Diana's Nightmare - The Family (20 page)

Only thirty-five miles from GCHQ, Cyril Reenan twiddled the dial of his scanner along the wavebands allocated to radio telephones. He overheard a trainer talking to a jockey about a horse running at Newbury. 'I heard him say the horse was sure to win and it was a rank outsider,' he said. 'My wife was out shopping. As soon as she came back, I told her, "We're going to Newbury races". I took £100 with me but I lost my nerve and just put £20 on the horse to win. I was shaking like a leaf. It was in a photo finish and then it was announced as the winner at twenty-five to one. I won £500 plus my £20 back.'

His hobby had become so profitable that he invested £1,012 in an IC-R700 scanner which could monitor one hundred calls. He also installed a twenty-year-old tape recorder and dangled a microphone down in front of the scanner.

One day, he thought, he might hear something worth recording.

'You're awfully good at feeling your way along'

Camilla Parker Bowles

THE Squidgy episode in Diana's nightmare began to the sounds of revelry. One night in the summer of 1989 she partied with a couple of pedigree chums from the Gilbey and Guinness dynasties. The Princess arrived alone at the party, hosted by one of her friends, the former Julia Guinness, daughter of the brewing family.

Julia, who was married to Old Etonian banker the Honourable Michael Samuel, was the sister of one of Diana's
betes noires,
Sabrina Guinness, who had preceded her in Charles's affections. They had a passionate fling in 1979 but it was a passing fancy that soon ran its course. Diana, however, showed traces of jealousy when she bumped into Sabrina at the hairdressers after her marriage. 'Diana walked in and caught sight of her straight away,' said Kevin Shanley. 'Somewhat indignantly she enquired, "Is that who I think it is?" Before I could reply, she added, "I wish you had told me one of his exes would be here."'

But Julia had been a good friend to Diana and they sometimes lunched together, once at a Kensington restaurant where they sat and chatted for two hours over two green salads. The bill for £14 was the smallest the management could recall. Charles's relationship with her sister wasn't Julia's only connection with the Windsor boys. She had dated Prince Andrew several times when they were teenagers. She was in his company when he was turned away from Annabel's one night for not wearing a tie.

One of the other guests at Julia's party was James Gilbey, a relation of the Gilbey's Gin empire whose family motto was Honour and Virtue. His father Ralph was a retired wine merchant who lived with his wife Barbara in a Somerset farmhouse. He shared at least one thing in common with Charles: at school, he had been called 'Fatty'. Over a few drinks, Diana shared her troubles with the young motor trade executive, or used car salesman as he modestly called himself. She was helpless and angry, desperately in need of a soulmate. Gilbey listened attentively. 'James attracts women who want to sob and pour out their troubles,' said a friend. 'He makes a woman feel special - like she is the only person in the world who matters to him.'

Gilbey, a darkly handsome Libran, had known Diana during her bachelor-girl days at Coleherne Court. He had attended Ampleforth, the
alma mater
of Andrew Parker Bowles. Gilbey was shocked by what Diana told him about her husband and the officer's wife. She gave him her telephone number at Kensington Palace and, genuinely moved by her plight, he kept in touch.

It would be disingenuous to suggest that he didn't find her immensely attractive and at six-foot-three-inches tall, Gilbey was one of the few men Diana could look up to. He was also an optimist. Several false starts not only in the used car business but also in love, had taught him the power of positive thinking. Diana was drawn to his New Age philosophy. She saw Gilbey several times before her brother's wedding to the model Victoria Lockwood in September. Listening to the couple make their wedding vows in a church near Althorp, Diana reflected on the husband sitting beside her. He was, in her words, 'stuffy, old and boring before his time'. She also knew that he had been unfaithful to her.

'Diana had never slept with anybody except Charles,' said a friend. 'Charles went to the altar and made a vow before not just God and her but the rest of the world that he knew he wasn't going to keep. It's nearly two hundred years since a royal who was to be king did that, and that was Prinny. He is blacker than a great many of his ancestors.'

'Prinny, the Prince Regent, had gone through a marriage ceremony with his widowed mistress Mrs Fitzherbert in his twenties even though she was a Catholic,' said the royal historian. 'But he dumped her and married Caroline of Brunswick to pay off debts of £500,000. He had a string of mistresses before, during and after the wedding. Caroline was an exceedingly ugly woman who refused to wash below the waist. When George met her, he ordered a large brandy. He stayed drunk and, on his wedding night, he collapsed in the fireplace. His bride left him there. Somehow, they had a daughter, Princess Charlotte. Caroline travelled around Europe with an entourage of lovers and her affairs were so notorious that George charged her with adultery. She was put on trial at the House of Lords where she claimed she had only committed adultery once - with Mrs Fitzherbert's husband.

'When he succeeded to the throne as George IV, Caroline was Princess of Wales but although she became Queen Consort she wasn't crowned. She tried to break into Westminster Abbey during his coronation but he had prizefighters stationed at the doors to keep her out. She continued to make trouble for him and, soon afterwards, she was taken ill at the theatre and died of inflammation of the bowel. The suspicion was that she was poisoned.'

Diana had at least one chance to step back from her entanglement with Gilbey, but ignored it. He invited her to dinner at his flat in Lennox Gardens, South Kensington, and she was photographed by Jason Fraser leaving the one-bedroom premises at one fifteen a.m. i suppose it wasn't that wise for Diana and me to meet in those circumstances,' said Gilbey, even more unwisely, it's hard for the Princess to keep up old friendships.'

It was a measure of Diana's desperation that she continued to take Gilbey's calls. She might like to say, 'I treat the Press as though they were children,' but she knew that once the tabloids scented a big royal story with her name on it they would pursue it to the end. Around this time, Andrew Morton decided to write a book called
Diana's Diary.
When he read about Diana's late-night visit to James Gilbey's flat, he recognised a potential entry. Morton started to make some tentative inquiries. At this stage, he had no inkling that Gilbey was already calling the Princess of Wales 'Squidgy'.

ONE old friend who really needed Diana's help was the Duchess of York. The Yorks were living at Castlewood House, a mansion loaned to them by King Hussein of Jordan, while work proceeded on Sunninghill. Although Andrew was frequently away, Sarah had unexpectedly fallen pregnant with their second child. 'Fergie's life was in a mess and she was very unhappy,' said a friend. 'Andrew wasn't coming home on some of his shore leave - he was going to his old quarters at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle to see his mother - and he was spending time with Liz Nocon.' Elizabeth Nocon, wife of Andrew's photographic guru Gene Nocon, had been the Prince's confidante before his marriage. Fergie felt excluded from the friendship and there were arguments when Andrew did go home to Castlewood.

When Fergie told Diana about the new baby, the Princess decided it would be a boy, and she suggested he should be called Elvis. Fergie laughed good-naturedly at the dig. Her exploits with the movers and shakers of the Showbiz Set were something of a family joke.

If Andrew was unavailable, Fergie had grown-up things to do on her own. Her first two
Budgie
books had just gone on sale in the United States and she was going to promote them in New York. She had also accepted an invitation from Lynn Wyatt to visit Houston for a festival of British opera. As an added inducement, Lynn had recalled her son Steve for the occasion. Fergie wanted to meet Steve, whom she had heard about from one of his former American girlfriends. He sounded divine.

It had, however, taken all of Steve Wyatt's dimpled smiles, Southern drawl and saccharine charm to make his mark in London society. He came to the capital to work in the oil broking business for his stepfather Oscar at Delaney Petroleum, based in St James's. 'I met him when he was being touted around Europe as a sort of eligible bachelor,' said the young Chelsea deb. 'He was just hanging out, going to parties, stuff like that. I met him at a drinks party in Kensington because someone thought he was the man for me, but he wasn't my type. He has bad acne scars on his face and his lips are so big he looks like Bette Midler dressed as a man.'

Wyatt's 'fun' personality and spiritual approach to life, however, were immensely attractive to the Duchess of York. She began a less than clandestine affair with him soon after Lynn introduced them at Allington, the Wyatt's French-style chateau in opulent River Oaks Boulevard. Lynn knew so many royals, the house was known as the Wyatt Regency.

Fergie met up with Wyatt again on 8 December at Constable Burton Hall in Yorkshire, where he was shooting with friends including the actor Nigel 'The Charmer' Havers, Patrick, the Earl of Lichfield and the Royal Ballet dancer Wayne Eagling. 'It was the first time anybody knew they were seeing each other,' said Maggie Wyvill, the
chatelaine
of Constable Burton. 'But at that stage she was very much pregnant, and at that point there was nothing going on between them.'

Before long, however, Fergie was so smitten with the Texas playboy that she was often sighted with him at the trendy Cosa Nosheries around Knightsbridge while Andrew was away. When other commitments stopped her from going to a party he was attending, she rang friends the next morning to check who else had been there and to whom Wyatt had spoken. 'She rang him constantly at his office,' said a friend in the oil business. 'She kept after him.' Staff at Sunninghill were instructed to count the rings if line five, her private number, rang while she was away from the house. 'Nobody, but nobody was permitted to answer the calls on line five,' said an insider. 'But we knew she had a code for Wyatt's calls.'

The Duchess had flown south from Yorkshire on Sunday, 10 December, to join Andrew, who had been shooting at Sandringham. Fergie liked to say, 'You can always tell the way I feel by looking at me'. If Andrew was perceptive, he would have noted that his wife was deeply enamoured - and it was not with him.

ONE week before Christmas, a group of drinkers adjourned to a house in Merseyside after closing time at their local pub. For entertainment, the host, a man known to the outside world as Ordinary Joe, switched on his radio scanner and, as the revellers drank from cans of beer, they listened in to intercepted calls.

Suddenly, they heard a voice that one of them recognised. It was the Prince of Wales, not speaking in a recorded broadcast but talking live on the telephone. He was reading out the text of a speech he had prepared to an attentive listener.

Charles had been to Wales that day to visit a youth enterprise centre at Greenfield, Clwyd. After that, he presented awards at the township of Mold, visited an Abbeyfield Society old people's home and finished his official engagements at Wrexham Technology Park. Fairly tired, he drove to Eaton Hall in Cheshire, home of his close friend, Anne, the Duchess of Westminster, to spend the night. After a late dinner, he went up to his room and lay down on the bed. It had not been a particularly tough or demanding day on the royal circuit, but Charles was needy. He picked up his portable phone and dialled Camilla at Middlewick House.

They had been speaking for quite a while - fifty minutes, according to one source - and it was after one a.m. before the Merseyside partygoers switched on a tape recorder. Ordinary Joe recorded the date - 18 December, 1989 - as a voiceover in the process. Camillagate was born.

At first, the secret listeners tittered at the suggestive nature of the conversation:

Camilla: Mmmmm ... you're awfully good at feeling your way along.

Charles: Oh stop! I want to feel my way along you, all over you and up and down you and in and out. . .

Camilla: Oh!

Charles: Particularly in and out.

Camilla: It's like that programme Start the Week. I can't start the week without you.

Charles: I fill up your tank.

Camilla: Yes, you do.

The eavesdroppers soon realised, however, that the heir to the throne was involved in a deeply satisfying sexual relationship with a woman other than his wife. 'You have to hear the longing in his voice when he says "Ooooh daaarling" to realise that she knew just how to turn this guy on,' said one who listened to the whole tape. 'She certainly sounds earthy.'

It was obvious that the lovers met on a regular basis, and that they were planning another meeting.

Camilla: Darling, listen. I talked to David tonight again. It might not be any good.

Charles: Oh, no!

Camilla: I'll tell you why. He's got these children of one of those Crawley girls and their nanny staying. He's going, I'm going, to ring him again tomorrow. He's going to try to put them off till Friday. But I thought as an alternative perhaps I might ring up Charlie.

Charles: Yes.

Camilla: And see if we could do it there. I know he's back on Thursday.

Quite a few other people, it seemed, were privy to the deceiving of Diana and although the eavesdroppers had no way of identifying any of them, it reinforced the notion that this was not a fleeting romance but a long-term relationship. The woman referred to her husband, who was absent in London, as 'A' - and it seemed that he, like Diana, was also being deceived. The lovers expressed their longing to meet before Christmas because the prospect of spending the festive season apart was painful for both of them.

Camilla: It would be so wonderful to have just one night to set us on our way, wouldn't it?

Charles: Wouldn't it! To wish you Happy Christmas.