Chapter Nineteen ‘She Remained Intact – True to Herself’
Chapter Nineteen
‘She remained intact – true to herself’
From the time of their marriage till their separation, Diana and Prince Charles would stay at Althorp for a weekend each autumn, when the prince would shoot with my father and his other guests.
I was generally in the Falconry, my home at the back of Althorp’s park, when these annual visits took place, and would be a part of it all.
I arrived at the Falconry to find the place had been taken apart by the police. It was in a shocking state. There were sniffer dogs’ muddy pawprints all over the bedclothes, while overturned mattresses lay on the floor.
I understood the police had a job to do but mentioned to Diana the surprising way in which it had been done in a quiet aside rather than as a complaint.
Prince Charles wrote me a kind letter that showed real concern for any inconvenience and upset: ‘I just wanted to say how mortified I was to hear that the Northamptonshire police had behaved quite so idiotically last weekend…’
But my overriding takeaway from all of this was that stringent security was an ever-present necessity in Diana’s royal life, and the fact that it was required was always a worry to me. My sister’s gilded existence seemed to operate under a constant element of threat.
My main concern, when Diana burst into public life, had been that she might be assassinated by terrorists from the IRA.
In the early 1980s I told Allan Peters, one of Diana’s police protection officers, about this, my great fear for her. They had, after all, murdered Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, a few years earlier, so royal figures were evidently in their sights.
‘No, they wouldn’t dare do that,’ Peters said, with a wry smile.
‘If they did, the people would burn down Kilburn in revenge.’ He viewed the mantle of popular adulation draped around his principal as more effective protection than he and his colleagues could ever offer her: the Irish quarter of London would bear the brunt of any Republican terrorist attack on her.
*
Looking back, Diana’s astonishing level of celebrity turned pretty much everyone’s heads.
One evening quite shortly after her marriage, a group of older friends – whom Diana and I had first got to know through our sisters when we were children – invited us all to dinner in a private room in a restaurant off London’s Fulham Road.
I had been greatly looking forward to it, partly because I knew the crowd coming would be fun, but also because I felt that Diana would be able to relax and be herself among people who had known her since childhood.
The evening did not go as I had hoped. All attention was on Diana, of course, but inauthentically so.
Whenever she made a joke, the laughter was that little bit too loud and too long.
The dynamic had changed. Many of those old faces had lost their dependability and had become swept up in Diana’s new public status.
They seemed now to be more fans than friends.
Diana had told me soon after her marriage that she was worried that people she had long known would see her as stuck up, now her circumstances had changed so dramatically.
While she was attempting to show them that she was still the same old Duch, with her customary risqué humour, she must have sensed that something very important was different.
She was not being treated as she had been, even though that was what she craved.
I could see that this change was not her fault.
Nor could I blame those hanging on her every word.
They had been seduced by the phenomenal force of her extreme fame.
I left the dinner early and decided to walk the two miles home. I wanted some time alone, to process what I had just seen, and work out what it meant.
That night turned into the seminal moment in my relationship with Diana for the rest of her short life. I wrestled with what I should do, in the face of the well-meaning sycophancy that I had been so upset by that evening.
Then it came to me that I had one prime duty to my sibling, now that her life had been so completely upended. It was simple: I must always remain the same little brother – the same ‘Carlos’ – she had known since I came into her life.
Diana was extremely close to both our sisters, I knew.
They had their own distinct roles in her life.
She would always lean on them for marital and other feminine advice.
I could be of no help there. But I took as my self-appointed lot that of the loving brother, one who would always be on her side, but who would never shirk from telling her the truth, even when she did not want to hear it.
I took this stance, unaware till many years later how fragile Diana had already become.
Her weight loss between her engagement and marriage, when she had felt and been told that she was chubby, had returned with a vengeance after she gave birth to William, less than a year after her wedding.
Diana would later tell me how she had been fine in the days immediately after the birth.
Then she suddenly began to feel isolated and trapped.
She believed that her husband was sometimes too busy for her, and on other occasions that he was critical of her imperfections.
She told me he had married a twenty-year-old but seemed always to wish she was nearer to thirty-five, in character and outlook.
What may have been intended by him as helpful suggestions – as to clothing, how to interact with members of the public, and what pastimes to pursue – were taken as reproaches by a young wife who felt that she was trying her very best.
I suspect that Diana’s undiagnosed Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria – the strong emotional reaction she experienced as part of the ADHD I am convinced that she suffered from – amplified her wounded response to her husband’s criticisms.
As someone who has been divorced three times (from women who are all double divorcees), I am fully aware from personal knowledge, and the experience of those I have loved, how challenging marriage can be.
I am not hypocritical enough to judge or criticize anyone else’s marital record.
I am merely recording how my sister felt and am not assessing whether she was right or not.
She told me that things became very difficult indeed in the marriage early on, and I am sure that both spouses despaired of the other at times.
Everything must have been so much harder for each of them, starting out in a union where the world was demanding a narrative of make-believe perfection when the reality could only be different.
I feel huge sympathy for them both. It must have been intolerable.
Diana told me there was even talk of a temporary separation, early on, and experts were summoned to see what therapeutic support could be given.
The newlyweds were advised to compose a contract, with both spouses finding areas where they might surrender a little to the other, so the relationship could survive.
There was, at this time, concern at Diana having explosive outbursts when she was at her unhappiest. Palace witnesses to these spoke up for Prince Charles, as they would, and said that at times Diana struck them as troubled.
When members of our family were questioned, they were adamant that Diana had never exhibited any such behaviour before the wedding.
Diana felt painfully isolated during the early stage of her marriage.
She had had one of her periodical fallings out with our mother at the time, and she felt that our father – whom she had idolized when a child – was no longer someone to turn to.
His stroke had left him severely weakened, and his marriage to Raine made everything that much more difficult.
My sisters were as supportive as ever – especially Jane. Having married a courtier when also very young, she had come to understand the peculiarities of the royal set-up better than most. And Jane’s home was only a few hundred yards from Diana’s Kensington Palace apartment.
But Diana still found it hard to see our sisters often enough during this time of profound confusion.
Meanwhile, I was of no use, being at boarding school, then university, and having no understanding whatsoever of what she was going through as a new wife, or as the world’s favourite princess.
I had decoupled the ‘Diana’ I knew so well from the barely recognizable ‘Di’ in the media, and assumed ‘Diana’ was fine, whatever was supposedly going on with the ‘Di’ of popular imagination.
Doorstepped by a mob of reporters when driving out of Kensington Palace a few days after Harry was born, and asked how I felt about his birth, I said: ‘It’s great news, of course, but my sisters all seem to be having a lot of babies at the moment.
’ I found it difficult to view Diana through the public lens.
Royal life also made it impossible for her to see her friends in a relaxed setting, and when she did meet up with them, she worried that they might see her differently now her life was so alien.
There always had to be police protection officers in tow, while the press was constantly on her scent.
Even the tiniest titbit about Diana guaranteed a front-page splash.
While staying with me, a few months before her death, Diana told me that her weight had at one time dropped to eight and a half stone. Her doctors had been most worried by the effects of this and monitored her closely.
Diana told me this as though it was a problem that resided firmly in the past, but I could see that there were elements of her food issues that remained very much alive at that time.
She found it slightly easier to talk to me of her anorexia than she ever did of her bulimia.
That condition she shrouded with secrecy.