Penny Junor: Prince William

After a polo match the next day, Charles was presented with a miniature polo stick for William. ‘I suspect the first thing he will do with it is to chew it,’ he said, ‘the second thing will be to hit me sharply on the nose but I hope in twenty years’ time he will be galloping up this field, with me in a Bath chair on the sideline.’

The pleasures of William aside, it was a long and gruelling tour, and Charles was worried about Diana. She found the crowds terrifying and was exhausted much of the time. In another letter home he wrote, ‘I do feel desperate for Diana. 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 twenty-one-year-old, be expected to come out of all this obsessed and crazy attention unscathed?’

Everyone was worried about what the media obsession with Diana was doing to her. There were photographs of her in newspapers almost every day – and often she hadn’t even seen the photographer. In one picture she was inside the house at Highgrove, evidently taken with a powerful lens from across the park. Her face had become a money-spinner for them all. An exclusive picture on the front page for any one of them, no matter what the caption, meant a huge hike in circulation for that newspaper. Inside, any story, however trivial, however true, excited comment, but after the initial honeymoon period when Diana could do no wrong, she began to wobble on her pedestal. The columnists that would heap praise on her one day were just as likely to hurl brickbats the next. She read every last word of it obsessively, and was as buoyed up by the praise as she was depressed by the criticism.

Before William’s birth, the Queen had taken the unusual step of inviting the newspaper editors to Buckingham Palace, where Michael Shea, her Press Secretary, appealed to them to stop harassing her daughter-in-law and to allow her private life to be private. Diana couldn’t go anywhere without being photographed; she couldn’t even go to the village shop to buy some wine gums. After the briefing, the editors were ushered into an adjoining room for drinks with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The editor of the News of the World , who had obviously been pondering on the matter of the wine gums, asked why Diana hadn’t simply sent out a servant to buy them for her. ‘That,’ said the Queen, ‘is the most pompous suggestion I’ve ever heard.’

For a while most of the editors did stop buying the photos that came from the paparazzi, but it didn’t stop the commentary and speculation, and it didn’t help with Diana’s fragile and at times volatile condition.

As William was to discover more than twenty years later, to achieve any kind of real privacy, you had to do more than appeal to the better nature of the press.

Within weeks of returning home from the Antipodes, the Wales family was off again to conquer Canada, this time using the royal yacht Britannia as a base. The ‘Lady Di’ mania was every bit as alarming as it had been in Australia and New Zealand. While Charles looked ever more dispensable by her side – and collected tributes on her behalf from disappointed fans – she took the country by storm.

Her outfits were more dazzling, she attended more ceremonies, concerts and parades, planted more trees, held more hands and won more hearts. What people seemed to go crazy about, in Canada as much as everywhere else she went, was that she seemed so approachable. No one would have dreamed of lunging forward to touch, far less kiss, the Queen or even Princess Anne, but Diana looked sweetly vulnerable and waif-like and her friendly style struck a chord with the crowds. She did common-sense things, like squatting on her heels to talk to children or to people in wheelchairs so as to be at their level, and if someone dropped something in front of her, she would bend down to retrieve it for them. She had youth, beauty, glamour and a lightness of touch, which had never been seen in the Royal Family before.

It was a winning combination that was rapidly turning her into a superstar that no one in the Royal Household had any idea how to handle. Diana was becoming intoxicated by the adulation. Wherever she went, she was the centre of attention and she could see that with no more than a coquettish tilt of the head or a teasing laugh, men, and women too, fell like ninepins in her thrall. The adoration of strangers in some curious way made up for the vacuum she felt in real life and in her marriage.

Away from the cameras and the cheering she struggled with feelings of emptiness and depression and her moods continued to swing violently. Having tried everything in his power to help, Charles had run out of ideas and of sympathy. As he felt the chill of being outside the spotlight, the old feelings of insecurity and inadequacy that had haunted his youth came back with a vengeance. He didn’t understand what went on inside her head, or what he had done to incite such vitriol. The more he retreated into himself, the more she raged against his absences and lack of concern and the more she convinced herself that his friends were conspiring behind her back.

Her suspicions were completely unfounded, and Charles had spoken to no one about their difficulties, but her obsession ate away at her and corroded what little was left of their relationship. He became uncharacteristically moody and prone to violent outbursts of temper that he unleashed on his most loyal and trusted staff; people like Michael Colborne, who had been with him in the Navy and who had tried so hard to help Diana, were being lambasted for spending too much time with her. Gone was the man Colborne had known in his bachelor years, a man thirsty for life, who was ready to have a go at anything and everything, who worked hard and drove himself hard, but who was fun to be with. The joy seemed to have gone out of his life and the serious side to his nature, which had always been there, appeared to have taken over.

Early the next year Diana became pregnant again, ‘as if by a miracle’, she would later say – and on 15 September Prince Harry was born. Charles was again with her throughout, and the next morning brought William to see his new brother. Diana would later say that for six weeks before his birth she and the Prince were closer than they had ever been, or ever would be. ‘Then suddenly as Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain.’ She claimed it was because Charles was disappointed the baby was another boy, and a redhead. ‘Something inside me closed off.’

Those around them at the time say that if Charles was disappointed he showed not the slightest trace of it. He appeared to be thrilled to have another son, saying, ‘We almost have a full polo team,’ and was again overwhelmed by the miracle of childbirth.

But there was going to be no miracle cure for the marriage. Diana was spared the chronic postnatal depression she had suffered after William’s birth, but the bulimia was bad, as were her mood swings, and her demands were increasingly unrealistic. She insisted that Charles spend more time with the children and sent a note to Edward Adeane, their Private Secretary, saying that in future her husband would not be available for meetings in the early mornings or evenings because he would be upstairs in the nursery with William. Adeane, a bachelor with no children, and a courtier of the old school, was dumbfounded. Mornings and evenings were the two moments in their normally hectic day when they had time to go through vital briefings.

As his relationship with Diana deteriorated, the Prince became temperamental and depressed and hugely demanding of everyone around him. He cut back on his engagements and spent many a contemplative hour digging the garden at Highgrove or riding hard, pushing himself physically to the limits. And having cut his closest and oldest friends out of his life, he became isolated in his misery.