Diana's Nightmare - The Family (25 page)

He added: 'I think it was perfectly obvious to any editor at that time that the two rival camps in that marriage did have access to various newspapers. I can say that certain friends of the Prince spoke to senior people at the
Daily Mail
about his point of view.'

Diana's next call to Penny Thornton was made the day after the Queen had visited Sunninghill on Sunday, 8 March, 1992, to try to mediate once more in the Yorks' troubles. She had driven across from Windsor Castle to join them for afternoon tea, but only Beatrice and Eugenie enjoyed the Victoria Sandwich sponge cake served with fresh strawberries and cream. 'Sarah is very unhappy with Andrew,' Diana told the astrologer. 'She is going to do something very dramatic.' Ms Thornton logged this call on Monday, 9 March.

Right on cue, the lawyers were called to Sunninghill the following weekend. The Queen's solicitor, Sir Matthew Farrer, and another lawyer discussed the legal implications over a late dinner with Fergie and Andrew. The meeting broke up and the lawyers departed around midnight. News of it reached the
Daily Mail.
The story of the Yorks' break-up carried Andrew Morton's byline. Other reporters believed his information came either from one of Fergie's friends or from legal circles.

'At the end of that week, I was told by Arthur Edwards, "Watch your phones," and somebody else rang and said, "Be very careful because they want to find out who your mole is",' said Morton. 'Then two weeks later, my office was broken into. They just kicked down the door, opened a load of files and things. The only thing stolen was a camera.' The book was on hard disc in Morton's Epson computer, 'but it was in such a jumble at that point and you would have to spend a lot of time looking for it. I wrote it in January and February, edited it in March and added a bit more in April,' he said, it was a very tight schedule. I was due to interview Lord Spencer in the week that he was taken ill. Now the next question is, "Would he have approved the contents of the book?" I don't know.'

Believing he had attracted the attention of the Special Branch or a similar agency, Morton stopped using his office telephone to avoid bugging. 'I used payphones and spent a fortune on phone cards,' he said, it was not advisable to use the office phone because you never knew who was listening. Mike [his publisher] would ring me from his office in North Clapham and I'd ring him back from a payphone. We would see each other most days. It was a classic symbiotic relationship between publisher and author.'

As a further security precaution, O'Mara wisely decided to move the printing of the first edition outside the British Isles. 'The first print was in northern Finland because we assumed, rightly, that people would try to get hold of the book beforehand and to try to stop anybody from either injuncting it or from stealing it. This kind of journalism is a bit like a chess game where you have got to identify the opposition and work out their moves a few down the line. As it was, I got a call from a news agency pal of mine saying, "We've been given a few hundred quid from a newspaper to get hold of a copy of your book." They thought we were using our usual printers out in East Anglia. So those precautions were necessary. That was the nerve-racking period, giving birth.'

Rumours about the book started to cause alarm at Buckingham Palace, where Morton was regarded with some suspicion. 'By late April, I had been told by a very good source that the Queen herself had been informed about the book and was very worried about it,' said Margaret Holder. 'She was concerned that the Princess of Wales might be giving out information. I found out that a number of the Princess's friends had spoken on the record for this book and it was clear to me that this could not have happened without Diana's consent. A definite message was being put across as part of a strategy to impart to the world the story of her misery.'

Extracts of
DIANA: Her True Story
were due to be published on 7 June, 1992, in the
Sunday Times,
which had paid £250,000 for the serial rights. The alchemy of the Sorcerer's Apprentice was about to produce a sizable chunk of gold. For Lord McGregor and other notables on the Press Complaints Commission, however, it was a prelude to disaster. 'A frenzy of reporting by most sections of the media followed and details of the split between the Prince and Princess of Wales were publicised widely for the first time,' McGregor recounted. 'The impression that the Princess of Wales and her friends had co-operated with Andrew Morton in the writing of this book was denied by Charles Anson and Sir Robert Fellowes.'

On the evening the
Sunday Times
went to press, there was only one story. 'ITN (the television news service) phoned me and said the Palace were flatly denying that the Princess of Wales had anything to do with the book,' said Margaret Holder. 'They wanted someone who was reliable to put the opposite point of view. I wanted to speak to Andrew so I rang his wife Lynne and she said he was away somewhere, which I later found out was the Lake District. He rang me back and I told him, "From my long knowledge of the Royal Family, you could not have done what you have done without Diana's express approval." He replied, "Exactly." '

Prince Charles was devastated when he read in the opening instalment that his cold and hostile attitude towards his pregnant wife had driven her into throwing herself down a flight of stairs at Sandringham. 'I can never forgive her,' he said. 'I cannot comprehend how she could have done these things.'

For Diana, the tension had been even more nerve- racking than for Andrew Morton as what amounted to an act of revenge reached its moment of execution. The world now knew her shameful secrets. Her father had died in March and she was still grieving his death. She felt unloved and unprotected. Visiting a hospice in Merseyside, the crowd greeted her with cheers and people called out: 'We love you.' Diana suddenly burst into tears and, sobbing uncontrollably, fled from the scene. The cameras, normally so flattering, captured her distress.

So effective was the Palace camouflage that Lord McGregor was still unable to see the wood for the trees. He issued the most damning indictment ever levelled against journalists, accusing them of 'dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people's souls'. 'I arranged a meeting with three commissioners, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, Sir Edward Pickering and Mr David Chipp, at which we drafted the attached statement criticising severely Press reporting of the state of the marriage,' wrote McGregor. 'Before it was issued to PA (the Press Association), I read it over the telephone to Sir Robert Fellowes, in the presence of my colleagues, and asked him for an assurance that the rumours linking the Princess of Wales and her friends with involvement in leaking information to the Press were baseless. Sir Robert Fellowes gave that assurance . ..'

Andrew Knight, now executive chairman of News International, decided it was time to tear down some of the foliage that obscured McGregor's view. 'The following morning I was told by Mr Andrew Knight that the Princess of Wales was participating in the provision of information for tabloid editors about the state of her marriage and was going to make herself available to be photographed with a friend who was known as one of Andrew Morton's sources,' wrote McGregor. 'I took further soundings and was satisfied that what Mr Knight had told me was true.'

Knight confirmed that McGregor had been shocked to learn that cameramen had photographed Diana visiting one of the book's chief sources, Carolyn Bartholomew. Newspapers had been alerted by an anonymous caller that Diana would visit Carolyn's flat in Fulham on the evening of 10 June. The informant had phoned a
Sun
executive at his home at eight o'clock in the morning with news of the rendezvous. When Diana arrived in her Mercedes convertible twelve hours later, several photographers had taken up position in the suburban street. Some of them had been hanging around for hours. The visit was irrefutable evidence that Diana openly approved of the role Carolyn had played in the book.

Sir Robert apologised to Lord McGregor, stressing that his assurance had been given in good faith. 'Whitehall sources said Sir Robert asked the Princess about the allegations and she denied them,' reported George Jones, Political Editor of the
Daily Telegraph
. 'The Princess had, in practice, been invading her own privacy,' concluded Lord McGregor, who accepted that Sir Robert had not misled him intentionally. 'I feel like I was used.'

It was the biggest establishment cover-up since King Edward VIII's affair with Mrs Simpson in the 1930s,' thundered the
Daily Mirror
when the truth finally came out. 'Before he was revealed to have had an adulterous affair, David Mellor (the disgraced National Heritage Minister) warned newspapers about their conduct. He said the Press was drinking in the Last Chance Saloon. But the Last Chance Saloon is crowded by a bunch of hypocrites from Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster. And they are serving the drinks.'

One of the few stores to ban the Morton book was Harrods, owned by Mohammed A1 Fayed, a friend of Charles and his father. 'Our customers would not expect us to stock such a scurrilous book,' said Michael Cole, who had gone to work for the Knightsbridge store after leaving the BBC.

'It was like lancing a boil,' said the clinical Andrew Morton.

The Queen called Charles to a meeting with Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace and, enraged as he was, he had to listen to his mother's advice. Her Majesty suggested a cooling-off period of six months before any final decision was taken on the question of separation or divorce. Diana was informed of the Queen's wishes and agreed to go on a cruise with Charles and the princes as well as turning up at Balmoral for the annual summer holiday. 'She wasn't happy, but she agreed,' said a friend.

Andrew Knight seemed to confirm her worst fears when he wrote in the
Spectator
magazine that 'documented stories of regal infidelities' were locked away in a safe. His organisation had deliberately refrained from publishing them, even paying money to prevent them falling into the hands of tabloid competitors. He was, surely, referring to the existence of the Squidgy tapes.

Not surprisingly, the House of Windsor had passed the seventy-fifth anniversary of its creation on 17 July without a single hurrah. No one at the Palace wanted to draw attention to its origins. The House had come into being when King George V changed the family name from the Germanic Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the very English sounding Windsor in 1917 during the Great War against his cousin the Kaiser. The choice had been forced upon him by strong anti-German feelings among his subjects.

In his meticulous way, George's grandfather, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, had chosen Balmoral as the site for a royal retreat after studying weather reports for Upper Deeside. It had, he concluded, purer, fresher air than anywhere else in Scotland. But for Charles and Diana, the outlook was extremely bleak that summer, and for Andrew and Fergie even worse. Whatever their expectations, however, nothing could have prepared the young royals for the apocalypse that lay ahead.

ON a typical rainy midsummer day, a character straight out of Central Casting kept an appointment he had agonised over for three weeks. Nervously, he glanced at his watch as he entered the building in London's East End. He was late and he knew it.

'He came in wearing the proverbial raincoat, an awkward, bulky grey-haired man of about fifty and I thought he was either shy or embarrassed,' said Constance Regnier, London boss of the giant German publishing group, Burda. in any event, he was not a go- getter; he was not a huckster. There had been some warm-up on the telephone when he first contacted me. He had, he said, this deep, dark secret about the Royal Family and would I be interested? It was so unbelievably enticing that to ask me afterwards if I would be interested was almost an insult. Then he phoned back a week later to make an appointment.

'I was amused and curious. He sat down, not facing me but keeping the chair at right angles to me so that his body language was talking away from me. But I could tell that he was awkward, he
felt
awkward, about what he was doing. When I questioned him, he said he was just a middleman. The people he was working with were extremely concerned and nervous. He was so nervous himself I didn't push him for his name. He produced an abbreviated transcript of the Squidgy tape. I was interested but I was cautious. I said I needed some evidence that this was genuine and he replied that he was working on that, but it would take a while.

'We chatted about the Royal Family and what all of this meant and he thought that someone was out to get Diana. I asked him who his employers were but he wouldn't say. I didn't press him because he was so secretive and awkward and
unpunctual
about the whole thing that I felt sorry for him. He said there was a tape of the conversation and when I asked him who the man was in the transcript he said: "We think it is Hewitt."

'He left my office promising to produce the tape, but even though he phoned several times promising to bike it over to me the messenger never arrived. There was a mysterious delay of a couple of weeks. I was quite annoyed but, lo and behold, it did arrive by bike one day in a Jiffy bag with no return address. This was a sample tape of edited highlights but he later sent the full tape, about twenty minutes, and a full transcript of the conversation. He phoned the next day to get my reaction and I said, "It sounds like dynamite but is it the Princess's voice? And if it is, how much do you want?" He said the tape was being tested for authenticity in America and he sent me a fax the next day asking for £50,000. It was absurd - he was reaching for the moon. Then silence again. It was another two weeks before he phoned me, this time saying he was in Australia.'

By that time, the circus had moved on and the big top was pitched in the grounds of Balmoral Castle.

IN planning Balmoral, Prince Albert envisaged a baronial- style castle equipped with the very latest mod cons. Beneath the Gothic turrets and inside the smooth white granite walls, he wanted every comfort that money could buy. A watercolour painted by James Roberts in 1857 showed the beautiful drawing room, furnished with gilt mirrors, tartan-covered sofas and a white marble fireplace with alabaster lamps. It was a showpiece of elegant highland living. The builder whom Albert had hand-picked to install modern plumbing and central heating, even though his wife's obsession with fresh air meant she kept windows wide open in the middle of winter, was Camilla's illustrious forebear Thomas Cubitt. This was just one of her connections with the stately pile.