Diana's Nightmare - The Family (26 page)

High above the square tower on the south-east side of the castle, the Royal Standard testified to the Queen's arrival on Sunday, 16 August, 1992. She had sailed to Scotland in
Britannia
with the Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Andrew in the hope of gaining some respite from the rancour that was tearing the Family apart. The Queen was particularly fond of Balmoral because, like Sandringham, it remained her personal property. She loved to ride through the heather and take walks in its gardens with her grandchildren. It was at Balmoral that Philip had proposed to her and where he cooked his famous barbecues for all the Family.

The other performers in this dynastic melodrama dutifully turned up, not knowing that the script was already being written in two unlikely centres: Paris, France, and Lantana, Florida. Diana arrived with William and Harry to join Charles, who had flown in to Aberdeen airport with Fergie, Beatrice and Eugenie. The Duchess had just returned from holiday in the South of France, where a fresh suntan had helped her to cope with the angst in her life.

Diana and the princes took up residence at Craigowan House, a large hunting lodge set amid pine trees on a hill inside the Balmoral perimeter. Fergie moved into a suite with the princesses in the castle proper - as did Charles and Andrew. Although Andrew reverted to the rooms he had used as a bachelor, Fergie wasn't comfortable with the arrangement. 'Andrew knew that Johnny Bryan was with her at St Tropez and he questioned her about it,' said a friend. 'He wasn't happy - not because he feared Bryan was getting too close to the Duchess, but because he felt the other man was taking his role as a father.' Andrew had heard that, while on holiday, Eugenie had started calling Bryan 'Daddy'.

Fergie thought it might be wiser to put some distance between herself and the problem. The American's hold on her was stronger than ever, not only in matters financial, and she wasn't prepared to undergo a third degree from the husband she was hellbent on leaving. She asked the Queen if she could move into Craigowan House with Diana. Her Majesty agreed. Anything for a quiet life.

But the Queen's hopes of finding peace in the most stressful year of her reign were short-lived. Just five days after she arrived, pictures of Fergie's topless frolic with Johnny Bryan at St Tropez were splashed across the front page of the
Daily Mirror
under the headline
FERGIE'S STOLEN KISSES.
Fergie had been forewarned of the disaster because Bryan, hearing about the pictures, made an abortive attempt at the eleventh hour to get a High Court injunction to prevent publication. He also contacted Lord McGregor, who patiently explained that he had no powers to act.

Fergie, in the words of the friend, 'was completely floored' when copies of the
Mirror
and its sister paper the
Daily Record
arrived at Balmoral. The salacious nature of the pictures was far worse than she had envisaged. Many of them had been taken through pine trees between a hill-top vineyard and the pink-painted villa Le Mas de Pignerolle, the House of the Pines. They showed Fergie cavorting beside a kidney-shaped pool with the man she had aways insisted was merely her financial adviser and a close and trusted friend of her husband. In one picture, he was sitting at her feet, sucking her toes; in another he was stretched out on top of her in his pink bathing trunks. The film had been flown secretly to Paris for processing and the prints sold to a hastily despatched emissary from the
Mirror
for £60,000. In Fleet Street terms, it was an unbeatable scoop for the paper's editor, Richard Stott, and the paper instantly sold out.

After breakfast, the Queen summoned Fergie to her private suite and, in a curt three-minute exchange, it was decided that it would be best if she returned to London. Princess Anne, an implacable foe of both Diana and the Duchess, was more outspoken, 'I will not sit at the same table as that woman,' she stormed. 'The Duchess was red-eyed and went about with a hollow look on her face,' admitted a Balmoral source.

The new scandal only confirmed to Diana that, in the game of Unhappy Families, she had been dealt a winning hand. She wasn't entirely sure, though, how to play it. This uncertainty was partly a reflection of her growing sense of isolation inside the Family. She had held Balmoral in contempt ever since her first visit as a married woman. She also suspected that the other royals, particularly the Queen Mother, were
au fait
with what happened every time Charles and Camilla visited the Balmoral Estates. Charles preferred to stay at Birkhall, the Queen Mother's white-walled Queen Anne house a few miles away, often with Camilla and Kanga among the house guests. In Diana's mind, this amounted to a conspiracy and she felt disinclined to spare royal feelings, any more than she had over the Morton book. The Windsors, she decided, were self-centred and spoiled.

Quietly, the Princess made secret arrangements with the help of her staff. At least six airline seats were booked under assumed names. Then she went to see the Duchess of York. The two young women talked late into the night, not always as friends. Sources reported that raised voices could be heard coming from the lodge. Fergie made several long, sometimes tearful phone calls. 'She talked about leaving Britain for good and going into exile abroad,' said the Balmoral insider. 'She wanted to fly to Argentina to be with her mother but she knew she would lose the children if she did that. The strain was terrible.' To make things more complicated, it was Princess Margaret's sixty-second birthday the following morning and a big party had been planned for that night. Fergie dreaded the thought of it; Diana had plenty to fear as well.

Shortly before six a.m., long before Margaret had even woken up, Diana swept through the castle's wrought-iron gates with her lady-in-waiting and a detective. She was wearing her working clothes: a navy-blue jacket with matching blouse and a blue-and-white striped skirt. At six fifty-five she caught Air UK's Flight 601 from Aberdeen, bound for Humberside four hundred miles to the south. She shared the thirty-seater plane with businessmen and oil riggers, but the first few rows of the aircraft had been reserved to ensure privacy for the royal party. At Humberside airport, the plane was met by Special Branch detectives and Diana was driven in a black Granada to her destination, the Dove House Hospice in Hull. While Fergie was still dragging herself out of bed for a picnic with the princesses and Charles was planning a day's shooting, Diana was out and about doing the Work.

She had performed the opening ceremony at the hospice for thirty terminally ill cancer patients in the middle of the Morton expose and no one had expected her to return so soon. But Diana had remembered a promise she made to a dying man on her first visit and she had resolved to keep it. Only a handful of people knew about the trip. The arrangements had been made in utmost secrecy and neither airport staff nor workers at the hospice were expecting her. 'This visit is a lovely surprise for everyone here,' said John Fenwick, the hospice's chief executive. 'We are all thrilled.'

Undeterred by his wife's absence, Charles kept his appointment to shoot grouse with his father at Delnadamph, sixteen miles from the castle. At one p.m., the Queen joined them for lunch, bringing William and Harry with her. She had spent the morning with Margaret and her mother, although it was far from a festive occasion. Prince Andrew and his advisers stayed inside the castle to discuss not only how the St Tropez photographs had been taken but their impact on his separation. The presence of his daughters in some of the pictures seriously challenged his view that Fergie was a perfect mother.

By late afternoon, it was clear that all was not well with the Duchess. After she returned from the picnic, one of her staff called a doctor to the lodge. There were fears that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Further south in Dove House, Diana was undergoing therapy of her own choosing. She visited the wards and heard that a shortage of cash was threatening the running of the newly-opened hospice. 'We had to lay off some staff because money is so tight in the recession,' Diana was told. She spoke to every patient well enough to meet her, holding their hands as she sat on their beds. 'Her visit has really made a difference,' said the wife of a man dying from bone cancer.

In Craigowan House, the visiting medico gave Fergie a sedative to calm her down and recommended that she stay put for the night. This meant she missed Princess Margaret's birthday celebrations, which coincided with a dinner party to honour the Queen Mother's ninety-second birthday. As Fergie slept, Diana left the hospice after eight hours and was driven back to the airport to catch the return flight. She was late for the party, but happy inside herself, it was typical of Diana that she could carry out some good works in the middle of a crisis and then plunge straight back into the problem,' said the Balmoral insider.

It was, in fact, a typical symptom of the Squidgy Syndrome.

EMBOLDENED by Fergie's disgrace, Diana was even more determined in her resolve. Treating the Duchess merely as a preliminary to the main event, she confronted Charles to discuss their own wretched predicament. She had resented the spotlight being turned away from her, no matter how harshly it had fallen on the Redhead who, when they were friends, she had called 'Duch' after her own childhood nickname.

Fergie's problems, she believed, were of her own making and they seemed inconsequential compared with her own. 'Royal marriages are too restrictive for the people who are sucked into them,' said the mother of a former royal girlfriend, 'I was appalled when, shall we say, a certain interest was being pursued in my daughter. But she was far too intelligent to get into such a situation.' Diana might have been 'sucked in', but she was, she felt, smarter than Fergie in finding a way out. She decided it was time to wring some concessions from the war-weary Windsors. Her first demand was that she and Charles should lead separate lives. She would stay at Kensington Palace with unlimited access to the princes While he would be based at Highgrove with unlimited access to Camilla Parker Bowles. It turned out to be a case of extremely bad timing.

Across the Atlantic, the
National Enquirer,
a mass selling tabloid based in Lantana, Florida, revealed the existence of the Squidgy tapes for the first time. The story was written by Noel Botham, a skilled operator from the days when Fleet Street was based at the correct address. He was now owner of The French House, a venerable drinking establishment favoured by writers and artists in the red-light district of Soho.

It was arranged through Lantana and then a stringer (local reporter) up in the North and myself actually got to grips with the story and wrote it,' said Botham. 'We had a transcript, not the tape itself, and we were told that the actual people supplying it thought at that stage the man was probably James Hewitt.' Over in Lantana, the
Enquirer
declined to elaborate. This was only one of many curious links in the Squidgy chain.

The Palace Press Office immediately branded the tape a hoax, 'an absolute fake', and an amateurish one at that. In the absence of any proof, reporters who listened to pirate copies and read censored versions of the transcript had to agree its provenance did seem suspect. 'A contact played some of it down the phone to me,' said one journalist. 'My reaction was like John McEnroe, "You cannot be serious!" It was such childish drivel. For one thing, who in their right mind could possibly think of the Princess of Wales as someone called "Squidgy"? But I can see now that it was too rambling and unscripted to be a fake. Clearly, it was part of a dialogue that had been going on between these two for some considerable time.'

On 15 August, a Squidgy transcript marked Strictly Confidential was passed to the authors by one of our sources. This version contained the following passage:

Diana: Well, he's sort of heterosexual and everything else, I think.

James: Heterosexual, is he?

Diana: Mmmmm.

James: What do you mean heterosexual?

Diana: Everything.

James: Oh, he's everything. That's not heterosexual. Oh, Squidge. (Laughs.) You're so ... (Laughs.) Do you know what heterosexual is?

Diana: No.

James: You and me. That's hetero. The other's sort of alternating current. I never know. What is it? Uhhh, bi. Is he bi?

This transcript ended at the point where Gilbey told Diana he was wearing brown suede Gucci shoes. It did not include references to Diana spending money on clothes for James Hewitt nor a swimming excursion Diana had planned with Fergie. As both of these exchanges were on the Reenan tape, the transcript was almost certainly taken from a pirate copy of the Norgrove tape, which Phil Dampier had secured. 'When I left the
Sun
, I had to leave the tape with them, obviously,' said Dampier. 'I didn't have a copy and that was the end of my involvement.'

At Balmoral, Fergie packed her bags and prepared to return to London with her daughters on Sunday, 23 August. The other royals turned up in force at Crathie Kirk, just outside the castle gates. Determined that the Family should at least appear united, the Queen greeted the enthralled crowd with a delighted smile and a regal wave. 'There was forty years' experience in that smile,' one newsman said admiringly.

Diana and Charles arrived in the same limousine but she averted her gaze away from him as well as the crowd. Andrew looked pale and grim, his jaw set firmly, but he managed a smile after the service.

Down in
Sun
Country beside the Thames, Stuart Higgins, promoted to deputy editor, was standing in for the editor. The
Mirror's
St Tropez coup had forced the Sun's hand in a circulation war which now centred almost entirely on royal sensations. 'We did well considering we didn't have one single Fergie picture,' said Stuart Higgins. But we used our cunning to get our hands on some and we published the only one that was topless because the
Mirror
thought it was in bad taste.'

Higgins knew that Squidgy, the story he had sat on for two-and-a-half years, was easily the biggest gun in the armoury. 'The fever was so hot that we struck back with the tapes because other people had started running them,' he said. 'We had gathered that the
National Enquirer
was running excerpts from one tape. I still have no idea how they got it. What we must remember is that the tape they published was the Norgrove tape; it wasn't the Reenan tape. The Norgrove tape could have gone anywhere and obviously people have pointed the finger at Phil Dampier, who had left the paper. He assures me personally that he hasn't sold it. I'm also sure that no one from the
Sun
ever passed on any material whatsoever. As far as I know, John Askill and I were the only ones who ever held transcripts and copies of those tapes. The
Sunday Express
and the
News of the World
also ran sections that day, but not the full transcript. So we decided to run the whole lot because, from that moment, the conversation was in the public domain, although we only published a self-censored version of it. We left out the parts that we thought didn't reflect too well on the Princess of Wales.'