It was supposed to be the start of a new beginning for Diana, Princess of Wales. Instead, 1994 ended as her lowest point in the maelstrom that her life would increasingly become in the last five years of her life.
In December 1993 he announced his retirement from his official duties. He had ignored pleas from the Queen and Prince Charles to issue a palace statement.
Instead, she opted to break the news herself in a dramatic, well-choreographed, tearful speech during a charity luncheon at London’s Hilton Hotel.
The implication was that he was giving up his sponsorship of 118 charities to focus on a few particular causes and relevant overseas tours.
Diana, Princess of Wales, gives a speech at the Hilton Hotel, London, during the Headway Charity Luncheon. She renounces her public duties and asks for ‘time and space’
Diana arrives at London’s Serpentine Gallery wearing a Christina Stamboulian dress, June 1994. Her appearance coincided with Prince Charles’s televised admission of adultery and Stamboulian’s creation became known as the Revenge Dress.
Diana’s romance with former army officer James Hewitt was explosive news.
Looking back three decades later, we can now see that opting for this half-in/half-out real life would never have worked. It could be that memories of this influence the Queen’s decision not to allow Harry and Meghan to have the same grooming style.
In Diana’s case, the situation worsened when, later that month, she abandoned her police protection team against the wishes of Lord Condon, 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 borrow Queen Elizabeth’s words, its own annus horribilis.
1994 was one of those in-between years for the monarchy. There were none of the royal births, marriages, deaths or jubilees that fascinate the nation and that, in those days, sold newspapers by the millions.
There were some highlights, such as the Queen’s official opening of the Channel Tunnel in May.
This was followed a few weeks later by the D-Day commemorations, which Diana attended: the opening of the Canada Memorial in Green Park and a reception on the Royal Yacht Britannia hosted by the Queen for world leaders, including the 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 was seen chatting warmly with Prince Philip.
Author and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby is pictured alongside Prince Charles to promote his show Charles the Private Man, The Public role on ITV. Transmission has a seismic impact
London art dealer Oliver Hoare, who found himself in a relationship with Diana and received a series of anonymous calls from the princess.
Diana laughs and jokes with Sarah Ferguson at Guards Polo Club. Oliver Hoare is in front of the camera, in the center, next to Major Ronald Ferguson.
Since Diana left her charities in the lurch following her decision to retire, she would only carry out ten royal engagements in 1994, a drop from 198 the previous year.
(However, he increased this to 127 engagements the following year.)
This meant that magazines and newspapers had to focus increasingly on her private life to satisfy their readers’ endless thirst for news about Diana.
One story in particular that everyone wanted to know was if there was a new man in the princess’s life.
No one realized it at the time, but Diana had already found herself involved in two complicated relationships. The consequences of this would dominate the headlines all 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 his circle to forge strong relationships with both the prince and princess.
Hoare, three years older than the strikingly handsome Charles, shared Diana’s love of ballet and they 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 encouraged her without knowing it.”
The princess began making silent calls to his home until in October 1993, his wife, Diane, insisted that he 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 13 January 1994 and were traced back to the princess.
Police advised the art dealer to shout Diana’s name the next time he called. When she did she started crying and replied: ‘Yes, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ I do not know what happened to me.
In early March, paparazzi photographers photographed the couple driving to Kensington Palace. Five months later, on August 21, it was directly alleged that the two had been carrying on a secret relationship.
Diana denied it, saying: “They’re trying to understand that she was having an affair with this man or that she had some kind of fatal attraction.” “It is simply false and very unfair.”
He even added a lie about his ability to use phone boxes to contact Hoare, which could easily be ridiculed: “You can’t be serious.” I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, much less a phone booth.
Even the Observer called his claims “neurotic nonsense.”
That summer, Jonathan Dimbleby’s documentary Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role was also screened, in which the prince admitted his adultery. On the night of her broadcast, Diana made a defiant appearance at the Serpentine Gallery in a cocktail dress designed by Christina Stamboulian, 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 either the documentary or the book that was published in October.
What upset the princess was not the Dimbleby project but an incendiary headline in the News of the World which said; ‘Charles; I have never loved Diana.’
It wasn’t true, but it naturally distressed her.
In August, Diana was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard with her friend Lucía Flecha de Limas when she learned an even more explosive story.
Her former lover, James Hewitt, had collaborated with writer Anna Pasternak on her memoir Princess in Love.
Ultimately, the book, which would detail their five-year romance, was widely ridiculed. As Pasternak later admitted: “The press and real hackers, furious that I had gotten ‘the scoop of the decade,’ lampooned me.”
Hewitt was labeled “Britain’s biggest daredevil”, a “rat” and a “scoundrel”.
It was partly as a result of Hewitt’s book that, by late 1994, the tide was turning and Diana began to receive more positive press.
This was partly due to his determined effort to court royal newspaper owners, editors and reporters.
The year ended with what would be Diana’s last family Christmas with the royal family at Sandringham.
A happier Diana appears in a Catherine Walker dress at Versailles in November 1994.
She seemed calm and relaxed after the tumultuous headlines she had endured over the past twelve months; The princess was happy to put on a public show of solidarity with her husband’s family.
Once again, he would have had no idea what fate had in store for him the following year.
The following Christmas, the monarchy was shaken by her unfortunate 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 embark on the final phase of her all-too-brief life.