The Queen, however, was another matter. Her Majesty was not impressed by her grandson’s noisiness, which got worse as Harry became old enough to join in – with fighting, crying and boisterous running around whenever they came to stay at Windsor, Sandringham or Balmoral. It was poor behaviour that she did not expect of her grandchildren. Elizabeth II made some enquiries and was particularly horrified to learn that one of William’s favourite lines ran: ‘When I am king, I’m going to make a new rule that …’
‘You really must do something, Charles,’ the Queen said to her son. ‘The boys need discipline. Perhaps a new nanny is in order.’
Barnes shrugged her shoulders when it reached her ears that the Queen herself felt William was getting ‘a little bit out of control’.
‘His behaviour was only natural for a boy in front of his grandmother,’ she said to a fellow member of staff. ‘What was she expecting, for God’s sake, a mini Prince Charles?’
The dishevelled rock star and human rights activist Bob Geldof did not mince his words when confronted by the young prince’s rudeness at Kensington Palace in the summer of 1985. Geldof had come to see Charles to discuss the preparations for his forthcoming Live Aid concert at Wembley, and William, barely three years old, was frustrated not to be receiving his father’s full attention.
‘Why do you have to talk to that man?’ he asked Charles.
‘Because we all have work to do,’ replied the prince.
‘He’s all dirty,’ said William.
‘Shut up, you horrible little boy,’ said Geldof.
‘He’s got scruffy hair and wet shoes,’ continued William.
‘Don’t be rude,’ said Charles in a vain fatherly attempt at discipline. ‘Run along and play.’
‘Your hair’s scruffy too,’ said Geldof in his own attempt at a final word.
‘No, it’s not,’ responded William. ‘My mummy brushed it.’
Harry just adored his elder brother. He looked up to ‘Wills’ – another of William’s family nicknames – and he responded willingly to being treated as his brother’s favourite toy. Both Charles and Diana were keen that their sons should mix with ‘ordinary children’ – those of friends both inside and outside the palace. But when playing with outsiders the two brothers usually still operated as a unit. They were encouraged by their parents to love each other and to express their love – and they did.
‘William spends the entire time pouring an endless supply of hugs and kisses onto Harry,’ reported Diana, ‘and we are hardly allowed near.’
Nanny Barnes picked up and strengthened the family ethos of brotherliness. Both boys tended to wake with the dawn, so she would bring them into her bed most mornings to romp and play together, before giving them their breakfast and passing them on to their parents when they woke.
Diana would then take over if she did not have work to do, but with her pregnancies behind her and by then moving into her middle twenties, her time was more and more occupied by the charities and humanitarian causes for which she would become famous. She also had an increasingly active social life, meeting girlfriends (boyfriends would come later) to discuss the deteriorating state of her marriage, and she continued to accompany Charles on his major foreign tours. Diana, Princess of Wales was the British monarchy’s number-one international selling point and the Prince of Wales was not going to miss out on the benefit of that when he travelled.
All this meant that Nanny Barnes spent more and more time with the boys, and she did become something of a surrogate mother, particularly to William who had been her solitary charge for two years before the appearance of Harry. She taught the boys to walk and talk and read. She comforted them when they woke crying in the night. She chose their clothes as well as their shoes.
In the absence of their parents, ‘Baba’ even took her charges away on their own ‘family’ holiday – to Scotland and the Scilly Isles, where she set the agenda every day as any mother would. As one observer admiringly put it, the two princes ‘sailed from house to house under Nanny’s calm captaincy’.
But less admiring observers felt that Barnes was getting too possessive with ‘her’ boys and the princess came to share that suspicion. ‘It almost got to the stage where Diana felt she had to make an appointment to see her sons,’ said deputy nanny Olga Powell, ‘and she wasn’t having any of that.’
Matters came to a head at the end of 1986, when Barnes took a holiday to attend the birthday party of her former employer, the ever-flamboyant Lord Glenconner, on his Caribbean island of Mustique. There the nanny was photographed alongside celebrities like Raquel Welch and Princess Margaret – to the intense irritation of Diana, who was a long-time addict of the gossip pages and did not expect to find her nanny sanctified in the hallowed columns of Nigel Dempster, the Daily Mail’s irrepressible diarist.
Baba had got above herself, Diana decided, and she made that clear when the nanny returned to work. During the Sandringham Christmas break of 1986–7, Barnes resumed her duties and daily routine with the boys as usual, but Diana cold-shouldered her to the point of frostiness, sharing scarcely a word until the family got back to Highgrove, where Diana brusquely informed her that it would be ‘better’, as she put it, if Barnes departed.
‘One weekend she just wasn’t there any more,’ recalled Highgrove housekeeper Wendy Berry. Diana had given instructions that the nanny’s bags should be packed ahead of time, and that all trace of her be removed. ‘No one saw her again.’
It is not known how Baba’s abrupt disappearance was explained to the boys by Diana – who had by this
