‘A simple comparison of dates proves it is impossible for Hewitt to be Harry’s father,’ wrote Ken Wharfe, Diana’s trusted bodyguard. ‘Only once did I ever discuss it with her, and Diana was in tears about it.’
These solid facts did not stop a conspiracy from being hatched in the early 2000s to snatch a sample of Harry’s DNA and compare it to Hewitt’s – many folk prefer a conspiracy theory to the old-established truth that grooming people for different roles in life tends to produce different personalities. The plan was to use a ‘honey-trap’ involving an attractive Argentinian girl who would pluck a hair from the prince’s scalp after a polo match. The plot came to nothing, but it is not surprising that its intended victim should ultimately reach the conclusion that the game of being a royal in Britain was not worth the candle.
Still at Ludgrove, Harry, eleven, was relatively shielded from the embarrassments of his mother’s Panorama interview with Martin Bashir in November 1995 – Diana’s final flanking movement in her media battle with Prince Charles. But William, thirteen, viewed the entire programme in the study of his Eton housemaster, Dr Andrew Gailey, and as soon as he saw his mother’s face appear on the screen, the prince later related to a classmate, he was overcome with a feeling of dread.
‘Friends on my husband’s side,’ said Diana, explaining her reasons for doing the interview, ‘were indicating that I was again unstable, sick, and should be put in a home of some sort. I was almost an embarrassment.’
As she bowed her head archly to the cameras, fluttering her heavily mascaraed eyelashes and speaking in dramatic whispers, ‘embarrassment’ described the gentlest of the emotions that she must have generated in her watching son.
‘There were three of us in this marriage’ – William heard again his mother’s much-rehearsed complaint, coupled with her wish to be ‘the Queen of people’s hearts’. The eating disorders, the depressions, the suicide attempts – no detail was spared.
March 2020: Prince Charles quarantined with coronavirus
Diana had pre-taped the interview with a BBC crew, and the previous day she had driven down to Eton to warn her son to be ready for strong stuff. But this was more than William had expected – and his mother’s candour when Bashir asked about her affair with James Hewitt tipped her son over the edge.
‘Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him …’
Diana spoke of ‘betrayal’, and that was exactly what William now felt. Their mother had clearly seen how upset both her sons had been when Charles had confessed his intimacy with Camilla on television the previous year. Here she was doing the very same thing, and even talking about her ‘love’ for this other man.
It was too much for the thirteen-year-old. When housemaster Gailey returned to the study to collect his pupil, he found William slumped on the sofa, his eyes red with tears. The prince pulled himself together to rush back to his room. But when, an hour later, Diana telephoned on the house phone, William refused to take the call.
‘He hated the idea of everything being on television,’ related Simone Simmons, Diana’s faith healer who became close to her in these years, ‘and he knew his friends would poke fun at him, which they did. He felt she made a fool of herself – and of him.’
William came home from school to Kensington Palace on the Saturday after the broadcast, and Simmons heard from Diana the following Monday what had happened.
William had been ‘so angry with her,’ the still weeping and distraught princess told Simmons. ‘All hell broke loose. He was furious … that she had spoken badly of his father, furious that she had mentioned Hewitt … He started shouting and crying and, when she tried to put her arms around him, he shoved her away.’
The next day William apologised to his mother for his bad temper, and he presented her with a small bunch of flowers. But Diana felt that some irretrievable damage had been done.
‘She was still somehow convinced,’ recalled Simmons, ‘that he would hate her for the rest of her life, and when I saw her later there was a look of hopelessness on her face … She cared more about them than anything in the world.’
‘What have I done?’ Diana kept asking Simmons, as if she finally realised the ghastly pain and damage that her bitter public feuding had inflicted upon her sons. ‘What have I done to my children?’
The distance between mother and son became uncomfortable. When the question arose as to who William would invite to his first Fourth of June celebrations – Eton’s equivalent to Founders’ or Parents’ Day – the prince decided that he would not invite either of his parents. Both his mother and his father had become an embarrassment to him.
Diana felt deeply disappointed. She did not understand how her usually sympathetic son now could behave with such aggression towards her on occasion. It was already whispered around the palaces that the teenager could turn ‘obstinate’ from time to time, with stories circulating of how the charming young prince was sometimes very un-charming to both his parents – telling them to their faces what he thought of them. William was growing up, and the developing complexities of his character demonstrated how Diana had endowed her elder son with a most healthy streak of emotional independence and the ability to speak his mind – however negative.
13
People’s Princess
‘Not a day goes by when I don’t think about it once in the day.’
(Prince William, June 2007)
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, 30 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales left the Ritz Hotel in Paris with her latest boyfriend Dodi Fayed, son of the Egyptian owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al-Fayed. The couple, who had known each other
