‘Diana’s stepmother wasn’t wicked to me’
The suggestion that Raine Spencer was a fairy-tale villain is unfair, says Harry Mount. She comforted the Princess in tough times
Raine Spencer’s manners belonged to a different, more courtly age. I met her in 2000, when I was a gossip columnist for this newspaper. I wasn’t used to being treated so politely as a hack. Shortly before meeting her, I had been pelted with ice cubes by Jade Jagger at the opening of a south London nightclub, while I was chatting to the charming, diminutive Seventies pop sensation, Leo Sayer. So it would be fair to say that my expectations were pretty low. Not only did Raine not hurl ice at me when we met at a Mayfair party, she asked me thoughtful questions – and then, surprisingly, invited me to lunch a few days later at the Capital Hotel in Basil Street, Knightsbridge, just round the corner from Harrods, where she was a director.
The daughter of an American friend had just moved to London, and the Countess – kindly, but erroneously – thought I was the sort of man who could introduce this ingénue to polite London society.
Although she was immaculately dressed – her hair perfectly coiffured – she was extremely un-grande dameish. Her entire efforts were devoted to helping this pretty American girl find her footsteps in the capital. Again, she showered us both with questions and kept on suggesting friends her new young charge might like to get in touch with. She insisted on paying the bill.
And, in between all this, she passed the grand person’s ultimate test – she was extremely polite to the waiters, whom she knew well.
I, on the other hand, can’t claim to have known Countess Spencer at all well. I sadly never saw her again before her death last October, aged 87. But, after those two brief encounters, I have always been baffled by the widespread malice towards her, not least in her nickname “Acid Raine”. But that’s the popular image that’s stuck – and is revived by the title of tonight’s Channel 4 documentary, Princess Diana’s “Wicked” Stepmother, which is being aired to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, her stepdaughter.
I am told by a friend of the family that those quote marks around “wicked” were only inserted after vocal protests by her many loyal associates.
In fact, in recent years, it has emerged that the Princess ended up having a much better relationship with Raine Spencer than the words “Wicked Stepmother” might suggest. And to give tonight’s programme its due, it does acknowledge how dramatically their dynamic changed in the latter part of Diana’s life.
Yet, in the “from bad to good” narrative so beloved of television of this type, the documentary denigrates Raine before absolving her. One talking head refers to her as a “barbed-wire powder puff ”. Lord (Julian) Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey and her friend, says, “Nobody is a countess three
Chapel in Mayfair last November. It was into this domestic disaster zone that Raine stepped in 1976, to understandable opposition from the Spencer offspring. “But she never said a word against them,” says Cole, “She never mentioned the unkind ways in which, as children, they had treated her, simply because their father had fallen in love with her.” Relations became particularly chilly when she moved into Althorp and helped redecorate the house, in the early Eighties, selling off some of the contents to pay for a £2million refurbishment. After Earl Spencer’s stroke in 1978, she was responsible for much of the running of estate. Charles Spencer described the redecoration as having “the wedding cake vulgarity of a five-star hotel in Monaco” – and has since reversed much of the work. In fact, Countess Spencer’s tastes were more sophisticated than that implies. The sale of her effects at Christie’s in July this year included a treasure trove of deftly chosen antiques: a Louis XVI commode; a pair of Louis XVI urns; a fine portrait by Louis-léopold Boilly, the 18th-century French artist.
It wasn’t until Diana’s own marriage began to fall apart that her early unpopularity with the Spencer children began to thaw. One of the more intriguing revelations in last weekend’s Channel 4 documentary,
Diana: In Her Own Words was how desperately lonely she was living in Kensington Palace. Patrick Jephson, her former private secretary, explained that she would come home from visiting terminally ill patients in hospital to an empty palace – with no one to ask her how her day was. As the Windsors froze her out, so she warmed to her stepmother, particularly after the death of her father, aged 68, in March 1992 – just nine months before Charles and Diana released a statement announcing their separation. “The friendship between Raine and Diana took root after Johnnie’s sudden death,” says Lady Charlotte di Carcaci, the Countess’s daughter by her first husband, the Earl of Dartmouth. “While supporting each other in grief, the two women discovered a common ground. My mother could understand the pressures of a life lived in the glare of relentless publicity.”
Michael Cole agrees that, in the end, Diana and her stepmother were brought together by their shared love for Johnnie. “As the Princess always said, ‘We have Daddy in common’,” he explains. “No daughter was more in love with her father than Diana with Lord Spencer. She recognised that Raine had made her father very happy and their 13 years together were the best and most contented in a life that had not always been easy. I do know Raine was very happy that she was not just reconciled with Diana, but on the closest and friendliest terms with the Princess for a long time before she was killed so tragically.” There are no fairy stepmothers in fairy tales; only wicked ones. But this cliché should not be the abiding image of Countess Spencer, a woman whose life and loves were so much more complicated – and sophisticated – than that.