Ten years ago, the day before Princess Diana’s funeral, a police car picked up
Earl Spencer from Althorp, the family estate near Northampton, and took him
to Westminster Abbey. There was to be a rehearsal and, Spencer was told,
they needed a “mike check” for the delivery of his eulogy. His suspicions
were aroused.
“I suddenly thought, ‘Why do they need a mike check? This is ridiculous, they
just want to hear what I am going to say.’ So I came over all upper-class
twit and said I was so sorry but I’d left the speech behind and I said I’d
just read a hymn. I think I read three words and they said that’s all right.”
I am, in fact, sitting at the exact spot where he wrote that speech. The room
is now a modest – by Althorp standards – living room with two brown sofas, a
huge Bang & Olufsen TV, a lifeboat in a glass case, glass lamps, some
Edward Burra paintings and an air of not being lived in. Spencer is pleased
with the paintings. He bought them. Everything else in the house is just his
staggering patrimony, 500 years of Spencer acquisitions.
Though he took pains to keep the speech secret, he insists he had no inkling
of the impact it would have.
“No I didn’t expect that – I had a girlfriend at the time [the Calvin Klein
model Josie Borain] and I read it to her and she just said it sounds fine .
. . It was so easy to write. It wasn’t a head speech . . . I’d jotted down
some headings and they sounded trite, like something an uncle would say at a
wedding. Then I just couldn’t sleep so I got up to work on it, it took about
an hour and a half and I hardly changed a thing.”
I was in the abbey when he delivered it and I, like everybody else, shivered
and gasped. As he finished, we all heard a sound like heavy rain rushing
towards us. Then, weirdly, the rain was inside the abbey. It was applause,
racing in from the London parks, through the abbey and then across the
nation. He may or may not have known what he was doing, but he’d certainly
done it – attacked the press and the royals and endorsed the popular sense
of Diana as the innocent, beautiful, hounded victim.
“It is a point to remember,” he said, “that of all the ironies about Diana,
perhaps the greatest was this: a girl given the name of the ancient goddess
of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the age.”
The late Alan Clark, the maverick politician and compulsive philanderer, wrote
to congratulate him.
“I didn’t know him, I just met him once. He wrote, ‘Dear boy, Bravo on the
speech, every word true. But you’ve now upset the two most powerful
institutions in the country, the press and the monarchy, and they will
destroy you’.”
In the speech he had contrasted Diana’s “genuine goodness” with “those at the
opposite end of the moral spectrum” and the latter plainly meant the press.
“We will not,” he said of Princes William and Harry, “allow them to suffer the
anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair.”
Game, as they say, on. In fact, Spencer had already been established as a bad
boy in the press. From 1983, he recalls a story about an unpaid bar bill –
wrong, he insists – that had produced a one-day tabloid hounding.
“Two tabloid journalists wrote to me afterwards. One had been at The Sun and
one the Mirror and they were setting up a PR agency. They told me I had to
realise that it was not in the tabloids’ interests to let Diana have a
brother who is anything but a ne’er-do-well, and even if I’d collected
stamps and had a puppy, they still want me to be this bad brother. Well,
it’s reality, isn’t it?”
But bad boy is one thing, irredeemable villain is another, and that is exactly
what he became within weeks of the funeral when the press started picking
over the details of his impending divorce from Victoria, his first wife and
mother of four of his children. Now he is firmly established as the nation’s
über-cad, the baddest of bad boys, the very type-specimen of the icy,
callous toff. He’s sued successfully, but it doesn’t help.
“Well, people say to me that it’s only the Daily Mail, but it doesn’t mean
it’s not hurtful and disappointing. I’ve won a dozen libel actions, but it’s
pointless, really. It doesn’t work, the newspapers just think next time
round we’ll kick him harder. My biggest character flaw has always been a
keen sense of if something is unfair I don’t like it . . . It’s a playschool
thing to react so badly when you’re being falsely accused but it’s something
that, you know . . . I am thin-skinned enough still to feel hurt.”
The problem is, of course, that he emphatically does not collect stamps,
though there may well be a puppy or two in his vast pad. His private life
is, well, colourful. There was his first divorce, followed by countless
girlfriends, then, last year, he left his second wife Caroline for Coleen
Sullivan, an American news anchor who has taken time off work to live with
him at Althorp. There have also been fisticuffs in South Africa with his old
Eton friend Darius Guppy and numerous accusations of callousness towards
Diana during her split from Charles as well as charges of profiting from her
memory.
Perhaps like Prince Rupert, his boyhood hero and the subject of the biography
he is now publicising by talking to me, he is misunderstood. Rupert, who was
Charles I’s flamboyant but only partially successful general during the
civil war, was hounded by the press of his day. Pro-parliament pamphleteers
accused him, among other things, of having sex with his dog, a charge that
has not so far been levelled at Spencer. He says the Rupert story
“resonates” with him.
“They really ripped him to shreds the whole time – you would have thought he
would let this criticism go and not let it bug him, but he didn’t.”
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the man, and even if he writes the greatest
book of the age, the death of his sister and that speech will be the
episodes that define him until the day he joins his ancestors beneath the
Spencer Chapel in St Mary’s Church, Great Brington. For the truth is Diana
will not rest in peace on the island in the middle of the lake at Althorp.
Mohamed al-Fayed pursues his accusations of a cover-up, this August is the
10th anniversary of her death, books still pour from the presses – the
latest by Tina Brown is said to be a savage attack on Diana, portraying her
as a calculating woman in search of an even richer husband – and, last week,
we had the Channel 4 documentary Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel, about
the circumstances of her death, which her sons objected to. It established
that the paparazzi weren’t to blame as they had seemed to be at the time
Spencer gave his speech. But he didn’t watch the show and says it would not
affect his point about her hounding. He saw enough of it himself. He shrugs
when I say it was a solid piece of journalism – “Okay.”
Though not prone to instant tabloid judgments of people and finding Spencer an
amiable easy-going type, I do find such coolness odd. Whatever he may think,
he and Althorp, with its grave of Diana and its museum to her memory, lie at
the heart of a colossal contemporary fable of British identity.
I find myself studying the physical presence of the man very closely. He is
tall, gently spoken and sandy-haired with a face that, now he is 43, has
started to take on some of the ruddiness of his father’s. He wears a black
corduroy blazer, white shirt, chinos and Prada trainers. He is as
immaculate, as finished, as the beautifully tended estate. He is, in fact,
very like the house itself. Built in red brick at the beginning of the 16th
century, it was, in the 18th, clad, at the prompting of Capability Brown,
with cold grey stone in an aridly classical style. English feeling and
tradition have been camouflaged, once by alien stone, now by Prada trainers.
This may be unfair. Perhaps constantly being reminded by the bodies in St
Mary’s that you are just one incident in a long and very precisely defined
history instils a certain imaginative remoteness. Also he is very clearly a
bloke, an identity that includes a certain emotional autism and a bottomless
air of confidence. And, to his credit, he has proved a conscientious steward
of the estate. He even supports it by the revenue from a licence granted to
a factory in Vietnam to make reproductions of its furniture. “It’s all
overseen by the World Bank, so it’s quite moral.”
The plans to hand over 300 of its 14,000 acres to a housing and shopping
scheme, though not likely to happen in the near future, will guarantee its
preservation. And he intends to hand it all over to his 13-year-old son
Louis at a decent age.
“You need a young man’s energy to deal with this. Running an estate and a
house like this is not intellectually taxing, a lot of it is about common
sense and a lot is about people. He should inherit when he’s 30-35. It’s
wonderful to think, thank God it’s finite.”
This great backdrop, this history in stone and rolling fields, is, perhaps,
all the inwardness he needs. He has faith but he only visits church on
special occasions. Instead, he has “a private religion”.
“I do pray every day and I get a great deal out of that. It’s settling to my
mind and I do believe in a higher being.”
Meanwhile, the books – this is his fourth, the first two were on Althorp and
the family and the third on the battle of Blenheim – are the main outlet for
his private ambitions. He is doing 15 publicity events, though he does not
answer questions after his talks. He doesn’t know what to write next. Since
the abbey speech, he has done some work training City businessmen in public
speaking.
But this latest book, Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, is plainly a very
personal project. He is at great pains to insist he does not compare himself
to this warring polymath, but the “resonances” are clear enough. Not only
does he feel misunderstood, he also feels a certain longing for the very
possibility of such a life.
“I have to say you can’t live that life any more. I regret that. I know it was
pretty awful . . . The 17th century was brutal and bloody and horrible, but
there was a chance to be something.”
But he doesn’t think there is a warrior struggling to get out.
“War? No, I don’t think I would be very good at that. I don’t romanticise it
at all, I have a friend who’s fighting in Afghanistan and he doesn’t enjoy
it very much. He’s an officer there and he says if only politicians knew
what it was really like, they’d never allow war to happen. It’s so terrible,
you can’t imagine it.”
Perhaps most importantly, he identifies with Rupert’s frequently catastrophic
impatience with the slippery politicians at court, notably Lord Digby, an
unloved ancestor of his – “He was a weasel.” Rupert preferred to speak out
and damn the consequences.
“We share a ridiculously old-fashioned notion that you must do and say what
you believe is right – I’m not saying I always had the courage to do that.”
At the abbey, he says, he spoke the truth for him at the time. He won’t
discuss the royals, so he barely now acknowledges the attack he made on them
and he refuses to talk about Princes William and Harry, whose future
upbringing he challenged the royals to get right for once.
“My role in their life is as a figure they can trust and who won’t talk.”
In the speech, he implicitly slammed the royals for their attitude to Diana
and even seemed to claim the boys as pure-bred Spencers – “on behalf of your
mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can
to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these
two exceptional young men, so that their souls are not simply immersed in
duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned”.
As he has his photograph taken, I wander into what must be the breakfast room
– there is marmalade anda large jar of Marmite – and notice on a side table
a little pile of pamphlets ina Great Speeches of the 20th Century series.
His is at the top, as it should be in any British contemporary history and,
ideally, engraved on the tomb in St Mary’s of Charles Edward Maurice
Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, steward of the Althorp patrimony and impenetrable
and perhaps unreachable bloke.
Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20 Althorp
Literary Festival takes place on June 16-17. For details see www.althorp.com/literaryfestival
www.bryanappleyard.com
A lot of British people have very little time for the aristocracy, some very little time for the monarchy, many are critical of the government, the church, the economy, the climate, footballers etc etc. One thing however unites everybody in the country - a huge, national, universal, visceral and totally justified contempt for the British press.
eric campbell, harrogate, uk
I for one will not be buying any of his books. He failed to give support to Diana when she was at her most vulnerable, refusing to allow her to return to Althorp, yet he was happy to have her buried there so as to promote tourism to his estate.
Carrie, Gold Coast, Australia
Was this article supposed to be about how the family "still feels hunted" or is it just a plug for his new book.
DTB, Washington, DC, USA
While he may be a good speechwriter, the reality is that he was not wliing to offer Diana a safe haven at Althorp after her divorce, and I can never forgive him for that. He was a lousy brother.
Alex, Queensland, Australia
From the grave, Diana may yet bring down the monarchy. I hope so, because in a nominal democracy, a hereditary monarchy is an anachronism. Had the queen positioned herself as the focus to oppose NuLabour/Blair's assaults on civil liberties and civil rights, I could have made an exception. But the monarchy essentially lends credibility to the lamestream media. Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem. The Diana assassination conspiracy is never going away. That and the power of the Internet were the two overlooked factors. There will be a reckoning. 1789 ring a bell?
Andrew Milner, Karuizawa, Nagano