The royals - Kitty Kelley [228]
When the Princess was asked to deliver the prestigious Richard Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC to discuss her views on AIDS, the courtiers finally took action. The invitation was withdrawn.
What they did not take away from her, Charles did. He wanted her removed from public life with no access to the Queen’s Flight, the royal train, the royal yacht, or any other privileged form of royal travel. In fact, he wanted her to be shorn of all royal trappings. But the Queen worried about isolating Diana and the effect it might have on her troubled mind. The monarch dispatched the Prime Minister to visit Kensington Palace to reassure the Princess that she had a continuing part to play. Her Majesty then authorized publication of the Prime Minister’s visit in the Court Circular so the public and Diana would think she was still considered valuable.
The Palace allowed her to make a few goodwill tours, but, instructed by Charles, they cut back the honors she had once been accorded. No more high-level courtiers or official ladies-in-waiting. Her airline seating arrangements were downgraded from first class to business class, and the Palace banned playing the National Anthem upon her arrival in Nepal. The tabloids, which revered her, reported the petty slights and wrote editorials calling for more dignified treatment for the mother of the future King.
But the courtiers were dropping the curtain on the star and inching her off stage. She was no longer invited to appear with the royal family at public celebrations like Trooping the Color. When the Queen did not extend an invitation to Royal Ascot in 1993, Diana took her boys to Planet Hollywood. The next day’s newspapers showed a doting mother in blue jeans romping with her children alongside a stiff picture of the royal family waving from their carriages. One tabloid headline captured the contrast: “The Hugger and the High Hats.”
Nor was Diana invited to the Queen Mother’s birthday party in August of 1993. So she took her children go-carting. Again, her picture frolicking with her sons appeared on the front pages. When the Queen went to Hungary, her first visit to a postcommunist state, Diana went to Paris to shop. The monarch’s visit received minor coverage while Diana’s was given the front pages. An Evening Standard editorial wondered: “Might it not be appropriate to place the Princess under house arrest when visits abroad by her less newsworthy royal superiors are imminent?”
Intent on being seen as an angel of mercy, Diana had wanted to attend the memorial service for two children killed by an IRA bomb in the Cheshire town of Warrington. But the Palace said no and sent Prince Philip instead. Diana let the Palace know that she understood how to play hardball: she phoned the grieving mothers of both bomb victims.
“I want to be there with you and give you a hug,” she told them, “but I can’t because they are sending my father-in-law.”
Even Diana’s critics felt the Palace looked petty and spiteful.
She saw the royal family siding with her husband and arrayed against her. He viewed it differently, saying he received more support from his friends than from his family. His father kept in contact by sending messages through his laptop computer, not all of which were appreciated. “Ah, yes, the Duke and his helpful bulletins,” recalled one of Charles’s aides. His arched eyebrows indicated the communications were unwelcome. The aide said nothing about the Queen, who maintained a cool distance from her heir. Sometimes the courts of mother and son clashed like fighting cocks.
“I nearly went mad trying to accommodate them,” recalled the interior designer Nicholas Haslam. “The competition between the two circles is fierce and strangulating. There is no regard for the bond of mother and son: none whatsoever. It’s a pitched battle: