Diana

by Andrew Morton

  The tone of the letters was adoring. I recall the lengths to which Camilla went to contact Charles, on one occasion writing to him while secreted away in a lavatory on the Queen Mother’s ninety-first birthday, 4 August 1991. ‘I just hate not being able to tell you how much I love you,’ she wrote. The note, on her headed writing paper, continued in a similar vein, saying how much she longed to be with him and that she was his for ever. I particularly remember one vivid passage that read, ‘My heart and body both ache for you.’

  She apologized for breaking into gibberish during a secret phone call with Prince Charles, blaming her husband in a memorable turn of phrase: ‘The erstwhile silver stick appeared through the door looking like a furious stoat – pity they did not stuff him.’ It was a sentence that stuck in my mind because Brigadier Parker Bowles had held the largely ceremonial post of ‘Silver Stick in Waiting’ to the Queen. I recall that she went on to proclaim her undying affection for Prince Charles with phrases like, ‘I yearn to be with you day and night, to hug, comfort and love you.’ She reminisced about a ‘magical night’ with her prince at a friend’s country house, lamenting the difficulties of their illicit relationship. ‘I dread the acting part,’ she wrote, referring to a forthcoming lunch where she, with her husband in tow, was to join Prince Charles.

  As Diana absorbed the depth of her rival’s love she was also able to see the extent of the duplicity that her husband and his lover connived in to pursue their affair. In one of the letters, Camilla reflected that the long periods of separation were a test of her love and affection for him. She carefully outlined the dates and places when she was available to see him while her husband and children were away. It must have been horrible for Diana to realize that the venues where Mrs Parker Bowles might meet Charles included the homes of people she called her friends.

  Just as shocking to Diana must have been the letter which referred personally to her in very unflattering terms. Camilla advised Charles to erase any thoughts of guilt about their relationship from his mind and rise above what she termed ‘the onslaughts of that ridiculous creature’ – clearly a reference to Diana.

  Calling herself ‘your devoted old bag’, Camilla reminded the Prince that she loved him above all others, and signed off, ‘Your hopelessly besotted old friend’. Having read this sheaf of passionate love letters Diana told Colthurst that any hopes she might have harboured of saving her ten-year-old marriage were doomed.

  The glimpse we were given of the letters removed any doubts we might have had about Diana’s tale of woe, but they cut little ice with the libel lawyer we saw in February 1992. We were, of course, unable to tell the lawyer of Diana’s involvement in the book and he did not ask how we had had sight of the letters. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that he appeared to view the enterprise (and Colthurst, O’Mara and Morton) with some distaste. He informed us that our knowledege of the letters could not be used in court in any circumstances, and that we did not have sufficient evidence, under English libel law, to prove that Charles and Camilla were lovers. He put me well in my place when he said, ‘Who do you suppose the judge would believe, Mr Morton – you or Prince Charles?’ When Diana was told that all her undercover efforts had come to nothing, she was understandably furious, seeing it as another example of the whole world standing against her.

  Our distinguished legal adviser did, however, come up with a method of conveying to the reader that Prince Charles and Mrs Parker Bowles were lovers without actually saying so. ‘If you refer to their “close friendship” often enough, and in the correct context, your reader will assume they are lovers,’ he advised. And he was absolutely right. Although I never said outright that the pair were lovers in the first edition of Diana: Her True Story, the whole world assumed I had.

  The Princess was now thinking soberly about life after the contents of the book had been revealed. During the late summer of 1991 she went to Colthurst’s home in west London to see his astrologer friend, Felix Lyle, for a reading that might yield clues to her future. During their conversation, which she had tape-recorded, she forecast that her marriage break-up would come about in around eighteen months – she was just a few months adrift. She realized there would be turmoil for two or three years before she could remarry, and in any case she wanted space between relationships. But, she wondered, what should her next suitor’s star sign be? Taurus and Capricorn were deemed too slow for her, but a man born under Aquarius, an air sign, would be best suited to the new Diana who was gradually emerging, Lyle told her.

  Gravely, the Princess recognized his prediction that she must endure many trials and tribulations before she could find the new life that she craved. The doubts and concerns were evident as they discussed her future. ‘Will I be allowed to break away?’ she asked, then added significantly, ‘And will the public let me?’

  These were difficult and trying days as the pressures began to mount. The Princess’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, lost no time in warning her, before Christmas 1991, that the ‘men in grey suits’ knew about the book and her involvement in it. Nevertheless, Diana forged ahead. She knew there was a cataclysm in the offing, but had no doubts that she would survive it. In a letter to James Colthurst some six months before the book’s publication, she wrote:

  Obviously we are preparing for the volcano to erupt and I do feel better equipped to cope with whatever comes our way! Thank you for your belief in me and for taking the trouble to understand this mind – it’s such a relief not to be on my own any more and that it’s okay to listen to my instinct.

  Diana was not the only one considering a future life free of royal constraints. During the summer and autumn of 1991, the Duchess of York was continually beseeching her sister-in-law to jump ship with her. Not only did her unhappiness encourage further instability in Diana’s marriage, editorially it pushed us to produce the book as quickly as possible. So nervous were we of Fergie’s unbridled influence that publication was brought forward from September, the traditional date for potential bestsellers, to June 1992. The warning signals were coming thick and fast. Just before Christmas 1991 we heard that a very well informed individual had placed a £500,000 bet on the Waleses’ marriage not lasting a year; and in the same month Fergie, who was secretly seeing her lover Steve Wyatt in Texas, asked Diana if she could look after her children, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice when she left the royal family.

  Diana was becoming increasingly anxious as she waited for her book to be completed, worried that in the PR war with her husband and the Palace, the enemy were gaining advantage. In late February 1992 she was appalled when a book entitled Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows by Lady Colin Campbell was serialized in Britain’s bestselling tabloid, the Sun. The book took the view that if there was a problem with the Waleses’ marriage, it was Diana. Worse, it hinted that Diana had romantic attachments to men other than her husband.

  The Princess immediately passed on her fury to James Colthurst, who phoned me on the ‘scrambler’. I too was deeply concerned but, as I told James, there was little I could do – the only thing that could remove Lady Colin’s version of events from the front pages of the tabloids would be an even bigger royal story and there were none available (that is, not until my book arrived in June). Colthurst relayed this information to Diana, who to his astonishment instantly provided the blockbuster story we required. She had recently learned that Fergie had visited the Queen to talk about a separation from Prince Andrew; after much discussion the Queen had agreed that a separation was the best option in the circumstances.

  When Colthurst passed the story on to me I was dumbfounded. I had not dreamed for a minute that a royal scoop to blow away Lady Colin’s account could ever materialize – but here it was in spades. I duly wrote the front-page story for the Daily Mail, which the Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, later described as ‘inch-perfect’. As we had nail-bitingly hoped, Lady Colin Campbell’s anti-Diana stories were submerged by the new feeding frenzy in the tabloids.


  Our main objective, however, was to ensure that the book measured up to Anson’s assessment of the article – that it reflected Diana’s life, both in words and in pictures, as accurately as possible.

  As she had promised, in November 1991 the Princess supplied us with several large, red family albums together with a selection of photographs taken by Patrick Demarchelier, which she pulled from a desk drawer in her sitting room. From time to time, however, Diana would get cold feet about the project. For a long while there was a debate between Kensington Palace and the publisher about the proposed title. We thought ‘Diana: Her True Story’ the only possible choice, as the book told the story very much from her point of view; Diana, though, nervous that the choice of title would hint at her involvement, wanted it to be called ‘The True Story’. Eventually, she was persuaded that her choice, in the circumstances, would have been misleading – but only after she had been secretly shown mock-up covers of the book featuring both versions of the title. She even changed the jacket blurb saying that her wedding day was not, as she had alleged previously, the ‘worst day’ of her life but the most ‘emotionally confusing’.

  As each chapter was written, Colthurst would deliver it to the Princess to read; when he was on holiday I cycled, on a Saturday morning, to the Brazilian Embassy, where Diana was seeing her friend, the Ambassador’s wife Lucia Flecha de Lima, to drop off a chapter. She admitted to finding herself by turns moved by her own story and anxious about its content, occasionally deleting material that she thought would implicate her. In fact, many of Diana’s deletions concerned other people or material already in the public domain – a comment to Sarah Ferguson during her first engagement on board HMS Brazen to see Prince Andrew; her sister Sarah’s anorexia nervosa, and stories about Camilla Parker Bowles (the deletion of which would have undercut Diana’s case against Camilla) – and once James had pointed this out she agreed to reinstate the material. Time and again, the Princess returned to the driving imperative behind the book – to allow her voice to be heard clearly.

  It was a theme she articulated in a letter she drafted to her father, Earl Spencer, a few days before his final fatal illness in March 1992. In the short note she talked about her involvement with the book and tried to explain her reasons for cooperating so fully. She wrote:

  It is a chance for my own self to surface a little rather than be lost in the system. I rather see it as a lifebelt against being drowned and it is terribly important to me . . .

  For a few weeks in February 1992, as the final manuscript was being prepared, it looked as though the book would surface with a whimper rather than a bang. Serialization was crucial and both the newspapers we approached, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, turned it down. When Michael O’Mara approached the editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, and briefed him on the book’s contents, Neil’s response was: ‘I think it would be better off in a tabloid.’ In spite of all O’Mara’s arguments, Neil turned the book down out of hand, making it clear that he was simply not interested in serializing royal books. While he ran royal stories, at that time usually written by me, he was still sore about having serialized a previous royal book of mine, a frothy lifestyle tome about the Princess of Wales called Diana’s Diary. He had been criticized by both senior editorial executives and some readers for serializing a lightweight book in a heavyweight newspaper and he was not prepared to go down that road again. At the time his judgement was backed by his paper’s proprietor Rupert Murdoch. The outlook was bleak; we needed a reputable newspaper backing the book, otherwise it might easily be dismissed as tittle-tattle and hearsay. In the last throw of the dice, I had a word with Diana’s friend Angela Serota and asked her if she would speak to her friend, and Andrew Neil’s boss, Andrew Knight, chief executive of News Interna­tional, which owns the Sunday Times, and assure him that the book was authentic and came with Diana’s approval.

  The last-ditch appeal worked. Just a few hours later, O’Mara received a phone call from Sue Douglas, executive editor of the Sunday Times, saying that they were now very interested in looking at the book. She arrived soon after at O’Mara’s office and, after reading the manuscript, made it clear that the paper would like to serialize the book. Within a matter of days a deal was done. Andrew Neil, the man who initially rejected the book, became its staunchest defender, effectively laying his job on the line to support it. However, as the weeks ticked by and speculation about the book’s contents reached fever pitch, even the notoriously pugnacious Andrew Neil began to appreciate the enormity of what he was about to do, realizing that if the individuals who had spoken to me during the course of my research for the book did not stand by their statements he would have to resign. In late May, a few days before serialization was due to begin, he called O’Mara and me into his office at Wapping, in London’s East End, and asked us to provide signed statements from the book’s main witnesses. This we duly did. We had a reciprocal request to make of him: Diana had complained that she had heard that Murdoch himself was gossiping about the contents of the book, which were then secret, at New York dinner parties. This was a cause for considerable concern and we now formally asked Neil if he could prevail upon his boss to keep quiet.

  The prospect of Rupert Murdoch himself blowing the gaffe did little to calm Diana’s nerves and she had to have her hand held by the sisterhood, notably Carolyn Bartholomew, Angela Serota and her healer Oonagh Shanley-Toffolo, who independently reassured her that the book would, despite the coming upheaval, ultimately be a positive force in her life.

  As well as talking to her friends, the Princess was making her own internal preparations for the coming storm. Towards the end, a week before serialization began, she arranged a meeting with the Queen to discuss the possibility of having her own home, staff and money, made independent from the Prince of Wales. In conversations with James Colthurst, the Princess made it clear that the Queen was aware of the problems in her marriage, and had indicated that, if the couple were so unhappy, she felt that there was no reason why the Prince and Princess should be artificially pushed together.

  For his part, Prince Charles had already discussed the prospect of a royal separation with the august lawyer, Lord Goodman. While these behind-the-scene manoeuvres were taking place, on the surface, in the face of the mounting flurry of media speculation, the Prince of Wales’s supporters were trying to downplay the book’s potentially explosive contents. When Prince Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard briefed journalists, he told them dismissively: ‘You know Morton – a bit of insight, a bit of invention and the colour of the tablecloth.’

  An unguarded comment by Andrew Neil on Sky News gave an indication that domestic furnishings did not form a part of this royal narrative. A couple of days before the book was serialized for the first time, Neil mentioned that Diana thought that she would never be Queen. Next day it was splashed across two pages of the Sun newspaper.

  This, however, was nothing compared to when the first extract appeared in the Sunday Times on 7 June 1992. The front-page story carried the headline: ‘Diana driven to five suicide bids by “uncaring” Charles’. Underneath was the sub-heading: ‘Marriage collapse led to illness; Princess says she will not be Queen’. It is hard now, some twelve years later, when the narrative of her unhappy life has been accepted as conventional wisdom, to convey the shock, disgust and astonishment that greeted that first instalment. The criticism came from all sectors of society and was severe and unrelenting. I, as the author, suddenly became an object of hatred – to the extent that when I appeared on This Morning, hosted by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan, in Liverpool one morning in June 1992, security guards patrolled the roof of the building, the car park next door was evacuated, and a helicopter flew me away from the studio because they feared some crazed attempt to attack, even kill, me. A tad extreme, but indicative of the public mood.

  Hours before the first serialization appeared in the Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch phoned Andrew Neil from New York to warn him of the coming onsla
ught from the Establishment. ‘They will try to destroy you,’ he said. ‘Be careful; they are not nice people and you are about to become their number-one enemy.’ He was proved to be absolutely right – the snobbery, class divisions and instinctive deference to Britain’s ruling elite all came to the fore in the days and weeks following the book’s publication.

  The Archbishop of Canterbury warned about the damage to the boys; the Labour politician Peter Mandelson complained that the book was ‘scurrilous’ and that there were ‘no longer any boundaries between fact and fiction’. The former Arts Minister Richard Luce said that the book went beyond the pale of decency and could only serve to undermine the monarchy, while his Tory colleague Sir Nicholas Fairbairn was rather pithier, saying that I should be put in the Tower of London. Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who was editor of the Sunday Telegraph from 1986 to 1989, declared that Andrew Neil ought to be horsewhipped for serializing the book. Indeed, the media – which in a free society should by its very nature believe in disclosure rather than censorship – were the most damning in their criticism. The Sunday Telegraph’s editor Charles Moore said on BBC’s Newsnight that journalists should use ‘hypocrisy and concealment’ when writing about the royal family, while Max Hastings, then editor of the Daily Telegraph and since knighted, told listeners to Today, BBC Radio Four’s flagship morning current-affairs programme, that I was not fit to play a piano in a brothel, dismissing the story as ‘a deluge of rubbish and a farrago of invention’ that lacked a ‘single reliable fact’.

  In the rush to condemn, supercilious book reviewers exposed their own class prejudices: Hugh Montgomery Massingberd dismissed me as a ‘tabloid vulgarian from Leeds’, old Etonian Philip Ziegler called me a ‘little hack’ and Lady Longford described the book as ‘Crawfie [the Queen’s former nanny who wrote an anodyne account of royal nursery life] with strychnine’. Even the Sunday Times’s sister paper, The Times, was unconvinced about the veracity of the book. Its headline ‘Royal book serial provokes distaste’ made clear its disapproval.