Meghan and Harry: The Real Story

1992 as her annus horribilis. It cannot have been easy for Harry to start boarding school at the height of the War of the Waleses, as the spectacular unfurling of his parents’ marriage became known. The first shot across the bow had been the publication in March of that year of this author’s Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, which revealed that both the Prince and Princess of Wales had had extra-marital affairs, that she wanted out of the marriage, that she suffered from bulimia, and even that she believed that her late lover Barry Mannakee, formerly her protection officer, had been wiped out to prevent him from speaking out about their affair: a belief she would later confirm in print and on television. (The author never shared her belief, and always thought that Mannakee died in a genuine road accident.) The book became a worldwide best seller, hitting the New York Times and London Times Best Sellers lists. Several months later, Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story, was published. When it became apparent that this had been written with Diana’s connivance, the book made an even bigger splash, the public naively believing that its contents must be true if Diana was behind its publication. The reality was, of course, that Diana had contributed to the contents of both books, and the reason why the Morton book had come to be written was that she and this author had fallen out because of her determination to propound a version of her tale so heavily slanted in her favour that it was more propaganda than fact. From the children’s point of view, however, the most excruciating incident must have been the publication of the Squidgygate Tapes on the 23rd August 1992 in the Sun, the best-selling British tabloid. These tapes could also be listened to for a fee, and while the most intimate minutes had been edited out, the remainder left no room for doubt. Diana had been having an affair with James Gilbey and, even more importantly, her contempt for the Royal Family was self-evident. As she put it, resentful that they were not more grateful for her presence amongst them, ‘after all I’ve done for that fucking family.’

Worse was to emanate from the Wales quarter as Harry adjusted to his new school. In November, his parents went on a tour of South Korea. So disaffected was Diana’s demeanour, so self-evidently miserable was she in the presence of her husband, that the story became yet again the disastrous state of the Wales marriage, instead of Anglo/South Korean relations, as it was supposed to be. Ludgrove School’s response was to deny their students access to newspapers in the hope that Harry and William would not be affected by the public speculation about the state of their parents’ marriage.

In many ways, Ludgrove’s headmaster Gerald Barber could not have handled the situation better. By filtering out bad news, he created a cocoon in which his students flourished undisturbed by the ugly realities of the outside world. Harry and William were thereby protected as much as possible from the consequences of the scandal surrounding the disintegration of their parents’ marriage. They would attend classes, play games, interact with the other students as if life were continuing as normal outside the school’s precincts, when of course the opposite was true.

When Charles and Diana returned from the disastrous South Korean trip, the Queen consented to their separation. Up to then, she and Prince Philip had encouraged her daughter-in-law to stay within the marriage, but by now it was obvious to the Sovereign and her Consort that the only solution would be for Charles and Diana to part officially. With her goal of separation achieved, Diana arranged with Gerald Butler to meet her boys in his study, where she broke the news to them that she and Daddy would be living apart though they both still loved their boys and nothing would really change.

In truth, this was much more than a mere figure of speech. The reality is that the Prince and Princess of Wales had been de facto separated since Harry had been a toddler. Very little would change in terms of their actual lifestyle, except that Diana and Charles would no longer have to endure the excruciating pretence of being a couple on the few occasions that duty or convenience pitted them together. As Patrick Jephson, Diana’s Private Secretary, put it, weekends had been ‘a real source of difficulty for them both’ and now that they were separated, it was hoped that the tug of war which, it has to be said, Diana was largely responsible for, would come to an end. It did not, at least not in the shorter term, for Diana continued to make as many difficulties as she could. Only after she had overplayed her hand in the Martin Bashir interview in November 1995, which resulted in a host of unanticipated and unwanted difficulties for her, did she rethink her tactics and become more cooperative. And by then her boys had grown up sufficiently to be expressing their desire to spend more time with their father and his family in the country, enjoying rural pursuits such as shooting, stalking, fishing, and riding, rather than remaining in London with Diana at Kensington Palace, a metropolis which she found desirable, but whose attractions had palled for both boys, though these would return once they grew a bit older and nightlife became a bigger feature in their lives than it then was.

When Diana broke the news of the separation, Harry started to cry, but William, whose age had given him more insight into the realities of his parents’ lives, simply kissed her on the cheek and said he hoped she and Charles would ‘both be happier now’. After Diana had left, William, playing the bigger and wiser brother, suggested the way forward for both of them: they should not take sides, should show no preference, and should respect both their parents equally.