The letters were the opening salvo in what proved to be a long hot summer of intrigue and innuendo. The image of the House of Windsor as a dutiful, sober and industrious family had for years captured the public imagination. Now the sudden and dramatic disclosure that their behaviour was no better than any other family’s – and often a good deal worse – came as an unpleasant surprise to many who had once unquestioningly accepted the sanitized Palace version as it was transmitted through trusted editors, writers, interviewers and programme-makers. Of the many shocks inaugurated by the publication of Diana: Her True Story, and confirmed within only a few weeks of its appearance, this contrast between the public royal family and the private Windsors was one of the most dramatic.
Within the Palace, a whispering campaign against the Princess now began in earnest as the royal family closed ranks against her. Both she and the Duchess of York became convinced that there were numerous plots and conspiracies against them, as often as not aimed at reducing the public’s support for them. At times they fell victim to wild and ludicrous exaggerations; at others, however, their suspicions proved all too well founded. Meanwhile, a climate of paranoia prevailed within the royal family itself. Bitter accusations, witch-hunting inquests and acrimonious investigations – the latter occasionally involving officers from the Royal Protection Squad – became routine occurrences. It is little wonder, therefore, that coded conversations, the scrambler telephone and the paper-shredder came to figure daily in Diana’s life. At Kensington Palace she had the rooms swept for listening devices and destroyed every scrap of paper she wrote on, knowing that there were those who would secretly rummage through the waste-paper baskets for anything that might be used against her.
As the summer dragged on, Prince Charles’s allies began to rally round in earnest. Friends who, a dozen years earlier, had warned him against marrying Diana now questioned her mental stability, advising him to ‘dump her immediately’ and seek a divorce. Describing Diana: Her True Story as ‘the longest divorce petition in history’, they urged the Prince to authorize an assault on his estranged wife’s integrity. While Prince Charles himself made it clear that he would take no part in any such campaign against Diana, his sympathizers gradually took it upon themselves to contact the media and give his side of the story. Diana, as the rumoured source of my book, would be painted as a sick woman barely maintaining a tenuous grasp on reality. This offensive, rooted in disdain, if not derision, for the Princess, enjoyed the willing collusion of numerous newspaper executives. (One senior editorial figure even faxed a sympathetic piece to Prince Charles at Highgrove. Though he initially vetoed it, that did not prevent its appearance a few weeks later.) As the daily drip of critical, often downright abusive, articles about her turned into a downpour, the Princess gradually learned who was trying to blacken her name and poison the public against her. At first she was disbelieving, but eventually she was forced to accept, albeit reluctantly, that close friends of her husband’s – friends whom she had thought sympathetic to her – were briefing the media almost every day. If she was sickened, however, she was not about to give in to the pressure: ‘Why don’t you save yourself a phone call and ring the papers direct?’ she demanded of Prince Charles during one terse conversation.
As effective as the smear campaign undoubtedly was, it could not amount to a vindication of the Prince of Wales. That task largely fell to his private secretary, Richard Aylard, who in late June convened a meeting of the Prince’s friends to try to salvage his reputation. Again, several newspaper executives were used as conduits for positive stories about Prince Charles and his valuable contribution to national life; he was, too, portrayed as a doting father to his sons, a by-word for unassuming parental devotion, in sharp contrast to his wife’s suffocating affection for her children. Indeed, Diana was accused of thwarting the Prince’s attempts to see the two boys so effectively that he was forced to act like a divorced father seeking access. One royal writer, Penny Junor (a biographer of the Prince), described Diana’s conduct as ‘irrational, unreasonable and hysterical’; other newspapers were told by Charles’s friends that his wife was a ‘megalomaniac who wants to be at the top of the pile. She wants to be seen as the greatest woman in the world. Her behaviour is endangering the future of her marriage, the country and the monarchy itself.’
With open warfare declared between the Waleses, Buckingham Palace in turmoil and separation discussions under way, the grotesque charade of normality was still maintained. A summer cruise, foolishly billed as a ‘second honeymoon’ for the Prince and Princess, was announced. For Diana it was the holiday from hell. She had too many painful memories of previous holidays on board the Alexander, one of 11 luxury yachts owned by the Greek billionaire John Latsis. The distance between the couple was all too evident to the other members of the party, who included Princess Alexandra and her husband, the Honourable Sir Angus Ogilvy, and Lord and Lady Romsey. Diana kept herself to herself, having little contact with her husband, sleeping in a separate cabin and preferring to take her meals with the children. The underlying tension was not helped when she picked up a ship-to-shore telephone and overheard her husband speaking to Camilla Parker Bowles. She was not surprised, though her misgivings about the relationship had been derided as the fantasies of a sick woman. ‘Why don’t you go off with your lady and have an end to it?’ she asked Prince Charles wearily. ‘The marriage is all over bar the statement,’ one of those on the yacht remarked after the royal party had left. For the Princess, the holiday had simply been yet another example of royal duplicity and self-serving hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, the summer suddenly became uncomfortably hot for the Duchess of York, on holiday in the South of France with her daughters and her ‘financial adviser’, John Bryan. Long-distance photographs of Bryan sucking a topless Fergie’s toes and kissing her made headlines around the world. The episode was devastating for the Duchess’s public image, and effectively ended any chance of a reconciliation between her and Prince Andrew. The presence of her children heightened the scandal, angering MPs, press and public alike, and there were calls for her to be stripped of her title and expelled from the royal family.
The repercussions of this episode were still being felt when, in August 1992, Diana found herself caught up in a similar scandal. Under the headline ‘My life is just torture’, the Sun newspaper ran a transcript of a tape-recorded telephone conversation between a woman alleged to be the Princess of Wales and a mystery admirer, later revealed as James Gilbey. It would prove to be one of the most embarrassing episodes of Diana’s royal career.
There were, in fact, two tapes, both recorded illicitly – indeed, illegally – by radio hams, who had then contacted the Sun, though there was a year between their approaches to the newspaper. The conversations were similar; the first had been recorded on New Year’s Eve 1989, when the Princess had been at Sandringham. Her ostensible lover had spoken from his car while parked by a roadside in Oxfordshire; in the course of a long conversation in which the woman emerged as a deeply troubled, lonely and vulnerable person, almost pathetically grateful for her caller’s attentions, he called her ‘Darling’ 53 times and ‘Squidgy’ or ‘Squidge’ 14 times. Inevitably, the scandal came to be known as ‘Squidgygate’.
During the racy, if rambling and rather juvenile, conversation, the Princess was heard telling Gilbey about her impossible life with Prince Charles and her isolation inside the royal family which, she felt, was increasingly ‘distancing’ itself from her. She spoke of her fear of becoming pregnant (though this part of the tape was not published until five months later, on the eve of her solo visit to Nepal), her anxiety about a clandestine meeting with her admirer, and her dreams for the future: ‘I’ll go out and conquer the world … do my bit in the way I know how and leave him behind,’ she says significantly – if not prophetically – having complained that her husband made her life ‘real, real torture’.
Amid much chatter about mutual friends, horoscopes, and fashion – Diana admitted that sh
e dressed another lover, Captain James Hewitt of the Life Guards, ‘from head to foot’ – she went on to discuss the royal family. She dismissed the Duchess of York’s attempts to mend her tarnished image, and recalled the ‘strange look’ the Queen Mother had turned upon her during lunch – ‘It’s not hatred, it’s sort of interest and pity … I was very bad at lunch and I nearly started blubbing. I just felt really sad and empty and thought: “Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family” … It is just so desperate. Always being innuendo, the fact that I’m going to do something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage.’
The Princess, so obviously lonely, despondent and neglected, derived much comfort from her besotted admirer. Their long-distance dalliance, at a time when she was only just beginning to fight her bulimia, and to come to terms with her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, vividly demonstrated her chronically low self-esteem as well as an embryonic ambition to use her undoubted abilities outside the confines of the royal system.
The front-page treatment given to the Squidgy tape ‘devastated’ Diana, while Gilbey became for a time Britain’s most wanted man, hunted day and night by teams of journalists; he has, however, resolutely refused to comment, either publicly or privately, on the conversation. The Princess was certain that the tape’s publication was part of the campaign to discredit her: ‘It was done to harm me in a serious manner, and that was the first time I’d experienced what it was like to be outside the net, so to speak, and not be in the family.’ She tried to show a brave face in front of the royal family, but her moods swung wildly. ‘I ain’t going anywhere. I haven’t got a single supporter in this family but they are not going to break me,’ she told anxious friends. Her sense of isolation in this hostile climate was complete; indeed, at the height of the scandal she even seriously considered packing her bags and leaving the royal family and public life for ever. Sometimes, too, that courageous façade would slip. Several friends confirmed that she felt ‘destroyed’ by the coverage, telling one of her circle that ‘If this is the price of public life then it is a price I am no longer willing to pay.’ According to the same friend, the Princess had never sounded so depressed or hopelessly forlorn. She did, however, find one, perhaps rather unlikely, ally at the Palace in the Queen, whose understanding and helpful attitude did much to encourage Diana to soldier on. Even so, the Princess had few illusions about the royal family, its courtiers and supporters: as one of her closest friends remarked, ‘Even if they have not managed to kill the golden goose that laid the golden eggs for the media, they have certainly succeeded in wounding her.’
It would seem that the royal family was unwilling to learn that lesson, wholly unable to see that an orchestrated campaign to discredit the Princess of Wales was intrinsically self-defeating, and ultimately deeply damaging to the monarchy. For now the coverage ranged from the hysterical to the sinister, as every day seemed to bring its own new royal scandal. Amid such frenzied speculation, a suspicion developed within Diana’s circle that there was a conspiracy among Prince Charles’s closest friends, the Palace Establishment, or even the security service, MI5, to discredit the Princess of Wales.
Yet black propaganda can only achieve so much. The issue of the Waleses’s marriage had still to be addressed, and to this end a deal was discussed during a closed meeting at Balmoral between the Queen, Prince Philip and the Prince and Princess of Wales. The central issue discussed was an informal separation, a course the Queen had long favoured, and under which Diana could lead a separate life within the royal family, joining her husband only for formal engagements such as Trooping the Colour. Prince Charles agreed to move out of Kensington Palace and Diana, determined to achieve a working relationship with his family on her terms, tacitly accepted. For a time, an unstable equilibrium was established.
Ultimately, the Princess was always loyal to the Crown, and almost always ready to defer to the Queen. She was, too, especially sensitive to the Queen’s difficulties in a year the Sovereign herself would later describe as her annus horribilis: her solicitor, Sir Matthew Farrer, was negotiating with Downing Street over secret proposals to pay income tax; senior Church figures were criticizing the royal family for not providing a healthy example of family life; and opinion polls were charting the general public’s growing disaffection with the monarchy.
Now, in the autumn of 1992 and against this background of public and private disquiet, the Princess of Wales embarked on a series of meetings with her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, and her lawyer, Paul Butner, to discuss an official separation from her husband and to plan her own future within the royal family. Those involved in these delicate negotiations recalled her evident vulnerability. ‘She was terrified that the family were going to take the children away and drive her into exile,’ said one adviser. ‘It was her greatest anxiety and she was prepared to give up everything, do anything to keep the boys.’ Diana needed no reminding of her own parents’ acrimonious divorce, during which her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, lost custody of her four children to Diana’s father, Earl Spencer.
Meetings between the Waleses to discuss the issues involved in a formal separation were invariably emotional and highly strung, ending, and sometimes starting, with slammed doors, raised voices and moist eyes. A venerable legal figure in the considerable shape of Lord Goodman was brought in to arbitrate on the constitutional questions raised by the prospect of a formal separation. At various stages the Prime Minister, John Major, was consulted and asked what effect, if any, a separation would have on the governance of the country. He indicated that it would have none.
For the most part, the discussion centred on the children, the couple’s homes and their offices. At the same time as asking Charles to leave Kensington Palace, Diana also wanted to divorce her office staff from his, which were both based at St James’s Palace, and move her employees to quarters at Buckingham Palace. This demand was unacceptable to Charles. As one of his advisers recalled: ‘The Prince was reluctant to go down the road of a formal separation and divorce, not only for the sake of the children, but also for the constitutional mess which would arise from that.’
The meetings continued, each with its highly charged content of argument and anger. Tried beyond endurance, during one of these discussions Diana desperately played her ace. Her frustration with the royal system was such that she threatened to take her children and live with them abroad, making a new life in Australia. To no avail – she was reminded very forcibly that the boys were second and third in line to the throne and as such had to be raised inside the royal court in order to learn their royal duties. She was also made chillingly aware of the stark legal realities underlying her predicament. Laws which apply exclusively to the royal family effectively deny a royal mother any real say in the upbringing of her children. Her ace was comprehensively trumped.
All through that tense autumn of 1992 the steady drizzle of pro-Charles stories continued, heightened when it was announced that he had commissioned the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to write his biography, described as the ‘complete riposte’ to Diana: Her True Story. The image of a loyal employer, a loving, if thwarted father, and a misunderstood public figure who was there for the duration – all this was beginning to emerge.
As the preparations were completed for a joint visit to Korea in November, Prince Charles’s private secretary briefed several newspaper editors that it would be the ‘togetherness tour’. By this time the separation negotiations had reached a critical stage and the Princess was in no mood to continue the hollow charade. Earlier in the year, on an unhappy trip to India, Diana had used her body language to devastating effect when she posed alone by the Taj Mahal, that monument to lost love, while Charles addressed a business meeting. The distance between the couple was underlined when the Princess deliberately turned away as the Prince tried to kiss her after a polo match in Jaipur. She used the same tactics in Korea, determined to show the world what was really going on, a decision which sever
al friends, including Rosa Monckton, then the President of Tiffany’s, questioned. Headlines like ‘The Glums’ and ‘How much longer can this tragedy go on?’ signalled that the ploy had been successful.
The tour was also dogged by exaggerated reports of the contents of the paperback edition of Diana: Her True Story, which briefly mentioned the angry letters she had received from Prince Philip. When all this had been embroidered by the tabloids, there seemed to be the makings of yet another ‘Diana’ scandal, and in the end she was forced to make a brief public statement in explanation of her relationship with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. ‘The suggestion that they have been anything other than sympathetic and supportive is untrue and particularly hurtful,’ she said.
It was, in any case, now only a matter of time before the official separation was announced by the Prime Minister. The Princess had asked that the statement be made while the boys were still protected at school, and the date was set for 9 December 1992. The week before, Diana had been to see Princes William and Harry at Ludgrove School in Berkshire so that she could break the news to them herself and try to reassure them about the future.
During that tearful encounter Diana steadfastly refrained from mentioning the name of the woman who had, to her mind, destroyed her marriage. She was acutely aware of the distress caused to children when ‘the other woman’ is given as a reason for the collapse of a marriage. For the Princess, her boys came first – whatever the cost.
The announcement itself was, Diana said, ‘very, very sad. Really sad. The fairytale had come to an end …’
It was not only the Princess’s personal fairytale that had ended. The events of 1992, the Queen’s annus horribilis, had effectively shattered the myth of the royal family. The year saw the collision of fantasy and reality, as unadorned facts triumphed over homely fiction. ‘The symbolism of the fire at Windsor Castle was not lost on anyone inside the family,’ Diana told her friends.
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