It was supposed to be the beginning of a new beginning for Diana, Princess of Wales. Instead, 1994 ended up as her nadir in the maelstrom that her life would increasingly become in the last five years of her life.
In December 1993, she announced her retirement from her official duties. She had ignored pleas from the Queen and Prince Charles to issue a palace statement.
Instead, she chose to deliver the news herself in a dramatic, well-choreographed and tearful speech at a charity lunch at London’s Hilton Hotel.
The implication was that she was relinquishing her patronage of 118 charities to focus on a few specific causes and relevant foreign travel.
Diana, Princess of Wales, gives a speech at the Hilton Hotel in London, during the Headway Charity Lunch. She resigns her public duties and asks for ‘time and space’
Diana arrives at the Serpentine Gallery, London wearing a dress by Christina Stamboulian, June 1994. Her appearance coincided with Prince Charles’ televised confession of adultery and Stamboulian’s creation became known as the Revenge Dress.
Diana’s affair with former army officer James Hewitt came as bomb news
Looking back, three decades later, we can now see that choosing this half-in/half-out royal life would never have worked. It could be that memories of this would influence the Queen’s decision not to allow Harry and Meghan to share the same style of arrangements.
In Diana’s case, things got worse when she jettisoned her police protection team that same month, against the wishes of Lord Condon, the former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
This paved the way for more attention from the paparazzi who were already making her life difficult.
What should have been a year of freedom became – to use the words of Queen Elizabeth – her own annus horribilis.
1994 was one of those gap years for the monarchy. There were no royal births, weddings, deaths or anniversaries that fascinated the nation and sold millions of newspapers at the time.
There were some highlights, such as the official opening of the Channel Tunnel by the Queen in May.
This was followed a few weeks later by the D-Day commemorations, two of which Diana attended: the unveiling of the Canada Memorial in Green Park and a reception at the Royal Yacht Britannia, hosted by the Queen, for world leaders, including President Clinton.
The Princess also attended a family event, the wedding of Princess Margaret’s daughter Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones to former actor Daniel Chatto in July, when she chatted warmly with Prince Philip.
Author and presenter Jonathan Dimbleby is pictured with Prince Charles to promote his program Charles the Private Man, The Public Role on ITV. The broadcast has a seismic impact
London art dealer Oliver Hoare who had a relationship with Diana and received a series of anonymous phone calls from the princess
Diana laughs and jokes with Sarah Ferguson at the Guards Polo Club. Oliver Hoare stands facing the camera, centre, next to Major Ronald Ferguson
Because Diana abandoned her charities after her decision to retire, she would carry out just ten royal engagements in 1994, down from 198 the year before.
(However, she did increase this to 127 assignments the following year).
This meant that magazines and newspapers had to focus increasingly on her private life to satisfy their readers’ never-ending hunger for Diana news.
One specific story that everyone wanted to know was if there was a new man in the princess’s life?
No one realized at the time that Diana was already involved in two complicated relationships. The consequences of this would dominate headlines throughout the year.
The first was with Oliver Hoare, an Islamic art dealer, who had met Charles and Diana at a house party in Ascot in 1985.
He was one of the few in their circle who built strong relationships with both the prince and the princess.
Three years older than Charles, the strikingly handsome Hoare shared Diana’s love of ballet and were both friends of Adrian Ward-Jackson, the art dealer and AIDS activist.
Diana fell in love with Oliver Hoare and, according to another mutual friend, ‘he was flattered that Diana was in love with him and he encouraged her without knowing it’.
The princess began making silent calls to his home until his wife Diane insisted in October 1993 that he had to ask the police to install equipment that could trace the calls.
After a hiatus while Hoare was away for two months, the silent calls resumed on January 13, 1994 and were traced back to the Princess.
The police advised the art dealer to call Diana’s name the next time she called. When he did, she started crying and replied, “Yes, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened to me.’
In early March, paparazzi photographers snapped the couple as they entered Kensington Palace. Five months later, on August 21, it was directly alleged that the two had been in a secret relationship.
Diana denied it and said: ‘They are trying to find out that I had an affair with this man or had some sort of fatal attraction. It’s just not true and so unfair.”
She even added a lie about her ability to use phone boxes to contact Hoare, which was easy to ridicule: ‘You can’t be serious. I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a payphone.’
Even The Observer labeled her claims ‘neurotic nonsense’.
That summer, Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role, in which the prince had admitted his adultery, was also shown. On the night the broadcast aired, Diana made a provocative appearance at the Serpentine Gallery, wearing a cocktail dress designed by Christina Stamboulian, which is still referred to as the princess’s ‘revenge dress’.
To be fair to Charles, he had stipulated that there should be nothing critical of Diana in the documentary and book released in October.
What upset the princess was not the Dimbleby project, but an inflammatory headline in the News of the World that said; ‘Karel; I never loved Diana’.
It wasn’t true, but of course it upset her.
In August, Diana was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard with her friend Lucia Flecha de Limas when she heard of an even more explosive story.
Her former lover, James Hewitt, had collaborated with writer Anna Pasternak on his memoir Princess in Love.
Ultimately, the book, which would chronicle their five-year romance, was widely ridiculed. As Pasternak later admitted, “The press and the royal hackers, furious that I had secured ‘the scoop of the decade,’ laughed at me.”
Hewitt was labeled ‘Britain’s Biggest Bounder’, a ‘Rat’ and a ‘Cad’.
It was partly thanks to the Hewitt book that the tide turned in late 1994 and Diana began to receive more positive press.
This was partly due to her determined attempt to woo the newspaper owners, editors and royal reporters.
The year ended with what would be Diana’s last family Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham.
Diana looks happier and appears in a Catherine Walker dress at Versailles in November 1994
She looked calm and relaxed after the tumultuous headlines she had endured over the past twelve months; the princess was happy to publicly show solidarity with her husband’s family.
Then again, she would have had no idea what fate had in store for her the following year.
By the following Christmas, the monarchy was rocked by her fateful Panorama interview, and the Queen would order her son and daughter-in-law to divorce. The princess would sever her last ties to her royal life and begin the final phase of her all-too-short life.