Shadows of a Princess. Patrick Jephson

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FOUR

       DOUBLE UP

      Once I had achieved a shaky confidence in organizing the Princess’s UK engagements, I could look forward to the challenge of planning her overseas visits. I remembered pictures I had seen of the Princess looking cool and compassionate in a dozen exotic foreign locations. This, I thought, would be where my new job started to become a bit more glamorous. The reality, of course, was that it took a lot of very unglamorous hard work to reach the media-friendly results that she – and her public – expected.

      I have always taken undue pleasure even from aimless travel, and to be offered transport and accommodation on such a royal scale and be paid to indulge my puerile desire seemed the best part of the job description. During my early days at St James’s I heard an endless travelogue of tour stories, some of dizzying tallness. As I was to learn, even in exaggerated form these tales struggled to convey the reality of transporting our royal circus to foreign countries. Not to be outdone, over the years I developed my own improbable repertoire of traveller’s yarns from which, if nothing else, my audiences learned that the overseas tour encapsulated in concentrated form all the best and worst aspects of life with the Waleses.

      Tours were a big challenge for our royal employers too. The task of representing the country overseas as a kind of super-ambassador makes great demands on their reserves of diplomacy, tact, confidence and patience – not to mention the royal sense of humour, digestion and general physical and mental constitution. There are therefore big demands for both external comforts and internal strength. These must somehow be supplied from the foreign surroundings in which duty has deposited the royal traveller and from internal resources, reinforced by years of heredity and training. However gilded the cage, though, no guest palace provides the familiar, reassuring touches of home.

      To help achieve the external comforts, the Waleses usually travelled with a surprisingly large entourage. On one of my first tours the party totalled 26. As well as more senior officials such as private secretaries and press secretaries, the cast included a doctor, four policemen, three secretaries, a butler, a valet, an assistant valet, a dresser, an assistant dresser, two chefs and a hairdresser.

      Not surprisingly, we also needed a baggage master to look after the small mountain of luggage. In order to achieve the desired result of making the Prince and Princess feel that their temporary accommodation was a real ‘home from home’, an extraordinary amount of personal kit had to be carried with us. Everything from music equipment to favourite organic foods had their special containers – and came high on the list of priorities.

      In-flight meals were seldom straightforward either. In later years when travelling on solo tours, the Princess was happy enough to choose from standard airline menus. This also applied to journeys with the Queen’s Flight, who usually found reliable airline caterers whatever the exotic destination. Before the separation, however, the Princess took a leaf out of her husband’s rather more fastidious book, and while their accompanying staff demolished the output of the British Airways first-class flight kitchen, our employers would pick at home-grown organic concoctions in Tupperware boxes like pensioners on an outing. They were a lot slimmer and fitter than most of us, of course, but it still looked like a pretty joyless experience.

      Meanwhile, host government officials, Embassy staff and senior members of the Wales household (the collective term for private secretaries and other top management) laboured to produce a programme befitting the stature of the visitors. The planes, boats, trains and cars – as well as the cameras, crowds, guards of honour and banquets – combined to create the overall theatrical effect without which no royal visit can be really royal. Adjusted for scale, the same principles apply equally to a visit to a crèche as much as to a continent. Add the scrutiny of the press and the unpredictability of foreign hosts’ resources, and it is little wonder that touring is seen as one of the greatest tests royal service can provide. Little wonder either that it demands the full set of royal stage props to achieve its full effect.

      Every month or so a list of forthcoming engagements was circulated in the office. For many excellent reasons it was treated as a confidential document, though whether to thwart terrorists or merely to baffle the Queen’s Flight was never fully explained. Its colloquial name was Mole News, since it was assumed that its list of dates and places would form the leaker’s basic fare. By the time of my arrival, however, the leaking was beginning to emanate from more exalted sources such as royal ‘friends’ and other thinly disguised mouthpieces for the Prince and Princess themselves. Eventually Mole News practically lost its original innocent purpose as a simple planning aid and became instead just another piece on the board game of misinformation in the intelligence war between them. As they drew up their diaries with more and more of an eye to the media impact of their activities, information on each other’s future movements became vital in the popularity contest that they were both beginning to wage.

      Soon after my arrival I had scanned this programme eagerly, looking for my first chance of an overseas trip. Disappointingly it seemed that I would have to wait almost a year before I could join the veterans whose briefcases sported the tour labels which I so coveted. I was scheduled to accompany Their Royal Highnesses on a tour of the Gulf States in March 1989. At least, I thought, it was a part of the world I knew slightly and liked a lot. Also it would be hot and I would at last have an excuse to wear that expensive tropical uniform – the preferred choice of most officers who had seen Top Gun.

      In Mole News joint engagements were indicated with an asterisk. What had not yet been widely noticed, however, was that asterisks were becoming a rarity. In fact, by the late eighties joint appearances at home were already mostly confined to set-piece events such as the Queen’s Birthday Parade, the Garter Ceremony, Ascot and the staff Christmas lunch. The same trend of disappearing asterisks was visible in the overseas programme. Solo expeditions had always been a feature of royal overseas work, but the Waleses were noticeably beginning to make more and more of their overseas trips alone. This was bad for publicity – it just fuelled rumours about the state of the marriage – but for staff in the firing line it was also a bit of a relief. The coup de grâce was finally administered to joint tours by the Korea trip of November 1992, but the signs of a terminal divergence of interest were already perceptible in January 1989 when I joined the Gulf recce party at Heathrow.

      Just as joint engagements gave the Prince and Princess the chance to work together (however reluctantly), so they drew their respective staffs into cautious co-operation. When they were on form, we saw our employers put on a double act which carried the world before it. For our part, we enjoyed the opportunity to put aside the growing estrangements of the office and reclassify our differences as merely interesting variations of technique.

      The Prince’s team provided the lead. Under the direction of the private secretary or his deputy, His Royal Highness’s press secretary and senior personal protection officer (PPO) were joined by either his own or his wife’s equerry, depending on whose turn it was to swap the pressures of the St James’s office for the pressures of its temporary foreign equivalent. On the tour itself this would mean that I would primarily be in attendance on the Prince, particularly if any of the engagements called for military uniform to be worn. The Princess would take a lady-in-waiting and forgo the services of her equerry unless he could negotiate his absence from the Prince’s entourage, a loss which His Royal Highness bore with increasing fortitude as time passed.

      The gloss on my picture of royal tours soon began to look pretty patchy. I would be junior boy on the recce team – the private secretary’s scribe, memory and general bag-carrier. On the tour I would also be responsible for transport, accommodation, the travelling office and a million undefined administrative details. The horrifying truth slowly dawned that I would take the rap СКАЧАТЬ