Daniela Elser: Inside Prince William's strange relationship with Princess Diana

"Last year, Kensington Palace revealed that the Cambridges' three children annually make cards for the grandmother they never knew." Photo / Getty Images

Opinion:

There is a particularly mind-bending irony to the fact that, if there was a prize for best parenting by a royal couple, it would go Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.

Their two daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, have managed to get to their 30s without ever once getting into a scuffle with the press, boozily falling out of nightclubs, getting naked in Las Vegas, being caught on camera using racial slurs or even once attending a Freakin' Naughty party as a sexy nurse. (Looking at you, future Queen Catherine).

That said, when it comes to raising children and the house of Windsor, the bar is not so much as low as somewhere about ankle-height.

Prince Charles had a strained relationship with his own father Prince Philip who spent years trying to toughen his son up, including by sending him to his alma mater Gordonstoun. (Or as Charles called it, "Colditz in kilts.")

That pattern looked like it was repeating itself when his son Prince Harry then turned around and took aim at his own upbringing, speaking out about "genetic pain and suffering".

Now we have a new entrant in the ranks of HRHs who weren't exactly exemplary parents with an extract from an upcoming book, The Palace Papers, written by Tina Brown, the legendary editor and social insider par excellence, pulling back the curtain on the very odd relationship between Diana, Princess of Wales and her son Prince William.

(The first extract from the hotly anticipated publication has been published by Vanity Fair).

We've all seen the famous roster of pictures of Diana and William, or "Basher Wills" as he was nicknamed as a tot.

William playing on a rug on the lawn of Government House in Wellington. William curiously peering at the press in the garden of Kensington Palace in a padded onesie, aged 18-months.

Prince William was in the loop on most of Princess Diana's bizarre world, Brown writes. Photo / Getty Images

William hamming it up at Prince Harry's christening. As his teenage years approached, William's height, blonde locks and smile were all pure Diana.

However, the picture that Brown paints of the way Diana treated her elder son is a tad bizarre.

Even though the young Prince was 10 years old when his parents separated, his role in his mother's turbulent existence was unlike that of any normal child, with William being, as Brown writes, "privy to her volatile love life. He knew the tabloids made her life hell, but he also knew she colluded with them. By his early teens, he was his mother's most trusted confidant".

In a telling gesture, the Princess, per Brown, used to refer to her son as "my little wise old man".

"Diana used her elder son as both a stand-in and a buffer," she writes, a role that included taking him to meetings with her eternal fixation slash perpetual foe – the press.

One incident sums the strange dynamic up.

It's 1996. The setting is a smart dining room in Diana's Kensington Palace apartment. Piers Morgan, then the wunderkind editor of The Mirror, arrives for lunch with the Princess, a meal which also, it turns out, includes the 13-year-old Prince.

Of the strange scene, Brown writes: "William insisted on a glass of wine even when Diana said no, and he seemed thoroughly up-to-date on all the tabloid rumours about her lovers.

"For Diana to include the future heir to the throne at a meeting with one of the royal family's most reckless tabloid tormentors and freely refer to a casual affair was, on its face, amazing. (Try imagining the Duchess of Cambridge and a teenage Prince George doing the same today.) It suggests that her boundaries were dissolving and, with them, her judgement."

As Morgan later wrote in his diary: "He is clearly in the loop on most of her bizarre world and, in particular, the various men who come into it from time to time" and that the teenager was permitted to ask "literally anything".

Let's just pause here. Sure, the children of divorce are often required to grow up fast and forced to occupy strange places in the complex emotional terrain of their parents' new lives. But there is something more than a little unsettling about this image: William holding a wine glass of Châteauneuf-du-Pape (okay, that's just creative flourish on my part), chatting to the immensely powerful Morgan and fully briefed on Diana's love life.

While it is Charles who is generally associated with infidelity in the Wales' marriage, Diana was no babe in the woods and by some accounts, was the first one to stray. By 1996 and this lunch, the Princess had earned something of a reputation for perennially ill-fated entanglements with poorly chosen men.

There had been her five-year affair with the nearly comically upper-crust James Hewitt which started in 1986 and ended in the early '90s.

In 1994, Diana was accused of having made up to 300 nuisance calls to the home of society art dealer Oliver Hoare and his socialite wife Dianne. The Princess, you see, and Hoare had had a fling and such was her ardour, she once told her confidante Lady Bowker that she "daydreamed of living in Italy with the handsome Hoare".

The revelations of the phone calls were deeply humiliating for Diana, only adding to the image of her as unbalanced and untethered which suited Team Charles just fine.

In August 1995, another scandal was about to hit Diana. She had met the captain of the English rugby team Will Carling at the west London gym they both worked out at, leading to, depending on who you believe, either an affair or Carling basically just developing a thumping crush on the royal.

"Diana would jokingly answer the phone as 'Mrs Carling' to the man she called 'captain'" Andrew Morton writes in Diana: in Pursuit of Love.

When Carling and his TV presenter wife Julia separated in September, the underlying implication was that it was because, to co-opt Diana's own infamous turn of phrase, three of them in the marriage.

Julia Carling came out firing, telling the Mail on Sunday: "This has happened to her before and you hope she won't do these things again, but she obviously does. She picked the wrong couple to do it with this time because we can only get stronger from it."

All of this, it would seem, William was painfully aware of, with the Prince, at that Piers Morgan lunch, reportedly mentioning at one point, "I keep a photo of Julia Carling on my dartboard at Eton."

Then there was the man routinely wheeled out as the Princess' One True Love, the unlikely and deeply reluctant romantic hero of the piece, the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

While Diana's relationship with Natty, as she called him, had all the makings of a made-for-TV movie – a hospital bed meet-cute; long, lingering glances across an operating table; our heroine dashing across the city after hours to meet Khan at his flat for clandestine trysts – their amour was doomed.

His conservative Pakistani family would never have reportedly countenanced him marrying her while Khan himself was said to be incredibly leery of the media circus that Diana brought with her.

When in July and August 1997 Diana began an affair with Dodi Fayed, it was not just the thrill of a new love affair that was driving her. Remember the famous shot of the new couple locked in an embrace aboard his father's superyacht and which ran in the UK press with the headline, 'THE KISS'?

That was not, in Brown's telling in Palace, a stolen moment but a mise-en-scene Diana had facilitated. Brown writes that it was the Princess of Wales "who tipped off Italian lensman Mario Brenna – to send a taunting message" to Khan.

"Prince Harry seems to still view his mother through rose-tinted glasses." Photo / Getty Images

It would be tricky enough navigating all of this as a fully-grown adult with the emotional resources to match.

So imagine, just for a moment, being William in all of this, having to wake up and face, with brutal regularity, the front page headlines about his mother's liaisons.

This very adult world was not one that Diana shielded or even could have shielded her eldest child from and instead, as Brown tells it, was invited to be a participant in.

(In one story that gets regularly trotted out, it was the future king who would push tissues under the bathroom door as his mother wept inside).

While Harry, even as he inches towards 40, seems to view his mother still with the rose-tinted glasses of childhood, never having come to see her as a woman made flesh and blood who made mistakes and who was so very desperate to be loved, for William it was a different story.

This dynamic – the old-for-his-years William lunching with Morgan and impish Harry adoring his mother – goes a long way to explaining their current attitudes and choices. While the elder Prince has forged a necessary working relationship with the press, Harry wages legal war on the media.

"If your beautiful 36-year-old mother dies in a car crash and is mourned – canonised, even – by the whole world, an unblemished picture is frozen that erases everything else. William, 15, and Harry, 12, believed – and still believe – that their mother was martyred by the paparazzi," Brown writes in Palace.

"I don't subscribe to the now pervasive narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette tossed about by malign forces beyond her control.

"While strongly sympathetic to her sons' pain, I find it offensive to present the canny, resourceful Diana as a woman of no agency, as either a foolish, duped child or the hapless casualty of malevolent muckrakers."

Veteran royal biographer Penny Junor, whose history with Diana goes back to being there when the Prince and Princess first visited Wales together and she was pregnant with William, caused controversy back in 2012 when she released Prince William: Born To Be King and made the case that Diana had been mentally ill. (Such was the reaction to its publication, Junor briefly hired a bodyguard).

"She was wonderful in many ways … but the facts are William had a very difficult time growing up," Junor said at the time.

In Prince William: Born To Be King, she writes: "The reality was Diana was not always as warm and demonstrative in private as she was in public … 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'."

Based on Brown's Palace Papers, William certainly did "learn the truth".

However, none of this is to say that her loss is not one that he still keenly feels, a father now himself.

This year Mother’s Day will be different once again.

Many of us will be apart from our loved ones, but looking forward to a time in the not too distant future when we can give our mother a hug again. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/Bys6OCqtTT

— The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) March 14, 2021

Last year, Kensington Palace revealed that the Cambridges' three children annually make cards for the grandmother they never knew.

"Dear Granny Diana, I am thinking of you on Mother's Day. I love you very much," Princess Charlotte wrote in hers. "Papa is missing you."

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and a writer with more than 15 years experience working with a number of Australia's leading media titles.