Shadows of a Princess

"Well I think (and I have said this to Patrick face-to-face, so I am not telling him anything he doesn’t already know) that there was a degree of weariness with Diana that conveys itself in the book, which fails to appreciate the charismatic qualities that she had. And I think Patrick would now agree that, like a good roast, he should have let his memories rest for a while before carving them up into a banquet for us all to feast on. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He got a lot of hostility for bringing out his book. The traditional thing for a biography is that you have the official line, you have the memoir, and you have an unauthorised biography. And taken as a whole, those three methods of analysing someone’s character will yield an approximation of the truth. Patrick Jephson’s is a memoir of his time spent with Diana – just as Lord Moran wrote very colourfully about Churchill . I thought he was overly critical because at the time he was fed up with her. The element he missed was the fact that she was more than the sum of the parts – and that is the key to her. If you want to understand Diana, you need to know that, just like anyone else, she was a series of contradictions. Rather like Paul Burrell, the butler, in a role like the Private Secretary you tend to want people to do what you want them to do, and when they don’t, they are being a pain. So it is the usual complaint of intimate members of staff. I have never heard what they felt about it. In terms of the book I am doing about William and Kate, I don’t have anything like the access I had to Diana. But writing about the royals is like putting on a comfortable old shoe. Since doing the book on Diana, I have written about the President of Kenya, Tom Cruise, the Beckhams, Madonna and Angelina Jolie. But going back to the royals… a lot of the people I spoke to for the book about Diana have become friends, so it is easy getting back in contact with them. And also, over the years I have got to know the royal landscape – and when you know the Royal landscape, you know where to go for information. No, I can’t do that. I think one of the interesting things about them is that they say very little in public. But you can always talk to the people around them. There are lots of students who knew “Big Wills” and “Babykins”, as they were known at St Andrews University. Several things struck me. One was how the phone tapping scandal affected them. That was when News of the World over a long period of time tapped their phones. It really affected their day to day life. It bled into their dealings with everyone and made them paranoid. And you can see that through the way they are organising the Royal Wedding. The BBC presenter Huw Edwards is doing the commentary and as part of his preparation he has asked for a list of the guests but they just won’t give him one. So this kind of boneheaded secrecy is still as much in place today as it was years ago."