Was Diana the original Duchess Difficult? Long before Meghan, the Princess of Wales was known for firing staff – including a ‘totally devoted’ secretary who left for the strangest reason…

When it comes to staffing crises within the royal family, recent years have been dominated by the Duchess of Sussex’s ongoing staff turnover.

Meghan has been branded ‘Duchess Difficult’ after media reports claimed the ‘dictator in high heels’ had reduced grown men to tears over her ‘barking’ of orders, although she denies the allegations.

But long before the American actress married into The Firm, Princess Diana, who is usually remembered for her gentle nature, also had her fair share of turmoil in that area.

In her later years, the then Princess of Wales, who also held the title Duchess of Rothesay in Scotland when she married Charles, repeatedly dismissed staff from her household for a seemingly endless list of arbitrary reasons.

Due to employment law, every time the princess fired people without warning or good reason, her husband Prince Charles would have to pay what they would have been awarded by a tribunal, plus 20 percent, according to author Penny Junor.

When the succession of cooks, maids, dressers, secretaries and butlers left, it cost between £12,000 and £14,000 each to get rid of (about £27,000 in today’s money).

The constant turnover of staff also included her long-serving secretary Victoria Mendham after they fell out during a Caribbean holiday in Easter 1996.

In her book Charles Victim or Villain? in 1998, Junor wrote that the “completely dedicated” 27-year-old clerk, who had worked with Diana for seven years, had become so close to her boss that they became personal friends.

They became so affectionate that Diana asked Victoria to go on holiday with her four years in a row.

Diana paid full costs for the first two. So when they went to the Caribbean for Easter 1996, Victoria assumed she was there again as a guest of the wealthy princess.

But halfway through the journey, Diana suddenly said, ‘Oh, Victoria, I wrote a note… to make sure you get your share of the bill. I think it’s about £5,000, Junor said.

“But ma’am,” Victoria spluttered, “you asked me to come.”

“Yes,” replied the princess, “but you always knew that you had to pay for yourself.”

According to Junor, Victoria called the London office in tears after the conversation, saying she didn’t have £5,000, and was worried about what on earth she would do.

The Prince of Wales eventually stepped forward and quietly paid the bill.

Nine months later, on another Caribbean holiday, it happened again.

This time Victoria told Diana that she could pay for the plane tickets, which had been economy class, but they had to stay at the K Club, where beachfront villas cost £1,700 a night, which would have been impossible for a secretary to to afford.

When the princess heard her husband had paid the previous bill, “she went through the roof” and Victoria was frozen like others before her, Junor said.

During her anti-landmine campaign in Angola, Diana left Victoria behind and took her butler Paul Burrell with her instead.

When Diana returned, she had a confrontation with a very upset Victoria, which led to her handing in her resignation. She was told to clear her desk and leave immediately, without four weeks’ notice.

Diana was not considered mentally fragile at the time and saw conspiracies everywhere.

She left disturbing messages on a number of people’s pagers and answering machines.

Junor writes that Camilla had also received a number of threatening and nerve-wracking phone calls in the middle of the night in the late 1980s.

Diana would never say who she was, but would say things like, “I sent someone to kill you.” They are outside in the garden. Look out the window, can you see them?’

And she even suspected that the staff members who were doing good work were secretly undermining her.

She fired William and Harry’s dutiful nanny Barbara Barnes in 1986 after she felt she was becoming too possessive of ‘her’ boys.

Barnes was a surrogate mother to Prince William for more than four years and to Prince Harry for more than two years. According to royal author Robert Lacey, Ms Barnes should not have said a word about her charges.

But despite the way she was treated by Diana, Victoria remained faithful to Mendham until the end.

When Diana died in 1997, she volunteered to go to her old office and help arrange the funeral, according to royal author Tim Clayton.

And in the years since, she has never succumbed to the temptation to sell stories about the princess to the press, which would have fetched a high price given their many years together.

Over the years, William and Harry became infuriated by the way their mother’s former assistants ‘exploited’ her name by selling stories – most notably Paul Burrell.

The princes have expressed disgust at the way they ‘cashed in’ on their mother’s memory by revealing secrets about her during the most difficult years of her life.

Many would go on to forge lucrative careers as royal experts, as the fascination with her life continues to captivate the world years after her death.

In 2007, a commemoration was held to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death and the princes did not invite servants who had sold stories or written books about their mother.

Mendham was not originally on the guest list, but courtiers eventually made an about-face to invite her, claiming it was a “regrettable mistake.” Burrell was not invited.

And now, more than 27 years after Diana’s death, Mendham has stayed out of the press and never said a single word about her royal service — including her resignation after that trip to the Caribbean.