Royalty vs. the Pursuing Press: In Stalking Diana, Fleet Street Strains the Rules

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Creeping about in the undergrowth is not the style of the Daily Mail's influential gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. He claims that he attends many parties that royals do, and when he is leaving he sees Whitaker in the bushes. He insists that he is not a royal-watcher but a "social policeman." About the time that Whitaker diagnosed anorexia, however, Dempster indulged himself with a lofty and fairly encyclopedic denunciation of Diana's faults. It was he who said that she was spoiled, fiendish and a monster, that she was spending too much money on clothes shaming the nation's upper classes by having temper tantrums that drove staff to resign, and making Charles "desperately unhappy."

The rubbishy News of the World called Dempster's outburst rubbish too. Like Whitaker, he is unruffled. Royal-watchers tend to identify themselves with the family and even imagine that they are on intimate terms. "She should be brought up short," the avuncular Dempster explains. "The message got through to Diana that she cannot behave badly and that she'd better start pulling up her socks. Since then, she has been out all day, visiting hospitals and talking to children. She is showing more interest in Charles' hobbies. She is wearing the same clothes over again. What I am saying to her is, 'I know you are having a difficult time, but best to start behaving before the hatchet-type journalists start getting on to you.' Hopefully, that has been averted now."

Of course, nothing had been averted except a peaceful winter for the royals. Palace efforts to bargain with the Fleet Street scamps—a photo opportunity in exchange for privacy over the year-end holidays—dissolved in futility as the pack went hallooing off in all directions after Koo, Andrew, Charles and Diana. Koo had shown surprising staying power for a princely romance, despite speculative QUEEN BANS KOO and BUST-UP AS ANDY IS TOLD TO DROP HIS GIRL headlines in the Sun, a journal that occasionally runs its royals coverage down the side of what is called its "tits-and-bums" page, in giddy proximity to the precariously cantilevered breasts and shyly undraped buttocks of naked models.

"I can reveal that . . . Andrew would dearly love to settle down with Koo, 26, and raise a family," wrote Harry Arnold in the Sun. This was for public consumption; privately, Arthur Edwards, the veteran Sun photographer, said, "We can't have Princess Koo as an example to the nation's youth."

In any case, the lady was proving royally elusive. Photographer Steve Wood, who had spotted Koo and Randy Andy, as the press took to calling the Prince, on their flight to Mustique last fall, never got a shot of the pair. He tried from a chartered yacht, tried heroically while water-skiing behind a motor boat, and tried in jungle stakeouts, where, he admitted dolefully, "the police always found me." Some two dozen other journalists in expensively chartered watercraft also flopped.