(Date Posted:14/08/2006 01:04:53)
Diana believed MI5 was persecuting her for years and trying to harm her. In her November " Panorama " 1995
interview she said she believed they leaked her phone call with James Gilbey for the purpose of doing her harm. In the
book Diana on the Edge (1996) she is quoted as saying they would one day kill her.
There is no doubt in my mind that the secret service would do whatever it took to "preserve" the monarchy and there
is no doubt that the Queen would not have tolerated a marriage between Diana and Dodi Fayed. It is knownthat the
royal family were glad to be rid of Diana. Princess Margaret was quoted as saying so.
It is known that Diana wanted more children, and not with Charles. Diana was divorced, she had not wanted the
divorce, but it was forced on her. It is known she still loved Charles and would have taken him back had he apologized
for his affair with Camilla Parker -Bowles, and turned over a new leaf. None of these things are speculation! Let's say
MI5 didn't do it. I much prefer to think that. However, in that case it is even worse. In that case, Diana's death was
directly caused by the Queen, because the Queen alone had the power to leave Diana's status royal after the divorce.
Yet she wrote new rules to cover the situation and any future situations like it, so that a divorced person who was
HRH through marriage alone would lose the H.R.H. upon divorce. That rule did not exist before, and was written just
for Diana.This is fact, not speculation.
Diana would not have been in a car chase like that, without a seat belt on, without a phalanx of policemen around her,
in front and back of the car she was in, if she had remained H.R.H. The Princess of Wales. This is fact, not speculation.
Diana would not have died. Now, isn't it less painful to believe the shadowy MI5/MI6 assassinated her and Dodi to
prevent their "Loose Cannon" from doing anything else spontaneous ever again?
Otherwise you have nothing but mean spiritness and misunderstanding of her free spiritedness (which the world
began to laud so much only after her death) which caused her to live a reckless, non-royal lifestyle. Anyway, whether
it was a direct assassination or directly caused by her treatment at the hands of the monarch, she is dead because she
married into that family, therefore her death was in the cards at the wedding and the entire story is so tragic that I
don't see how anyone can even enjoy looking at their royal souvenirs anymore. I cannot.
In the matter of collectibles, a separate subject:In death she is even more of a moneymaker for free enterprise than
she was during her life. Stamps are coming out (though delayed currently by Earl Spencer as he felt it was too soon);
they will be hoarded and scalped. Whether or not the palace licenses her image, it will be used to cash in on her death."
Commemorative" magazines are already lining the supermarket shelves; in one of them I counted 42 reversed
pictures. A reversed picture is an obvious sign of a publication being carelessly rushed into print to cash in, not to pay
tribute. Reversed pictures are not even flattering.
One of the people who bought a dress of hers at the auction is cutting off the beads and selling them separately as
earrings for $1,000 each, in other words, destroying the dress for profit. Another woman is asking ten times what she
paid for the dress, the beautiful red one she wore in Argentina. A collector who claims he paid $500 for the Diana
bride doll wants $5,000 for it. I have the original advertisement for the doll, which cost $185 when it came out, and I
considered that too much to pay for a doll in the mid-80's and still do!The British papers accept that it was an accident
and there is no talk of assassination.
Only "loonies" are currently talking about that and not in a plausible way (i.e. if the person was a mental patient, that
means his ideas are ludicrous. However, that isn't logical. Mental patients also may believe in things that are possible).
No one wants to face the facts, no one writes about how she died. In death the TV plays her charitable visits to
hospitals over and over but no longer shows the swimsuit frolicking pictures with the son of the billionaire Egyptian
owner of Harrod's who was himself involved in a government scandal. No one talks about how much the British
papers despised her and criticized her ever since the Andrew Morton book came out in 1992. Diana read all these
papers; no one thought about that. Diana found some peace in her charitable works and her belief in using her
stardom for good purposes, but guess what?
For those who don't know because they didn't read about her in the last few years, her charitable works were mocked
and scorned. The royal family were shocked when she spent hours at the bedside of her friend who was dying of A.I.D.
S. They were shocked when she attended his funeral. A.I.D.S. was an unsuitable subject to them, and only recently has
it become a suitable subject thanks in part to her willingness to be associated with it as a cause. Her own ideas were
thought to be stupid by the royal family and the British press, and many members of the British government. None of
this is speculation; it is all in black and white for those who saved back issues of newspapers. Diana was despised in life
except by the common people and her friends and family, and those who despised her are now relieved. Her death will
never be pinned on those who hated her, but I am a voice in the wilderness saying that I know they killed her, that it
was neither Henri -Paul nor the paparazzi who killed her ! ( Since this precis was originally written Camilla is now
married to "H.R.H. Prince Charles of Wales"and officially titled " H.R.H.The Duchess of Cornwall " )
ANONYMOUS
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
(Date Posted:15/08/2006 00:32:23)
SARAJEVO, August 1997 Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Leaving behind speculation about a new romance, Princess Diana on
Friday took her crusade against land mines to Bosnia. Up to 70 people a month in Bosnia are injured by land mines
left over from the 3 1/2-year war that split the country. Efforts to remove the explosives are dragging.
The princess, trying to forge a role as a roving humanitarian ambassador, arrived in Sarajevo on Friday and, during a
three-day Bosnia visit, planned to visit victims of mines and meet rehabilitation specialists. In the afternoon, she
travelled in a vehicle of a Norwegian humanitarian organization to the northern Muslim town of Tuzla. There, the
princess spoke for 45 minutes with Franjo Kresic, a former soldier who lost both legs above the knees in a land mine
blast during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. The meeting was closed to the press. Kresic, who is 47 and married with two
daughters, is completely blind in one eye and mostly blind in the other. He is regarded as a hero in Tuzla for his efforts
to rebuild his life. With the help of municipal officials, he has been given a ground-floor apartment and opened a small
business.Diana emerged from his home, smiling and waving at neighborhood children who gathered to greet her.
While her trip was meant to focus worldwide attention on the issue, at home it only seemed to put the spotlight on a
minefield of a different sort her personal life. Britain's tabloids only fleetingly mentioned her Bosnia visit, being more
interested in reporting a new man in her life.
On the morning of her departure August 21st 1997, British tabloids were full of speculation about Diana's friendship
with divorced, polo-playing film producer Dodi Fayed, 41, and said the divorced princess had been seen entering his
luxury London apartment in London's Park Lane for a dinner date. The Daily Mail's front page headline read: "Diana
-- it's a real romance," while The Sun said: "Romantic meal in new love's London flat -- then farewell kiss before
Bosnia. Diana: I'm so in love," shouted the Mirror."
The term 'playboy' may have been invented for him," said Evening Standard correspondent Gervasae Web. "He is the
son of a very wealthy man." Dodi Fayed's father, Mohamed al - Fayed is an Egyptian tycoon who owns London's world
famous "Harrod's" department store. The father is embroiled in a political scandal and has been turned down
repeatedly in his bid for British citizenship."If I were the royal family I'd be pulling the remaining hair out by now,"
said Web. "From their point of view it is not the most suitable relationship."
Diana's 15-year marriage to British royal heir Prince Charles ended in divorce last year. Diana's on an anti-mine
crusade! The 36-year-old princess was invited to Bosnia on a "private visit" by the Washington-based Land mine
Survivors' Network to highlight the plight of land mine victims. Diana was not expected to visit Serb-controlled
territory, where anti-British feeling is running high following an operation by British special forces to arrest two Serbs
wanted for war crimes. One of the suspects was shot dead during the arrest.
It is the second time she has visited a former war zone on her anti-mine campaign. The first trip, to Angola in January
this year, brought home to many around the world the terrible toll inflicted on civilians by the millions of anti-
personnel mines left behind by war. As the princess toured another war zone, Britain's tabloid newspapers were in a
bloody battle of their own -- a high-priced tug of war over paparazzi photographs reportedly showing Diana and Dodi
Fayed cavorting in the Italian Riviera. Newspapers have already printed pictures of them on a boat enjoying a
summer holiday together in the Mediterranean sunshine.
###########################################################################################
20th September 2009 / Andew Morton
As the funeral cortège approached Buckingham Palace where the Queen and the rest of the Royal family had
gathered, I whispered to Jennings: “Watch Princess Margaret.” As Diana’s bedecked coffin passed the royal party, the
Queen and other members of the family bowed their heads in respect. Princess Margaret remained upright and
upstanding, looking like she would rather be somewhere else.
It was a moment that somehow symbolised not only the estrangement between two former royal neighbours, but the
genuine distance that existed between Diana and the Royal family. So the confirmation in the weighty 1,059-page
official biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, by William Shawcross that the Queen’s younger sister
deliberately burnt correspondence between her mother and Diana comes as little surprise.
This was no bonfire of the inanities, the routine thank-you notes and other confetti of royal life, but intimate and
private letters that could have, it is assumed, damaged the Queen Mother and the Royal family. “No doubt Princess
Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family,” says Shawcross as he discussed
his 5lb door stopper. “It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical point of view.”
But let’s weigh the evidence more carefully. Her actions took place in 1993, months after the formal separation
between the Prince and Princess and the publication of my book, Diana, Her True Story, which first revealed Diana’s
unhappiness inside the Royal family. At that time, Margaret’s relations with the occupant of apartment eight and nine
Kensington Palace were cool but still cordial. After the Wales’s separation, she wrote to Prince Charles and informed
him that she was going to continue the association with his estranged wife.
They occasionally went to the theatre together and sometimes travelled to royal engagements in the same car. She
even derived a frisson of vicarious enjoyment watching the Princess’s clumsy antics when she smuggled a male friend
into the back door of her apartment after releasing him from the car boot where he had been hiding. While Princess
Margaret was irritated that her courtyard space was being used by Diana’s car, her displeasure did not stop her
peering round the double doors she kept open to try to identify Diana’s secret visitor.
For her part, Diana spoke fondly of the occupant of 1A Clock Court. “I’ve always adored Margo, as I call her,” she said
in one of the half dozen or so tape-recorded interviews she gave for my “unofficial official” biography. “I love her to
bits and she’s been wonderful to me from day one.”
So while Shawcross and others may surmise that Princess Margaret was protecting her mother – which may well be
the case – she could also, at that time, have been mindful of Diana’s future embarrassment. She was, after all,
expected to outlive them all.
The ice only truly entered her soul after Diana made her infamous appearance on the BBC flagship programme,
Panorama, in November 1995, when she admitted her own adultery and skewered Prince Charles with the silky
sentence: “There were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
From that day on, Princess Margaret wanted nothing more to do with her, sending Diana what she later described as a
“wounding and excoriating” letter regarding her behaviour. In her eyes, she had exceeded the bounds of propriety in
agreeing to talk so publicly about her marriage. While she and the rest of the Royal family had chosen, as is their
wont, to turn a blind eye to Diana’s suspected, but unproven, collaboration with my book, her candid TV interview
was seen as both shocking and unforgivable.
Princess Margaret turned against her “neighbour from hell” so vehemently that she would flip over the cover of any
magazine in her apartment that featured Diana on the front. There was no thaw even in death, the Princess apparently
arguing that Diana should not be allowed to lie in the royal chapel or have a royal funeral. Hence her flint-eyed
response to Diana’s funeral cortège.
So what do the ashes of those lost Diana letters to the Queen Mother contain? As reckless as Diana was, she always
reined in her remarks concerning the Queen and the Queen Mother. It is ironic that during the television interview
that proved to be her royal nemesis, only her response concerning the Queen Mother was cut from the hour-long
chat. She would not be drawn into answering Martin Bashir’s questions about the Queen Mother’s role in orchestrating
the marriage and the help, or lack of it, she gave when Diana first entered the Royal family. Hesitant about attacking,
however obliquely, the supreme national treasure, Diana was opaque, merely saying that the Queen Mother had been
“very busy and did not have much time to help”.
Early on in her royal career she saw which way the wind was blowing from Clarence House, then the Queen Mother’s
London home. The dreams that she may have cherished, consciously or unconsciously, of the Queen Mother being
some kind of maternal guardian, guiding, nurturing and nourishing her, were soon dashed. Shortly before her
wedding, she spoke to the Queen Mother about her suspicions concerning Camilla Parker Bowles. The elderly
Windsor matriarch suggested that she should not be such a “silly girl”, effectively telling her to do her duty. Far from
feeling that she could confide in the Queen Mother, Diana was always wary. “I don’t really trust her,” she once
remarked.
Her attitude was perhaps unsurprising. There was, as they say, previous. The Queen Mother’s long-time companion
and lady-in-waiting was Lady Ruth Fermoy, Diana’s maternal grandmother, who testified in court against her own
daughter Frances Shand Kydd in the rancorous custody battle with Earl Spencer. By siding with Norfolk aristocracy
rather than her own flesh and blood, she changed Diana’s life forever as the judge gave the Earl charge of his four
children. History repeated itself at the time of Charles and Diana’s separation, this time her grandmother siding with
the Crown rather than the Spencer family.
A courtier to her elegant, piano-playing fingertips, Lady Ruth Fermoy personified, in the words of Diana’s private
secretary, “an attitude which was anathema to the Princess”. As Diana told me: “My mother and grandmother never
got on. They clashed violently. My grandmother tried to lacerate me in any way she could. She feeds the Royal family
with hideous comment about my mother running and leaving the children. Mummy’s come across very badly because
Grandmother has done a real hatchet job.”
During her marriage, Diana came to see Clarence House as the source of all negative comment about herself and her
mother, much of it emanating from her own grandmother. Before her wedding, Lady Fermoy had warned Diana about
the dangers of marrying into the Royal family – advice Diana later realised was given not for her own sake, but
because Lady Fermoy did not consider her an appropriate match for the future King.
When the marriage turned sour, it was her implacable opinion that her granddaughter should stay with Prince Charles
in order to spare the Royal family the embarrassment of a marital scandal. In this view, as in others, Lady Fermoy and
the Queen Mother were in lockstep. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, commented: “Ruth was
very distressed about Diana’s behaviour. She was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’s seen him grow up,
loved him like all the women at court do, and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.”
At the same time, the Queen Mother, unfavourably predisposed to Diana and her mother, exercised an enormous
influence over the Prince of Wales; it was a mutual adoration society from which Diana was effectively excluded.“The
Queen Mother drives a wedge between Diana and the others,” noted a friend. “As a result, she makes every excuse to
avoid her.”
Diana did, though, confront the Royal family through correspondence, as they all did and do, during the hectic if
increasingly isolated time following her separation in 1992. Among her correspondents was the Duke of Edinburgh
whose now-infamous letters at first enraged and later soothed her, the Prince cheerfully admitting his failings as a
“marriage counsellor”. There is a kind of benign perplexity in his notes, a sense that he and the rest of the Royal
family just didn’t get her, never would, but were willing to meet her half-way. Certainly for an emotional, needy young
woman, life in a family whose instinctive response to personal matters is silence or an averted gaze – “ostriching” as
they themselves call it – was difficult.
She saw herself as an outsider; they saw her as a problem, the phrase “cracked vessel” used to describe her
personality. As the Queen’s cousin Lady Kennard admitted in an officially sanctioned BBC documentary: “The Queen,
or anybody else, would never quite understand what Diana was about. She was very damaged – her background and
her childhood – and it is very difficult to know.”
While the Queen Mother placed “your devoir, your duty” above all else, leading a life based on obligation, discretion
and a decent gin and Dubonnet, Diana was of the school that placed the pursuit of happiness first. Unlike previous
generations, she was not prepared to sacrifice her life on the altar of monarchy. On the day of the funeral, this divide
was characterised as the “trembling lower lip” versus “the stiff upper lip”, an acknowledgement of this emotional sea
change.
So would the letters from Diana to the Queen Mother have in some way touched upon this philosophical divide?
Hmmm, I doubt it. Let me take a contrary view. Given the task of preserving her mother’s intellectual estate, Princess
Margaret was enough of a scholar to appreciate the historical importance of such an exchange, touching as it does on
the nature and values of monarchy. At a time when she still had a modicum of sympathy for Diana, I suspect that she
ordered the letters burnt because they dealt with incidents and people outside the purview of royal history, in fact,
the Spencer family.
Any exchange about her separation, her feelings about the Queen Mother and Prince Charles would inevitably have
involved reference to her grandmother, Lady Fermoy. The Queen Mother and Lady Fermoy were entwined in her
mind and probably in any letters. It is perhaps telling that this correspondence was destroyed in 1993, the year that
Lady Fermoy died. Shortly before she passed away, Diana, Princess of Wales visited her and finally made her peace.
Diana believed MI5 was persecuting her for years and trying to harm her. In her November " Panorama " 1995
interview she said she believed they leaked her phone call with James Gilbey for the purpose of doing her harm. In the
book Diana on the Edge (1996) she is quoted as saying they would one day kill her.
There is no doubt in my mind that the secret service would do whatever it took to "preserve" the monarchy and there
is no doubt that the Queen would not have tolerated a marriage between Diana and Dodi Fayed. It is knownthat the
royal family were glad to be rid of Diana. Princess Margaret was quoted as saying so.
It is known that Diana wanted more children, and not with Charles. Diana was divorced, she had not wanted the
divorce, but it was forced on her. It is known she still loved Charles and would have taken him back had he apologized
for his affair with Camilla Parker -Bowles, and turned over a new leaf. None of these things are speculation! Let's say
MI5 didn't do it. I much prefer to think that. However, in that case it is even worse. In that case, Diana's death was
directly caused by the Queen, because the Queen alone had the power to leave Diana's status royal after the divorce.
Yet she wrote new rules to cover the situation and any future situations like it, so that a divorced person who was
HRH through marriage alone would lose the H.R.H. upon divorce. That rule did not exist before, and was written just
for Diana.This is fact, not speculation.
Diana would not have been in a car chase like that, without a seat belt on, without a phalanx of policemen around her,
in front and back of the car she was in, if she had remained H.R.H. The Princess of Wales. This is fact, not speculation.
Diana would not have died. Now, isn't it less painful to believe the shadowy MI5/MI6 assassinated her and Dodi to
prevent their "Loose Cannon" from doing anything else spontaneous ever again?
Otherwise you have nothing but mean spiritness and misunderstanding of her free spiritedness (which the world
began to laud so much only after her death) which caused her to live a reckless, non-royal lifestyle. Anyway, whether
it was a direct assassination or directly caused by her treatment at the hands of the monarch, she is dead because she
married into that family, therefore her death was in the cards at the wedding and the entire story is so tragic that I
don't see how anyone can even enjoy looking at their royal souvenirs anymore. I cannot.
In the matter of collectibles, a separate subject:In death she is even more of a moneymaker for free enterprise than
she was during her life. Stamps are coming out (though delayed currently by Earl Spencer as he felt it was too soon);
they will be hoarded and scalped. Whether or not the palace licenses her image, it will be used to cash in on her death."
Commemorative" magazines are already lining the supermarket shelves; in one of them I counted 42 reversed
pictures. A reversed picture is an obvious sign of a publication being carelessly rushed into print to cash in, not to pay
tribute. Reversed pictures are not even flattering.
One of the people who bought a dress of hers at the auction is cutting off the beads and selling them separately as
earrings for $1,000 each, in other words, destroying the dress for profit. Another woman is asking ten times what she
paid for the dress, the beautiful red one she wore in Argentina. A collector who claims he paid $500 for the Diana
bride doll wants $5,000 for it. I have the original advertisement for the doll, which cost $185 when it came out, and I
considered that too much to pay for a doll in the mid-80's and still do!The British papers accept that it was an accident
and there is no talk of assassination.
Only "loonies" are currently talking about that and not in a plausible way (i.e. if the person was a mental patient, that
means his ideas are ludicrous. However, that isn't logical. Mental patients also may believe in things that are possible).
No one wants to face the facts, no one writes about how she died. In death the TV plays her charitable visits to
hospitals over and over but no longer shows the swimsuit frolicking pictures with the son of the billionaire Egyptian
owner of Harrod's who was himself involved in a government scandal. No one talks about how much the British
papers despised her and criticized her ever since the Andrew Morton book came out in 1992. Diana read all these
papers; no one thought about that. Diana found some peace in her charitable works and her belief in using her
stardom for good purposes, but guess what?
For those who don't know because they didn't read about her in the last few years, her charitable works were mocked
and scorned. The royal family were shocked when she spent hours at the bedside of her friend who was dying of A.I.D.
S. They were shocked when she attended his funeral. A.I.D.S. was an unsuitable subject to them, and only recently has
it become a suitable subject thanks in part to her willingness to be associated with it as a cause. Her own ideas were
thought to be stupid by the royal family and the British press, and many members of the British government. None of
this is speculation; it is all in black and white for those who saved back issues of newspapers. Diana was despised in life
except by the common people and her friends and family, and those who despised her are now relieved. Her death will
never be pinned on those who hated her, but I am a voice in the wilderness saying that I know they killed her, that it
was neither Henri -Paul nor the paparazzi who killed her ! ( Since this precis was originally written Camilla is now
married to "H.R.H. Prince Charles of Wales"and officially titled " H.R.H.The Duchess of Cornwall " )
ANONYMOUS
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
(Date Posted:15/08/2006 00:32:23)
SARAJEVO, August 1997 Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Leaving behind speculation about a new romance, Princess Diana on
Friday took her crusade against land mines to Bosnia. Up to 70 people a month in Bosnia are injured by land mines
left over from the 3 1/2-year war that split the country. Efforts to remove the explosives are dragging.
The princess, trying to forge a role as a roving humanitarian ambassador, arrived in Sarajevo on Friday and, during a
three-day Bosnia visit, planned to visit victims of mines and meet rehabilitation specialists. In the afternoon, she
travelled in a vehicle of a Norwegian humanitarian organization to the northern Muslim town of Tuzla. There, the
princess spoke for 45 minutes with Franjo Kresic, a former soldier who lost both legs above the knees in a land mine
blast during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. The meeting was closed to the press. Kresic, who is 47 and married with two
daughters, is completely blind in one eye and mostly blind in the other. He is regarded as a hero in Tuzla for his efforts
to rebuild his life. With the help of municipal officials, he has been given a ground-floor apartment and opened a small
business.Diana emerged from his home, smiling and waving at neighborhood children who gathered to greet her.
While her trip was meant to focus worldwide attention on the issue, at home it only seemed to put the spotlight on a
minefield of a different sort her personal life. Britain's tabloids only fleetingly mentioned her Bosnia visit, being more
interested in reporting a new man in her life.
On the morning of her departure August 21st 1997, British tabloids were full of speculation about Diana's friendship
with divorced, polo-playing film producer Dodi Fayed, 41, and said the divorced princess had been seen entering his
luxury London apartment in London's Park Lane for a dinner date. The Daily Mail's front page headline read: "Diana
-- it's a real romance," while The Sun said: "Romantic meal in new love's London flat -- then farewell kiss before
Bosnia. Diana: I'm so in love," shouted the Mirror."
The term 'playboy' may have been invented for him," said Evening Standard correspondent Gervasae Web. "He is the
son of a very wealthy man." Dodi Fayed's father, Mohamed al - Fayed is an Egyptian tycoon who owns London's world
famous "Harrod's" department store. The father is embroiled in a political scandal and has been turned down
repeatedly in his bid for British citizenship."If I were the royal family I'd be pulling the remaining hair out by now,"
said Web. "From their point of view it is not the most suitable relationship."
Diana's 15-year marriage to British royal heir Prince Charles ended in divorce last year. Diana's on an anti-mine
crusade! The 36-year-old princess was invited to Bosnia on a "private visit" by the Washington-based Land mine
Survivors' Network to highlight the plight of land mine victims. Diana was not expected to visit Serb-controlled
territory, where anti-British feeling is running high following an operation by British special forces to arrest two Serbs
wanted for war crimes. One of the suspects was shot dead during the arrest.
It is the second time she has visited a former war zone on her anti-mine campaign. The first trip, to Angola in January
this year, brought home to many around the world the terrible toll inflicted on civilians by the millions of anti-
personnel mines left behind by war. As the princess toured another war zone, Britain's tabloid newspapers were in a
bloody battle of their own -- a high-priced tug of war over paparazzi photographs reportedly showing Diana and Dodi
Fayed cavorting in the Italian Riviera. Newspapers have already printed pictures of them on a boat enjoying a
summer holiday together in the Mediterranean sunshine.
###########################################################################################
20th September 2009 / Andew Morton
As the funeral cortège approached Buckingham Palace where the Queen and the rest of the Royal family had
gathered, I whispered to Jennings: “Watch Princess Margaret.” As Diana’s bedecked coffin passed the royal party, the
Queen and other members of the family bowed their heads in respect. Princess Margaret remained upright and
upstanding, looking like she would rather be somewhere else.
It was a moment that somehow symbolised not only the estrangement between two former royal neighbours, but the
genuine distance that existed between Diana and the Royal family. So the confirmation in the weighty 1,059-page
official biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, by William Shawcross that the Queen’s younger sister
deliberately burnt correspondence between her mother and Diana comes as little surprise.
This was no bonfire of the inanities, the routine thank-you notes and other confetti of royal life, but intimate and
private letters that could have, it is assumed, damaged the Queen Mother and the Royal family. “No doubt Princess
Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family,” says Shawcross as he discussed
his 5lb door stopper. “It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical point of view.”
But let’s weigh the evidence more carefully. Her actions took place in 1993, months after the formal separation
between the Prince and Princess and the publication of my book, Diana, Her True Story, which first revealed Diana’s
unhappiness inside the Royal family. At that time, Margaret’s relations with the occupant of apartment eight and nine
Kensington Palace were cool but still cordial. After the Wales’s separation, she wrote to Prince Charles and informed
him that she was going to continue the association with his estranged wife.
They occasionally went to the theatre together and sometimes travelled to royal engagements in the same car. She
even derived a frisson of vicarious enjoyment watching the Princess’s clumsy antics when she smuggled a male friend
into the back door of her apartment after releasing him from the car boot where he had been hiding. While Princess
Margaret was irritated that her courtyard space was being used by Diana’s car, her displeasure did not stop her
peering round the double doors she kept open to try to identify Diana’s secret visitor.
For her part, Diana spoke fondly of the occupant of 1A Clock Court. “I’ve always adored Margo, as I call her,” she said
in one of the half dozen or so tape-recorded interviews she gave for my “unofficial official” biography. “I love her to
bits and she’s been wonderful to me from day one.”
So while Shawcross and others may surmise that Princess Margaret was protecting her mother – which may well be
the case – she could also, at that time, have been mindful of Diana’s future embarrassment. She was, after all,
expected to outlive them all.
The ice only truly entered her soul after Diana made her infamous appearance on the BBC flagship programme,
Panorama, in November 1995, when she admitted her own adultery and skewered Prince Charles with the silky
sentence: “There were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
From that day on, Princess Margaret wanted nothing more to do with her, sending Diana what she later described as a
“wounding and excoriating” letter regarding her behaviour. In her eyes, she had exceeded the bounds of propriety in
agreeing to talk so publicly about her marriage. While she and the rest of the Royal family had chosen, as is their
wont, to turn a blind eye to Diana’s suspected, but unproven, collaboration with my book, her candid TV interview
was seen as both shocking and unforgivable.
Princess Margaret turned against her “neighbour from hell” so vehemently that she would flip over the cover of any
magazine in her apartment that featured Diana on the front. There was no thaw even in death, the Princess apparently
arguing that Diana should not be allowed to lie in the royal chapel or have a royal funeral. Hence her flint-eyed
response to Diana’s funeral cortège.
So what do the ashes of those lost Diana letters to the Queen Mother contain? As reckless as Diana was, she always
reined in her remarks concerning the Queen and the Queen Mother. It is ironic that during the television interview
that proved to be her royal nemesis, only her response concerning the Queen Mother was cut from the hour-long
chat. She would not be drawn into answering Martin Bashir’s questions about the Queen Mother’s role in orchestrating
the marriage and the help, or lack of it, she gave when Diana first entered the Royal family. Hesitant about attacking,
however obliquely, the supreme national treasure, Diana was opaque, merely saying that the Queen Mother had been
“very busy and did not have much time to help”.
Early on in her royal career she saw which way the wind was blowing from Clarence House, then the Queen Mother’s
London home. The dreams that she may have cherished, consciously or unconsciously, of the Queen Mother being
some kind of maternal guardian, guiding, nurturing and nourishing her, were soon dashed. Shortly before her
wedding, she spoke to the Queen Mother about her suspicions concerning Camilla Parker Bowles. The elderly
Windsor matriarch suggested that she should not be such a “silly girl”, effectively telling her to do her duty. Far from
feeling that she could confide in the Queen Mother, Diana was always wary. “I don’t really trust her,” she once
remarked.
Her attitude was perhaps unsurprising. There was, as they say, previous. The Queen Mother’s long-time companion
and lady-in-waiting was Lady Ruth Fermoy, Diana’s maternal grandmother, who testified in court against her own
daughter Frances Shand Kydd in the rancorous custody battle with Earl Spencer. By siding with Norfolk aristocracy
rather than her own flesh and blood, she changed Diana’s life forever as the judge gave the Earl charge of his four
children. History repeated itself at the time of Charles and Diana’s separation, this time her grandmother siding with
the Crown rather than the Spencer family.
A courtier to her elegant, piano-playing fingertips, Lady Ruth Fermoy personified, in the words of Diana’s private
secretary, “an attitude which was anathema to the Princess”. As Diana told me: “My mother and grandmother never
got on. They clashed violently. My grandmother tried to lacerate me in any way she could. She feeds the Royal family
with hideous comment about my mother running and leaving the children. Mummy’s come across very badly because
Grandmother has done a real hatchet job.”
During her marriage, Diana came to see Clarence House as the source of all negative comment about herself and her
mother, much of it emanating from her own grandmother. Before her wedding, Lady Fermoy had warned Diana about
the dangers of marrying into the Royal family – advice Diana later realised was given not for her own sake, but
because Lady Fermoy did not consider her an appropriate match for the future King.
When the marriage turned sour, it was her implacable opinion that her granddaughter should stay with Prince Charles
in order to spare the Royal family the embarrassment of a marital scandal. In this view, as in others, Lady Fermoy and
the Queen Mother were in lockstep. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, commented: “Ruth was
very distressed about Diana’s behaviour. She was totally and wholly a Charles person, because she’s seen him grow up,
loved him like all the women at court do, and regarded Diana as an actress, a schemer.”
At the same time, the Queen Mother, unfavourably predisposed to Diana and her mother, exercised an enormous
influence over the Prince of Wales; it was a mutual adoration society from which Diana was effectively excluded.“The
Queen Mother drives a wedge between Diana and the others,” noted a friend. “As a result, she makes every excuse to
avoid her.”
Diana did, though, confront the Royal family through correspondence, as they all did and do, during the hectic if
increasingly isolated time following her separation in 1992. Among her correspondents was the Duke of Edinburgh
whose now-infamous letters at first enraged and later soothed her, the Prince cheerfully admitting his failings as a
“marriage counsellor”. There is a kind of benign perplexity in his notes, a sense that he and the rest of the Royal
family just didn’t get her, never would, but were willing to meet her half-way. Certainly for an emotional, needy young
woman, life in a family whose instinctive response to personal matters is silence or an averted gaze – “ostriching” as
they themselves call it – was difficult.
She saw herself as an outsider; they saw her as a problem, the phrase “cracked vessel” used to describe her
personality. As the Queen’s cousin Lady Kennard admitted in an officially sanctioned BBC documentary: “The Queen,
or anybody else, would never quite understand what Diana was about. She was very damaged – her background and
her childhood – and it is very difficult to know.”
While the Queen Mother placed “your devoir, your duty” above all else, leading a life based on obligation, discretion
and a decent gin and Dubonnet, Diana was of the school that placed the pursuit of happiness first. Unlike previous
generations, she was not prepared to sacrifice her life on the altar of monarchy. On the day of the funeral, this divide
was characterised as the “trembling lower lip” versus “the stiff upper lip”, an acknowledgement of this emotional sea
change.
So would the letters from Diana to the Queen Mother have in some way touched upon this philosophical divide?
Hmmm, I doubt it. Let me take a contrary view. Given the task of preserving her mother’s intellectual estate, Princess
Margaret was enough of a scholar to appreciate the historical importance of such an exchange, touching as it does on
the nature and values of monarchy. At a time when she still had a modicum of sympathy for Diana, I suspect that she
ordered the letters burnt because they dealt with incidents and people outside the purview of royal history, in fact,
the Spencer family.
Any exchange about her separation, her feelings about the Queen Mother and Prince Charles would inevitably have
involved reference to her grandmother, Lady Fermoy. The Queen Mother and Lady Fermoy were entwined in her
mind and probably in any letters. It is perhaps telling that this correspondence was destroyed in 1993, the year that
Lady Fermoy died. Shortly before she passed away, Diana, Princess of Wales visited her and finally made her peace.
