s sixteen years at Althorp.
Diana told me she had a tame journalist who could get the story out and, hopefully, try to shame Raine into staunching the flow of secret disposals of our family’s historic treasures.
Richard Kay of the Daily Mail duly appeared at the Falconry, at Diana’s behest, and listened to the details of the sales.
He then wrote a piece about the way in which they were being conducted.
I do not feel proud of this, colluding with the media against my own flesh and blood, but Diana and I felt justified because we were sure our ancestors and descendants would be appalled at what was happening to their collection.
Indeed, when my father died, the estate’s senior trustee, who had his own stately home, wrote: ‘I am so sorry that your father has died. Johnnie was a wonderful man. However, the one consolation has to be that, with his death, one of England’s greatest estates has been saved from extinction.’
By way of repayment for Kay’s helpful article, Diana asked me to help her with a secret project.
At around this time, Diana had confided in me how unhappy she was as a royal wife.
She was, she told me, secretly cooperating with Andrew Morton, who was writing a book that would help her to explain to the world the sad truth behind her supposedly fairytale marriage.
I was surprised by her choice of author, having only come across Morton as a journalist writing for one of the worst British tabloids.
After much thought, I said to her: ‘Duch, I feel entirely comfortable talking to Morton about our shared childhood. However, I’m not going to share anything with him about your life from the moment you met Prince Charles, because I don’t feel that’s for me to talk about.’
She was disappointed that I would not support her in her cry for help to the world, from inside her most gilded of cages, but she was pleased I would lay out how our early years had been.
I wish I had talked through Diana’s hopes for my contribution in advance of my meetings with Morton.
I assumed my job was to give him the entire truth – even the mundane points, such as going through the physical layout of Park House.
I tackled such details with great seriousness, realizing that what he was writing would be, as an inside account of Diana’s world, in its way, a significant work of modern history.
I talked about life in Park House, but Diana was also disappointed with me for revealing how much she had struggled academically at our primary school, Silfield.
I had mentioned these classroom toils to Morton without malice, and with compassion, but she saw this as a terrible betrayal and told me how hurt she was.
I was equally upset that she felt wounded, in an enterprise I had never wanted any part in.
*
Back in my study, looking at the text of my speech, I now put a line through the next, thundering, paragraph:
To say she manipulated the media is to miss the point.
Yes, she quite rightly harnessed the interest in her to highlight her charities’ aims; and, through sheer need to survive, she had to defend her inner self by bowing to the juggernaut strength of the press occasionally.
But ‘manipulation’, with its implied slyness and cunning, I reject as a charge against her.
From where I stand, the only people I see ‘manipulating the media’ are those who own large chunks of it.
I accepted that many of the tabloid editors were appalling people, but I was even more contemptuous of those media barons who gave such bullies their power and agency.
The owners could have insisted on responsibility and ethical behaviour, but they chose not to.
They preferred to cash in on Diana, even when this saw her suffer terribly.