by Tim Clayton
The Romseys and van Cutsems wrote long letters to the Queen, explaining how Charles had suffered in silence throughout his dismal marriage. For the first time, the Queen and Prince Philip raised the question directly with their son. Diana met Prince Philip, and the pair exchanged a series of letters. Diana drafted hers with the help of a lawyer. Her description of Philip’s letters as ‘wounding’ and ‘condemnatory’ appeared in a later book by Morton. Philip, she said, threatened her with the loss of title and position. Summoning up all her Spencer pride, she replied that she had come into his family with a title of her own and didn’t need one of his.
The Queen met Charles and discussed a separation. She instructed the couple to go away together one last time. Diana agreed to what she later described as the ‘holiday from hell’ on Greek billionaire John Latsis’s yacht. She had holidayed on the yacht the previous year, undergoing what the press described as a ‘second honeymoon’ with relative equanimity. But when, dutifully but implausibly, the papers presented this trip as a ‘second honeymoon’ yet again, there were no smiles to convince anyone that all was well.
* * *
August at Balmoral was not pleasant. As the entire Royal Family gathered for the rest of the summer holiday, further scandals hit both royal wives. The Mirror pulled off a huge coup with its pictures of a topless Fergie having her toes sucked by Johnny Bryan, her financial adviser. The Duchess fled from Scotland. Patrick Jephson was on holiday with his family in Devon. Diana had him standing at dawn in a telephone box, reading the morning headlines to her, before she decided whether to go downstairs to face the kippers and the in-laws.
Having assisted Andrew Morton and the Sunday Times so publicly, Diana was now regarded by other papers as fair game. The Sun had been sitting on the Squidgy tape for two and a half years. The tape was mentioned by the National Enquirer in America, and excerpts from it were published there. On 25 August 1992 the whole story was printed in the Sun under a huge banner headline, ‘My Life is Torture’. Stuart Higgins was acting editor on the day:
Apart from some of the material at the beginning of the tape, which we thought was rather tasteless and offensive, we published every word of the tape and put it on an 0898 number for people to listen to as well. . . . She had had her say if you like, and clearly part of her aim in writing this book was to dilute or to stop Squidgygate ever appearing if she could.
If so, she had had some success. Her True Story had explained the unhappiness and isolation that provided the background to her remarks on the tape. And although she clearly had been enjoying some sort of intimate relationship with James Gilbey, it seemed to most listeners that he was a great deal more besotted with her than she was with him.
* * *
Back in the autumn of 1989 a second radio ham had been amusing himself by listening to royal phone calls. He had a tape too. Seeing the Squidgy story in the Sun, he took his recording to the Daily Mirror’s Manchester office. Soon it was on editor Richard Stott’s desk in London:
I actually thought it was a Spitting Image sketch. Not only did Prince Charles sound like his puppet but the conversation sounded as if it was something from Spitting Image – although I suspect that they would have paid millions for a script like that! . . . Because it’s clearly dynamite. I mean, it was seriously worrying because the monarchy was in such terrible sixes and sevens and in crisis over Morton and then Squidgy. And to have a tape where the Prince of Wales is ruminating about being a Tampax was not something that was going to endear the monarchy, or indeed the Daily Mirror, to the nation as a whole.
One of the first tasks was to check the voices. Stott called in his expert, Harry Arnold, who had recently moved from the Sun to the Mirror:
Richard Stott played the tape and said, ‘Whose are those voices?’ And I said, ‘Well, one’s the Prince of Wales and the other one’s Camilla Parker Bowles.’ And he said, ‘How can you be so sure?’ I said, ‘I’ve heard their voices so many times, I’m sure.’ And he said, ‘Yes, but if you’re wrong I’ll be in the dock, not you.’ So he gave me the task of proving to him that the tape was genuine and I spent six weeks doing it. . . playing it to phonetics experts. We had other experts examine the tape to make sure it wasn’t spliced and cobbled together.
When I first heard the tape I was utterly amazed. Not simply the racy part of it, which was in itself very enlightening, but the degree of intimacy between them, the arrangements they made to meet in private and the secret addresses. . . . One of them used the word ‘Bowood’ – it meant nothing to me. And then we discovered it was a stately home of one of his friends.
Ken Lennox was given the task of identifying the houses that were mentioned in the tape and establishing whether Prince Charles had been there or not. Someone in the local post office was usually able to help. The phonetics experts confirmed that one voice on the tape was that of Prince Charles and, by recording her answerphone message, Arnold allowed him to identify the other voice as that of Camilla Parker Bowles. He also satisfied himself that the tape had a relatively innocent origin:
There are a lot of myths about the origins of this tape – MI5 and MI6, all sorts of nonsense. In fact the truth is very, very simple. A radio ham who lived in Cheshire was twiddling with the scanner late one evening and he heard Charles’s voice reading a speech. Charles used to read his speeches to Camilla for her approval. And she also used to collate them as a form of library. And he’d finished reading the speech to her when this man started recording with a very ordinary second-hand tape. That’s why the conversation picks up in the middle of a sentence – he’d just switched it on. He was terrified at first. He thought that if anyone discovered that he’d secretly recorded the heir to the throne he’d be thrown in the Tower.
Having proved to his own satisfaction that the tape was genuine, Stott had to decide what to do next:
And it was a considerable dilemma because what the Sun had done was to just run a whole tape, and my view was that this was such strong meat we couldn’t possibly do that. It would’ve brought a Press Complaints Commission charge of invasion of privacy. Not because we were wrong to be pointing out that Diana had been right and that Charles had been lying, but because it was so shocking . . .
* * *
As Stott considered what to do, the royal couple were scheduled to go on a joint visit to Korea. They were barely on speaking terms and Diana did not want to go. Royal officials tried to talk her round. One of them told us, ‘Diana said, “It’s dishonest, such a sham, making a pretence,” then she changed her mind – I thought of her own accord, but it was after she had spoken to the Queen. And not to go would have caused immense offence to the Koreans.’
But having gone, she sulked. In fact they both did. The press called them ‘the Glums’. To support this headline some newspapers used a photograph of the couple wearing suitably solemn faces in order to lay a wreath, and then cut the wreath out of the picture. Royal photographer Jayne Fincher remembers it as a thoroughly depressing experience for everyone involved:
They were visiting a temple and we wanted a picture of them walking down these temple steps together with the temple behind. And they actually both came down a separate staircase. So we had a picture of them, one there and one there. You couldn’t get them together. I felt really sad one particular evening when I went to photograph her at the President’s banquet. She arrived and she’d obviously been crying. Her eyes were red, she’d put a lot of make-up on her face to cover up her bags and her red, sore eyes. She stood there shaking all these hands and then she went and sat at the banquet table and this huge Union Jack was hanging on the wall behind her, which was very poignant really. She sat there with all her finery on and her tiara and she just stared at the tablecloth.
Photographed at the Cenotaph a few days after her return, Diana appeared to be isolated among the other royal women. Richard Stott decided that he would run the ‘Camillagate’ story soon.
* * *
On 13 November the Princess left for Paris on
what Jephson considered her most successful solo trip. It included a forty-minute meeting with President Mitterrand, an honour never previously extended to a lone Princess of Wales. Diana was heartened by Paris Match’s cover with its Patrick Demarchelier photograph and ‘Courage Princesse!’ headline. She glowed in the rapturous attention and performed with flawless composure throughout.
The separation was finally precipitated by Diana’s refusal to co-operate with Charles’s plan to maintain a united front on the children’s next weekend away from school. He had planned a weekend party at Sandringham for the family and sixteen of what Jonathan Dimbleby called ‘their friends’ (‘they’re all his friends’, she complained). When Diana returned from Paris on 15 November she announced that she was not coming, she was taking the boys to Windsor Castle instead. ‘Just think Patrick, Nicholas Soames can eat all the food they’d bought for me,’ she joked to her secretary. Charles said that he couldn’t cancel his arrangements only days before the weekend. She refused to relent and took the children to Windsor. As it happened the castle proved an unfortunate destination that weekend. On Friday, 20 November fire swept through it. The Prince rushed from Sandringham to comfort his mother and then returned to complete the weekend with his friends.
The fire had started in the private chapel and then spread, causing damage estimated at between £20 and £40 million. The castle was uninsured. Heritage Secretary Peter Brooke’s offer to pay the bill brought a storm of protest, supported by opinion polls. For the last two years of deep economic recession the issue of whether the Queen should pay tax had been simmering. Dissatisfaction with the monarchy was now reaching boiling point.
On 24 November, with Windsor Castle still smouldering, the Queen made an anniversary speech at the Guildhall. Instead of delivering the usual platitudes, she spoke about her own recent experience, her voice husky from a head cold exacerbated by time spent among the smoking ruins of her home. ‘1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,’ she said with dry understatement. ‘In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.’ She gave a first indication that things would have to change: ‘No institution – City, Monarchy, whatever – should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t.’ On 26 November it was announced that the Queen and the Prince of Wales would pay tax on their private incomes from 1993, and that Civil List payments to five other members of the Royal Family would cease. ‘The Queen Pays Tax and it’s Victory for People Power,’ boasted the Sun.
But the ‘annus horribilis’ had not ended. Richard Aylard, ‘wearing his most important expression’, confronted Jephson to demand the name of the Princess’s lawyers. On 25 November Prince Charles told Diana he wanted a separation. He removed his effects from Kensington Palace and she removed hers from Highgrove. She told Joseph Sanders that before she left Highgrove for ever she took the opportunity to throw some of her husband’s clothes on a garden bonfire.
On 9 December, John Major announced the separation to the House of Commons. There was, he said, no question of a divorce, and in the event of Charles becoming King, Diana would be Queen.
The Queen’s twin tormentors had still not finished with her. The Buckingham Palace press office was forced to announce that the Princess of Wales had decided not to spend Christmas with the Royal Family, and two days before it was due to be delivered the Sun published the leaked text of the Queen’s upcoming Christmas broadcast to the nation.
* * *
Diana went skiing in America with Jenny Rivett. Rivett had been one of her personal trainers since 1991. And like Carolan Brown before her, she’d become a friend as well. In December 1992, Diana told Rivett that she was not looking forward to her first Christmas holiday as a separated wife.
I felt sorry for her because she was dreading that time between Christmas and New Year when she was going to be on her own. And out of the blue I just suggested that we would go skiing together in Vail, Colorado, because I used to live there. I never expected in a million years that she would say, ‘Well, I’d love to, Jenny.’
Rivett organised a fantastic holiday for Diana at the large, secluded home of a friend.
She had a wonderful, wonderful time and I saw a different side completely. She was just totally relaxed and she said to me that it had been one of the best holidays that she had been on. And I saw a side to her that was just so much fun.
I remember her shrieking up the mountain to me when I was skiing behind her. I just remember her saying, ‘Jenny, Jenny,’ and she was doubled over laughing at some lady who was skiing with her poles up in the air. She just found everything amusing.
[At night] we just stayed in and everybody mucked in with cooking and cleaning. It was just like going away with a group of friends.
I remember a certain guy who was trying to introduce himself to her and he had obviously prepared a speech in the mirror that morning. And she just looked at him, and before he could get his speech out she just became completely hysterical and laughed and looked at me and I started to laugh and she fell back in the snow and was just laughing so hard.
Diana at thirty-one, happy in the snow. It’s an arresting image of the kind of life that could now have been her fate – wealthy friends, lots of time abroad, a low profile. But although she could have moved easily into this world, she told her friends that she had a different sense of her future. She still wanted to play a part in public life, and she wasn’t going to hand over control of her children to the Royal Family.
13
What Men Are Like
* * *
In January 1993, Harry Arnold was finally writing up ‘Camillagate’, the scoop of his life. His first draft paragraph read: ‘The heir to the throne has been conducting an adulterous affair with the wife of one of his closest friends before and during his marriage to the Princess of Wales.’ Richard Stott swallowed hard and said, ‘Try again, Harry.’ After several long sessions with the lawyers, Arnold’s fifth version of the story was published. It revealed a sleepy, funny and loving late-night conversation. Charles made self-mocking jokes, Camilla was supportive. They talked about his speech. They missed and wanted each other very badly. The sex talk was intense. The details of how they organised their meetings were embarrassing.
Despite all the denials that had followed Morton’s book, the tape proved that Charles and Camilla had been lovers. Not, perhaps, throughout his marriage, but certainly by 1989. And given their obvious dependence on each other, many listeners assumed that the relationship was well established by this date.
The day after the story ran, Buckingham Palace was besieged by reporters. Charles Anson and Sir Robert Fellowes offered ‘no comment’. Cartoonists had Charles talking dirty to his plants and Diana’s legal team had solid evidence to support a cross-petition for adultery should they need one.
* * *
Camillagate reinforced Diana’s image as the world’s foremost female victim. In the battle for hearts and minds she was already doing especially well with women, as poll after poll attested. At the Chiswick Family Refuge in March she said to great applause, ‘Well ladies! We all know what men are like, don’t we?’
Writers such as Suzanne Moore and Camille Paglia praised her as a woman who refused to accept the roles and limitations set down for her by society. In June, as patron of Turning Point, a mental health charity for women, Diana announced to huge cheers that ‘Sisters are doing it for themselves!’ In the middle of a thoughtful speech, she said: ‘It can take enormous courage for women to admit that they cannot cope . . . as their world closes in on them, their self-esteem evaporates into a haze of loneliness and desperation.’ To warm applause, Libby Purves, chairing the meeting, claimed that Diana ‘is one of us, a wife, a mother, a daughter, who has known problems in her own life and who has courageously used these experiences to comfort other people’.
Judy Wade watched and was impressed.
She was courageous enough to stand up to the most powerful people in Britain, and give them a two-fingered salute. She said, ‘I’m not going to be the quiet, long-suffering little wife and put up with what other royal wives have put up with for centuries.’
And the whole mental health thing was so sexist anyway. Prince Charles had gone to psychiatrists and he was seen by the establishment as somebody who wisely sought help when he needed it. But Diana, when she talked about her depressions, she was called an hysteric, somebody that should be locked up. A lot of women have experienced that kind of double standard.
In February 1993 Anthony Holden had written a cover story for Vanity Fair entitled ‘Di’s Palace Coup’. ‘There is a new bounce in her step, a cheekier smile on her face, a new gleam in those flirtatious blue eyes . . . at long last the sham is over.’ Since falling out with the Prince, Holden had written extensively against him and had been attacked in turn by Charles’s supporters. He soon discovered how grateful Diana was for his words:
I got a phone call from a friend saying, ‘Be at San Lorenzo at 12.40 p.m. next Wednesday.’ I met him and we noticed that the table next to us was the only one with flowers on it. At one o’clock in she came with the boys and a nanny and she saw us and said, ‘Oh, what are you two doing here, why don’t you join us?’ And this was the beginning of a process that recurred quite a lot over the rest of her life. And the gist of it was that she was saying thank you to me for being supportive in what I’d written in Vanity Fair. And I have to say I thought, Well, this is some measure of the difference between them as human beings. Because for at least ten years I thought I was a better PR man for Prince Charles than the ones he actually paid – for most of the eighties in fact – and there wasn’t the slightest note of thanks from him.
