Diana's Nightmare - The Family (22 page)

'We took the tape back to the office and it took a long time to transcribe it.

'I was astonished - I just couldn't believe it. We went through all sorts of emotions -whether it was an elaborate fake or whether it was soundalikes trying to cause some damage. We got the tape analysed and went through it, line by line, to corroborate all the evidence that was available at the time. There were lots of pointers to it being the Princess of Wales because of various comments she made, but there was no clue as to who the man was. Indeed, the only time we'd heard Gilbey mentioned before was when Jason Fraser took the picture of Diana visiting his flat. Within a week of actually receiving it from Cyril Reenan, though, it was obvious that it was genuine. It was really decided very quickly after that that it would never be published. For a long time, the tape was in the bureau of my home at Teddington.

'The Norgrove tape of the same conversation came in some time later and that was down to Phil Dampier (the paper's royal reporter at the time). I was flabbergasted, absolutely flabbergasted when I heard it. I mean, the tapes almost molded together and they provided enormous evidence of the association. It was easy to prove it was Gilbey because of the various pointers there.' Still the
Sun
held back and both Squidgy tapes were deposited at the Midland Bank in Fleet Street for safekeeping.

'I realised the significance of the tapes two and a half years ago and I never envisaged the day when they would be published,' said Higgins. 'Although it was written all the time that the marriage was in trouble, there was never any clear evidence. So we didn't publish. I think it is on the record as being said that this was a decision taken by Mr Murdoch.'

The Australian-born media magnate was given a ringside seat from which to evaluate the marriage for himself a few months later. He and his wife Anna were invited to the fiftieth birthday party of King Constantine, the exiled Greek monarch. Charles and Diana were among the guests.

The party was held at Spencer House, previously Diana's London home, which had been sold to the Rothschild family for £9 million a year earlier. The mansion, bordering Green Park, was a few doors away from the Murdochs' penthouse in St James's Place. Lord Rothschild had spent £15 million restoring its Georgian grandeur. The guest list included the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Andrew, but not the Duchess of York who was in America, and the crowned heads of Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Belgium. 'Tino', as Prince Philip called his Greek cousin, arrived in a green Porsche convertible from his home in a cul-de-sac at Hampstead Garden suburb. The Murdochs and Prince Andrew arrived on foot.

Most of the 650 guests consumed smoked fish, poussin with fresh vegetables, strawberries and vintage Bollinger in a marquee draped with pink chiffon and lit by crystal chandeliers. The top forty, which included the Royal Family and Rupert and Anna Murdoch, dined inside the house with Constantine and his wife Queen Anne Marie. After dinner, the guests mingled in the gardens or danced to the music of Lester Lanin's orchestra. A green canopy surrounded the house to foil even the sharpest paparazzi. Tino's family and friends picked up the bill for £250,000.

When Murdoch returned home, his butler Philip Townsend asked him if he had enjoyed the evening. 'Oh yes,' replied Murdoch. 'There were nine royal queens and about forty of the other sort.'

'Whatever do you mean, darling?' asked Anna Murdoch.

'I mean nine real queens and forty poofters.'

'You are not allowed to say that, darling.'

'I'm allowed to say it,' her husband replied, it's the
Sun
that's not.'

The abundance of tiaras and titles failed to impress Murdoch who had been seated next to the Queen. 'Even with all those queens, it was no big deal', he told his butler. He was quite dismissive about Prince Charles: 'He sat there like a zombie. No one seemed particularly interested in him.' Murdoch would have had his undivided attention had he mentioned the two tapes sitting in a bank vault in Fleet Street.

Three weeks later Charles broke his right arm in two places when he fell from his pony Echo while playing polo at Cirencester. Until then, he had been cautious whenever Camilla visited Highgrove. After his accident, he became positively careless, it was a very bad break, so bad that he nearly fainted when he saw the bone sticking through his elbow,' said a polo source. 'He was in terrible pain.' it was a silly thing to do,' Charles admitted. 'I was a silly fool.'

When he was well enough to leave hospital, his damaged arm in a sling, he posed for pictures with Diana before she drove him to Highgrove. But minutes after she dropped him off, she left the estate to drive back to Kensington Palace. Charles sent his detective to collect Camilla from Middlewick House. According to PC Andrew Jacques, one of the police guards assigned to Highgrove, the couple adjourned to Diana's private sitting room. Noticing a light in the room, Jacques peered through a chink in the curtains and saw Charles and Camilla 'dancing cheek to cheek'.

'Though the Prince had his arm in a sling, they were smooching to the very romantic music,' claimed Jacques after he had left the police force and become an insurance salesman. 'Eventually, they disappeared down on to the sofa out of my sight. I moved away, but when I returned fifteen minutes later, the light was still on. I saw Camilla emerge from behind the sofa and shake her dress. Then Charles stood up. He looked down and intimated that because one arm was in a sling, he couldn't readjust his clothes.'

Camilla became Charles's nurse as well as his lover and helped him to cope with his duties as best he could. The couple spent hours inside the seven foot high walls of the private vegetable garden, where not even his children were permitted to roam. Charles was suffering from delayed shock and depression. 'I think they put it on backwards,' he said after an operation. 'I had to encourage him to go through the pain barrier and force himself to do some pretty nasty things,' said Sarah Key, his Australian physiotherapist. 'The arm had stiffened up. We could straighten his elbow but the problem was getting it to bend. Because of who he is I think he feels the need to prove himself and drive himself that much harder.'

To help Charles keep in touch with his friends, Camilla drove him to social events and encouraged him to rise above the pain. 'They were going around to dinner parties together in the Gloucestershire hunting circle,' said a Highgrove insider. 'They were more and more accepted as a couple among their friends.' As travelling to his office at St James's Palace was excruciating, Charles asked people to visit him. He received them in his study. 'Charles started to invite people he would normally only have seen in London down to Highgrove while he was recuperating,' said a Palace insider. 'They were allowed to see, among other things, that Camilla Parker Bowles was acting as his hostess in Diana's place. Slowly, some of these people talked and the circle widened.'

If Charles had ever learned anything from his father, it should have been that he needed to maintain the utmost discretion about his private life. Prince Philip knew that loose talk could be dangerous.

TO his utter dismay, James Gilbey learned that the Squidgy call had been taped. When he told Diana, she was devastated. Unable to read the signs at all clearly from that distance, she suspected that her husband and the Highgrove Set had something to do with it. This unfounded fear motivated many of her future actions.

'The
Sun
approached Gilbey in early 1990 to say that they had the tape and they'd identified him,' said a Fleet Street insider. 'He'd learned by this time to say nothing, but he turned white with shock.' At that time, Andrew Morton was toiling away on his first Diana book,
Diana's Diary.
Soon after the
Sun
confronted Gilbey, Morton approached him through an intermediary to inquire about the dinner date at Lennox Gardens. Gilbey responded: 'I'm sorry, I can't help you.' Morton's name meant nothing to him at that stage.

A few weeks later, as the time approached for Morton to deliver his manuscript to the publisher, the writer announced to a friend: 'I've got to the bottom of the Gilbey thing. Diana was helping him with an emotional problem - a broken romance.' A mutual friend, he said, had helped him to get the information.

Despite a modest upbringing as the son of a picture framer in Yorkshire and a higher education at the very red-brick Sussex University, Morton was surprisingly well-connected. He played squash with Dr James Colthurst, one of Diana's friends, and he and the Princess attended the same society wedding during 1990. Diana put Morton on her Christmas card list. It was just another piece in the jigsaw.

The Queen had already been alerted to problems in the Yorks' marriage by a miserable Prince Andrew. When Her Majesty asked to see her for a private chat, Diana feared the worst. Her mother-in-law, she decided, must know about Squidgy.

'The marriage was made in hell and they're both well out of it'

Stuart Higgins

IF the Queen had heard the name Squidgy at that point, she might have mistaken it for some household product she had seen advertised on TV. One of Her Majesty's endearing qualities was the way she either mixed up words or forgot them completely. 'What's that thing that goes round and round and plays records?' she once asked. 'A gramophone, Ma'am,' replied a helpful aide.

Surrounded by medieval rituals, a few trusted friends and her favourite corgis Spark, Myth and Fable, Elizabeth II acted out a history of which she was justifiably proud in grand homes and castles. By any standards, she led an extraordinary life, but sceptics who questioned whether she had lost touch with reality were wide of the mark. Although one courtier admitted privately that the Queen had become a little eccentric in later life, she still had more political savvy than anyone else in the Palace. She also possessed a modern intelligence-gathering service that was frightening in its scope. At five foot four inches tall, she was small but perfectly informed. 'She sometimes knew things the Prime Minister doesn't know,' said Sir Edward Heath, one of the nine holders of that office during her reign.

The Queen had learned from her sources a great deal about the private lives of members of her family and their friends. Added to her own insight, it amounted to a very comprehensive picture. 'The Queen knows what's going on,' said the Palace insider, it is a mistake to underestimate her. She has a ruthless streak.' Her Majesty could not have been happy with what she saw and heard during the final year of the 'Me' Decade - the egotistical Eighties. There had been, she noted, quite an outbreak of 'Me-ism' among the younger royals.

In the Forties, the Windsors had been a compact unit which George VI referred to in a letter to Elizabeth as 'our family, us four, the "Royal Family" .. . with additions of course at suitable moments!!' There had been many additions since then, but the effect had been to scatter the Family rather than unite it.

Increasingly the Queen has become an isolated figure,' wrote Elizabeth Grimsditch in the
Sunday Express.
'Her closest friends are elderly, her children she sees rarely. Princess Anne is the only royal who drops in on her mother, and then only when the staff are informed. Touchingly, whenever she does, the Queen insists on making tea for her personally.'

Prince Philip preferred the atmosphere at White's Club in St James's Street to stuffily formal weekends at Windsor Castle. The Palace discounted suggestions that he stayed overnight in a suite of rooms at the club after enjoyable evenings in the company of like-minded friends.

Even if one or more of her three sons were spending time at the castle, they kept to themselves, often dining from trays sent to their rooms. Charles had to make an appointment if he wanted to dine with his mother at Buckingham Palace. When he played polo at Windsor Great Park, he would arrive and depart without seeing his mother at the castle.

The Queen's visits to Sunninghill to see the Duchess of York and her granddaughters were restricted to just forty-five minutes while afternoon tea was served. She then drove straight back to Windsor. She rarely visited Kensington Palace to spend time with Diana and her sons. They had to visit her.

Much of Her Majesty's day was spent working on her red despatch boxes and studying other reports which were regularly handed to senior Palace courtiers by Scotland Yard. These were compiled from at least two dossiers about the royals and the people they met either socially or in their work. Detectives assigned to the Royal Protection Branch, who shadowed the royals whenever they left home, not only kept tabs on their friends and acquaintances, they were obliged to report any incident which might jeopardise their safety. 'Anything to do with personal matters goes through a channel for sensitive information,' said a former royal minder. 'The protection of lives and property, which is a more practical concern, goes through another.'

The Queen also received briefings from the Prime Minister at their meetings every Tuesday at six-thirty p.m. in the Audience Room at Buckingham Palace about specific matters which had been brought to his attention by the heads of British Intelligence. Information concerning the royals was passed to the Prime Minister's office through the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). Government eavesdropping was carried out at the GCHQ listening station at Cheltenham, dubbed The Puzzle Palace.

'If you think the staff sit hunched over a radio set wearing earphones and clutching a notebook you'd be wrong,' said investigator Gerry Brown. 'The radio messages are fed through computers which switch on and record conversations automatically when they pick up key words such as Hijack, Kidnap, Cocaine — or even Squidgy.' It was claimed, however, that a twenty-four-hour electronic watch was maintained on members of the Royal Family by a team of six civil servants who monitored the switchboards of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Kensington Palace and Balmoral Castle.

'Monitoring royal calls is carried out as a matter of routine at GCHQ,' claimed a security source quoted in the
Mail on Sunday,
it is imperative that the intelligence services know the movements or intended movements of the Royal Family at all times. Some of this team's work is designed to screen out nuisance calls getting through to the royal residences. But it is mainly to provide a running service of vital information about the royals.' Through one arm of this network or another, Her Majesty learned about her daughter-in-law's trysts with James Gilbey. More worryingly, she was told they had caused a potentially dangerous breach of security.