‘You’ll be king one day,’ said the four-year-old Harry. ‘I won’t. So I can do what I want.’
‘Where the hell did he get that from?’ asked Diana.
If the future King William V was already coming to appreciate and act upon his destiny, so was his younger brother. Welcome to Harry the Hellraiser – the don’t-give-a-fuck, apparently lifelong ‘spare’. The meek and submissive ‘sweet-natured, shy thumb-sucker’ was no more.
So who was now the king of the castle? And who the dirty rascal? The stresses and strains of their parents’ marriage had generated in William and Harry a massive and deeply meaningful character switch.
* Dimbleby’s supporters are Gyles Brandreth, and the writer–TV producer team of Tim Clayton and Phil Craig – see bibliography for details of their books, along with those of the authors who follow. The nine disbelievers, with the years from which they date Charles’s infidelity, are: Christopher Andersen (1982), Anthony Holden (1982), Christopher Wilson (1982), Tina Brown (1982 or 1983 or 1986), Sally Bedell Smith (1982 or 1986), Sarah Bradford (1983), Andrew Morton (1984), James Whitaker (1984), Kitty Kelley (1985).
10
Exposure
‘She had such warmth, she wanted to make people feel special. She realised she was in a unique position and could make people smile and feel better about themselves.’
(Prince William, 22 August 2017)
When James Whitaker, tabloid king of the royal rat pack, sadly set down his field glasses in Majorca in 1986 and privately pronounced his ‘death sentence’ on the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, he did not, of course, make his thoughts public. The reporter’s verdict was based on the couple’s apathetic behaviour towards each other on the king of Spain’s yacht that summer, but at the time Whitaker filed only a mild and politely questioning story for the Daily Mirror – ‘Are Charles and Di Still in Tune?’
For the next five and a half years, the flow of Whitaker’s lively Charles and Diana narrative would remain consistently breathless and upbeat – like that of every other Fleet Street newspaper. The Waleses were Britain’s best export by far – and if some inside ‘sources’ whispered to their press contacts that the royal couple had been screaming at each other or were actually sleeping in separate cabins, well, that was not a topic for the front page then, or for any page. It did not make commercial sense to cast serious doubt on the glamorous happiness of this glamorous couple and their two glamorously growing sons. The Waleses sold newspapers. Charles, Di, Wills and Harry were Fleet Street’s most reliable good news story in tough Thatcherite times, and the palace’s media minders made sure that it stayed that way.
‘Look, you guys,’ rasped Diana’s rough, gruff Australian press officer Vic Chapman at the Majorca media briefing in 1986, ‘for Crissakes remember the rules. You don’t go out and write anything. Otherwise that’s it.’
September 1997: The death of Princess Diana
‘That’s it’ meant no more access to photo opportunities, along with the drying-up of hints as to when you might steal a quick exclusive of Diana buying shoes along the King’s Road or taking the boys to Thorpe Park.
‘Vic did that sort of “dangling the carrot” the whole time,’ recalled the photographer Jayne Fincher. ‘He instilled this thing where “If you break the rules … you will not be getting what I’m planning in three months.”’
The jovial Whitaker had to console himself with jokes. When he and some fellow rats managed to persuade the courteous King Juan Carlos to accept their offer to join them for drinks at the Palma Yacht Club, they could celebrate a new nickname for the Spanish monarch – ‘Juan for the road’.
By 2020 standards the subservience of the media in the dying days of the Waleses’ marriage was extraordinary, and this was partly a matter of changing times. Through the 1980s there was no Internet, which meant no Twitter, Instagram or Facebook to spread scandal – or some muted, barroom half-whisper of scandal – around the world within seconds. The palaces still had the media where they wanted them, with the royal family acting out their allotted parts beneath the proscenium arch whose curtains were strictly controlled by the likes of Victor Chapman.
But on 6 August 1991 the World Wide Web went live to the world. William was then just nine and Harry was coming up to seven. As teenagers and adults they would become the first ‘Internet Princes’, whose natural instinct would be to communicate with each other, their people and the world via email or SMS text message. Roneo-stencilled press releases would become antiques for them – relics of a bygone paper age. By the turn of the century the two boys would be beavering away on their portable laptops. Then in 2002 Nokia would make it possible for everyone to take photos on their mobile phones. You could become your own paparazzo!
In the early 1990s, however, the old certainties and constraints still prevailed – and there was another, human element to Fleet Street’s unfaltering reverence. Most people, and even cynical journalists, still believed that, for all their faults, the royal family behaved to a special standard – that Windsor folk were a superior brand of person who somehow managed to live their lives with extra dignity and class. While a prince might nurse a secret mistress for a decade, for example, he could never possibly nurse fantasies of burrowing up inside her like a Tampax.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves …
The proscenium arch began to crumble in February 1992 thanks to the revelations of a lady who was quite a revelation in herself. Lady Colin Campbell, born ‘intersex’ in 1949, grew up
