Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (10 page)

What is true is that by 1985 the rumours among the Waleses’s staff that she and Mannakee were having an affair grew stronger. Senior members of staff complained to the Prince that he was showing signs of over-familiarity with her during public engagements; moreover, Diana, a natural flirt, was said to have encouraged her protection officer in his attentions. Finally, an unsubstantiated rumour began to circulate, alleging that the two of them had been discovered in a compromising position by a senior member of Charles’s staff on the eve of the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of York in July 1986. This proved to be the last straw. Just days after the alleged incident, Mannakee was moved to other duties in the
Diplomatic Protection branch and out of Diana’s life for good. A year later he was dead.

Whenever Barry’s name came up in our conversations, the Princess told me with complete straightforwardness that the speculation about a relationship between her and the policeman was untrue. Having by then had some years in which to reflect on the rumours, she claimed that the allegations were part of a smear campaign against her by Prince Charles’s camp. Diana was not averse to embellishing the truth, but I believed her then and I do still. Undoubtedly, Mannakee, who was much older than her, became more than a policeman to her. He became a very close friend, a good listener whom she saw as a father figure, someone who would support her when she was down and say, ‘You can cope, Diana.’ Having been in much the same position myself, this has always struck me as the most convincing answer to the rumours.

When, in 1987, Prince Charles broke the news of Mannakee’s accidental death to Diana as they were travelling to RAF Northolt, from where they would fly to Cannes for an official visit to the film festival, she burst into tears. But why would she not? It was after all a natural reaction, especially in such a highly emotional woman who had just learned of the sudden death of a close friend. To suggest, however, that she went beyond simply crying on Mannakee’s shoulder and began an affair with him is at best speculation, but it is speculation of a particularly cruel kind, not least because both parties are dead, and cannot therefore defend themselves.

James Gilbey, the man on the infamous ‘Squidgygate’ tapes, re-established himself in Diana’s life in the autumn of 1989, and came to be an innate part of it; indeed, even when she was seeing James Hewitt up to three times a week, Gilbey was always around. He became completely obsessed with her, and although she was never as close to him as she was to Hewitt, she found him an enjoyable distraction, not least for his urbanity. Although Gilbey was by no means her only or most significant admirer, the Princess – so long starved of love – found that she enjoyed beguiling more than one man at a time. As she grew in confidence – partly as a result of her affair with Hewitt, and partly because of the decisions she had taken about her life and work – Diana was not afraid to play one admirer off against another, so that there were times when she was enjoying the attentions of more than one man at the same time. In order to do this, she increasingly came to rely on trusted friends to provide ‘safe houses’, places where she could spend hours with a male admirer, confident of absolute privacy away from the prying eyes of servants (though with her faithful protection officer somewhere close at hand).

She often used the elegant London home of Mara Berni, owner of her favourite restaurant, San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, as a meeting place. (She would later use the London home of her close friend Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian Ambassador, as a sanctuary.) I told Diana of my concerns about the extent of the Italian restaurateur’s knowledge about her private life, but she insisted that Mara was completely trustworthy. It was also in Mara’s house in
Knightsbridge, just a few minutes’ walk from Harrods, that she would meet some of the mystics and fortune-tellers with whom she became involved. She would spend hours locked away with these people, whom she grew to depend on. For myself, I regarded them with suspicious cynicism and told her so, to which she replied that although she doubted their veracity, she found them to be of increasing importance in her life. Each one told her a different story, and she seemed perfectly happy to accept that, something that highlighted her increasing insecurity, as well as the desperation of her quest to find solutions – any solutions – to the problems in her life.

As it happened, my first serious brush with the paparazzi who would dog Diana until her death came when she was tracked down to one of her so-called safe houses, the mews house in South Kensington belonging to her friend Kate Menzies. She had enjoyed an evening with her close friend David Waterhouse, a former Guards officer, whom she had met some years earlier through the Duchess of York during a skiing holiday in Klosters. As they talked into the night, I continued to keep a close watch outside, and when I went out to get the car I became aware that we were not alone. Somehow, one of the most skilful and tenacious freelance photographers of the time had traced the Princess. Now he was moving in for the kill.

Charming and clever, and very good at his job, Jason Fraser knew that a photograph of the Princess leaving a friend’s house where she had spent time with a handsome man in the dead of night, would make him a small fortune. The red-top tabloid
newspapers would have a field day, while the opportunities for syndicating the shots worldwide meant that Jason must have been seeing dollar signs flashing up before his eyes as he prepared to catch the Princess when she left.

What he did not know, however, was that even as he was preparing to pounce I had him in my sights. At around 1.30 am Diana was ready to leave, and I had come back inside to escort her to the car. As we walked through the door into the street there was Fraser waiting for his prey. The sudden, savage glare of his flashgun and the whir of the camera’s motor drive stunned the Princess, and she rocked backwards, shocked and surprised.

At once, Diana became hysterical, bursting into tears at this gross intrusion. I grabbed Jason, pushed him against the wall and demanded the film. He refused, mumbling something about his photos being in the public interest and that I had no right to touch his camera. After a short, meaningful dialogue, however, he opened the back of the camera, pulled out the film cartridge and handed it to me. Thereafter, the mood calmed down considerably. Diana walked to the car, while Jason and I had a little chat. We agreed to meet the next day, when I said I would return his film to him.

Next day we met for a coffee. I remember commenting on Jason’s jacket then reached over and opened it at the button in mock admiration. What I was actually doing was checking for a microphone or bug. Satisfied that he wasn’t wired, I handed him back the negatives, obviously minus any shots of Diana’s early-morning departure. The young photographer laughed as he took the film, and we parted on good terms with
a handshake. I told him that I knew he had a job to do, and he respected that I had one, too.

Perhaps, I was wrong, and Diana’s clandestine meeting with a handsome young man at her girlfriend’s house in the dead of night was indeed a matter of public interest. With hindsight, I think that it probably was, but not back then, or at least not as far as the Establishment – still desperately promoting the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales as happy and stable – was concerned. On the following Sunday a version of the story appeared on the front page of the
News of the World
which was remarkably accurate. There was no accompanying photo of Diana leaving the flat, however, and the story soon died.

Years later, by which time I was protection officer to the Queen’s cousin, HRH the Duke of Kent, I ran into Jason by chance. He had never been anything but charming to me, and when I approached him outside Kensington Palace, where he was loitering in the hopes of obtaining a saleable photo, he thrust out his hand in greeting.

‘What are you doing here, Jason?’ I asked.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Ken,’ he replied. ‘I’m not interested in minor royals.’

‘Jason, it’s not a bloody bird sanctuary,’ I retorted, which got a laugh from the photographer, who has a first-class reputation for catching royals and celebrities on film off-guard and when they least expect it. He himself recently briefly flirted with the role of senior, designer-suited executive with a national newspaper before returning to his more natural habitat as a highly rewarded pursuer of celebrity. And, as I say, he is very, very good at it.

Her interest in Hewitt may have been declining, but Diana was not about to let a little thing like the tailing off (or even the temporary cessation) of an affair stop her in her course. In fact, I believe it made her stronger and more determined. She had, after all, bigger fish to fry. Not only was she beginning to carve out a niche in the public arena all for herself, but she was now seriously considering the idea of actually leaving her husband and establishing a rival court. If that seems incredible now, it is worth remembering that back then, with the intense support she generated, Diana believed that she was capable of anything. In December 1989
Vanity Fair
reported her transformation into ‘dedicated Di’, adding that ‘Some people are beginning to talk about her as a saint’. Once again I urged caution when she privately described her plans to me, citing the
Vanity Fair
piece, but although she dismissed the article as ‘silly’, it certainly had longevity, adorning the coffee table in her sitting room Kensington Palace for longer than most of her magazines.

As a result of her new-found determination, by early 1990 Diana talked of nothing but escape, although I sensed that her eagerness to flee the Palace, as well as a loveless marriage, had more to do with her rekindled friendship with Sarah, Duchess of York. The royal wives met for lunch once a week, as they had used to do before Diana’s marriage. In one sense, this showed the Princess at her most scheming and manipulative. She was canny enough to realise that if she was to bolt the royal family, then she needed a partner in crime, and in Sarah she found the perfect assistant. Gullible, malleable, rarely careful of consequences and always willing to please, Sarah to Diana
was the perfect guinea pig, to be used to test the water if she herself feared that it was too hot. For a time, the two women bonded, not only because it had been Diana who engineered Sarah’s entry into the wealth and fame of the royal family by encouraging her romance with Prince Andrew, but also because both were outsiders, and both were locked in unsatisfying but seemingly unbreakable marriages.

Despite being among the most senior-ranking royals, both women felt that they were never truly part of that family. True, Diana felt this more deeply than Sarah, who at least initially believed the false promises and enthusiastic response she received from ‘the Firm’, particularly from the Duke of Edinburgh. Diana, however, unlike her husband and brother-in-law, Prince Andrew, was not scared of Prince Philip, or ‘Stavros’
2
as she privately referred to him, and his strictures against her left her largely unmoved.

By now the two sisters-in-law were as thick as thieves, despite my repeated warnings to the Princess against listening to Sarah. I had many times advised her against making such an alliance, but my doubts had fallen on deaf ears. I hasten to add that this was not because I did not like Sarah – I did – but because I knew that she was a bad influence on the Princess. Nor was I alone in believing this. Senior members of the Queen’s Household were equally concerned. They believed that the Duchess, whose indiscreet affairs were well-known in Palace circles, and whose extravagant behaviour was so often an embarrassment to the royal family, was in danger of self-destructing and might therefore bring the wife of the heir to the throne down with her. The matter was so serious that one
high-ranking courtier went to the Queen to air his concerns. Stony-faced, the Queen dismissed his fears by saying that she believed there was nothing to worry about, but later confided in Prince Philip, who in turn tackled his two elder sons about the behaviour and attitudes of their respective wives. As the wife of Prince Andrew, the Queen’s favourite, Sarah had until then lived a charmed life, enjoying a much warmer relationship with the Queen and other members of the royal family than Diana. Prince Charles’s famous comment to the Princess – ‘Why can’t you be more like Fergie?’ – was wounding precisely because it was so in tune with his and his family’s view of her.

For her part, Diana knew that the Yorks’ marriage was close to collapse. Andrew’s adolescent pursuit of golf, fast cars and not always very high-class parties, as well as his long absences in the Royal Navy, demonstrated his failure to face up to the harsh realities of marriage and fatherhood. Sarah had sought comfort elsewhere, and had confided her infidelity to Diana, who was shrewd enough to appreciate that it could only be a matter of time before the volcano erupted. Even given the precedent of the divorces of Princess Margaret and Princess Anne, she knew that if she was to escape the gilded royal cage, then she would need Sarah to open the door and fly free first.

The Duchess was close to a breakdown when, in 1992, she fell for John Bryan, an affair that would, in the end, secure her exit from the royal family. Bryan, a man whose name would later become synonymous with the notorious toe-sucking incident in the South of France, was a close friend of Sarah’s Texan lover,
Steve Wyatt. Given the hovering media, who sensed blood, it was only a matter of time before she would fall victim to her own indiscreet behaviour, and Diana knew it.