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where he was host to a party including two European Commissioners, and then
travelled overnight to Yorkshire for an official visit with his European guests. ‘What
kind of dad are you?’ asked the Sun. While Diana made a point of emphasizing her love
for her children in public as well as in private, Charles refused to perform for the
cameras, with predictable results. There had been more bad publicity earlier in the year
when Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, had died suddenly on 29 March while the couple
were for once on holiday together at Lech in Austria with their sons. Diana at first
refused to travel with her husband, then relented as far as the flight to London was
concerned, but was adamant that she would not travel to the funeral in
Northamptonshire with him. She went by car; he travelled by helicopter after his
anxious staff had hurriedly reinstated a cancelled meeting for him to provide a plausible
excuse for their separate journeys. The occasion was another publicity coup for Diana,
pictured grieving and apart from her husband. Reporters focused on her wreath: ‘I miss
you dreadfully, darling Daddy, but will love you forever.’ At the service she made a
public gesture of reconciliation, reaching out for her stepmother’s arm. According to
Countess Spencer’s personal assistant, the whole thing was a sham. ‘She hardly ever saw
him. She hadn’t been to Althorp since her brother’s wedding in 1989 and she made very
little effort to see him in London.’ It was no secret that the Spencer children hated ‘Acid’
Raine as they called her, blaming her for the sale of treasures from Althorp and for
vulgarizing the Spencer name and royal connections for commercial ends (even to the
extent of selling replicas of Diana’s wedding dress to the Japanese). Yet in the mid-
1990s Diana was indeed reconciled with her stepmother and, after her separation from
Charles, could be seen lunching with Raine, now Comtesse de Chambrun, at Claridge’s.
In February 1992 the cruellest images of all hinted at what the world was soon to be
told in detail, that the ‘fairy-tale marriage’ was definitely over. The pictures of a pensive
Diana seated alone in front of the Taj Mahal, the monument erected by the grieving
Shah Jehan to his beloved wife, sent the message loud and clear. It was followed up by
the famous ‘kiss that wasn’t’, when Charles after a polo match went to kiss his wife’s
cheek and Diana, with flawless timing, turned her head away at the last moment so that
he was left looking a fool leaning in the direction of her earring. Four months later,
with the serialization of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana: Her True Story, on 7 June in the
Sunday Times, the world learned the truth, albeit a somewhat slanted version of it. The
book presented Diana as a victim struggling to free herself from the crushing weight of
an ultra-traditional family and an uncaring, adulterous husband. It paraded the
difficulties she had suffered: the bulimia, the depression, the suicide attempts.
The trouble about the book from the Palace point of view was that the essential
presentation of Diana as a virgin sacrifice offered up on the altar of the dynasty was
near enough to the truth to be believable. The real problem which it presented was that
it could not be dismissed as a journalistic fabrication. Diana had authorized her closest
friends to speak to Andrew Morton and when, on the eve of publication of the
serialization, Elizabeth’s Assistant Private Secretary, Robin Janvrin, and Richard Aylard
prepared a disclaimer for Diana, she refused to sign it. Andrew Knight, a director of