Prince William by Penny Junor Page A

kind of mood both bosses would be in. The Prince, always demanding but normally friendly, polite and businesslike, was prone to unnerving temper tantrums. They quickly passed and although he didn’t always apologise, he thought no more about it. The Princess was deadlier. In a good mood, she was a veritable angel and couldn’t do enough to help people, be they strangers, staff, family or friends. She would send their mothers flowers on their birthdays, give them presents and open her heart to them. That could turn on a sixpence, and if she got it into her head that someone was plotting against her, or being disloyal, or she simply no longer liked having them around, they found themselves out in the cold; cut dead. Members of staff lost their jobs, friends were cut adrift without a word and even her own mother endured long periods of estrangement from Diana.
    Arguably, the only people Diana consistently loved were William and Harry. She would repeatedly say, ‘They mean everything to me.’ Her love for them was almost obsessive and it was possessive; as if she was afraid that if she didn’t demonstrate it, with treats and hugs, or verbalise it, they might not be aware of it. She couldn’t leave them to be quietly confident of her love for them, as they were of their father’s. Another of her favourite phrases to the children was,‘Who loves you most?’ She told her biographer Andrew Morton: ‘I want to bring them up with security, not to anticipate things because they will be disappointed. That’s made my own life so much easier. I hug my children to death and get into bed with them at night. I always feed them love and affection. It’s so important.’
    No one knew better than she how painful and upsetting it had been for her as a child to see her mother cry when her parents’ marriage disintegrated; and to hear her brother call out for their absent mother in the night. She knew precisely how sad and insecure it made her feel.
    Yet now she was a mother, she seemed unconcerned that William and Harry should see her tears and witness her distress – in just the same way as she had witnessed her own mother’s. William, being older, was more aware, and almost took on a parenting role. She spoke about running into her bathroom in tears one day, after an altercation with Charles over the Duke and Duchess of York’s separation, and William pushing paper tissues under the closed door, saying, ‘I hate to see you sad.’ William was only ten.
    The reality was Diana was not always as warm and demonstrative in private as she was in public – and she wasn’t the only one who handed out the laughter and the hugs. Away from the cameras, the boys saw the extremes of her moods as clearly as everyone else and were often quite frightened and bewildered by them. When a friend once suggested it was unwise to have hysterics in front of Prince William, who was then in a cot, Diana said he was too young to notice, and anyway, he would ‘have to learn the truth sooner or later’.
    Her attitude to their learning the truth was much the same when it came to her lovers. Several men had come and gone from her life after Harry’s birth, but there was one, James Hewitt, whom she seems to have loved very deeply. During the five years of the affair, he was part of William and Harry’s lives too. Hewitt was a charming, good-looking young officer in the Life Guards, one of the regiments that form the Household Cavalry, which traditionally guards the Sovereign and the Royal Household. Hewas a brilliant horseman and, as it turned out, a first-class cad, but their affair lasted longer than any other.
    They first met in a corridor when she flirtatiously admired his uniform. They met again at a party in St James’s Palace in 1986 when she asked whether he would teach her to ride. Riding lessons at his Windsor barracks swiftly turned into a love affair, and he later