Backstairs Billy by Tom Quinn

Author:Tom Quinn [Tom Quinn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849548939
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

IF BILLY HAD mixed feelings about Anstruther, Aird and the other advisers and equerries, his admiration for Prince Charles was unqualified. Charles always made a point of talking to Billy, and he had long ago given Billy a signed photograph of himself. Billy also had a specially inscribed photograph of Charles and Diana. He had been particularly close to Diana, who liked the fact that Billy could combine deference and loyalty with an impish sense of fun.

‘She loved his funny stories,’ recalled one friend of Diana’s, ‘especially if they involved gentle mockery of the firm.’

I don’t think she liked the rigidity of royal life even before she became part of it. She wanted to have fun and the royals, or at least most of them, simply don’t do fun. They take life very seriously indeed and Diana thought this was a very narrow view of life – she wanted life in the round; she didn’t mind being serious some of the time or when some public engagement or other demanded it, but in private she wanted to be very different. This was frowned upon by the key members of the royal family and it partly explains why she began to talk to the newspapers and the media in general about her life and its difficulties. I think the sense that she could do this and get away with it came originally from her long intimate conversations with Billy. You can tell that she took to him from their first meeting – which was a good while before she married Charles – because on the night before her marriage she spent a long time cycling around William’s office on a small bicycle while he was trying to work and all the while she kept up a long conversation with him.

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