In 1981, the lid was already off so far as the royal family was concerned. They had witnessed Diana’s weeping and fits – and their sympathies were all with Charles.
‘So I was “a problem” and they registered Diana as “a problem”,’ the princess told Morton. ‘Poor Charles is having such a hard time.’
The Queen saw Diana’s vomiting as a cause, not a symptom, of the marriage issues – but she did show sympathy when it came to her daughter-in-law’s troubles with the press. Diana suffered something close to a nervous breakdown that December when she went out from Highgrove to buy some wine gums in the local village shop – only to find herself surrounded by the ever-developing pack of newspaper photographers and reporters. The princess broke down in tears.
For the first time in her reign, Elizabeth II summoned the editors of all Britain’s national, daily and Sunday newspapers to Buckingham Palace, along with the principal news directors at the BBC and ITN. Never had there been a British media gathering like it. The Queen’s press secretary Michael Shea received the Fleet Street grandees in the palace’s magnificent white and gold 1844 Room, explaining how the princess was ‘more than usually affected by morning sickness because of her age and build’ and how the Queen was taking a personal interest in her privacy. Pleasantly suggesting that more restraint might be in order, Shea invited the editors for drinks next door in the still more magnificent Caernarvon Room decorated with paintings of Britain’s triumphs against Napoleon.
Hardly had the editors taken their first sips of champagne, when the Queen herself walked in escorted by her younger son Prince Andrew, who was just then approaching the height of his popularity as a naval helicopter pilot. The intrepid hacks were so overwhelmed by the royal presence that they simply exchanged humble banalities with their sovereign like any citizen would – until the editor of the News of the World, Barry Askew, also known as the Beast of Bouverie Street, finally dared to address the issue that had brought them all together.
‘If Lady Di wants to buy some wine gums without being photographed,’ he said, ‘why doesn’t she send a servant?’
‘What an extremely pompous man you are!’ replied Her Majesty with a gracious smile – and the hearty laughs around the room made clear who was considered the winner of that exchange. A month later Askew was sacked from the News of the World by his proprietor Rupert Murdoch – though it was not explained whether that was for making such a public fool of himself or because he had compromised his paper’s independence by attending the meeting.
The palace gathering had identified the new dimension – and the new challenges – that Diana’s glamour had brought to the royal family, and, sadly, it did not resolve them. Three months later, in February 1982, Charles and Diana flew to the Bahamas for a pre-baby holiday, staying at Windermere on the island of Eleuthera, the secluded home of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter and son-in-law, Patricia and John Brabourne.
In this romantic setting, far from civilisation – and from Camilla – the royal couple sunbathed and swam together, splashing and kissing in the surf with their arms around one another. They grilled each other barbecue suppers – but they were not alone. Before dawn one morning, kitted out in full tropical gear, binoculars and a huge, long-distance telephoto lens, Daily Star reporter James Whitaker and his photographer accomplice Ken Lennox crawled through the darkness across a spit of land opposite the Brabourne beach. Lying patiently in wait as the sun rose, the spies were finally rewarded by the extraordinary sight of a bikini-clad Diana splashing into the sea with her five-month-pregnant belly clearly visible – and obviously imagining that she was quite alone. The revealing photos covered the front page of the Star next morning.
In vain did the Queen condemn the invasion of her daughter-in-law’s privacy as ‘tasteless behaviour’ that was ‘in breach of normally accepted British press standards’. The Press Council tut-tutted – and James Whitaker proudly claimed the coup as the high spot of his career.
‘I’ve never done anything more brilliantly intrusive,’ the reporter boasted. ‘We’d crawled and waited for hours. It was one of the triumphs of my professional life.’
‘Brilliantly’ intrusive? A triumph? What profession? What life?
These are running themes to ponder as we leave Princess Diana for the moment, exposed on the front page with the unborn Prince William inside her. Before June 1982 when he enters our story, we have another character to meet, born five months ahead of William: Ms Catherine Middleton, and her family, who would, in due course, be joining the royal family.
6
Party Pieces
‘Une nation de boutiquiers.’ – ‘A nation of shopkeepers.’
(Insult directed against the British, attributed to Napoleon, 1822)
So that’s enough for the moment from those wacky Windsors – not to mention the manic Markles on the other side of the Atlantic …
Let us turn our attention instead to those charmingly civilised, middle-of-the-road, middle-class, middle-England Middletons who have risen so high, but also oh-so-modestly, from their salt-of-the-earth coal-mining origins, with no history of nasty plottings or family back-stabbings – no messy divorces, no scheming ambition …
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper …
Lord Copper was Evelyn Waugh’s brilliantly fearsome amalgamation of the overbearing 1930s press lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook, ruling imperiously over his imaginary tabloid rag The Daily Beast* in Scoop, Waugh’s 1938 novel of Fleet Street skulduggery. Lord Copper’s editors were so scared of their boss that they never dared say no to his face, only disagreeing with him ‘up to a point …’
So let us not dare to doubt the perfection of the sainted Middletons – well, up to a point, dear reader – as they now enter our story with the birth of their daughter Catherine Elizabeth on 9 January 1982, five months before the birth of her future husband Prince William. It is interesting to note that the brides of both
