I first met Charles in 1987 – I knew marriage to Diana was ‘terrible mistake’ & aides said she ‘upstaged’ him
I CAN’T quite remember the first time I met Prince Charles, but I think it was in 1987.
I was at Badminton attending the wedding of the then-Marquess of Worcester, or “Bunter” as he is known, and the socialite actress Tracy Ward. (Bunter’s mother, the Duchess of Beaufort, was my godmother).
I was about 17 at the time. There was a lot of gossip and anticipation at the drinks reception because the Prince and Princess of Wales would be coming to the dance afterwards.
Or at least Charles would be — there was some uncertainty about Diana.
By this time, Charles and Diana had been married for nearly six years, and their incompatibility had become legend. Most of my circle — unfairly — blamed Diana.
One can pinpoint a sharp deterioration in the relationship to 1981 when Diana, who was pregnant with Prince William, threw herself down the stairs.
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She had already shown signs of an eating disorder, but this desperate act induced not pity but repulsion in her bewildered husband.
“I don’t think Charles ever felt the same way about her after that,” said one of his friends. “He still loved her but he became very wary.
Could their marriage ever be gilded and frescoed again?
William’s birth brought the couple close together for a while, and their triumphant tour of Australia almost convinced Charles that Diana, if not his soul mate, was a wonderful mother and an asset to The Firm.
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There, things might have rested. Indeed, if that moment could have been frozen in perpetuity, the Waleses might have had a long and reasonably happy marriage.
But the gods were unkind.
On their return to England, Charles was told by mischief makers that his wife had deliberately upstaged him and was undermining his confidence.
Diana, who had anticipated glowing praise and gratitude, was bewildered and angry, retreating into bulimia.
Had the couple possessed different personalities the marriage might have had more of a chance, but as the Queen Mother told my father, it had been “a terrible mistake”.
The Queen Mother adored Charles. She once described him to me as “very sensitive”.
But he was unconscionably spoiled and used to getting his own way.
He needed careful managing, love of the maternal kind and someone to jolly him along.
The stiff upper lip
Very few people could have done it. Diana was not only not that person, but was even more sensitive than he (not surprisingly, given her troubled youth and inexperience). This was a different generation, that believed in discretion and the stiff upper lip.
No one talked about depression or mental illness, at least not in any open or constructive way.
Charles was not equipped to cope with the needs of a young woman suffering from what was a serious form of depression and an eating disorder.
Diana allegedly found solace in the arms of her bodyguard, Barry Mannakee, and later in a handsome Army officer called James Hewitt.
Though Diana publicly stated later that she was aware of her husband’s resumption of sexual relations with Camilla, Charles has never said if he was conscious of his wife’s early infidelities.
His friends, however, claimed to know all about them, and used her romances to excuse Charles’s betrayal.
The Queen Mother used to come to dinner at my parents’ house in London regularly.
She didn’t like to speak of personal matters but her desperation over the Charles and Diana situation had unnerved her. He was the son she never had.
Naturally she felt responsible when both Charles and Diana became wretched antagonists.
“My darling grandson is so desperately sad,” she confided, her eyes almost welling up.
Yet, despite what has been said or written, no one in the Royal Family hated or actively disliked Diana, except perhaps Princess Margaret, who was disobliging about nearly everyone. The Queen and Prince Philip liked Diana very much, and the Duke found his son’s obsession with the older Camilla baffling. Diana became pregnant again and there was hope.
But Harry’s birth in September 1984 had the opposite effect to what the Royal Family and even Diana longed for.
Charles had wanted a daughter, not another son, and apparently remarked when he saw his newborn: “Oh God, he has red hair.”
Pictures of the couple at official engagements showed them as hard-eyed antagonists with the steeliness of hitmen.
For Diana, this was a point of no return. “She became very bitter and from then on they both led separate lives,” a friend of Charles relates.
“Camilla resumed her position as Charles’s Maitresse en Titre and people arranged for them to meet at discreet country houses.”
But, as is typical of women scorned, Diana did everything she could to prevent The Rottweiler, as she called Camilla, from usurping her position.
Charles’s circle reacted by calling the Princess delusional – a manic depressive who needed psychiatric treatment.
No wonder Diana decided the world needed to know her side of the story — and with the assistance of writer Andrew Morton she related her version of events via Diana: Her True Story, complete with all the unkindness, ingratitude and treachery she believed she had suffered at the hands of the Royal Family.
The Morton book was a crossing of the Rubicon. I think Diana, when she matured, probably regretted it, or at least some of what she said.
But when it became clear, as was inevitable, that the Princess had actively co-operated with the author, she lost a great deal of sympathy and tried the patience even of her friends.
As far as Charles was concerned it was the end of the marriage.
Pictures of the couple at official engagements showed them as hard-eyed antagonists with the steeliness of hitmen.
There were the photographs of Diana pointedly looking away from Charles after Earl Spencer had died, and the now legendary 1992 photograph of the Princess sitting alone in front of the Taj Mahal, that famous monument to deathless love. The Press called the couple The Glums.
Then there was that interview.
Diana was torn over the Panorama “scoop” fraudulently obtained by Martin Bashir.
Depending on her moods in the year in which I knew her, she would sometimes say it had been the only way of obtaining a divorce, after the formal separation in December 1992, and at other times that it was “a bad call”.
It is an irony that it was the separation and divorce that enabled both Diana and Charles to take a more detached view of the past, and establish a genuine friendship.
After the London dinner party, I started meeting Diana quite frequently.
She had become the toast of London, and as with Scarlett O’Hara, even those determined to dislike her were unable to do so when confronted by her charm.
She was polite, thoughtful and was fun to be around, unlike Princess Margaret, who kept reminding you how royal she was.
Diana hated that kind of behaviour, and would have deplored the self- importance of the Duchess of Sussex, who in her obsession with the mother-in-law she would never meet, fails to appreciate what she really was — a lady. Not just by birth, but by temperament.
Even those who had most disliked Diana started to come round. Caroline Beaufort showed me a wonderful letter the Princess had written to her after Caroline had been diagnosed with cancer.
She was tremendously touched. It was as if Diana had become a different person.
The unhappiness and facade of her marriage had made her histrionic, and once she was free of it, she laughed a lot, and was simply radiant.
But the wistfulness was always there, like a dark thread running through a bright tapestry.
There was a dinner at the Ritz.
I sat next to her, with Kerry Packer, the Australian media tycoon, on the other side.
She was vivacious and unfussed by etiquette. I think we shared Packer’s lap as a joke.
She talked a great deal of her new-found friendship with Charles. That made her very happy.
‘Redo my marriage’
Kerry Packer asked her what she would do if she could live her life over again and she said, laughingly: “Redo my marriage.” But I always thought, and so did friends of both her and Charles, that she remained a little in love with him.
No one who knew her believed she was in love with Dodi Fayed. He was a bad joke in London.
A daddy’s boy, with a former drug habit. She had no intention of marrying him.
That was a fantasy of his father, Mohamed Fayed.
That Charles cared little when Diana was killed in Paris is a terrible lie that needs to be put to rest.
The Queen and Prince Philip were also distraught, partly for their beloved grandsons who had been deprived of an adoring mother.
But Charles broke down and wept. When he flew to Paris to collect her poor, broken body, he spent an hour alone with her. What he said to his dead former wife he will doubtless take to the grave, but friends who know him well testified to his terrible grief.
He had loved her. He couldn’t live with her, but he loved her still.
I think perhaps death was kind to Diana in taking her off so soon.
She would have discovered that what she had come to after her marriage was indistinguishable from what she had left.
She might have sought the quieter fame enjoyed by figures such as Mother Teresa, philanthropists or ordinary mothers.
But the media would not have let her, and I am not sure she would have found it any more satisfying.
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As for Charles, was he truly happy, after the divorce?
He married his mistress, Camilla, but marriage is very different from the excitement of a clandestine affair, and he would be less than human if thoughts and memories of Diana, in all her youth and beauty, did not impinge upon his thoughts.