Diana: In Pursuit of Love (6 page)

A greater test of his ingenuity came when Diana got herself in a rather sticky situation with Prince Charles’s valet Michael Fawcett. She had come to dislike Fawcett heartily and when he married Debbie Burke, a housemaid who was eventually to work for Prince Philip, in September 1991, the Princess somewhat childishly did not give the couple a wedding present. Fawcett recognized the slight as deliberate and in his anger complained to all and sundry, his gripes so vociferous that at one stage Diana’s detective, Ken Wharfe, told him, in no uncertain terms, to ‘get a grip’. Too late, the Princess realized that most people would conclude that she, Diana, with her reputation as a generous giver of presents, was being mean-spirited. She talked the issue over with Colthurst, who came up with the diplomatic suggestion that she should give Fawcett and his bride an engraved photograph album and make some excuse for the delay – such as that they had misspelled his wife’s name. He then went to a store in Bond Street and bought her an album, which he had appropriately engraved. When she presented it to Charles’s valet – at a very public occasion – he was genuinely taken aback and socially wrong-footed, a reaction which ensured that Diana, for once, was able to enjoy a frisson of satisfaction from a small moral victory.

Much as the Princess depended on him, however, she did not tell Colthurst everything. While she was raging against her husband’s infidelity, she was hiding the fact that she had enjoyed a long if
sporadic love affair with Captain James Hewitt from 1986 to 1990; and a dalliance with James Gilbey, who was later to be exposed as the male voice on the notorious ‘Squidgygate’ tapes, telephone conversations illicitly recorded over New Year 1989–1990. Throughout her sessions with Colthurst she dismissed Hewitt as a friend and nothing more, always speaking of him in less than flattering tones. Colthurst was not entirely convinced by her assertions, but she was never open about Hewitt, just as she avoided discussing her friendship with James Gilbey. Until, that is, she needed Colthurst’s help.

The first indications of her relationship with James Hewitt, which was alluded to in a Sunday newspaper in March 1991, came during the 1991 Gulf War when the dashing but indiscreet tank commander borrowed a news reporter’s satellite phone in the Gulf to call the Princess at Kensington Palace. Diana was so alarmed by the prospect of Hewitt being confronted on his return from the war by newsmen who would link her romantically with him that she asked Colthurst to draft a statement for Hewitt to read out to the media. ‘She was worried because she couldn’t trust him to open his mouth and come out with joined-up sentences,’ Colthurst said. ‘Understandably she was never explicit about the true nature of her relationship with him.’

Hewitt flatly turned down our request for an interview for the book, and with Diana passing the relationship off as a friendship there was nowhere left to go with the story. We did not have the faintest inkling either about her infatuation with the art dealer Oliver Hoare, who was the object of her love and devotion by early 1992. It was one of Diana’s enduring, and, for many, intriguing, qualities that no matter how close individuals thought they were to her – family, old friends like Colthurst, fortune tellers – she never revealed absolutely everything.

Rather less dramatic than his function as repository for the Princess’s confidences (some of them), but in the long term more effective, was Colthurst’s capacity as her unofficial speechwriter. She complained that the texts prepared for her by charity officials or the Palace were ‘heavy, formal and dull’ and wanted James to
inject a ‘Diana element’ into the address. They would discuss what Diana wanted to say, James would prepare a draft and she would contribute further thoughts and refinements. I too would find myself involved, and quite often even the Princess’s bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, would be found sitting in the royal limousine polishing her speeches minutes before an engagement.

‘The speeches meant a lot to her,’ said Colthurst. ‘It was an area where she gradually realized that she could put across her own message. It gave her a real sense of empowerment and achievement that an audience actually listened to what she had to say rather than just gazed at her clothes, hairstyle and general appearance. She used to ring up very excited if there had been coverage on TV or radio, delighted that she had received praise for her thoughts.’

The procedure, while amateurish, was highly efficient – even though it was usually undertaken in an atmosphere of barely suppressed frenzy and panic. Once, in August 1991, Diana rang in agitation from a Mediterranean cruise on board a yacht owned by the tycoon John Latsis because a speech she was due to give to the Red Cross had not arrived. In fact, Colthurst had faxed it to the boat two days earlier but a crew member had forgotten to give it to her. On another, later, occasion the Princess rang him in a panic as he was eating his breakfast at his farmhouse near Pangbourne in Berkshire. She was due to attend a retirement lunch for her friend Lord King, the former British Airways chairman, and had decided at the last minute to say a few words. In between munching his morning toast, James, pacing around his kitchen in his dressing gown, dictated his hasty thoughts to the Princess who painstakingly wrote them down in long hand.

One lunchtime meeting in September 1991 summed up the frantic mood of her life at that time. James and I were enjoying a liquid lunch in the Stag’s Head public house in London’s West End, editing and rewriting a speech she was due to give to a child-psychiatry symposium. This was the famous ‘hugging speech’ – which won her an award – in which the Princess informed her highly qualified audience of some 800 doctors of the enormous value of a hug, saying that a cuddle was ‘cheap, environmentally friendly and needs minimal instruction’.

As we tinkered with the phrasing, Colthurst’s bleeper went off. We initially thought it was an amateur photographer we had asked, with Diana’s knowledge, to take informal snaps of the Princess and her boys as they entered San Lorenzo’s restaurant where they were having lunch. In fact it was Diana herself. When James found a public telephone and called her, she informed him that his carefully crafted address had quickly to be cut from 2,100 to 1,600 words. The tone also had to be softened, she said, because the reference to hugging might be seen as a criticism of the Queen and the distant way that she had brought up her own family. During the conversation she made a wry comment about a fellow lunchtime diner, the Marchioness of Douro, a one-time friend who had fallen out with Diana when the Princess discovered that she was reportedly allowing her Scottish estate to be used by Prince Charles and Camilla for a romantic tryst. In delighted tones, Diana related how her former friend had been suitably embarrassed during their chance meeting.

This was by no means the first conversation of the day, nor would it be the last. Earlier, Diana had dismissed as ‘nonsense’ a Nigel Dempster story about the Queen ordering Diana to be with Charles – a point she was happy to have publicized if a journalist should call to ask me about it. On the same day, in between rewriting Diana’s speech, I briefed Stuart Higgins, then deputy editor of the
Sun
, about a secret trip Prince Charles was taking to a friend’s château in southern France. At the time Diana thought that Camilla was going too and we were very anxious to obtain independent confirmation of that, preferably photographic, to support her allegations of Charles’s infidelity. At the last minute, however, Camilla decided against joining the Prince.

Indeed, throughout the summer of 1991, the Camilla question was the most difficult. As the Parker Bowleses had successfully sued an author who had inadvertently linked Camilla to Charles, the prospect of fighting a court case was very real. We needed independent proof of Diana’s assertions that her husband was engaged in a long-term affair with Mrs Parker Bowles.

In late August 1991, irked because I seemed to be doubting her word, the Princess, who was staying at Balmoral, rummaged
through her husband’s briefcase and came across a cache of letters. In doing this she exposed herself to the cold and conclusive realization – rather than the abstract suspicion – that another woman was in love with her husband, and that that love was clearly returned. The letters – and a couple of saucy postcards – which I was shown in August 1991 were from Camilla Parker Bowles. As Diana read the passionate letters it was quite evident to her that Camilla, who called Charles ‘My most precious darling’, was a woman whose love remained undimmed in spite of the passage of time and the difficulties of pursuing the object of her affection.

The tone of the letters was adoring. I recall the lengths to which Camilla went to contact Charles, on one occasion writing to him while secreted away in a lavatory on the Queen Mother’s ninety-first birthday, 4 August 1991. ‘I just hate not being able to tell you how much I love you,’ she wrote. The note, on her headed writing paper, continued in a similar vein, saying how much she longed to be with him and that she was his for ever. I particularly remember one vivid passage that read, ‘My heart and body both ache for you.’

She apologized for breaking into gibberish during a secret phone call with Prince Charles, blaming her husband in a memorable turn of phrase: ‘The erstwhile silver stick appeared through the door looking like a furious stoat – pity they did not stuff him.’ It was a sentence that stuck in my mind because Brigadier Parker Bowles had held the largely ceremonial post of ‘Silver Stick in Waiting’ to the Queen. I recall that she went on to proclaim her undying affection for Prince Charles with phrases like, ‘I yearn to be with you day and night, to hug, comfort and love you.’ She reminisced about a ‘magical night’ with her prince at a friend’s country house, lamenting the difficulties of their illicit relationship. ‘I dread the acting part,’ she wrote, referring to a forthcoming lunch where she, with her husband in tow, was to join Prince Charles.

As Diana absorbed the depth of her rival’s love she was also able to see the extent of the duplicity that her husband and his lover connived in to pursue their affair. In one of the letters, Camilla reflected that the long periods of separation were a test of her love and affection for him. She carefully outlined the dates and places when she was available to see him while her husband and children
were away. It must have been horrible for Diana to realize that the venues where Mrs Parker Bowles might meet Charles included the homes of people she called her friends.

Just as shocking to Diana must have been the letter which referred personally to her in very unflattering terms. Camilla advised Charles to erase any thoughts of guilt about their relationship from his mind and rise above what she termed ‘the onslaughts of that ridiculous creature’ – clearly a reference to Diana.

Calling herself ‘your devoted old bag’, Camilla reminded the Prince that she loved him above all others, and signed off, ‘Your hopelessly besotted old friend’. Having read this sheaf of passionate love letters Diana told Colthurst that any hopes she might have harboured of saving her ten-year-old marriage were doomed.

The glimpse we were given of the letters removed any doubts we might have had about Diana’s tale of woe, but they cut little ice with the libel lawyer we saw in February 1992. We were, of course, unable to tell the lawyer of Diana’s involvement in the book and he did not ask how we had had sight of the letters. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that he appeared to view the enterprise (and Colthurst, O’Mara and Morton) with some distaste. He informed us that our knowledege of the letters could not be used in court in any circumstances, and that we did not have sufficient evidence, under English libel law, to prove that Charles and Camilla were lovers. He put me well in my place when he said, ‘Who do you suppose the judge would believe, Mr Morton – you or Prince Charles?’ When Diana was told that all her undercover efforts had come to nothing, she was understandably furious, seeing it as another example of the whole world standing against her.

Our distinguished legal adviser did, however, come up with a method of conveying to the reader that Prince Charles and Mrs Parker Bowles were lovers without actually saying so. ‘If you refer to their “close friendship” often enough, and in the correct context, your reader will assume they are lovers,’ he advised. And he was absolutely right. Although I never said outright that the pair were lovers in the first edition of
Diana: Her True Story
, the whole world assumed I had.

The Princess was now thinking soberly about life after the contents of the book had been revealed. During the late summer of 1991 she went to Colthurst’s home in west London to see his astrologer friend, Felix Lyle, for a reading that might yield clues to her future. During their conversation, which she had tape-recorded, she forecast that her marriage break-up would come about in around eighteen months – she was just a few months adrift. She realized there would be turmoil for two or three years before she could remarry, and in any case she wanted space between relationships. But, she wondered, what should her next suitor’s star sign be? Taurus and Capricorn were deemed too slow for her, but a man born under Aquarius, an air sign, would be best suited to the new Diana who was gradually emerging, Lyle told her.

Gravely, the Princess recognized his prediction that she must endure many trials and tribulations before she could find the new life that she craved. The doubts and concerns were evident as they discussed her future. ‘Will I be allowed to break away?’ she asked, then added significantly, ‘And will the public let me?’

These were difficult and trying days as the pressures began to mount. The Princess’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, lost no time in warning her, before Christmas 1991, that the ‘men in grey suits’ knew about the book and her involvement in it. Nevertheless, Diana forged ahead. She knew there was a cataclysm in the offing, but had no doubts that she would survive it. In a letter to James Colthurst some six months before the book’s publication, she wrote:

Obviously we are preparing for the volcano to erupt and I do feel better equipped to cope with whatever comes our way! Thank you for your belief in me and for taking the trouble to understand this mind – it’s such a relief not to be on my own any more and that it’s
okay
to listen to my instinct.