Jeffrey Archer opens up on his unlikely friendship with Princess Diana

2022-09-25

‘I’ll always regret I didn’t ask her to supper… that she spent that night alone’: Jeffrey Archer opens up on his unlikely friendship with Princess Diana – insisting she would have found a way to reconcile William and Harry

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There are moments in life so seminal that we know history is being made as they pass. The glorious solemnity of the Queen’s funeral. The tragically premature death of Princess Diana. Even her divorce from Prince Charles, which paved the way for Camilla to become our Queen Consort: all of them epoch-making.

Today Jeffrey Archer — best-selling author, one-time politician and tireless charity auctioneer — is ruminating on them all, recalling the day he chaperoned a disconsolate Diana when she announced she was stepping back from public life a year after she separated from Charles.

It is not so much the recollection of her famous speech, calling for ‘time and space’, that day that brings a catch to his voice, as its aftermath: the crushing loneliness of the Princess who returned to a solitary supper at Kensington Palace after informing the nation that she would be scaling back her official engagements, a clear sign that she would never be Queen.

‘Later she told me that evening she’d watched TV on her own with a tray of food on her lap, and of course, had I known I’d have said, “Come and have supper with us.” I said to Mary (his wife), “I’ll always regret that I didn’t ask her; that she spent that night alone.”

‘And towards the end she’d just ring up and chat, which was very flattering of course. But the truth is, she was lost.’

Princess Diana with writer Jeffrey Archer, actor Omar Sharif and doctor Magdi Yacoub attending a charity dinner for the Harefield Heart Unit at Harrods, London, February 1996

Gospel singer Lavine Hudson, Jeffrey Archer and Harvey Goldsmith meet HRH Princess of Wales, Princess Diana at the Simple Truth Concert

Although Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare met the Queen — at official and charity events — their acquaintance was formal. But he became both confidante and friend to the late Princess.

He believes she would have been invited to Her Majesty’s funeral — after all, her close friend Sarah, Duchess of York, divorced from Prince Andrew in 1996, took her place in the Abbey behind the senior Royals for the service — and he speculates that Diana would have effected a reconciliation between her sons, Princes William and Harry.

‘Diana would have been absolutely heartbroken about the rift between the princes, but if anyone could have brought them together it would have been her. There was an inch of cunning about her. She would have found a way.

‘She’d have wanted to help; no doubt about that. And, of course, her greatest distress would have been that they weren’t friends.’

Like so many of us, Jeffrey was glued to the spectacle of the funeral — at his penthouse flat a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey — and he has views on all the Royal Family. Of Charles, he says: ‘The Queen is not an easy act to follow. But I think he’ll make a good King. He’s had a long time to prepare and the Queen was an ideal mentor.’

He is voluble on Prince Harry and his self-imposed exile, with wife Meghan, in LA: ‘I watched him walk into the Abbey and wondered, “Do you miss all this?”

‘I can’t see him and Meghan coming back to the UK as a couple,’ he says pointedly. ‘But I’d be surprised if he’d be happy to spend the next 60 years in California.’

Prince William, Prince of Wales, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Peter Phillips and King Charles III during the State Funeral of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey

Like so many of us, Jeffrey was glued to the spectacle of the funeral — at his penthouse flat a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey — and he has views on all the Royal Family

He is a huge fan of Camilla, the Queen Consort: ‘I’ve known her for years and she has a calmness and dignity about her. Jolly lucky for King Charles. He will need some advice and she is a wise person. He’s found the right wife — and I know because I have some experience in the matter.’

On cue Dame Mary Archer, 77, clickety-clacks across the vast acreage of their sitting room en route to chair a meeting of the Science Museum Group. She looks luminously ageless in a dog-tooth check suit and high heels.

‘She’s a remarkable woman. I’m in awe of her. As I always say, women are naturally superior to men,’ says Jeffrey, who has been married to her for 56 years. (They have two sons and five grandchildren.)

Jeffrey, 82, and Dame Mary, it emerges, are possibly the only couple to have declined an invitation from the Queen — in their case a weekend at Windsor. ‘It was 40 odd years ago and Mary had promised to address the Commonwealth Conference on solar energy, so when we were asked to go to Windsor that same weekend, Her Majesty took the view that Mary shouldn’t cancel the conference.

‘It was correct. She felt Mary should put duty first.’

But it is Jeffrey’s friendship with Princess Diana — affectionate, jokey, conspiratorial — that is uppermost in his mind today. It began in 1991 at a charity concert and she came, during the next six years, to rely on his counsel and entertaining company.

Of Charles, he says: ‘The Queen is not an easy act to follow. But I think he’ll make a good King. He’s had a long time to prepare and the Queen was an ideal mentor’

He draws on their special relationship, revealing details of it for the first time, in his latest novel.

Next In Line is the fifth in a series of crime thrillers featuring Detective Chief Inspector William Warwick and it has at its heart the endearing, vulnerable and often lonely figure of Princess Diana.

Mixing fiction with real events and set in 1988, the plot centres on the Royal Protection Command, entrusted with guarding the most famous family on earth.

‘What I want people to say when they read the book is, “He knew her,”’ he explains. ‘For me, that’s its strength.’

It was December 3, 1993 when he was entrusted by then Prime Minister John Major to be the Government representative to chaperone Diana when she publicly announced her withdrawal from public life as she and Charles prepared to divorce.

She had been booked to address a charity function, but the momentous personal news overshadowed the event and her speech was hurriedly re-written by Buckingham Palace. ‘John Major asked me to go with Diana to the event at the Hilton Hotel in London, where she’d been due to give a speech on the importance of getting children to wear helmets on bicycles.

‘But the whole event changed overnight with the announcement that she wanted to live a more private life and wanted time and space from the overwhelming attention following her separation from the Prince of Wales.

‘The PM said to me, “You’ll want to re-write her speech but you can’t. It’s all been approved.”

He is voluble on Prince Harry and his self-imposed exile, with wife Meghan, in LA: ‘I watched him walk into the Abbey and wondered, “Do you miss all this?”

‘She asked me if I’d like to see it first and I told her I wouldn’t; that I’d have my head chopped off if I changed a word. She delivered the speech and, although her voice cracked a little bit, she was remarkably calm and composed.

‘I decided the last thing she should do was hang about afterwards shaking everyone’s hand and listening to them saying how sorry they were. So immediately I said, “We’re going now, ma’am,” and out we went to the waiting car which took her back to Kensington Palace. I’d assumed she’d spend the evening with close friends; that someone would be there to cuddle her, poor dear. So off I went home.

‘Later, she told me she’d spent the evening on her own. It was quite heartbreaking.’

Still, conscious of her friend’s kindness, there was always gracious thanks for any small favour done. ‘She wrote the day afterwards thanking me for being with her at a “crucial” time and sending me a beautiful pair of cufflinks.’ His correspondence from the Princess — there are many letters — will form a bequest to Churchill College, Cambridge after his death.

His latest novel, drawing on their shared experiences, features a scene in which Diana is guest of honour at an auction in aid of children needing heart operations.

In the book, eminent cardiac surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub has organised the event and the auctioneer is coaxing money for the lots — everything from a box at the Royal Albert Hall for the Last Night of the Proms to debenture seats for the Wimbledon finals — until £160,000 is raised.

At this point, Diana appears to do something completely spontaneous. She leans across and confers in whispers with the auctioneer, then begins to sign tablecloths for anyone who will bid £1,000 for them.

But Jeffrey reveals that in real life the gesture, although apparently impulsive, was a well-rehearsed routine they’d cooked up between them every time he took on the role of auctioneer for one of her charities.

‘It was an old trick we both played. We’d whisper to each other when all the lots had been sold. Then Diana would take out a pen and start signing the tablecloths. In her sweet, clever way, she’d put the blame on me and say, “Oh, you are wicked, Jeffrey.” ’

He recalls, too, the time when he and Mary were invited to lunch with the Princess at Kensington Palace. ‘It wasn’t out of the blue. We knew each other quite well by then. We’d assumed there would be several people but when we got there it was just three of us.

‘Mary was a fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Diana wanted to chat about her boys’ education. She was keen to seek Mary’s advice on the best schools for them. It wasn’t an area Diana felt very confident about and she wanted the boys to have as normal a life as possible.

‘She was devoted to those children — they were about 12 and eight at the time — and there were photos of them all round the room.’

Diana was, it seems, as generous as she was anxious not to exploit the advantages conferred by royalty

She came to lunch with Jeffrey and Mary, too, in their vast open-plan apartment, with its vista of London, from Battersea Power Station to the Shard, unfurling through giant windows overlooking the Thames.

Nobody marked her coming, but a small crowd had gathered by the time she left, he recalls. ‘And if we ever went to lunch together at the Caprice, there would be 500 people outside when we left.’

That their friendship was affectionate is evident in memorabilia displayed in the sitting room: he shows me a photo of the Princess in a silver frame, engraved by royal jeweller Garrard with the informal inscription (taken from her own handwriting), ‘To Jeffrey, Love Diana’.

Diana was, it seems, as generous as she was anxious not to exploit the advantages conferred by royalty.

‘She didn’t want anything for nothing. She’d be careful not to admire anything, or six of them would arrive by special delivery the next morning.’

Take a scene in the novel set in a grand charity dinner she attends, hosted by jeweller Asprey. During the meal, several unscrupulous guests secrete items of silver tableware into pockets and bags.

Diana, the Princess of Wales, with her two sons Prince Harry and William in 1995

‘By the time HRH rose to make her speech at the end of the meal, six salt cellars, four pepper pots, three napkin rings and a mustard pot — full of mustard — had gone AWOL,’ writes Jeffrey.

But this scene, he says, is also drawn directly from life. Afterwards Diana, hearing about the snaffled silverware, wanted to make up for it by ordering 100 silver picture frames from Asprey’s and giving one to everyone she sent a photo to after a function.

‘But her lady-in-waiting said, “That would only make it worse. The last time you did that, ma’am, Asprey’s didn’t send you a bill.” ’

Sadly, Jeffrey doesn’t know how this story ends — whether Diana ordered the frames or not.

Their friendship began at a fund-raising concert in aid of Kurdish refugees at Wembley in 1991. ‘I expected just to say, “hello” and “goodbye” to Diana, but I sat next to her for three hours and I thought how staggeringly beautiful she was and what fun to be with.’

He recalls a Christmas lunch for the Royal Variety Club in 1992 in which he and Labour peer Denis Healey both dressed as Santa Claus. A photo shows the serenely smiling princess standing between the two of them, sporting fake white beards and red, fur-trimmed suits.

Her death, on August 31, 1997, remains etched in our collective memory and Jeffrey still remembers the shock of the early morning call: ‘The phone woke me at 4am. It was the BBC telling me the news and asking me to go in to the studio immediately’

‘And Jim Callaghan (the former Labour PM) turned to the Princess and said, “You’re standing next to the two biggest hams in England, ma’am.” And, of course, she giggled away.’

‘Mary said to me, “Don’t go over the top,” but when she heard Tony Blair talking about “the People’s Princess” later that day, she said, “You won’t be able to go over the top.” ’

There is a moment of rueful laughter, but the grief abides. ‘Stupidly I’d thought, “I’m so much older than she is.” Of course it just didn’t occur to me then that we’d lose her first. I thought we’d remain friends for the rest of my life; that we’d be doing auctions together, working for charities. If I’d known she was going to die so young . . . ’ his voice tails off.

‘If she’d lived she would have been 61 now. A wise woman. And heaven knows, she would have wanted to help and advise her sons, to bring them together again. It’s what she would have wished for most of all. I’ve no doubt at all about that.’

Jeffrey Archer’s new book, Next In Line, is published on September 27 by HarperCollins. Join Jeffrey for an evening conversation with Fern Britton on Thursday, September 29, at 6.30pm. For tickets search ‘Jeffrey Archer’ at eventbrite.co.uk: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/join-master-storyteller-jeffrey-archer-for-an-evening-with-fern-britton-tickets-399406945927

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