Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (23 page)

By the summer of 1992 the royal family seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. The Duke and Duchess of York had separated, and the infamous toe-sucking incident, in which the Duchess appeared in intimate photographs with her Texan ‘financial adviser’, John Bryan, had graced the front pages of the British tabloids. The Princess Royal was divorced from Mark Phillips, and was enjoying a new love affair with the Queen’s former equerry, Commander Tim Laurence, Royal Navy (whom she would later marry), while Prince Edward was making headline news by announcing ‘I’m not gay!’ without, it seems, having been asked the question. Above all, the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales had been exposed as a charade, and many felt that it was only a matter of time before it was dissolved.

By the time the royal couple returned to Britain the marriage, far from being revived by the cruise, was on the verge of collapse.
Now, however, the taped telephone conversation, recorded on the last day of 1989 between Diana and James Gilbey was at last released. Coming as it did so soon after the row over Andrew Morton’s book, it proved to be, for the Princess, one scandal too many. Ultimately, the publication of her intimate conversation and deeply unflattering comments about the royal family was the catalyst for her exit from the House of Windsor. In my opinion, the tapes were more damning in the Palace’s eyes, than even her suspected co-operation in the writing of
Diana: Her True Story
.

I had heard rumours of the tapes’ existence several weeks before the transcripts were published. When I confronted the Princess with this less than welcome news she was understandably concerned. She had every reason to worry, for she of all people knew the nature of her relationship with James Gilbey.

What actually happened was this. On 25 August, not long after the Prince and Princess returned from the cruise aboard the
Alexander
, the editor of
The Sun
, Kelvin MacKenzie, who always knew the tapes were a ticking time bomb in the newspaper’s safe, published transcripts of the illegally recorded conversation after the existence of the tapes was mentioned in America’s top-selling magazine, the
National Enquirer
. ‘Dianagate’ or ‘Squidgygate’, as the scandal came to be called, effectively exploded the myth of Diana the perfect princess.
The Sun
even put an extract from the tapes on a premium telephone number, so that readers could call and listen to Diana’s unmistakable voice. Throughout the conversation the Princess, who was alone in her bedroom at Sandringham,
desperate to escape the tension and hostility emanating from her husband’s family, simpers as her admirer begs her to blow him a kiss over the phone. She describes life with her husband as ‘real, real torture’, and speaks of her frustration and resentment towards the royal family. Significantly, she also expresses fears about becoming pregnant with his child, a clear indication of the intensity of their relationship. In turn, Gilbey calls her ‘darling’ fifty-three times, and ‘Squidgy’ or ‘Squidgy’ fourteen times. In one exchange he says, ‘Oh Squidgy, I love you. Love you. Love you.’

Here was a typically foolish, if affectionate, conversation between two people involved in an intimate relationship. Adolescent sexual innuendo aside, the illegally taped conversation was significant because it confirmed to the public that the claims made in Andrew Morton’s book that the Princess could no longer cope with her life as a member of the royal family, claims dismissed by the Palace as mere speculation, were true. At one point during her conversation with Gilbey, Diana says, ‘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 that fucking family,” it is so desperate.’ Nobody, not even a Palace skilled at evasion and stonewalling, could call such a remark ‘speculation’. Diana also told Gilbey how, at lunch, the Queen Mother had given her a strange look. ‘It’s not hatred, it’s a sort of interest and pity,’ Diana said.

Until that moment no one inside the royal family and its circle had ever publicly criticised the Queen Mother (although, to be fair, it was not Diana’s fault that her private conversation was
made public). Privately, however, being disrespectful about Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was a favourite pastime of the Princess’s. Ironically, she would often speak with satisfaction of the disruption the death of ‘the nation’s favourite granny’ would cause the officials at Buckingham Palace, and speculate irreverently on the choice of black clothes available to her to wear at the Queen Mother’s funeral.

Perhaps Fate, like God, is not mocked. The grand old lady would outlive Diana by five years, and was there to pay her respects at the younger woman’s funeral. Yet the extraordinary public reaction to Diana’s death meant that she had the last word. No royal funeral, not even that of the Queen Mother in 2002, matched the public outpouring of grief for the Princess.

From the transcripts of what was said, Diana’s words gave me all the confirmation I needed that the taped conversation was genuine.

Although some commentators questioned whether the Princess would actually use expletives to describe her in-laws, I knew beyond doubt that the conversation was not a hoax. I had, after all, heard her use that same expression in the same context a hundred times and more.

I now know by whom the original recordings of the intimate conversations were made and why. True, they were picked up by amateur radio hams using basic scanners, but they were being transmitted regularly at different times to ensure the conversation was heard, knowing that it would eventually end up in the hands of the media. There are at least two sets of Diana tapes in existence; recordings of the same conversation made on different days by different radio buffs. A full investigation was
carried out by the internal security services which identified all those involved, but for legal reasons I cannot expand further, nor is it necessary to do so. It does, however, lend credence to the Princess’s belief, so often dismissed by her detractors as an example of her paranoia, that the Establishment was out to destroy her. She was aware that the intelligence agencies routinely monitored the daily lives of the royal family. Royalty Protection Department officers were categorically not involved in this surveillance. For my part, I simply accepted that any such steps would be a necessary part of her security, and warned the Princess to be aware, and went about my business.

I did not know until much later that they routinely taped the Princess’s telephone conversations. We, her protection officers, were trained to be always careful, in case a terrorist organisation was bugging her phones, to keep our conversations on the telephone short, and to speak, if necessary, in coded language. Not Diana, however, who used the telephone incessantly, and often spoke on it, literally, for hours. Nevertheless I was as shocked as she was when the tapes were made public.

In the end, the ‘Dianagate’ scandal was a pretty tawdry, if not squalid, affair that reflected little credit on most of those concerned: the Princess and Gilbey, Prince Charles and the senior members of the royal family, the media, and the eavesdroppers.

AN ESSENTIAL PART of ensuring Diana’s security when she was in my care was understanding her mood swings. While I enjoyed her complete trust this was not too difficult, but it became increasingly hard after she became involved in a police investigation as a result of her close friendship with Oliver Hoare.

Hoare, an Old Etonian, was well known to the royal family, and a friend of Prince Charles as well as of Diana; Charles often stayed in the summer at the chateau belonging to Hoare’s mother-in-law in the heart of Provence.

By early 1992 Diana had become totally obsessed by Oliver Hoare. They had first met during Ascot week in 1985, when he and his wife were staying as guests of the Queen at Windsor Castle. She was instantly attracted to him. Darkly good-looking, with thick, wavy black hair that he wore quite long,
he was confident around the royal family, completely at ease, where others in the room were nervous and anxious to please. By his side was an attractive woman whom Diana, rightly, took to be his wife.

Hoare, a millionaire (or so it was said) art dealer specialising in Iranian art and antiques, was then thirty-nine, his wife Diane, the daughter of a hugely rich French heiress, Baroness Louise de Waldner, two years his junior. The Princess later confessed to me that she had felt a little shy when, at Windsor, she shook Hoare’s hand for the first time, and had blushed as she flirted with him. She made polite conversation with Diane, both women talking of their young families. That conversation ended abruptly when the Prince of Wales and the Queen Mother joined them.

Hoare had certainly led an interesting life. His work had drawn him into some fascinating company, including a friendship with the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev. The two became close friends in the early 1970s and the Russian ballet star asked the young Hoare to decorate his apartment overlooking the Seine. They went through some wild times together. Diana was captivated, not least because of his connection with Nureyev, given her passion for ballet.

At that first meeting Diana saw a man who was everything the Prince of Wales was not, and, feeling rejected after the birth of Prince Harry, found herself drawn to him. The relationship between the Hoares and the Waleses flourished. Within a few weeks of their first encounter at Windsor Castle the Hoares were invited to dinner at Kensington Palace. They soon became firm friends. As the Waleses’ marriage moved closer towards
open warfare, both Diane and Oliver tried to help them resolve the crisis in their marriage. But when communication between the Prince and Princess finally broke down, Diana turned to Oliver Hoare for help and comfort. He spent hours with her in private at Kensington Palace. It is possible that Diana welcomed Hoare as an intermediary because she knew that he was a friend of Camilla Parker Bowles, and could therefore tell the Princess about her rival. Later, Charles and Camilla would dine with the Hoares at their London house, although Oliver never told Diana, knowing that she would have seen it as a betrayal.

As his friendship with the Princess deepened, Hoare found himself in an increasingly difficult position. He enjoyed a close friendship both with her and her husband (among other things, the Prince, too, is interested in Islamic culture), and as their marriage crumbled he did not want to be seen to be taking sides. The Princess added to his dilemma. She would question him endlessly about Charles’s attraction to Camilla, something that she simply could not understand. In her desperation and sadness she came increasingly to depend on him. She could not get through a day or a night without at least speaking to him on the telephone. It was at around this time too, early in 1992, that Diana fell completely in love with Hoare. She had been physically attracted to him from the first moment she saw him, and believed that he possessed the strength and sophistication of a true man. She also knew that Hoare found her attractive but she was uncertain whether he felt the same for her as she did for him.

Diana absolutely adored him, as she confided to me. That admission did much to explain her behaviour, and the
humiliating events that followed. She craved him; she needed him at every conceivable moment. They used friends’ safe houses in which to meet, and I would keep a watch from a respectful distance. Hoare, however, seemed to resent the fact that I was there, and probably suspected that I was reporting each meeting back to my superiors at Scotland Yard. Of course I was not, for I took the view that there was no need for them to know about the relationship as long as Hoare was not compromising Diana’s security. I had taken the same line with Hewitt and Gilbey, who had both recognised the paramount need to keep the Princess safe, and had cheerfully accepted that I had to do my job.

What happened next would not have been out of place in a theatrical farce. I was on duty at Kensington Palace, since Diana was there. The Prince was away and Oliver Hoare was visiting. There was nothing new in this, but Diana maintained that the relationship was innocent.

‘We just talk, Ken,’ she told me. ‘He is a very experienced, interesting man.’ Quite, I thought acidly, ‘experienced’ being the telling word.

At around 3.30 am all hell broke loose as smoke alarms sent a piercing shrill around the apartments. I ran out of my room and headed straight for the Princess’s. But before I reached it, like any good detective I traced the problem. It wasn’t difficult. There, beside the huge plant in the hallway stood a dishevelled Hoare, puffing on a cigar. Diana, who hated the smell of smoke, had obviously told him to smoke in the hallway, forgetting that this would set all the alarms off.

I knew that Hoare didn’t like me – indeed, it was blindingly
obvious. I honestly had nothing against him personally, but it was not entirely without satisfaction that I urged him to put out his cigar. He looked almost pathetic as he gathered himself together and left.

Next morning, I tried to make a joke of the incident. Diana, however, clearly did not want to talk about it. So when I suggested that she had been playing cards, perhaps strip poker, she flushed scarlet and went back to her room. No doubt I had overstepped the mark, but by this time she was already in danger of losing all sense of perspective. She knew this, yet she was not prepared to admit it, and I realised that, where I was concerned, it could only be a matter of time before there was a parting of the ways.

At the beginning of November 1992, Diana and Charles were forced to embark on an official visit to South Korea, a farcical trip which the press swiftly dubbed the ‘Glums Tour’. Just days before she was due to set off with her husband, to whom she was not speaking, Diana declared, in the name of ‘honesty’, that she would not go. Fearing the worst, the Queen and Prince Charles urged Patrick Jephson to ‘do something’. He therefore wrote Diana a letter which, in essence, said, that if she pulled out now, she could not expect the Foreign Office to help her when she wanted to embark on her solo career after her marriage was over (an example of the tacit acceptance in royal circles that separation, perhaps even divorce, was now only a matter of time).

I too was drafted in to try to ‘talk sense’ into the Princess. In the event, however, I simply told her to trust her instincts,
although I reminded her that her father, Lord Spencer, had raised her to do her duty. Finally, the Queen personally intervened. What went on between the two women I don’t know, but whatever was said, it certainly struck a chord, for the Princess eventually agreed to go along with what she privately called a farce.

Looking back, perhaps it would have been better if the entire tour had been cancelled and the Palace had come clean, rather than allowing the fiasco to unfold in public in the way it did. The press, who were circling the royal marriage in a feeding frenzy, were edging towards the hysterical. Newspaper editors sensed blood, and they sent their hounds in for the kill.

Nor was Diana, emotionally spent as she was in the aftermath of the row over Andrew Morton’s book, in any mood to play games. ‘It is bloody dishonest – it is just a damn farce,’ she told me repeatedly. I could only agree. Nevertheless, Diana was determined to upstage, if not embarrass, her husband on this, their last foreign mission together. Whether it was flirting outrageously with a good-looking army officer, or storming ahead of Prince Charles as he courteously greeted people in the line-up at the opera, her behaviour demonstrated at every turn that she could not have cared less whether he was with her or not. The Prince, ever the diplomat when on duty, was, however, beginning to lose patience.

The reporters covering the tour, hungry for the real story after years of being fobbed off with evasive or downright untruthful statements from Palace officials about the marriage, were taking no prisoners. Peter Westmacott, who had been seconded from the Foreign Office to act as deputy private
secretary to the Prince, was their first victim. Pressed by James Whitaker about the state of the marriage, he admitted under pressure that ‘of course there were problems’. This was overheard by Simon McCoy from Sky TV, who immediately went on air with the story. It led the channel’s news bulletin. Without naming Westmacott, McCoy said that a senior official had for the first time admitted that the marriage was on the rocks. The newspapers wanted the official identified, and one,
The Sun
, named Westmacott. Later, battered by his experience, he returned to the Foreign Office and was posted to Washington.

Not content with that, the royal reporters pressed harder. The next to suffer at their hands was Dickie Arbiter, who had the impossible job of acting as press secretary to both the Prince and Princess at a time when full-scale civil war was breaking out in their household. The newshounds, having tasted blood, told him that if he could not say where the Prince and Princess of Wales would take their next official trip together, they would write that South Korea was to be the last and that the marriage was doomed. Dickie pleaded for more time, promising to get back to them with an answer. Naturally, he could not – no such trip had even been suggested, let alone planned. The reporters ran their story. From their point of view, it was as well that they did, because if they had swallowed the Palace’s line about the marriage they would have been made to look ridiculous when the truth came out. They were also right in saying that this was the Waleses’ last tour together.

The Princess left Korea with her husband, but flew home without him. A photograph that appeared in most of the
papers, which showed her looking out of the airplane window as Prince Charles disembarked at Hong Kong for an official solo visit, told the story. She was exhausted, and she knew that their marriage was finally over.

In Hong Kong the Prince was still smarting from the way his wife and the press had made a laughing stock out of him. He snapped bitterly at reporters for the next couple of days. At one stage he turned to the reporter he now regarded as Diana’s apologist, Richard Kay, as he stood behind a staircase looking through the banisters, and grunted, ‘That’s where you belong – behind bars.’ Striding past reporters and photographers on another occasion, he snapped sarcastically, ‘And a merry Christmas to your editors!’

Back in Britain, the Princess was more determined to make a stand than ever. She felt vindicated by the Korean debacle. The disastrous tour had not, she insisted, been her fault. ‘It should have bloody well been called off in the first place,’ she told anyone who dared mention it.

She was desperately anxious to promote her own cause, and if she succeeded in doing so at the expense of her husband and the Palace, then so much the better. ‘Ken, I want to get my shot in before they order the big guns to shoot me down,’ she told me. I admired her spirit, but urged her to remain calm and keep a clear head.

‘No, Ken, it’s time I spread my wings. I’m going to fly and they cannot stop me,’ she insisted. This was fighting talk, but dangerous.

‘Be careful, ma’am. It’s very difficult to take on the Establishment when you’re an intrinsic part of it,’ I warned.
But my advice fell on deaf ears. She was determined to have her day, and determined, too, that everyone should see how she had been wronged.

A few days later, as we set out on an official solo visit to Paris and Lille, she declared, ‘I’ll bloody well show that family, Ken, you just watch me.’ For me, the French trip epitomised her new spirit. She glowed, and she knew it, and for this brief moment the world was at her feet. Even before she arrived in Paris the French, who love a heroine, had rallied behind her.
Paris Match
carried a front-page photograph by Patrick Demarchelier (one of her favourite photographers) with a banner headline that screamed; ‘
Courage, Princesse
’. She did not need the French press to tell her anything, however. She had the courage and purpose of a lioness, and she was ready to roar.

It was a wonderful trip to be on. No longer shackled by her husband and his entourage, she showed the media – and the watching world – that this was the new Diana, and that nothing was going to hold her back. For her, the tour was about one thing: showing her public that as far as she was concerned she did not need her husband or his stuffy family. Diana, she believed, could stand alone.

The three-day visit was an overwhelming success, not only for her personally, but in terms of her official role: both the Foreign Office and the Queen congratulated her on her return. She and I even managed to sneak out without anyone knowing to see Paris by night. Diana was ecstatic, her face alive with pleasure and excitement. ‘By God, Ken, this is living,’ she declared as we drove along the Champs-Élysées.

The Princess returned to London on 15 November 1992
buoyed up by the success of her trip. She now truly believed that she could take on the royal family at their own game and win. Her mood, although still volatile, had improved out of recognition, and she no longer seemed weighed down by her troubles. She knew, however, that within a few days the Prime Minister, John Major, would get to his feet in the House of Commons to announce formally that the Prince and Princess of Wales had separated. Only hours before the announcement, and after all the protracted negotiations that had been going on between her advisers and Charles’s since the publication of Andrew Morton’s book, Diana told me that she still had her doubts about going through with it. She added that if the Prince had shown any remorse for his persistent relationship with the ‘Rottweiler’, she would, even then, have pulled back from the brink.