Charles: Victim or villain?. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ likely to be, she laughed when he said, ‘Will you marry me?’ But was not slow to reply, ‘Yeah, okay.’

      Then she laughed some more. He was thrilled.

      ‘You do realise that one day you will be Queen,’ he said.

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I love you so much, I love you so much.’

      According to Diana, he then coined that most memorable phrase, ‘Whatever love is’, and ran upstairs to telephone his mother with the news.

      Diana rushed back home to tell her flatmates, and they screamed and howled and went for a drive around London with their secret. Meanwhile, the Prince rang a few of his closest confidants to let them know how he had got on, one of whom was Camilla Parker Bowles. Not because she was his lover – that had ended when he started to fall for Diana’s charms – but because she was his best friend, as she is today. She had played a key role in helping and advising Charles in his relationship with Diana. She and Andrew had been at Balmoral in September, and he had taken Diana to spend weekends at their house in Wiltshire several times. They had been racing at Ludlow together from there, when Charles was riding his racehorse, Allibar; he had first taken Diana to see Highgrove while staying with the Parker Bowles; and he and Andrew had been hunting together on a couple of occasions, leaving Diana and Camilla together at home. Camilla had known he was planning to propose to Diana that day and, like so many others, was eager to have a progress report.

      The Prince had also told Michael Colborne, secretary to the Prince of Wales’s office, about his marriage plans the day after the proposal. He had come into Colborne’s office in Buckingham Palace, sat down in an armchair and told Michael to shut the door.

      ‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said. ‘Other than Her Majesty, and Papa and a few others, nobody knows. This is between you and me. I’ve asked Lady Diana to marry me, and she said yes straight away, but I’ve asked her to think about it and she’s going to Australia to stay with the Shand Kydds. We’ve got a very busy period in front of us and we’ve got a tour coming up …’

      Michael was thunderstruck. ‘Congratulations, sir,’ he said.

      The Prince smiled. ‘Well, we’ll see what happens.’

      Michael Colborne knew the Prince better than most, and was to play an important part in Diana’s early years at court. The two men had met aboard HMS Norfolk when the Prince was a sub-lieutenant and Colborne a non-commissioned officer, and he was one of the few people who were not afraid to tell the Prince what he thought. They struck up a good friendship and, when the Prince left the Navy and needed to set up an office in London, he invited Colborne to join it. Officially in charge of his financial affairs, he became the Prince’s right-hand man, and remained with him for ten years, providing many valuable lessons about what life was like beyond the ocean of privilege in which the Prince swam. He was the only member of his staff at the time who was not in the public school, officer training college or Foreign Office mould, and he viewed all those who were with a healthy disdain. The Prince liked his straightforward approach. In offering Colborne the job he had made him promise that he would never change. ‘If you don’t agree with something, you say so,’ he had said, and over the years Michael had spoken his mind. Charles didn’t always like what he heard and became extremely angry on several memorable occasions, but it was an exceptionally warm relationship nonetheless.

      That same day, Diana went to Australia for a holiday with her mother and stepfather, Peter Shand Kydd. As Charles put it, ‘to think if it was all going to be too awful’. For three weeks they hid from the press and kept Diana’s whereabouts such a guarded secret that even the Prince of Wales had difficulty getting through to her when he telephoned.

      ‘I rang up on one occasion,’ he said in a television interview after the engagement had been announced, ‘and I said, “Can I speak?” And they said, “No, we’re not taking any calls.” So I said, “It’s the Prince of Wales speaking.” “How do I know it’s the Prince of Wales?” was the reply. I said, “You don’t. But I am,” in a rage. And eventually … I mean, I got the number because they were staying somewhere else. They said the phones were tapped or something – which I found highly unlikely …’

      When Diana arrived back in London the Prince told Michael Colborne that he wanted the biggest, smelliest bunch of flowers possible delivered to Diana’s flat, and gave him a hand-written note to be delivered with the flowers. Knowing that her flat would be under siege, Colborne telephoned ahead to warn Diana that some flowers were on their way and a very sleepy voice answered the phone. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’ll look out for them.’

      Sergeant Ron Lewis was duly dispatched to deliver the flowers and note to Coleherne Court that morning, but Diana’s memory of the incident was sadly different from the facts. Ten years later she said, ‘I came back from Australia, someone knocks on my 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.’

      Michael didn’t meet Diana until shortly after she returned from Australia, when the Prince asked him to look after her for the afternoon. She had been to watch Charles ride out his racehorse, Allibar, along the gallops at Lamborne early one morning. He was in training for a race at Chepstow the following weekend, and having completed seven furlongs, they were walking quietly home for breakfast, when Allibar had suddenly collapsed with a massive heart attack and died in his arms. The Prince refused to leave the horse until a vet arrived, and was so distraught that he couldn’t drive. It was his detective, unusually, who drove them back to Highgrove.

      It was obvious as soon as the car arrived back at the house that something was wrong, and Diana went into the kitchen with Michael to explain what had happened, while the Prince went off to be alone for a moment. But the treadmill of his life pauses for neither courtship nor grief. That afternoon, a helicopter arrived at two o’clock sharp to take him to an engagement in Swansea. Meanwhile Diana and Michael Colborne went into the drawing room for the first of many lengthy heart-to-hearts. Later, as they wandered around the garden together, Diana told him all about herself, her family, her parents’ divorce, her father’s illness and her stepmother. The relationship between them was cemented. He was struck by how young she was – she had puppy fat and quite ruddy cheeks – and how badly educated. He also realised how little discipline she had had in her life, and wondered if she had any idea what she was taking on. Twenty-seven years her senior, he felt like a father to her and became one of her closest friends in the Palace. They shared an office in the run-up to the wedding and he tried hard to help her understand and prepare her for what lay ahead, but knew it was going to be difficult.

      ‘Is it all right if I call you Michael, like His Royal Highness does?’ she asked, to which he said, ‘Of course.’

      ‘Will you call me “Diana”?’

      ‘No,’ said Colborne. ‘Certainly not. I appreciate what you’ve just said, but if it all works out you’re going to be the Princess of Wales and I’ll have to call you Ma’am then, so we might as well start now.’

      Two days later the engagement was officially announced and Diana was swept into the royal system. The idea was to rescue her from the media that had made her life so impossible. She had certainly found the attention extremely frightening at times and was pleased to be rescued. But the effect was to make her lonely and insecure. Buckingham Palace is not a home by any normal standards, and not even members of the Royal Family would describe it as such. Over 200 people work there, from the Lord Chamberlain to the telephone operators who man the switchboard. There was no alternative place to take her, but with hindsight, nobody – least of all her fiancé – had thought through the implications of removing a nineteen-year-old СКАЧАТЬ