by Tim Clayton
The world felt it had a right to know about this couple. It had attended their wedding, cooed over their baby pictures, and then watched the body language change. The next plot twist was inevitable.
Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles moved house in the summer of 1986. Diana’s rival’s new home, Middlewich House, was even closer to Highgrove than her last, a mere twenty minutes by car. Diana could time the distance herself, because Charles took her to the Parker Bowles’s house-warming party.
Whatever Diana did was news, whoever she saw was news, whatever she wore was news. In Tokyo, in May 1986, 100,000 people had lined the streets to watch her drive past standing in an open Rolls. And yet, as she complained during those long evening phone conversations from Highgrove, it was the man cheerfully passing around drinks downstairs that she wanted to love her, and he patently did not. She may have played a large part in driving him away – the precise share of responsibility can never be calculated. But the twenty-five-year-old beauty was not getting what she wanted.
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Diana grew close to her personal protection officer, Barry Mannakee. She had first met him as a back-up officer in 1984. The next year he was promoted to look after the children, and finally to look after Diana. Protection officers travel everywhere with their allotted VIPs and the relationship is inevitably intimate. He was calm, unflappable and supportive. Mannakee and Diana got on very well, and she sought his advice on clothes, modelling dresses for him from time to time. After a few months they would disappear on long drives together.
Diana certainly exchanged flirtatious banter with Mannakee – teasing him, for example, in the following: ‘Barry, how do I look?’ ‘Sensational, as you know you do. I could quite fancy you myself.’ ‘But you do already, don’t you? Escort me to my car, if you please.’ Wendy Berry, the Highgrove housekeeper, recalled Mannakee telling her that he felt obliged to listen to the Princess’s problems and, at times, hug her when she was crying in front of him.
Rumours about their relationship did the round of the various palaces. The senior royal protection officer, Colin Trimming, who was also Prince Charles’s bodyguard, warned Mannakee that he was getting too close, and he was made Prince Charles’s bodyguard. But the warm friendship with the Princess continued. Finally, in July 1986, he was transferred to other duties in the Diplomatic Protection Squad. In July 1987 Mannakee died in a road accident. When she heard about his death Diana was utterly distraught. For a while she believed that he had been murdered. In fact he was hit by a teenage learner driver while riding as a passenger on a motorbike.
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Maybe it was all down to what Nicholas Soames would one day describe as her paranoia, but because Diana felt she was being undermined and criticised by so many of the people around her, she could turn on them. Courtiers like Everett had already felt the icy edge of her displeasure, but some lower down the royal pecking order – like her dresser Evelyn Dagley – received a hotter variety.
Look at this fucking shirt, Evelyn, look at it you idiot, it’s rubbish, rubbish, rubbish – what is it Evelyn? Rubbish . . . Get out of my sight.
Wendy Berry relates that inside Highgrove the servants would mutter that Diana, so sweet and so tender to the outside world, frequently seemed spoilt and contrary. There is a strong savour of class war in Wendy Berry’s memoir. She thought Charles was haughty and didn’t take to Andrew and Sarah’s offhand ways at all. Up to a point she fits Diana into a general thesis about ‘them’ and ‘us’. But this raises an interesting issue. A large part of Diana’s appeal was based on the sense that she was somehow not quite ‘one of them’ at all, that she was the anti-establishment princess – a ‘fifth columnist’, in constitutional historian Ben Pimlott’s phrase. There’s no doubt that Diana did become strongly anti-Windsor, but throughout her life she was an aristocrat to her fingertips.
Yet the same staff who have told us that Diana could be a difficult woman to serve also say that she was frequently the pick of their royal employers. She was the one who would kick off her shoes, sit and chat in the kitchen, join in at the annual staff dance. A former royal butler told us how refreshing it was to have someone come through ‘the green baize door’ that separated the servants from their masters and ask them questions about their lives, mark their birthdays with thoughtful presents and turn up at their drinks parties.
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Charles’s friends were closing ranks around their Prince. Seeing him so despondent, listless and irritable, they decided that he needed Camilla. If Charles and Camilla did recommence their affair at this date, and not years before as Diana always believed, the story – as told to Penny Junor – goes as follows.
He went back to Camilla in ’85, ’85 and ’86. Friends brought them together, friends who were desperately worried about the Prince. He was on the brink of real despair. Suicidal is perhaps being overdramatic, but he was in a very, very bad way and friends thought that he needed someone to talk to. They knew that he had always got on very well with Camilla. She’d always been very good with him. They knew that she was pretty unhappy because she was in a fairly dud marriage herself and so they brought them together again . . . I think that Camilla brought him back from the brink, and I think that Camilla has a very, very good effect on him. I’m not saying they immediately began an affair once they got together again but they started to talk and he desperately needed someone to talk to. Throughout the years, the black, black years of his marriage, he never said anything to anyone, he didn’t complain about Diana ever.
It was Patti Palmer-Tomkinson who took the initiative, putting the two in postal contact and then, some time in 1986, inviting them to meet at her house. The date at which the relationship is said to have resumed (having been denied completely until the Camillagate tapes were played in 1992) is now around the time of Diana’s first confirmed affair.
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In the summer of 1986 James Hewitt received an invitation to a Buckingham Palace drinks party. It clashed with a dinner engagement and he almost didn’t go.
One of her ladies-in-waiting – a lady called Hazel West – had a drinks party to which we were both invited, and I spent most of the time talking to Diana. It made the drinks party more bearable – I mean, that sounds rude, but you know drinks parties can be a bit difficult when you’ve got to make small talk and be polite, particularly in that environment. But that wasn’t the case talking to her, it was very easy and natural. I think she was trying to find out more about me and what I did and she learned that I was a riding instructor, and that’s really how we started. She said she would like to learn to ride again. She had hurt herself as a young child falling off, and lost her nerve, and wanted to get her nerve back again. So I said I would be able to help, and so it was arranged.
The previous year Hewitt had given riding lessons to Princess Michael, Diana’s neighbour at Kensington Palace. As a polo player he also had a nodding acquaintance with Prince Charles. There was nothing particularly unusual about Diana’s request and the lessons were easy to arrange. Hewitt knew the colonel at Hyde Park barracks and got his permission. Other members of the Royal Family rode from the barracks already. Hewitt was an experienced instructor and the lessons quickly fell into a pattern:
Once I’d established what she knew and she’d got a little bit of confidence in her horse we went outside, and then there were three of us, Diana, Hazel [West] and myself, and a few police cars, and a few bodyguards wandering around. They were great fun. Other people would join our little ride. A terribly nice major-general [Sir Christopher Airy] would come riding with us, and we would see various other people out and about, like the Duke of Luxembourg – particularly around the time of the Queen’s birthday parade when they suddenly feel it’s time to get back on a horse and practise for Trooping the Colour.
The lessons took place two or three times a week and they both enjoyed them.
It soon became very obvious to me that she got a great deal of pleasure from doing it. And it was something tha
t she looked forward to, away from her normal routine and existence.
We’d discuss minor politics or people, or events that were going on in the news, or where she had been. Occasionally she’d point someone out and talk about them or what they were wearing, in an idle sort of chit-chat way. We’d stop and talk to the tramps who were sleeping on the benches. ‘What are you doing there?’ I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, sort of staring down, but – it was meant in a kind way and I think it was received in the way that it was meant.
As they got to know each other, Diana started to ask for his advice:
What do you think I should wear to this engagement or that engagement? Or did you see me on television the other day, do you think I looked all right? I suppose she wanted to build up her confidence, not only on a horse but also in her life as well. I think she wanted recognition from someone.
When she rang him to arrange a lesson, they would talk on the phone for an hour or more. In late autumn, he was promoted to acting major, and took charge of Headquarters Squadron at Combermere Barracks in Windsor. He was delighted that Diana decided to continue to ride with him there. But the last thing he expected was that his increasing devotion to her might be reciprocated.
It’s something that I wasn’t expecting or wanted to happen. I mean, sometimes when you don’t expect something you don’t see it until it hits you in the face. I left London and was posted back to the regiment at Windsor and she made the effort to come down to Windsor to continue to ride, which was a big effort. Then there were less bodyguards about, less police. Windsor Great Park’s a big place, a great place to go riding. You can get lost in there. She said, ‘I wish we could be alone.’ We weren’t being stupid about it, because there was a very real risk of some madman trying to kill her. So I was always in touch by radio and always had security in the back of my mind. I enjoyed her company, we enjoyed each other’s company, and the more time we could spend together, the more we’d enjoy our week.
We were sitting in the anteroom of the officers’ mess at Windsor and we’d been riding. It was quite crisp and cold outside and we were having coffee and biscuits. I think she’d had a hard week and she just poured out all her problems to me, which was extraordinary because that was the first time I realised how dreadfully unhappy she was in her life.
She explained that underneath the veneer of calmness meeting big crowds of people would really make her very nervous. She explained what bulimia was to me, which is the first time I’d ever heard of it. She said she wasn’t appreciated as much as she should be by those who were asking her to go and meet the crowds and go and be a public figure and go and work for the firm, the firm being the Royal Family.
She was in a tearful state – she apologised for that afterwards – she was in a tearful state and I remember she was sitting on the back of one of those leather chesterfield sofas with her boots on the cushion and I was sitting in the middle, sort of looking up. She was very tearful at that stage, so she came and sat next to me and we hugged each other.
When Diana phoned that evening, when Hewitt could have told her that their relationship was impossible, he didn’t. She invited him for dinner alone at Kensington Palace and he stayed the night. From then on they continued to ride in Windsor Great Park, but about twice a week Hewitt would visit Kensington Palace and leave in the small hours. Occasionally he met friends such as Harry Herbert, Kate Menzies or Carolyn Bartholomew there, but normally they were alone. Sometimes they went out to dinner – usually at San Lorenzo in Knightsbridge – with cover provided by Carolyn Bartholomew and another girlfriend. There were trips to the opera, Mozart, champagne, secretly holding hands in the dark. Bartholomew told Hewitt that he was good for Diana, ‘the one light in her life’.
Diana felt desired. This was the relationship she had wanted: love poems, secret gifts, shared confidences. One day Hewitt sent her a handwritten copy of Shakespeare’s love sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’. That same afternoon she heard it recited at a school she was visiting. It was fate, she declared; they were fated to be together.
It was important for both of us. I became deeply in love with her, and that’s a great thing to happen. It’s a great thing to be in love with someone. And if they’re in love with you, I mean, you know, it makes you want to sing and walk with a bounce in your step. And all the things that you can do, you can achieve, if you’ve got those feelings. I mean, she told me time and time again how much she loved me, and what our relationship meant to her.
* * *
In 1987 Prince Edward asked the Duchess of York to join him in It’s a Royal Knockout!, a game show he had organised for BBC Television. She agreed, as did Andrew and Anne. Charles and Diana declined. Fergie received most of the blame when, after much costumed whooping and cavorting, the programme was deemed a vulgar embarrassment. The tabloid Glenda Slagg, who had so praised the Duchess a few months before, now leapt on any example of bad taste, fluctuating weight or exuberant holiday fun. Soon she was ‘Freebie Fergie’ and the ‘Duchess of Pork’.
The Royal Family was under pressure. At the end of Knockout, Prince Edward stormed out of a press conference after criticising the watching journalists for their lack of enthusiasm. His petulance was mirrored by Charles’s own behaviour on Radio 4’s Today programme. When pressed about some of his more controversial public statements, he snapped, ‘There is no need for me to do all this . . . If they’d rather I did nothing, I’ll go off somewhere else.’ Charles was similarly stressed when he met the editors of The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the Economist. He spoke with ‘frightening intensity’ as he complained that his family were being reported as a soap opera. ‘I have been brought up to have an active role. I am determined not to be confined to cutting ribbons.’
* * *
When Diana returned to Kensington Palace after a hard day’s ribbon-cutting, winding down from another performance in front of the cameras, she no longer had to face a flat that was empty, or empty save for sleeping children and servants.
She’d come in still fairly hyped up and bubbly and excited by it, because she would have had to get herself into that kind of attitude, and before she could continue the evening, she’d need to completely unwind.
I would stand up when she came, and she’d just come bouncing into the room, and the whole place would light up and change and she’d come over and hug and her whole energy would be very evident. She’d say, ‘I can see you’ve started on the whisky already,’ or something like that. And there was always a joke and a laugh and a kiss and – and it was just wonderful, I mean, it was just a wonderful existence. And then she would talk about her day, her trials and tribulations or if it had gone well what she enjoyed about it, and then relax. And then you could see the sort of flow of exhaustion come across her. You know, it was very evident to see how much a day of public engagements can take out of you.
Now Diana began to talk more intimately about the problems in her life. As she explained it to Hewitt:
She felt that she was in an unloving marriage, but I think that can be survived. So it ran deeper in that she sincerely believed that she wasn’t being appreciated. Everything she did or tried to achieve she felt she was being criticised for, and there was very little support.
When she was speaking to me she tended not to refer to individuals. And when she was being critical it was ‘they’ or ‘the firm’. There were times when she was so frustrated that she would become unguarded in her criticism, for example towards the Queen. Any of us can get in a bit of a paddy about something and say something that we later regret. She would say, ‘The Queen doesn’t appreciate what I’m doing. I try to do my job. She’s not helping me.’ But then she would temper that with always sort of trying to show that she was respectful of Her Majesty, which was rather nice and touching, actually.
She would have much preferred to be involved and supported, and seen to be supporting the Royal Family – very much so. I believe that she’d have been a power to be reckoned with.
I think there was a really big mistake – she wasn’t a rebel, you know. It was her choice to get married to Prince Charles. She knew what she was getting into – the wider implications – she knew the importance of the monarchy. And let’s face it, her son was going to be a king one day. There’s no doubt in my mind that she would have loved to have been there supporting, and would have loved the outcome to have been completely different.
When she told me, ‘I think they’re jealous because I seem to be more popular,’ this complete expression of disbelief must have come across my face because, you know, I just didn’t think that people could be so petty about that.
Hewitt used to play with William and Harry, and even read them bedtime stories. A visit was organised to his regiment, and Hewitt had uniforms made for them. By the summer of 1987 Diana would go with Hewitt to his mother’s house in Devon. One day Shirley Hewitt answered the phone:
There was a girl the other end. A voice said could she speak to James? And I said, ‘Yes, just hold on a moment, I’ll see if I can find him for you. Who is it?’ And this pseudo sort of cockney voice said she was Julia and she wanted to speak to James. So I trotted off to find James and I said, ‘James, there’s a girl on the telephone for you. She’s called Julia.’ I probably said it rather scathingly. And his eyes lit up, ‘God, I know who that is!’ And, of course, he told me who it was, and the name stuck. She had to be Julia from there on in. So Diana became Julia and to complement that Highgrove became Low Wood, so it was Julia from Low Wood.
Before ‘Julia’ ’s first visit a detective came down to check that the Hewitt house was sufficiently private and secure. Anxious that all should go well, Mrs Hewitt gave the girls who worked at her riding school the day off. But she soon realised that there was no need to and that Diana’s presence could be quite inconspicuous. Her visits were meticulously organised, as James Hewitt explains:
