My first royal tour marked the end of my apprenticeship. There were still mountains of experience to climb. If I served her for a hundred years, I would still have much to learn about the Princess of Wales, and even more about the reactions she sparked in others. At last, however, I had the tour labels on my briefcase; I could swap tall stories with the best of them. Even more importantly, I had shared with the Princess the pressures and prolonged proximity that only foreign tours provide, especially difficult ones, which this definitely had been.
I had passed through a barrier of acceptability – one of many on the twisting and ultimately futile path to royal intimacy. From now on our relationship would be slightly different. She began to see through my mask of deference and I began to see through her saintly image.
The most significant change was the one least discussed. To travel with the Prince and Princess at that time was to learn, inescapably, the truth of their growing estrangement. In the office it had been almost possible to pretend that all was well. On the road in Britain I had been supporting only one half of what was still seen as a formidable double act. There was nothing to stop me arguing – as I did – that press speculation about problems in the marriage was offensive and inaccurate. The whole issue could be ignored in the comforting round of day-to-day business.
This was true no longer. I had arranged the separate accommodation and sweated to ensure the hermetic separation of his and her programmes, required for all but a few joint appearances. In Dubai I had been summoned into the cabin of the Princess’s departing jet to be given a farewell that was effusive and undeniably a pact of loyalty as I stayed behind with the Prince. I had witnessed with naive alarm the small, telltale signs of mutual antipathy that were soon to become public knowledge – averted eyes, defiantly uncoordinated walkabouts, competitive glad-handing.
Eventually, when she was travelling on solo tours, there was a welcome outbreak of informality in the Princess’s attitude towards me. Instead of the large numbers of their joint household who had previously paraded to greet her in the morning, she would find only me waiting at her door. I would be invited in, to steal extra breakfast, hear gossip from her phone calls, answer questions on the day’s business and compliment – or assist with – the choice of outfit. She might try three different outfits before setting off for the day and would ask my opinion on each.
‘Patrick, what d’you think of this hat?’
‘Um … very royal, Ma’am.’
‘Thanks. I’ll change it!’
The same process would operate in reverse in the evening, when she might ask me to pour a glass of champagne and join her in an irreverent postmortem on the people and issues that had made most impression on her over the course of the day.
This was quite nice, as far as it went. I defy anyone employed by royalty not to feel even a fleeting glow of illicit pleasure at being invited to share such intimacies. As I was to discover to my cost, however, centuries of deference had not been built up just to make the important people feel more important. Deference protected the small people too, from royal favour too lightly granted and too quickly withdrawn. So I was wary, even as I joined in what was, after all, just her way of dealing with the demands her job placed on her.
When she had chopped up and disposed of the day’s new players she often returned to a favourite subject: her husband. I once read extracts to her from Philip Ziegler’s biography of Edward VIII, in which the Prince of Wales (as he then was) was described by a contemporary as ‘part child, part genius’. She leapt at the comparison, as she did at many descriptions of her husband in which he appeared as naive, self-indulgent or emotionally immature.
In fairness, these were adjectives she was quite quick to direct at almost any member of the male species, and she was not blind to the Prince’s many virtues, among which she always included a touching vulnerability. When she spoke of him fondly – which admittedly was rare – it was with regret that he allowed his good intentions and good ideas (she stopped short of genius) to be hijacked by unscrupulous hangers-on. It was no surprise that many of her fiercest critics were drawn from these sycophantic ranks.
Even in the terminal stages of the marriage, when she was ready one minute to regard him as a wayward son and the next as her cold-blooded persecutor, I never knew her criticism of him to carry lasting malice. Nor do I doubt that she would have responded with pleasure and secret relief to marital peace overtures. For reasons that became clearer as my knowledge of them grew, however, the Waleses sadly found that they had less to contribute to their marriage than its survival demanded.
Meanwhile romance, in any of its forms, was what the Princess quite reasonably craved. She felt that it was withheld by her husband – deliberately or through incapacity – and therefore she sought and found it elsewhere.
Sometimes she found it in flirtatiousness at work, where her feminine charm was employed with precision and deadly effect. I was not immune to extravagant remarks such as ‘Oh Patrick, you’re the moon and stars to me!’ – even if the sentiment they implied did not seem to last very long.
Sometimes she found it in the supportive but necessarily circumscribed proximity of her personal staff. Any form of physical contact was, of course, unthinkable, but she would sometimes allow us all a playful frisson as we were invited to help her tie her army boots or check an evening gown’s dodgy zip.
With rare but spectacular exceptions, she was very cautious about expressing the aridity of her love life. Sometimes, though, the banter with which the painful subject was made bearable would slip, and in a voice suddenly sad and reflective, she would say, ‘Sex is OK, but sex with love is the best, isn’t it?’ That was quite a tough one to answer.
Although these sources of consolation were safe, they were no real substitute for the pleasures and hazards of a passionate relationship. Instead she developed an ability to experience emotions vicariously, drawing on her existing skills as a shrewd people-watcher and a natural talent to be sympathetic. St Paul’s injunction to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep might have been written for her. Sadly, joy is not an easy emotion to experience at second hand and after an initial expression of pleasure at another’s good fortune, she often found that it left her feeling envious and dissatisfied. This always seemed to be most pronounced in maternity wards. It did not take a genius to work out why.
In addition, she did find some consolation in well-documented liaisons with other men, most notably with James Hewitt, who already rode high in her affections when I joined her staff. He was a regular but discreet visitor to KP, although our paths seldom crossed. Sometimes when I was leaving the red-haired Captain would be arriving, emitting a palpable sense of unease and a nervous but winning smile.
Later, the Princess closely involved me in her attempts – by then – to distance herself from him. I even carried discouraging messages to him at his barracks when he was planning a newspaper revelation about their relationship ‘to put the record straight’ (something, incidentally, which I have never thought possible on practically any subject). In 1989, however, the affair was just one more thing to be ignored, another sign of our unhappy times.
Had I wanted to, I could have found out more and sometimes did, especially over a beer with a detective. I knew, however, that it was more important to be able to deny convincingly knowledge of anything that my boss might later wish she had not done. Being a royal conscience might be a wonderfully self-justifying job, but it would be a short one.
She was paranoid that her affair would be discovered – but only because it would weaken her moral superiority over her husband. She only admitted the affair with Hewitt after it had become public knowledge. After his return from the Gulf War in 1991, the Princess often visited Hewitt at his family home in Devon. She was terrified of being found out and I even warned the police that they might have to lie to cover up for her. I was shocked to hear myself say it, but they just smiled indulgently.
She wistfully imagined a house in the country – an idyllic domestic life for them