The Duchess by Penny Junor

Author:Penny Junor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

23

Week of Waiting

The first call alerting the family to the accident came through to Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s deputy private secretary, at one o’clock in the morning while he was asleep in his house on the Balmoral estate. It was from the British ambassador in Paris, who had only sketchy news. The Princess had been injured but no one knew how badly. Janvrin immediately telephoned the Queen and the Prince of Wales in their rooms at the castle, and put together a team of people to set up an operations room and man phones throughout the night. Meanwhile in London, the Prince’s team – Mark Bolland, Sandy Henney and Stephen Lamport – were being woken and told the news, ironically, by the tabloid press. Their information, which came directly from the emergency services, was therefore more up to date than the ambassador’s, and for once they were a great help to the Prince’s staff. Dodi they knew was dead; the Princess was injured but alive.

Never was the relationship between the Prince and his mother more starkly demonstrated than that night. They were just feet away from one another in their separate rooms, divided by paper-thin walls, but they didn’t go to one another, either for comfort or to discuss logistics. It was left to Camilla, five hundred miles away at Ray Mill, and other friends the Prince rang, to do the comforting through what remained of the night, and to his staff to debate how the Prince should get to Paris to visit his ex-wife in hospital. Mark Bolland played a pivotal role that night. The most obvious answer was to use an aeroplane of the Queen’s Flight, but that required Her Majesty’s specific permission and Janvrin was doubtful it would be forthcoming.

At a quarter to four the debate became academic. A call came through from the embassy in Paris to say that Diana was dead. She had lost consciousness very quickly after the impact and had been treated for an hour at the scene by the emergency services, who then took her to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital. Surgeons there had battled for a further two hours but had been unable to save her.

Camilla had at first thought that Diana’s injuries were not much more than a broken arm – which is what the Prince had been told. So when he rang at 3.45 with the news that Diana had just died on the operating table, she was as shocked as he was. They spent a long time on the phone for what remained of the night. She was terrified for him. He didn’t know what to do about the children, whether to wake them and tell them straight away or let them sleep until the morning and tell them then. He was absolutely dreading it. The Queen said they should be left to sleep. Charles knew immediately what the public reaction would be; they would blame him. The world would go mad and it could destroy the monarchy. He’d said as much to Bolland, who had known, as Camilla knew, that he was absolutely right.

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