Love and War

James Hewitt

Blake £16.99, pp296

In the course of a single stay in the Devonshire countryside with Captain James Hewitt, his mother and his sisters, the late Princess Diana left fragrant and indelible memories. According to her dashing (and now gushing) former swain: 'I do remember Diana coming across the cat's bowl with Pussy written on it, becoming helpless with laughter and daring me to eat out of it. Rarely being able to resist a challenge, I finished the entire cat's dinner.'

I have now read this brief passage upside down and inside out and held up to the light, and still could not state with any certainty whether the gallant captain thinks that the joke was at his expense, or hers. At any rate, we know that when teased by a beautiful and wayward girl he is able to ingest a full platter of Whiskas, or perhaps Miaow Mix, more or less on demand. But is this what he meant to tell us?

The rest of the book is a good deal more demure, but almost every bit as opaque. Anyone who has been anywhere near a public school has already met James Hewitt. Not exactly the brains of the family (bit of a late developer, ha ha ha); not bad at games but no show-off; capable of setting a good example but needs encouragement; prefers to get on with the job in hand and leave the big picture to the boffins. Officer material. Brave as a lion. Dull as rain. He's what Sloanes call a bit of a 'ginge'; sandy and slightly freckled. But a good seat on a horse. And available.

When he learns from the princess that his immediate predecessor in her favours had been one of her bodyguards - Sergeant Barry Mannakee - he barely turns a hair. Nor does he turn a hair when she tells him that she's convinced that Prince Charles had Barry Mannakee done in, by means of a faked motorbike accident. His ginger locks remain unruffled when she confides in him her chief girlish hope, which is that her astrologer is correct in predicting that Charles will die in a road accident, too.

Hewitt's imperturbability and stolidity also made him, at least for a while, almost the only person in the know who was not at least ghosting a book on the Diana phenomenon. In a head-scratching fashion that seems quite believable, he tells us how he eventually tumbled to the fact that Andrew Morton's book was dictated by the princess. Having declined to speak to Morton, he first felt entitled to speak to Anna Pasternak. He then felt entitled to feel aggrieved at sharing, with her, the tabloid title of 'Most Hated Person in Britain', or some such nonsense.

I seem to remember Clive James, in the course of his New Yorker obsequy for the princess, describing Hewitt's head as rotting on Traitor's Gate. Hyperbolic as this seemed to me at the time, it appears even more so now, set against Hewitt's own emotions when he describes being caught in the Fleet Street machinery. What must it be like to scan a Daily Mirror headline about one's fiancée, reading: 'I flushed Hewitt's ring down the loo where it belonged'? He gives us no idea. For him, the possession of the princess's letters was and remains a property question.

And, as he repeatedly insists, he's legally and technically in the right. You can't get a decent treason trial out of banality like that.

Here is a chap who is having a torrid affair with the wife of the heir to the throne. She finds out that he's being posted to Germany and is upset that he's kept her in the dark. He doesn't understand her annoyance; she carries on being upset even when he's patiently explained to her that his abrupt departure means command of his own squadron. Women!

The Parker Bowleses, she pointed out icily, were never sent overseas. (Among other things, this book clarifies what happens when the old regimental prohibition on sleeping with the wives of brother officers breaks down.) So we get a good deal of campaign and barracks memoir, with cheerful squaddies and slightly loopy but essentially good-egg messmates.

Confronted with a mob of surrendering Iraqi soldiers in the Gulf, Hewitt radios for instructions and is told 'Shoot them'. This potentially good story is immediately buried in a hail of reminiscence about how well Nigel and Henry and all the others behaved under fire. I really did get the impression, by the end of the book, that he doesn't recognise a sensational lead even when it's served to him in a bowl of cat food.

Unless Mohammed al-Fayed chooses to take up the baffling case of Sergeant Barry Mannakee, this depthless memoir stands a good chance of being the last real Diana book. So its combination of tedium and sentimentality is, if only by accident, judged exactly right. On the opening page, Captain Hewitt quotes something that he claims 'a poet once said': When most of life/ Is froth and bubble/ Two things stand alone/ Friendship in another's trouble/ And courage in one's own.

This is a loosely-rendered version of an anonymous sampler homily that was a standby for the princess at charity events. An irritated Sir Kingsley Amis once redid it to run: Life is mainly toil and labour./ Two things see you through:/ Chortling when it hits your neighbour/ Whingeing when it's you. The title might be drawn from the old adage about all being fair in love and war. Or it might be taken from that other adage, which states that love, poverty and war are the essential experiences. Either way, he has left himself little grizzle-room.

• Christopher Hitchens is a writer for Vanity Fair.

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