Penny Junor: Prince William

The Royal Family has an important relationship with the media. The institution of monarchy might have disappeared years ago had the media not been interested in the comings and goings of the Family and thereby kept alive the public’s interest. But it is true, nonetheless, that media pressure on Charles to find a bride and the constant intrusion before and after the marriage played a significant part in its breakdown.

A lot has been written about the Royal couple’s relationship over the years, by me as well as others, and Charles and Diana both gave differing accounts of it, but since it formed the bedrock of William’s childhood, and explains much about the man he is today, it needs to be retold. So does the part the media played in it, because it was the mistakes of thirty years ago that gave William the determination to make sure that when Kate Middleton was no more than a girlfriend, she was spared the worst of what his mother had to endure.

While staying at Balmoral in the summer of 1980, Diana was spotted by the late veteran royal correspondent, James Whitaker, then working for the Daily Star , whose binoculars were shamelessly trained on Prince Charles while he fished for salmon in the River Dee. Scanning the bank, Whitaker saw a girl he hadn’t seen before, sitting under a tree keeping the Prince company. Whitaker was with his photographer but Diana kept her back to them and neither got a view of her face. All they knew was that Charles had a new girlfriend – and they had a scoop.

It wasn’t long before they worked out who she was and where she lived, and from that day until the engagement was announced five months later, she had no privacy. Photographers camped outside her flat in Fulham, cameras flashed at her, following her wherever she went. Reporters fired questions at her whenever they saw her; they raked through her rubbish, posed as neighbours, anything to get a scrap of information. She handled it well and at times seemed quite pleased; she said good morning politely to the journalists she recognised, called them by name, and inadvertently posed in a see-through summer skirt at the kindergarten where she worked. It was intrusive, aggressive and at times frightening.

In the midst of all this there was an incident involving the Prince of Wales on the royal train, which had stopped at sidings in Wiltshire for the night. The Sunday Mirror was tipped off that a blonde woman, matching Diana’s description, had driven up from London, boarded the train and spent the night, the implication being that she had slept with Prince Charles. The paper contacted Diana for confirmation and, although she denied having been there, the editor was so convinced it was true he published the story anyway.

The result was an immediate and furious reaction from the Queen’s Press Secretary, the late Michael Shea, who normally let inaccuracies, even of this sort, pass. He demanded a retraction, calling the story ‘total fabrication’. A letter to The Times from Diana’s mother soon followed, appealing for an end to it all. ‘In recent weeks,’ she wrote, ‘many articles have been labelled “exclusive quotes”, when the plain truth is that my daughter has not spoken the words attributed to her. Fanciful speculation, if it is in good taste, is one thing, but this can be embarrassing. Lies are quite another matter, and by their very nature, hurtful and inexcusable … May I ask the editors of Fleet Street, whether, in the execution of their jobs, they consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily from dawn until well after dusk? Is it fair to ask any human being, regardless of circumstances, to be treated in this way? The freedom of the press was granted by law by public demand, for very good reasons. But when these privileges are abused, can the press command any respect, or expect to be shown any respect?’

Sixty MPs tabled a motion in the House of Commons ‘deploring the manner in which Lady Diana Spencer is treated by the media’ and ‘calling upon those responsible to have more concern for individual privacy’. Fleet Street editors met senior members of the Press Council to discuss the situation. It was the first time in its twenty-seven-year history that such an extraordinary meeting had been convened, but it did nothing to stop the harassment.

It was against this backdrop that the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to Charles. He told him he must make up his mind about Diana. It was not fair to keep her dangling on a string. She had been seen without a chaperone at Balmoral and her reputation was in danger of being tarnished. If he was going to marry her he should get on and do it; if not, he should end it.

If only father and son had been able to discuss the situation face to face, instead of relying on letters, everyone might have been saved years of unhappiness. Charles, mistakenly, took it as an ultimatum to marry and, even though there were serious doubts in his mind about his feelings for Diana, he knew that everyone else seemed to love her, and therefore he did as his father asked. He confessed to a friend that he was in a ‘confused and anxious state of mind’. To another he said, ‘It is just a matter of taking an unusual plunge into some rather unknown circumstances that inevitably disturbs me but I expect it will be the right thing in the end … It all seems ridiculous, because I do very much want to do the right thing for this country and for my family – but I’m terrified sometimes of making a promise and then perhaps living to regret it.’

He sought the advice of his beloved grandmother, the Queen Mother, who was enthusiastically in favour of the match. She was as enchanted by Diana as everyone else, and she was the granddaughter of her lady-in-waiting, Ruth, Lady Fermoy. The Queen gave no opinion, but almost everyone else whose views he canvassed thought Diana was the ideal bride. The only words of caution were to do with how few interests they had in common, and one friend was worried that Diana was a little bit in love with the idea of becoming a Princess but had no real understanding of what it would entail.

As Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, one of the Prince’s oldest friends, who was staying at Balmoral with her husband in the summer of 1980, told Jonathan Dimbleby, the Prince’s authorised biographer: ‘We went stalking together, we got hot, we got tired, she fell into a bog, she got covered in mud, laughed her head off, got puce in the face, hair glued to her forehead because it was pouring with rain … she was a sort of wonderful English schoolgirl who was game for anything, naturally young but sweet and clearly determined and enthusiastic about him, very much wanted him.’

No one who spent time with her during the next six months – not Charles nor any of his friends or family – suspected she was anything other than Patty described, because Diana was good at hiding her feelings and keeping the hurt buried deep inside. No one spotted that she was in any way more complicated than she seemed, far less that she was suffering from any sort of incipient mental illness.

The people who did know, kept quiet. A month before her death in July 1993, when the marriage was in ruins and their public feuding at its height, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, told the Prince that she had known Diana was ‘a dishonest and difficult’ girl and wished she had screwed up her courage to tell him he shouldn’t marry her. Even Diana’s father, who died in 1991, said before he died that he had been wrong not to say something to warn Charles. They both knew that Diana had been badly affected by the traumas of her childhood and that in marrying her, Charles was taking on an almost impossible task.

The cracks began to show when Diana was removed from her bustling flat in Fulham, which she shared with three young friends, to a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace. It must have stirred up memories of the painful move from Park House to Althorp, only this time she was among strangers and it wasn’t so easy to seek out the kitchen staff for company. The contrast could not have been more extreme, and while everyone within the Palace was kind to her, and went out of their way to be helpful, they were no substitute for her teenage girlfriends.