A longer-established tradition are small, informal lunches at Buckingham Palace for assorted members of the great and the good. It was an idea suggested by the Duke of Edinburgh, who has had many good ideas during the course of the Queen’s reign. These lunches were held so that the Queen could meet interesting people and opinion formers who she didn’t normally come across; and, just as importantly, so that they could meet her. The first lunch took place in 1956 and she has been holding them ever since. People who go are generally enchanted, my own father among them. There were ten guests the day he went, a typical number. At the time he was editor and columnist of the Sunday Express; his fellow diners were a Tory MP, Sue MacGregor, then the presenter of Woman’s Hour, a High Court judge, an interior designer, the coxswain of the Humber lifeboat and Anne Beckwith Smith, lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales. They gathered promptly at 12.50 in the 1844 Room where they were given a drink before lining up to meet the Queen and Prince Philip who came in and shook hands with each of them and engaged in small talk. There were corgis roaming around and my father jokingly asked the Prince whether they were dangerous. ‘You mean are they in danger from you?’ he retorted. He had clearly done his homework and had a journalist in his midst under sufferance.
At lunch my father found himself on the Queen’s left-hand side, the judge was on her right, and throughout the first two courses – salmon, followed by braised ham – she addressed not one single word to him. He was beginning to feel more than a little miffed. At the other end of the table he noticed that the Tory MP was in exactly the same situation. He was on the Duke’s left and for two courses had been completely ignored while Philip lavished attention on Sue MacGregor, seated on his right. The two of them looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.
But as soon as the pudding arrived the entire table was transformed. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh both turned to the guest on their left and my father basked in the Queen’s full attention for the rest of the lunch. They chatted, he said, like old friends and he was always certain that the key had been horses. On the way to the Palace his office driver, a very keen punter, had told him to ask the Queen whether her horse Height of Fashion was going to win the Oaks. This is precisely what he did and the Queen immediately lit up and explained that the horse’s legs were possibly too long for the Epsom course but that its chances would be decided by whether the horse ran well at Goodwood. Bingo.
Someone should have taken them to one side and said, ‘Make this work. Go out on to that balcony, hold hands, smile and when you come back down, one of you turn to the right, one to the left. Take a mistress, take a lover if you want, but for the sake of the boys, the family and the country, stay together.’ No one seemed to have the long view; Diana was a huge asset. She’d have been in her forties by now; and one of the most interesting women in the world, the best ambassador for this country ever. She could have been UNESCO’s child ambassador … Wherever we went people’s eyes widened – her mannerisms, her dress sense. What else did he want? In that position you’ve got to work together. Someone should have said to the Queen, ‘This is the next generation coming through.’ They should never have let her go.
These are not the words of an outsider who didn’t understand the situation. This is someone who worked for the Prince of Wales before his marriage and for both the Prince and Princess for several years after the marriage. He was a member of the royal household for ten years in all and was loyal, devoted and dedicated. He is now in his early seventies and might still have been there in some capacity or other had he not been caught in the crossfire of the warring Waleses. He was enormously fond of both the Prince and the Princess and would have wished the greatest personal happiness to them both, but this was not about personal happiness. It couldn’t be. They were not just any couple; they were royal, they had obligations; and his principal concern is for the monarchy.
There is no doubt that he is right. The monarchy was very seriously damaged by the breakdown of that marriage; it destroyed the respect that a great many people instinctively felt for the Royal Family and it paved the way for much of the intolerable media intrusion that has now become a part of their lives. Charles and Diana would not have been the first couple to have lived separate lives under the same roof; they didn’t even have to be under the same roof – they already had a roof each – Charles at Highgrove in the country, Diana at Kensington Palace in London. Aristocratic families have been doing precisely this for generations: staying married for the sake of their children and their estates, and discreetly taking lovers on the side. It should have been possible for the Prince and Princess, but this was such a mismatch, the relationship so volatile, Diana so unpredictable and the handling of it all so inept that in the final analysis bringing the marriage to an end was the lesser of two evils.
Michael Colborne first met the Prince of Wales in the Navy in the early seventies when, fresh out of Dartmouth, Charles had joined his first ship, HMS Norfolk, as a sub-lieutenant. Colborne was a non-commissioned officer, fourteen years his senior, unfazed by the HRH tag and quite unafraid to speak his mind. He was a grammar-school boy, with a wife and young son, who had joined the Navy at sixteen and been there all his working life. The two became friends and they would sit up at night, talking over a few drinks; Colborne would often pull his leg and when they were on shore leave he would show him the sights. This was the first time the Prince had mixed with people from a different social class and he was fascinated by every aspect of Michael’s life; when the Prince left the Navy in 1977 and became a fully-fledged member of the Family Firm he invited Colborne to help set up his office. Officially he was in charge of his financial affairs, but in practice he became the Prince’s right-hand man, and the only member of his staff prepared to tell Charles the truth, however unpalatable it sometimes was. The Prince welcomed his honesty and made him promise that he would never change. ‘If you don’t agree with something, you say so,’ he had told him, but, of course, on those occasions when Colborne had disagreed and said so, there was all hell to pay.
Like his father and grandfather, George VI, the Prince has a terrifying temper that has reduced strong men to tears; it was that which finally drove Michael Colborne away. Lord Mountbatten, the Prince’s great-uncle and mentor, had once said when he was on the point of leaving in the very early days, ‘Bear with him, Michael, please. He doesn’t mean to get at you personally. It’s just that he wants to let off steam and you’re the only person he can lose his temper with. It’s a back-handed compliment really, you know. He needs you.’
The Prince did need him, not least in helping him cope with Diana. The story of Charles and Diana and their marriage has been analysed and written about ad nauseam – I have done a fair share of it myself – but I am now about to do it again. This is partly because no book about the monarchy can ignore the significance that that marriage and all the consequences of its failure has had on the institution; and partly because, in my view, despite all the books, articles and documentaries, there is still a profound misconception about the whole sorry tale.
Colborne was one of the first people the Prince told about his proposal to Diana. He was the one who organized flowers to greet her on her return from Australia where she had gone while making up her mind about marriage. The Prince had asked him to send her the biggest, most fragrant bunch of flowers he could find and had handwritten a welcome home note to go with them. They had been delivered by the Prince’s police protection officer, yet years later, when the Princess was talking about her rotten marriage, she threw it out as a sign of his callousness: ‘I came back from Australia,’ she told Andrew Morton. ‘Someone knocks at the door – someone from his office with a bunch of flowers and I knew that they hadn’t come from Charles because there was no note. It was just somebody being very tactful in the office.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Colborne became like a father to Diana in her early years in the Palace, but he could see there was going to be trouble from the start. At nineteen, she was little more than a child when she first arrived,