At Patrick Jephson's ancestral home in Ireland, the family motto is chiseled in marble above two fireplaces: Loyalemente je sers--French for "Loyally I serve." It is a reference to the family's 400-year record of service to the British monarchy, including Jephson's eight years working for the late Princess Diana.
But with the publication of his controversial new memoir Shadows of a Princess, Jephson's own loyalty is being called into question. The most senior royal aide ever to write a tell-all, Jephson, 44, portrays the People's Princess as alternately childish, manipulative, vulnerable and vindictive. Diana had so many sides that "sitting in the car with her was like dealing with a minibus of princesses," writes Jephson, whose book hits U.S. stores Oct. 9.
Not surprisingly, the book, first excerpted in Britain's Sunday Times on Sept. 24, has enraged Diana's family and friends. "He's not thinking of anything except his bank balance," her brother Earl Spencer fumed to Larry King, while journalist Richard Kay, a longtime Di friend, declared Shadows "a work of revenge." The book also drew a furious response from Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth, who had tried to stop its publication. "The Queen and the Prince of Wales deeply deplore Mr. Jephson's decision to proceed with the publication of his book," they said in a statement, "...which can only be upsetting to the feelings of Prince William and Prince Harry."
But even some who view Jephson's book as a betrayal see a measure of truth in his portrait of Diana. "The saintly public image and the difficult person with rough edges in private is the Diana I knew," says royals reporter Peter Archer. "She was human."
From 1988 to 1996, first as her equerry--a catch-all job in which he helped organize Diana's schedule--and then as her private secretary, Jephson was at the princess's side for up to 18 hours a day during the most tumultuous years of her life. What he observed, he says, was a Diana so wounded by her lack of support from the royal family that she became obsessed with waging a public-relations war against them. "Time and again, a small handful of sugar lumps would have been enough to lead this nervous thoroughbred back to the safety of the show ring," writes Jephson, who maintains that the confidentiality agreement he signed with Diana was voided by her death in 1997.
Lacking reassurance from the Palace, Diana became increasingly skittish, reports Jephson. She continued to suffer from bulimia long after she claimed to have conquered it, he says, and became so paranoid that she believed she had been shot at in Hyde Park and that her car's brakes had been tampered with. He describes her once pulling up a carpet in Kensington Palace to show him where she thought eavesdropping bugs had been planted. "She saw plots everywhere," he says.
Yet according to Jephson, Diana herself was a master plotter, conspiring to sneak her lovers into the palace and exploiting her personal struggles to gain public sympathy, as with her secretly arranged 1995 interview with the British TV newsmagazine Panorama in which she questioned her husband's fitness to be king. He says she often fired staff members on a whim, and he confirms a report that Di, jealous of nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke's close relationship with Princes William and Harry, taunted her at a 1995 Christmas party by whispering into Legge-Bourke's ear, "So sorry about the baby"--an unfounded insinuation that her perceived rival had had an abortion. Already angered by Diana's Panorama interview, Jephson says, "my boss's treatment of Tiggy was all that my wavering resolve needed." Since resigning, he has opened his own public-relations firm.
Despite his harsh portrait of the princess, Jephson, a divorced father of two who now lives in London with girlfriend Rebecca Ward, denies accusations that he has betrayed Diana's legacy. "The great virtue of what I've done," he told The Sunday Times, "is to show that it is not necessary to protect [Diana] by avoiding the truth."
