‘I do feel desperate for Diana,’ he continued. ‘There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly, and I’m quite convinced mindless, people photographing it … What has got into them all? Can’t they see further than the end of their noses and to what it is doing to her? How can anyone, let alone a 21-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?’
For the future head of Britain’s most significant celebrity institution, Charles displayed a curious blindness to the realities of celebrity culture.
‘Princess Superstar!’ proclaimed the headlines. ‘Without a doubt,’ declared America’s Ladies’ Home Journal, ‘she’s the greatest media personality of the decade.’ The princess, wrote one columnist, had scored ‘a humdinger of a success’ in a sceptical and potentially hostile atmosphere.
Almost single-handed, according to most commentators, Diana had saved Australia from becoming a republic – and if Charles did not get it, the young princess did. Finally she started to believe in herself.
‘When we came back from our six-week tour,’ she said later, ‘I was a different person. I was more grown up, more mature … I learned to be royal, in inverted commas, in one week.’
Britain’s left-wing Daily Mirror, not always an admirer of the monarchy, editorialised that Diana had done ‘more for the Royalty she married into than other Princesses who were born into it’.
This was a less than subtle dig by the Mirror at Diana’s sister-in-law Princess Anne, whose notorious frostiness seemed to grow a couple of degrees chillier whenever the subject of Diana came up. Aged thirty-one and a mother of two, Anne had been particularly unreceptive to the good news of William’s arrival in June 1982, which had happened while she was in the American Southwest touring Indian reservations in New Mexico on behalf of Save the Children.
‘I didn’t know she had one,’ the princess snapped when asked by one reporter about Diana’s baby.
‘Do you think everyone is making too much fuss of the baby?’ asked another.
‘Yes,’ Anne replied shortly, moving on.
‘Sweet as vinegar, cutting as a knife,’ commented William Hickey in the Daily Express.
‘Anne’s behaviour,’ said the Mirror, ‘has confirmed for many Americans the stories that she is jealous of the adoration lavished on the Princess of Wales.’
There was a certain truth to this. In the early 1980s, the hard-working Anne was carrying out over two hundred engagements every year, compared to Diana’s fifty or so – and an unimpressive ninety-plus for Charles.
‘Anne works very hard,’ explained one palace insider, ‘and sees her sister-in-law picking up the glory. She’s sick to the back teeth with it all.’
The conflict came into the open when it was time to choose the godparents for William. In 1977 Anne had invited Charles to be the godfather of her firstborn, Peter Phillips, but the prince did not return the compliment when it came to William – or, rather, according to rumour, he had very much wanted to invite his sister, only to be blocked by his wife. Diana had sensed the disdain of her no-nonsense sister-in-law, who was reported to find Diana ‘gooey’, and even to have labelled her ‘the Dope’.
William’s godparents were certainly not headline-catchers: the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey, and cousin Alexandra of Kent; the Duchess of Westminster; Lord Romsey; the inevitable Laurens van der Post; and another of Charles’s friends – Constantine II, the Hampstead-dwelling ex-king of Greece.
Prince Philip shrugged his shoulders at the roll call, assuming that the omission of Anne would be corrected next time round. But when Prince Harry appeared in the autumn of 1984, Anne would once again be omitted from the list – and the princess took it personally when she discovered that her younger brother Andrew had been selected from her siblings as a godparent for Harry, rather than herself. There was a former flatmate of Diana’s, Carolyn Bartholomew; a wealthy polo-playing friend of Charles’s, Gerald Ward; Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones; a Gloucestershire neighbour, Celia Vestey; and the painter Bryan Organ, who had executed flattering portraits of both Diana and Charles – ‘Yawns all round’ was the press verdict on the list.
But Anne made her feelings obvious on the day. As the three-month-old Prince Henry Charles Albert David, third in line to the British throne, was being baptised at Windsor in the presence of the Queen, the Queen Mother, Philip and the rest of the royal family, there were two conspicuous absentees. His aunt Anne and her husband Captain Mark Phillips were out in the Gloucestershire countryside, eighty-five miles to the west, shooting rabbits. They had sent their children Peter, seven, and Zara, three, to the ceremony along with their apologies. But their shooting party, they explained, took precedence – it was a long-established date.
‘Don’t read a family row into it, for God’s sake,’ said Mark’s mother Anne. ‘The Princess and my son invited a party of 10 guns for a shoot three months ago. They decided it would be unfair to let these people down.’
Looking back three decades later from the twenty-first century, the 1984 row over Anne not being invited to become Harry’s godmother seems neither here nor there. But just imagine if Anne had been serving as the prince’s godmother in the years after the death of Diana in 1997. Would she not then have become the closest thing that Harry, twelve, had to a real mother?
In those tragic circumstances, Anne might well have operated alongside brother Charles as a more harmonious parental unit for Harry than anything the boy had previously known. The princess might be notorious for
