Fortunately for Harry, and to a lesser extent William, at the time of their mother’s death they had a secondary female figure who had already been playing a significant part in their lives since the time of their parents’ separation. Alexandra ‘Tiggy’ Legge-Bourke had been appointed Personal Assistant to the Prince of Wales in 1993, shortly after his separation from Diana. Her brief was simple. She was responsible for the welfare and, to a lesser extent, the entertainment of the two princes when they were in their father’s charge. Although she has frequently been described as having been the nanny, this description is inaccurate. If anything, the old French monarchic description of Gouverneuse to the royal children more accurately captured her status, for she was most decidedly a member of the upper class, which nannies are not. Then twenty eight, her royal credentials were impeccable. Her brother Harry had been a Page of Honour to the Queen between 1985 and 1987. Her maternal grandfather the 3rd Lord Glanusk had been Lord Lieutenant of Brecknockshire during the reign of the Queen’s father King George VI. (Lords Lieutenant are the Monarch’s representatives in the various counties.) Her mother, the Hon. Shân Legge-Bourke had been a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Royal since 1987, had been appointed in 1991 High Sheriff of Powys, and would later be made Lord Lieutenant of Powys, where the family’s 6,000 acre estate Glanusk Park was situated.
Tiggy’s brief was simple. Keep the boys occupied. Having been appointed because she was the embodiment of the aristocratic, no-nonsense, down-to-earth way of doing things, she articulated the difference between her approach and Diana’s: ‘I give them what they need at this stage: fresh air, a rifle, and a horse. She gives them a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies.’
Diana had always been jealous of any woman to whom her children warmed. When they became too fond of their nanny Barbara Barnes, she got rid of her with a speed that was truly astonishing to those who did not realise how competitive and possessive she was. However, there was little she could do once it became apparent that both boys ‘adored Tiggy’, as Princess Margaret and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Anson both confirmed.
The Royal Family was delighted that the boys had a more rural female in their lives to counterbalance their metropolitan mother’s influence. Diana tried using Tiggy’s smoking against her, demanding that her sons not be in the same room as she was when she was smoking. This, and other ploys, such as demanding that Tiggy leave the room when she was speaking to her sons on the telephone, failed to weaken Iggy’s hold over the boys, and within the year Diana was obsessing about her.
Ever prone to seeing squiggles where everyone else saw straight lines, Diana told her solicitor Lord Mishcon that ‘Camilla was not really Charles’s lover, but a decoy for his real favourite, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke’, a fact he attested to during Lord Justice Scott Baker’s inquest into Diana’s death in October 2007.
Diana had also recounted this theory to her butler Paul Burrell in a letter she wrote in October 1993, whose contents were entered into evidence during the inquest. She had stated, ‘This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous - my husband is planning “an accident” in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy. Camilla is nothing but a decoy, so we are all being used by the man in every sense of the word.’
If, as Diana claimed over a three year period between 1993 and 1996, Charles was really in love with Tiggy and intended to marry her, and Camilla had been nothing but a decoy, that made nonsense of the public’s belief that Diana held Camilla responsible for the breakdown of her marriage. However, because most of the dramas surrounding Tiggy’s supposed role in Charles’s life took place behind palace walls, safely out of sight and hearing of the general public, Camilla never benefited from the anomalies and the public continued to believe that Diana regarded her as the primary threat, when she did not.
By 1995, Diana had become so eaten up with the belief that Tiggy would replace her as Princess of Wales that she managed to convince herself that Charles had impregnated Tiggy. As her Private Secretary Patrick Jephson stated, Diana ‘exulted in accusing Legge-Bourke of having had an abortion.’ Not content to keep this information to herself, her friends, and cohorts, Diana sailed up to Tiggy at the palace Christmas party on the 14th December and said, ‘So sorry about the baby.’ Tiggy was justifiably furious and consulted the celebrated libel lawyer Peter Carter-Ruck. With the Queen’s blessing, he wrote to Diana four days later demanding an apology and retraction. This, together with Diana’s Panorama interview the month before, when she had angled to have the line of succession altered so that her son William instead of Charles would become the next king (she had also written that she believed that the Queen would abdicate the following year, so she was angling to become Regent to the next monarch), proved to be a step too far. On the 20th December, the Queen wrote to both Charles and Diana requiring them to divorce forthwith. This removed the possibility of Diana becoming Regent, even should Charles die and William accede to the throne.
Meanwhile, the public continued to believe that Diana’s comment, in her Panorama interview, that ‘there were three of us in the marriage’ referred to Charles, Camilla and herself, when in fact it referred to Charles, Tiggy and herself.
The fallout from Diana’s fall from grace came fast and furious. On the 22nd January 1996, her Private Secretary Patrick Jephson, finding his position untenable now that she had so blotted her copy that she had made
