Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (9 page)

After her tense meeting with the Queen, Diana had emerged, distraught, into the palace forecourt, where I was waiting with the car. Sobbing, she blurted out to me, ‘The Queen does not approve of what I am doing on AIDS, Ken.’ Then – a familiar litany – she added furiously, ‘That
bloody
family, after all I have done for them. I just cannot win. Everything I do is wrong.’

I tried to reason with her. It was undoubtedly true, however, that her stance on the issue had led one acid-penned critic to label her the patron saint of sodomy. As she began to calm down I told the Princess that I, and many others, thought she was doing a fantastic job for the homosexual community, as also for AIDS sufferers who had contracted the illness through being born to an HIV-positive parent, or from blood transfusions, but that perhaps there was a danger that she was losing her perspective on the issue. She was not in the mood to listen, however. In her anger and frustration she was determined to play the victim, a role she really enjoyed, albeit rather masochistically.

Yet despite the Palace’s attitude, Diana continued her AIDS crusade with the zeal of a missionary. She could not be swayed from her course. She deserves every credit for her work, but it reached a point at which nobody, not even the monarch, could soften her approach, even when there were good reasons for doing so. I remember on one occasion her passionate devotion to the cause threatened to backfire in just the way the Queen
had perhaps foreseen. This was during a visit to a hospital in London’s East End, which had been transformed into a hospice for dying AIDS patients.

Unfortunately, the Princess’s visit came at a time when the local National Health Service resources in the area, Bethnal Green, were being cut back drastically. The local people were outraged because while waiting lists for treatment for ‘ordinary’ ailments were growing ever longer, the Princess was using her official time to comfort AIDS victims. An angry crowd gathered at the Bethlehem Hospital in readiness for Diana’s arrival.

As we drove to the hospital, I learned over the radio from officers already there that the atmosphere among the crowd was in danger of turning ugly. From a security viewpoint I did not envisage it getting out of control, but in considering ways of avoiding trouble I came up with an idea which, I thought, was an ideal way to placate the hostility of the crowd that had gathered with their banners. Turning in my seat, I suggested to the Princess that we might pay a brief visit to the local old people’s home too. Anne Beckwith-Smith, her lady-in-waiting, who was travelling with us, agreed, but Diana was by now obsessed with only one thing.

‘Ken,’ she said, looking at me intently, ‘what is happening to these poor souls in this hospice is simply horrendous. Horrendous. We have to do something to stop this disease spreading, and we have to find a cure for them.’ I agreed with her wholeheartedly, but still urged her, in the interest of good public relations, to spend a few minutes among the elderly as well. The Princess, clearly somewhat irritated by
my impertinence, was having none of it, however, and the protesters, having made their point, soon left.

The Princess had a remarkable gift with AIDS patients. She never tired of visiting them; never grimaced at the sight of their ravaged bodies and sunken features; never did anything but empathise with their terrible plight. In return, the patients felt special. For them, a visit from the beautiful and sympathetic Princess of Wales was something to stay alive for, and I am convinced that this actually happened in several cases, no matter how far-fetched it might seem.

Regardless of one’s personal view on this subject – and I have to admit that in those unenlightened days I too regarded AIDS with horror as well as pity, and wanted as little to do with it as possible – no one could be anything but admiring of Diana’s courage and tenacity. She believed in what she did with all her heart and soul, but, more importantly, she genuinely did make a difference. She showed the bigots and the homophobes up for what they were, silencing the ignorant. I did not always agree with her stance on AIDS, not least because I felt that there were many equally deserving cases, from the old and lonely to sick or abandoned children. Yet to be fair, Diana did her best to ensure that her time and influence were spread across as many needy causes as possible, although none captured her interest as much as AIDS.

Tragically, AIDS is still a killer. Nevertheless, the way in which ordinary people now understand the disease and all the pain and suffering it involves is in no small measure due to Diana. Despite my reservations at the time, I too have to accept that in her short life she undoubtedly made a tremendous
contribution towards a more positive perception of the disease, while also showing many of those suffering from AIDS that they were not forgotten. She gave people hope, and in a world of cynics demonstrated that kindness and compassion are neither futile nor forgotten. Ignorance is bliss to some; by confronting the disease and, literally, embracing those stricken with it the Princess was able to change the attitudes of many, perhaps even millions.

There are still bigots, of course, and they are always among the first to criticise. Some of these have said that the Princess needed to champion the cause of victims not because she wished to help, but because she was a victim herself. Certainly there is truth in the statement, though it is far from being the whole truth. One thing that her decriers cannot steal from her, however, is what she achieved in opening the world’s eyes to the human disaster, and in making people think about, or rethink, their attitudes towards it. She was not alone in her work, nor would she have claimed that she was – there have been, and still are, many selfless people, famous or unknown, who have laboured tirelessly in the cause of AIDS awareness. But she was the first truly world-famous person to embrace that cause publicly, and to put all her considerable publicity ‘clout’ at its disposal.

Yet the Queen may have had a point if she had indeed urged the Princess to balance her public duties. At the time I could see exactly what she had been trying to make Diana understand – namely, that her association with a disease then often held to be a kind of self-inflicted plague visited upon promiscuous male homosexuals, and prostitutes, would inevitably weaken
the royal family’s standing in the public eye. But I believe that the Palace failed to appreciate what Diana actually stood for, or to appreciate the impact she was capable of making. Diana was the homosexuals’ champion precisely because homosexuality was no longer safe – she wanted to help. Nor, as was becoming increasingly apparent, was any unprotected sex unless both parties were certain that neither was infected. Diana knew that the power of her personality could at least make a large slice of the population, not only stop and reassess their often crass and misconceived judgments about AIDS sufferers, but also understand the nature of the dangers that sexually active people now faced.

In her own much used expression, Diana could not win. She was damned if she tried to do something, and criticised if she did not. To make matters worse, at about the same time as her meeting with the Queen she had also received a broadside from her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, about the way she was dressing. The Princess was wearing a pair of figure-hugging trousers she had recently bought, and thought, quite rightly, that she looked good in them. Seeing her as she walked into the Palace, Lady Fermoy, a lifelong serving courtier and a close friend of the Queen Mother, was appalled, to the extent that she cornered her granddaughter and called her a strumpet. Understandably, Diana felt she could no longer even trust her own family. In the car on the way back to Kensington Palace, as she wept about what she termed the ‘double attack’ upon her, I felt desperately sorry for her, although I was powerless to do anything other than offer such comforting words as I could muster. It is not given to policemen, even those on royalty-protection
duties, to confront senior courtiers, far less the monarch herself.

Leprosy and AIDS would not be the end of Diana’s involvement with controversial issues. Towards the end of her life she was accused of political interference, and of dragging the royal family into dangerous political waters, by the stance she took against land mines. For Diana, the cause was another AIDS. Land mines were (and are) a scourge of humanity, and the cause of countless deaths and maimings among the innocent. If she took a highly public stance against them, then the world would come to its senses and they would be banned for ever. Never mind that mines are a cheap and effective defence for armies in the field, especially ill-trained or ill-equipped armies. Never mind the views of those with vested interests – they must be cleared and then banned. She simply could not understand those who challenged her childlike logic. For her, if a single child lost a leg to a land mine, the solution was simple; ban the mines. While this may have been naive – there was a predictable outcry among the armed forces, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and others, for instance – it focused attention on the issue. In her mind, billion-dollar arms deals were not relevant. Clearly bemused by the chorus of disapproval that surrounded her widely publicised trips to the minefields of Bosnia and Angola, she declared, ‘I am not a politician, I am a humanitarian.’ It is exactly how she wanted to be remembered.

The word ‘humanitarian’ embodies the very essence of Diana. She believed that she could change humankind for the better. She tried; she raised our awareness, and our spirits, for a while, and then was cruelly snatched from us. But that, emphatically,
does not mean that she failed. For me, Diana made us examine ourselves for a moment. That alone, no matter how fleeting that moment, makes her life worthwhile.

GIVEN THEIR ITINERANT LIFESTYLES – not to mention their illicit love affairs – the mobile telephone became an essential tool for both Charles and Diana. The Princess in particular was almost addicted to hers, as she was to the landline telephone until the small, reliable mobiles became available, and constantly updated to the very latest model. Knowing that calls made on a mobile are not secure, I advised her to be cautious, urging her to use some sort of secret code (obviously the person on the other end would have to know the code as well) when speaking on the mobile in case others were listening in, accidentally or deliberately. Unfortunately, she dismissed my warnings as the first stages of paranoia which, coming from her, was a little rich, given that she quite often displayed an ‘Everyone’s-out-to-get-me’ mentality herself. I personally found the mobile revolution easy to resist (until quite recently,
anyway), preferring instead to use my dependable Scotland Yard pager. In an age of rapidly changing communications it at least gave me some semblance of being in control; in addition, it was secure and, when I wanted it to be, silent.

Diana’s addiction to her ‘talking brick’ also rubbed off on some of her staff. Dickie Arbiter, her talkative press officer, a former reporter for Independent Radio News who revelled in his poacher-turned-gamekeeper role, seemed to have his mobile permanently attached to his ear. Its ring tone, permanently set on ‘loud’, was particularly irritating. I had frequently suggested that he turn the thing off, but Dickie always thought he knew best. Dickie’s come-uppance came one day in April 1989, at the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth (the navy’s officer-training establishment). The Princess, in a spectacular bright red tricorn hat and a matching suit with large brass buttons, emerged from the main building and walked on to the raised dais from where she had been asked to take the salute at the Lord High Admiral’s Divisions, the Royal Navy’s version of a ceremonial passing-out parade. On the saluting platform she was flanked by the Commodore of the College and other senior officers, while I and other members of her entourage stood a little to the rear. As the mass of uniformed officer cadets marched in time to the beat of the Royal Marines band, the Princess, who was in a gaily flirtatious mood, was doing her utmost to retain her composure.

‘Look at all those uniforms,’ she remarked wickedly to the Commodore standing beside her, her eyes wandering up and down the massed ranks of cadets, who by now had come to a crashing halt and were standing rigidly at attention.

‘Hmm … and royal weather for you too, ma’am,’ added the Commodore, not quite sure how to react to this royal personage’s flirtatious manner.

‘But of course, Captain,’ she replied, ‘the sun always shines on the righteous.’

As I have said, Diana was an inveterate giggler, and when in that mood the tiniest incident could send her into paroxysms of barely suppressed laughter. Dickie, who had been standing just behind the Princess provided it. For just as the band finished playing and came to attention directly in front of the Princess, his mobile rang out. In the sudden silence after the music, it sounded as loud as a trumpet. The Princess could hardly contain herself as Dickie, flushed scarlet with embarrassment, fumbled desperately in his pockets for the offending instrument, which for once was not welded to his ear. From that day on I understand he switched off his phone when attending official functions.

Dickie Arbiter may have learned his lesson, but unfortunately the consequences of the royal couple’s dependency on mobile phones were to be far more wide-reaching, and more damaging. Mobile-telecommunications technology was in its infancy at the beginning of 1990, and transmissions were very far from being secure. At the same time, a portable directional scanner could be purchased for a few hundred pounds which, when connected to a receiver like those used by amateur radio hams, would allow an unscrupulous operator to eavesdrop on the most intimate mobile-phone conversation. True, bugging other people’s conversations is illegal, but the offence is almost impossible to police effectively. By the end of 1989 two unprincipled people had already secretly captured and
recorded two indelicate royal conversations that must have surpassed every illegal eavesdropper’s greatest expectations.

In January 1990 an amateur radio ham named Cyril Reenan approached
The Sun
newspaper, offering to sell tapes of a conversation between Diana and an unidentified man she referred to as ‘James’. It was extremely recent, having been recorded on New Year’s Eve. Stuart Higgins, a senior executive of the newspaper and, an erstwhile confidant of Camilla Parker Bowles, agreed to meet Reenan. Having heard the tapes Higgins, who had met the Princess before, was convinced that the woman to whom the mystery ‘James’ kept referring as ‘darling’, ‘honey’ and ‘Squidgy’ was indeed the Princess of Wales. During the conversation, ‘James’ spoke of looking forward to wrapping his ‘warm, protective arms around her in a couple of days’. The nature of the conversation confirmed beyond doubt that the two were close; she even talked of not wanting to get pregnant. This was simply sensational material, particularly for a tabloid newspaper.

Higgins, like many newspapermen at the time, was in tune with the Diana story and so was aware of the rumours circulating about the Princess and an army officer named James Hewitt. He correctly deduced, however, that the man on the tapes must be a different James because at one point in the conversation Diana complained that she had dressed Hewitt ‘from head to foot’; in addition, the other ‘James’ said that he had been obsessed with her for three months and Higgins knew that Diana had been involved with Hewitt for much longer. He therefore set his Fleet Street bloodhounds to work on finding the identity of this second James.

Although
Sun
reporters tracked down the Princess’s besotted beau, James Gilbey, within days, in the event the story of the intimate phone conversation did not surface until 25 August 1992. The management of Rupert Murdoch’s News International (which owns
The Sun
, among other papers including
The Times
) were not as convinced as Higgins that the woman on the tapes was indeed the Princess of Wales. Murdoch’s man-in-charge in London, Chairman Andrew Knight, therefore decided to sit on the tapes, banking them in
The Sun
’s safe where they were to remain – a ticking time bomb under the royal family, had they but known it – to resurface with dramatic effect more than two years later.

I will address the impact of what came to be called ‘Squidygate’ upon the Princess and others, including me, later because at the time Diana, the royal family and others close to them were all blissfully unaware of the tapes’ existence. This is, however, a good point at which to examine the influence of Diana’s coterie of male friends who played so important a part in her life. For although James Hewitt was her most significant admirer, he was by no means the only one.

As we have seen, by the time I became her protection officer Diana, tired of being spurned by her husband in favour of an older woman he had never stopped loving, had already been driven into an affair with another man. According to her, Charles had returned to Camilla as early as 1984, before the birth of his second son, Harry, on 15 September that year. Later, in a secretly taped interview for Andrew Morton’s book, Diana repeated what she had confided to me by the pool in
Majorca: ‘As Harry was born it just went bang, our marriage, the whole thing went down the drain … By then I knew he had gone back to his lady but somehow we’d managed to have Harry.’ The Prince’s rejection of her was, for Diana, the final irreparable crack in an already fatally flawed marriage.

Prince Charles may have turned his back on his beautiful young wife, but other men – young, well-bred, rich, powerful or good-looking men, and sometimes all of those – were fascinated by this naturally provocative woman, and more than willing to try to take his place in her affections. She in turn clearly enjoyed the power she seemed to exert over many men. Infidelity and the title ‘Princess of Wales’ do not mix, however, and I have never believed that Diana was naturally given to unfaithfulness; besides, she was terrified of discovery, and knew just how dangerous it might be to carry on an illicit affair in the enclosed world of Palace circles. Yet as the marriage deteriorated, Camilla’s hold over Charles seemed to tighten, until, inevitably, something had to give. It has become almost a cliché to say that Diana craved love. She had every intention of finding fulfilment, and since her husband had made it obvious that he did not want her, her adultery became inevitable.

In the event, it was not to the rich or famous that she turned for male companionship. In fact, the men whose company she sought or welcomed tended to be all of a type. To a man, they had to have one thing in common – patience, and bundles of it. They were invariably good-looking, public-school educated and from landed families, although by no means always rich themselves. They played bridge tolerably and enjoyed going
with her to the cinema or to dine, discreetly, at the trendiest restaurants, but small talk, the ability to chat endlessly for hours about almost nothing at all, seemed to be their speciality.

They also had to know how to please the Princess, which meant sharing her liking for risqué jokes and playing adult games like Twister. Invariably, they all had pet names for her. James Gilbey famously called her ‘Squidgy’, but her childhood nickname ‘Duch’, short for Duchess, was the favourite.

Before her marriage, her early suitors, she told me, had usually been disappointed cast-offs of her married elder sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale. Diana had loved to mother them; indeed, a part of dating the young Lady Diana Spencer was the advantage of having your shirts washed and ironed – a huge plus for feckless young bachelors. She used to joke about it to me, confiding that all she had ever really wanted in life was to be a loving wife, caring for her man and her family. Perhaps it was true, at least in part, but I knew Diana by now, and knew too that she was addicted to the buzz that her extraordinary life gave her.

She did love to care for her men, though. Any new man in her life received the benefit of her clothes sense – and her purse. One or two of them, like Hewitt, whom she had adored according to her own very public admission, had the good fortune to be ‘dressed from head to foot’ by her. She always picked up the bill too, which for someone like Hewitt, who seemed to be permanently short of money, was an added advantage.

There was one rather curious effect of all this. Even if they did not look like a ‘Dianaman’ at first, within a few weeks the cloning process was complete. I often thought that if
the men whom she admired, such as Hewitt, Gilbey, Philip Dunne, David Waterhouse and Rory Scott, were lined up in an identity parade, then one would hardly be able to tell them apart. All were tall, of similar physique, dressed and spoke in the same manner, shared the same tastes and the same circle of friends, and often the same mannerisms. They may have differed slightly, but all had one thing in common: they were nothing like her serious-minded husband, twelve years her senior, and by his own admission a man who acted older than his years.

Diana’s flirtatious remark at the Royal Naval College had not been entirely frivolous. She once joked with me, ‘I do so like men in uniform.’ I lightly replied that it was a good job therefore that I had to work as a plain-clothes police officer.

‘Oh no, Ken, not you. I couldn’t fancy you,’ she said. Deadpan, I told her the feeling was mutual. Used to male admirers falling over themselves for her she was not sure how to take that. It was an interesting exchange, however, in the light of one of the more persistent rumours about her.

Scotland Yard advises any would-be protection officer that strict protocol must be followed, and emphasises that it is important that the officer should not get too close to his or her principal. They stress detachment, so that the officer can focus entirely on the job of security. Sometimes this is easier said than done, and especially with someone of the Princess’s warmly sympathetic, confiding and often vulnerable nature. In 1986 a rumour surfaced, and was widely circulated in both Palace and Scotland Yard circles, that the Princess had become ‘too close’ to her then protection officer, Sergeant Barry
Mannakee. He was summarily discharged for overstepping the invisible mark of propriety between himself and Diana. Nothing was ever proved, but the rumour was strong enough, allegedly, for the Palace, fearing another royal scandal, to instruct Scotland Yard to act to prevent a recurrence. The Queen had been aware of the relationship between her daughter, Princess Anne, and her protection officer, Sergeant Peter Cross, and he too had been moved from his job. The last thing the Palace wanted was for another serious transgression of this nature to become public.

Years later, James Hewitt would claim that Mannakee was killed by rogue British intelligence officers. Without a shred of credible evidence, he suggested that these had somehow ‘arranged’ a fatal accident when, in the spring of 1987, Mannakee was the passenger on a motorcycle that collided with a car in the East End of London (the bike’s rider survived).
1
Hewitt alleged that Barry’s death had been no accident, and added that secret agents acting for the British intelligence agencies planned to dispose of him just as they had Mannakee. He also claimed that Diana had told him that she and Mannakee had enjoyed a passionate affair. As ‘proof’, he said that the policeman had given the Princess a cuddly toy, a brown teddy bear, which she kept on her bed. According to Hewitt, when he saw it and observed that he thought it a rather intimate present for a policeman to give her, she said, nonplussed, ‘But we were lovers.’

It is undoubtedly true that Diana and Mannakee were very close, perhaps in the eyes of the Palace and of Scotland Yard too close. Because of the long hours spent in each other’s
company it was almost inevitable that a close friendship would grow between them. Having myself been the Princess’s protection officer, I too became close to her – as I have tried to show, that was the nature of the job. To suggest, however, as Hewitt did, that Mannakee was murdered because of their intimacy is the stuff of romantic thrillers. Their alleged affair is said to have started in 1985 when Prince Harry was less than a year old, at a time when the Princess was suffering from postnatal depression. I was not with the Royalty Protection Department then, so I do not know whether this is true or not, but, like anyone else on the inside, I heard the rumours when I transferred to the department. Certainly, whenever speculation about the relationship was raised in the press it was categorically denied by the Palace that anything inappropriate had happened between Diana and her protection officer. That, of course, does not necessarily make it untrue.