‘I’ve just been watching Sky News,’ said Alastair Campbell in a phone call to Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary in London, on Wednesday, 3 September, three days after Diana’s death. ‘Now, it’s just a straw in the wind, but I think they’re going to make some mischief over this thing of the flag.’
Sky News had been running dramatic vox pops from the Mall in which mourners laying their bouquets complained about the bare flagpole over the palace and the absence of any sign of royal mourning.
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ replied Fellowes. ‘But it’s a curious business, the flag at Buckingham Palace. There are certain things, you know, that I can deliver straight away. But I’m not sure it’s going to be as easy as it looks, even if it’s right, to please the public on this one.’
Fellowes knew his boss. No flag in history had flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. The Queen had not done it on the death of her beloved father George VI, and she would not expect it for herself. It was a matter of tradition – something greater than oneself, symbolising for Elizabeth II values approaching the sacred. It was certainly not a gesture to be conceded to the popular media.
‘There were times in that week,’ recalls one of Tony Blair’s staff of September 1997, ‘when you could not believe what was coming down the line from Balmoral. You wondered if they were living in the same century.’
Next morning, the papers were aghast at the news that the Queen and her family were staying up in Scotland.
‘Show Us You Care,’ demanded the Express, over a particularly unflattering photograph of a flinty-faced Queen.
‘Your People Are Suffering,’ complained the Mirror. ‘Speak to Us, Ma’am.’
As the Queen mulled her breakfast at Balmoral that Thursday morning, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun had particularly powerful words to offer.
‘Where is the Queen when the country needs her?’ demanded an open letter on the front page. ‘She is 550 miles from London, the focal point of the nation’s grief … Every hour the Palace remains empty adds to the public anger at what they perceive to be a snub to the People’s Princess. Let Charles and William and Harry weep together in the lonely Scottish Highlands. We can understand that. But the Queen’s place is with the people. She should fly back to London immediately and stand on the Palace balcony.’
Robert Fellowes and Geoffrey Crawford, the Queen’s Australian-born press secretary, got on the phone to Balmoral to talk the problem through with Robin Janvrin, then with the Queen herself. There was clearly a need for a change of royal direction – and Elizabeth II got it immediately. Suddenly the details of what flag flew where counted for nothing.
‘The Queen has ruthless common sense,’ says one of her private secretaries. ‘If you can explain clearly why something has to be done, and she agrees, that’s the end of the matter.’
A Union flag would fly at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. The Queen’s advisors were told to start drafting a tribute to Diana that she would deliver on television. And the whole family would travel down to London next day to spend Friday night in Buckingham Palace. Tiggy began packing the boys’ suitcases for rapid departure.
St James’s Palace had a surprise waiting for them on that Friday, 5 September. Mountains of flowers surrounded the palace gates – as they did the gates and railings of every London palace – and the limos drew to a halt so that the royals could get out to inspect them and read what had been scribbled on the cards.
‘Looking back,’ remembered Harry twenty years later, ‘the last thing I wanted to do was read what other people were saying about our mother. Yes, it was amazing, it was incredibly moving to know. But at that point I wasn’t there – I was still in shock … People were grabbing us and pulling us into their arms and stuff.
‘I don’t blame anyone for that, of course I don’t. But it was those moments that were quite shocking. People were screaming, people were crying, people’s hands were wet because of the tears they had just wiped away from their faces before shaking my hand.’
This was contact between royals and public with a raw intimacy that had never been known before. The emotional shock of Diana’s death and the youth of the two boys whom so many had always looked on as ‘their’ own children led to traditional boundaries being breached.
‘You just felt,’ William later said, ‘wherever you went people were watching you.’
At fifteen, the elder brother was at an especially sensitive stage in his emotional life.
‘I remember just feeling completely numb. Disorientated, dizzy. And you feel very, very confused. And you keep asking yourself, “Why me?” all the time. “What have I done? Why has this happened to us?”’
William decided that he had to put his ‘game face on’, when all he really wanted to do was cry.
‘I just remember hiding behind my fringe, basically,’ he recalled in 2017, ‘at a time when I had a lot of hair’ – that was a ‘joke’ from a young man sensitive about going bald at an early age – ‘And my head’s down a lot.’
Over dinner that night, talk turned to the ceremony next day. The faxes had been flying, but it had still not been resolved exactly who was going to walk behind the gun carriage on which Diana’s coffin would be carried. Prince Charles had no doubt that he should walk the long route with both his sons beside him.
But Uncle Charles Spencer did not agree. He was already angry on his family’s behalf that his sister’s funeral had been hijacked into a royal occasion, and he was particularly opposed to the idea that his young nephews should have to
