The truth and the royals

Patrick Jephson is the man who spent six years as a private secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales, from 1990 to 1996, then wrote a warts-and-all portrait of her called Shadows of a Princess when she died. It was incredibly unforgiving.

Not since Tony Curtis said Marilyn Monroe kissed like Hitler has a goddess been so ruthlessly shown to have feet of clay. The scholarly Jephson painted his ex-boss as spiteful, self-pitying, deluded and melodramatic, with a nasty habit of sending poisonous text messages and a healthy streak of self-destruction.

While the book was remarkable, riveting and probably true, it was utterly damning.

People were taken aback by its barbed tone and, reading it, you couldn't help wondering if he had been in love with her, and been scorned, as some people claimed.

Prince William, whom Jephson had known since he was a little boy, called it an act of betrayal. The ex-courtier was duly crucified, and disappeared with his six-figure advance.

The man who knew the most legendary and dazzling woman of modern times better than almost anyone is sitting beside me in the Langham Hilton off Oxford Circus, looking mild in a thick, white, cotton shirt. It is a rare interview, but Jephson is once more on the attack, and this time his quarry is Prince Charles. The 47-year-old former naval officer has just made a two-part documentary for Channel 4 (the first episode was screened on Saturday) uncovering how the heir to the throne has permitted damaging stories to be spread about various members of the Royal family. "I certainly think Charles has allowed others to be smeared. Including his wife," he says. "Including his brother. And as a thinking monarchist I don't feel that's the way it ought to be."

He cites Penny Junor's biography, which was seen by St James's Palace before publication, in which she described Diana as mentally unbalanced, and the stories attacking Prince Edward for filming Prince William at St Andrews.

"Charles said he would never allow anyone to speak against his wife. But the facts seem to be that he did in the Penny Junor book. And one thing we look at in the film quite carefully was the whole Prince Edward stalking Prince William story. One headline was, 'You effing idiot, screamed Charles at Edward.' Now, if you're his little brother, and that's not how it happened, and nobody does anything to put it right, that's quite upsetting.

"All the tape that Ardent filmed in St Andrews was given to Buckingham Palace, and they confirmed to my programme that there was nothing of
Prince William on it. So I do think Charles has allowed things to be done in his name, long after it was made plain to him that what was being done was harmful.

"I've been told that the Queen is very concerned. You'll have noticed she doesn't employ spin doctors. A question I ask in the programme is: if Charles becomes King, what values will he bring [to the role]?"

You can't help thinking Jephson's a fine one to talk. His portrait of Diana, many people thought, was simply misplaced values. The man she had worked with more closely than any other, who had signed a confidentiality agreement, sat down as soon as she died to write icily of her "denial mechanisms", of how she was "several people in one person", of her "style of aggression which, with sinuous dexterity, combined a radiant smile with a knife between the shoulder blades".

When Jephson resigned over his disapproval of her Panorama interview - he felt like a man trapped in a cage with a tigress, he said - they spoke on the phone.

"She was hysterical," he recalled. "Her voice lost all semblance of control and expressed instead the raw emotion of a soul in torment."

But he insists now, and really seems to believe, that the book wasn't disloyal. "If I had written a hagiography, I'd have pleased half the people. And if I'd done a hatchet job and said she was a psychotic palace wrecker, I'd have pleased the other half. I was trying to be balanced."

The question is whether he should have written it at all, if he was going to be so ruthless about her "random axemanship" of loyal friends and staff, her death wish, her hypocrisy, her poisonous text messages. (Diana texted him: "The boss knows about your disloyalty and your affair." As he writes in the book, "I knew I'd not had an affair with anyone, but that was an insignificant detail to the princess.")

"All those facts were already known," Jephson protests.

But was there anything to be gained by publicising her pettiness? "The answer has to be yes. You got the impression that she was pretty faulty. Others who read it said, 'Look at the pressure she was under, how extraordinarily sane and positive and constructive she was, considering the awful situation she found herself in.'"

Well, maybe. Let's not forget he gained a huge advance - apparently almost £1 million. But he says his motive was to write a historical document. "Because there wasn't anyone else - without false modesty - who could write that book. The prince had seven private secretaries. The princess only had me.

"For that period, when she was going solo, getting separated and divorced, and becoming a worldwide figure, there was only me. So if I didn't write it, who would? She was angry and difficult, but she was dealing with a lot of big issues. I don't apologise for that and nor would she.

"But saying she wasn't right in the head and very difficult, as Penny Junor did in her book, without ever explaining why is, I think, far more corrosive in the long term."

I ask if he was in love with Diana. "No, I wasn't," he says firmly. "I wouldn't have been able to do my job if I was. My job was to be the one man in the world who was not in love with her." Did he want to be married to her? "In a word, no. Any more, I'm sure, than she would have liked to be married to me."

But there is no doubt that Jephson is a man of strong feelings and he had many for the princess. His book reads like a memoir of a failed marriage. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," he says heavily. "It was a crusade, it was a penance." He wrote movingly of her death in the underpass. How did he feel, watching her lurch around the world in the months before then, consulting faith healers and flirting with playboys? "I thought she seemed very unhappy," he says after a pause.

Did he foresee a happy ending? "I hoped for a happy ending, but I couldn't see how she was going to get there - the way she was going." But when I ask about her death that morning in August he swallows. "You're going to have to say, 'He wouldn't be drawn on that.' I felt all sorts of things."

Jephson divorced after leaving the princess, and his ex-wife, Jan - who, he says gracefully, was "wonderfully understanding" about his years at the beck and call of the princess - now lives in Devon with their two girls.

He went out with a PR girl called Rebecca Ward, but they broke up 18 months ago, and he is single again. On the work front, too, he seems directionless.

He says he "hasn't done anything much" since finishing his book about Diana three years ago. He thinks he would like to write a novel and do more TV, but is vague about his plans.

In the book he comes across as almost boringly stable - "I think my sheer ability not to be annoyed would annoy Diana" - keen on food and drink and harshly clear-sighted about the princess's failings. In person he
is gentle, courteous, precise. "Of course I have regrets," he says quietly. "But I have no regrets about the book. I wanted to write her as I saw her, and I thought she was worth serving for that big chunk of my life and I would have gone on serving her, given the opportunity, for the rest of my life.

"I was utterly committed to my job. And therefore the fact that part of that story included, er, telling some of the harder bits I had to live through, I think was essential to give a complete account - or as near a complete account as you're going to get."

A faint air of loneliness seems to cling to him as we say farewell, and I imagine him going home to last night's sausages in an empty flat.

The second part of Charles: The Battle With Diana is on Channel 4 next Saturday, at 7pm.