Diana, Duchess of Ulster, lowered the iPad on which she had just read a report of the late Mohamed Al Fayed’s misdeeds. She found her hands trembling. Anger? Or delayed shock at the behaviour of a revolting man who once tried to become her father-in-law?
In front of the 63-year-old duchess, beyond this shaded verandah, stretched a vista of sun-blessed vines that were among the finest in southern Africa. The 2024 harvest promised to be a good one.
Diana’s clever, kind husband – the 14th Duke of Ulster, though he seldom used the title – had planted Cape View vineyard soon after he emigrated here as a young man.
For a quarter of a century Diana had regarded it as home.
The name Fayed stirred unwelcome memories. How much less happy her life might have been but for that last-minute telephone call from MI5 back in July 1997.
A painted image of a 63-year-old Princess Diana sitting at a table with a glass of wine beneath a shaded verandah as she reads a report of the late Mohamed Al Fayed’s misdeeds
She was packing for a yachting holiday in St Tropez when Paul, her butler, said there was a telephone call in the study. Diana sighed. A Harrods limousine was due any moment to whisk her and her 15-year-old son William to the airport and their Gulfstream flight to France.
As she lifted the security-cleared receiver she noticed the framed photograph of her new boyfriend, Dodi. She didn’t really fancy him but it annoyed Charles that she was seeing the younger Fayed. Petty games: the two of them were like that back then.
The voice on the line was MI5’s deputy director. She was calm but serious: ‘There has been a serious development regarding Mr Fayed Senior and I would be failing in my duty if I did not tell you.’
Diana listened in silence to a litany of grotesque allegations about Dodi’s father raping female employees. Diana had never liked the older Fayed – she nicknamed him Yoda, after the character in Star Wars. He had even once propositioned her, but she had naively put that down to dated chauvinism. Rape allegations were in a different league.
What if, as MI5 now speculated, Fayed’s security personnel had planted bugs and hidden cameras on the yacht? Could she be walking into a blackmail trap?
It was too late to cancel the trip to France but the MI5 boss told Diana there was a hotel suite booked for her at St Tropez’s best hotel. She duly agreed to stay there.
The next day, under a blazing Cote d’Azur sun, she found the paparazzi on the quayside and explained that her relationship with Dodi was merely platonic and she would only be taking lunch on the Fayed yacht.
Dodi begged her to travel with him to Paris but she declined. There was something not quite right about the Fayeds. They were trying to trap her.
Towards the end of September 1997 Labour’s then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook came to lunch at Kensington Palace. He always had a twinkle in his eye.
‘Tony Blair suggested I could be a trade envoy,’ said Diana coyly.
Cook replied: ‘I’m no monarchist but from what I read, you may not be much of one, either. Provided you took a trade role seriously it might indeed work. You know we can’t pay you.’
Diana said her divorce settlement should probably just about stop her from starving.
Diana died aged 36 after a catastrophic car crash in a Paris tunnel in 1997
Diana and Prince Charles during a trip to Toronto. The pair announced their separation in 1992 with their divorce becoming final in 1996
Trade envoy was a perfect job for her. She was advised by officials and they handled all the detail. All she had to do was charm foreign dignitaries.
At last she had something to do other than stewing about Camilla P-B and attending charity galas. Diana’s star-power opened doors in chancelleries and trade ministries around the world, from the US to the Middle East to Japan.
After six months Tony Blair sent his new trade envoy a hand-written hero-gram.
Even sweeter, her mother-in-law (as Diana still thought of the Queen) invited her to bring the boys to Sandringham for a few days, a precious opportunity to repair relations.
The two swapped stories about world leaders. Discussing garlicky Chirac and old gravel-guts Kissinger was somehow easier than talking about horses. Diana enjoyed politics; she found she was unexpectedly good at it.
No longer need she and her brother Charles, Earl Spencer – always loyal to a fault – dwell so much on her divorce. The press saw her in a new light. In their eyes she was no longer merely a scheming clothes-horse. Aged 36, Diana finally hit her stride.
Time magazine ran a cover story about her negotiating prowess. She became such a prominent face of British diplomacy that she was invited to the Millennium Dome for the New Year’s Eve celebrations at the end of 1999 and linked hands with the Queen to sing Auld Lang Syne.
Prince Philip told her she was proving ‘not nearly as useless as my sons’. From Phil the Greek, that was quite a compliment. He and Diana had always got on much better than the Palace gossips suggested.
There was talk of a seat in the House of Lords but she declined, not wishing to be exposed to all those old bores.
The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, used Diana’s success to push through a cut in the Civil List.
Brown argued – and who could say he was wrong? – that it showed other senior royals should be sent out to work for a living.
Prince Andrew, who was about to retire from the Navy, did not take this suggestion with his usual equanimity. ‘If that’s how things stand, I demand to be a trade envoy, too,’ said the Duke of York. This was met with a stony silence at the Foreign Office.
As part of the rearrangement of the royal budget St James’s Palace was rented out as commercial office space. Kensington Palace became a five-star hotel and was soon earning the House of Windsor a tremendous income.
When in London, Diana lodged at Carlton House Terrace in accommodation reserved for the Foreign Office. She also bought an old rectory in Oxfordshire, which was close enough to Eton to let her see plenty of schoolboy Harry. Her younger son benefited from that stability and from the fact that Diana and Charles were no longer briefing against each other.
It was on a working trip to a wine exporters’ conference in Paris that she met Robert Ulster. He was there to promote his Cape wines, she was there to bang the drum for English sparkling whites.
Robert’s ancestral home was near Newry in Co Down but living there had become untenable during the Troubles and that was the reason he emigrated. He invited Diana to South Africa and she found herself agreeing.
Princess Diana pictured with Dodi Fayed on board a boat on holiday in Saint Tropez, France, in 1997
Rob was unstuffy, shy, a farmer rather than an intellectual. Ten months later they were married at St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town, the service taken by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an old friend of Robert.
Elton John played during the signing of the register. ‘Weddings are much more fun than funerals,’ said Elton.
Like her mother Frances, Diana found herself becoming more interested in religion as she aged.
Archbishop Desmond was a spiritual mentor to her, but that, like much else in Diana’s life these days, was kept quiet. The crazy, ceaseless attention of the 1980s and 1990s now belonged to another world.
Diana gave up her government job in 2001. Robin Cook had moved from the Foreign Office and it was only fair to let his successor, Jack Straw, appoint his own trade envoys. Now remarried, Diana was able to see her ex-husband and Camilla in a more forgiving light.
A therapist might have told her the reasons for that but living in South Africa with Rob, Diana no longer felt any need for shrinks. How much happier she felt without them.
With Charles and Diana no longer bickering, public opinion became calmer.
The Palace sounded out Diana to see how she felt about Charles remarrying, and later about Camilla becoming Queen.
Diana talked it through with Archbishop Desmond. It was time to forgive on all sides. Camilla could become Queen.
William came out to Cape Town for a university holiday and brought with him a charming girl called Catherine.
When they wed a few years later Diana was proudly at Westminster Abbey and posed with the rest of the Royal Family on the Palace balcony.
In Cape Town, Diana had a minimal staff. She drove and cooked for herself. She seldom wore jewels. Her nail varnish was frequently chipped by farm work. In many ways it was just like her girlhood at Althorp.
Harry did a stint in the Army, which he loved, and then signed up for a short bush-management course at Stellenbosch University, less than an hour’s drive away. He now ran a safari business in Namibia, most of his clients being rich Americans.
One of the tourists was an actress called Meghan Markle and she soon had her hooks into him. It looked for a while as if they might marry but a visit to the Cape by the young lovebirds did not run smoothly. Meghan and Diana did not get on. Harry’s affair duly ended.
Ever since his first love affair, with Zimbabwean Chelsy Davy, Harry had understood bold, outdoor girls with Africa in their blood. It was, therefore, no great surprise when he married the daughter of a Namibian diamond miner.
Diana saw plenty of Harry and his wife then, but less of William and Catherine who were busy with royal duties in Britain.
One Princess of Wales in the kingdom was probably sufficient, Diana realised. Catherine probably agreed.
Sometimes, as with this terrible story about Mohamed Al Fayed, her old life came flooding back.
The BBC sent an official delegation to Cape Town, led by the chairman, to grovel and offer compensation when it at last admitted how Martin Bashir had forged documents to secure his notorious Panorama interview with Diana all those years ago.
She was amused by the BBC grandees’ discomfort but, really, that was all water under the bridge. Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis later made approaches for an interview. Diana wavered for some time and, after seeing what Maitlis did to poor Prince Andrew, declined.
She did not want to revive old enmities – ‘what good will come of it, poppet?’ as her new husband put it – and, anyway, it would have meant a lot of hassle doing her hair and wardrobe.
Diana was still a good-looking woman but her blow-dry, bouffant days were long past her.
South Africa was jeans, polo‑shirts, short hair, red dust, barbecues, dawn rises and safari sunsets.
Life had never been better. Thank heavens she had said no to those ghastly Fayeds.
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