Diana: In Pursuit of Love (23 page)

‘They Want To Kill Me’

D
IANA
’
S APARTMENT
at Kensington Palace, with cream church candles burning in the windows and the smell of incense wafting through the sitting room, seduced her guests with its monastic calm. It was a quiet disturbed only by the sound of choral music or the soaring film scores of Vangelis, the composer of the
Chariots of Fire
theme music, played at high volume – sometimes to the annoyance of her neighbours. ‘The music police are after you,’ her immediate neighbour Dave Griffin would call out to Diana if he spotted her at her first-floor window. ‘You’ve been murdering a tune for the last half-hour.’

On the surface, it seemed that at last life inside the combined apartments 8 and 9 was in harmony, enjoying a rhythm and routine that was much more peaceful than the discord of the Princess’s married life. But behind that smoothly orchestrated royal existence lay a world of conspiracy and treachery. For much of her adult life, Diana lived in an environment of unease and apprehension, distrust and suspicion virtually incomprehensible to outsiders. At her door, no fantasy, no plot, no conspiracy, however absurd, was ever turned away and rarely a day went by without some alarm or plot to trouble her.

Diana was continually being buffeted by events, either real or imagined. A typical day might start with an urgent phone call from the Duchess of York passing on a doom-laden warning from
one of her ‘spooks’ – the battery of mystics and soothsayers she consulted; or perhaps a rumour about an impending hostile story in the newspapers would make its way to the Princess’s ears. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the Princess would begin her day on edge, anxious and apprehensive about what the hours to follow might have in store for her.

Then, if Prince Charles’s private secretary Richard Aylard were to call unexpectedly to arrange a meeting she would be thrown into a state of agitation, wondering and worrying about a possible ambush ‘the enemy’ might be preparing for her, fearing it would be some proposal regarding the vexed subject of divorce. In the end it would, more often than not, concern some mundane administrative matter. This state of constant agitation was reinforced by her personality. Vulnerable, impressionable and unworldly, the Princess, who, as her astrologer Penny Thornton observed, loved intrigue and the excitement of cloak-and-dagger, was naturally predisposed to credulity. For Diana, her life was a melodrama in which she was a problem; first to her parents for being born a girl; then to her husband for getting in the way of his surrogate marriage; and later as an outsider challenging the Establishment. While her personality encouraged her sense of victimhood and her feeling that she was a martyr to dark forces ranged against her, this tendency in her was exploited by those who called themselves friends. For it was not only the ‘men in grey suits’ inside the Palace, or Prince Charles’s circle of friends, who were working against her. They at least were easy to identify. But, the Princess eventually realized, even her closest friends, staff and advisers wanted her to remain weak and dependent so that they could be strong for her. In her uncertainty and insecurity lay their power.

She knew too that behind the ever-obliging veneer of life at Kensington Palace, every fragment of her existence was picked over, discussed or salvaged. In the early 1990s she bought herself a shredder because she suspected that the cleaning staff were picking through her discarded mail; she also had strong suspicions that members of staff were showing their friends and acquaintances around her apartment – for a fee. (These misgivings were
well-founded – it later emerged in a Sunday newspaper that at least one member of staff was conducting private tours. ‘For £200 you could get a guided trip around Diana’s bedroom,’ another member of staff told the
News of the World
in December 2002.) She also had concerns about Prince Charles’s court, fearing that those close to the Prince were using him for their own ends.

Indeed, when the Duchess of York first joined the royal family the Princess suspected that her friend had been rummaging through her mail and then reporting her findings back to the Prince of Wales in order to curry favour. Diana passed on these concerns to her astrologer, Penny Thornton, who commented, ‘Diana told me that Sarah had been doing things behind her back.’ What is not in doubt is that the Princess trusted no one inside the royal world, for years keeping the famous letters from Prince Philip in a safe at the Brazilian Embassy. ‘All sorts of people could come and go in her apartment,’ as Lucia Flecha de Lima explained.

It is easy to understand Diana’s caution. When she entered Buckingham Palace as a teenager she discovered that nothing in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the royal family was as it seemed. From the early 1980s until Prince Charles publicly confessed his adultery in 1994, she had been at the centre of a web of deceit, organized and coordinated to cover up the Prince’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. As outlined in earlier chapters, everyone – bodyguards, butlers, courtiers, members of the royal family and friends, Diana’s own grandmother, Lady Fermoy – was either actively or passively involved. Any questions she asked about her husband’s relationship were dismissed as the ravings of a woman suffering from jealousy, depression or worse. ‘Diana’s unstable and Diana’s mentally unbalanced,’ she said of people’s attitudes towards her within the Establishment. ‘And unfortunately that seems to have stuck on and off over the years.’

What truly rankled with and upset Diana was that, while Prince Charles was protected by a discreet network of friends and safe houses to conduct his liaison in the time-honoured royal fashion, her own attempts to find happiness were doomed to exposure, embarrassment and heartbreak. During the 1980s not only was there a concerted plot to shield Prince Charles – but, or so it
appeared to Diana, there existed a conspiracy to shackle her and condemn those who came too close to her.

She saw this the first time she enjoyed some kind of a relationship once it seemed to her that her marriage had broken down, shortly after the birth of Prince Harry in September 1984. Her instincts told her that Charles had, in her words, ‘gone back to his lady’, and not long after that she became close to Sergeant Barry Mannakee, who had joined her protection team in the late spring of 1985. He was a charming man with a roguish manner and jaunty sense of humour, and Diana immediately warmed to him, at first enjoying his joshing compliments about her appearance and later confiding in him. The father of two became a shoulder to cry on and a dispenser of worldly advice. She even consulted her astrologer Penny Thornton and asked her about his star sign – he was a Gemini – and whether it was compatible with her Cancerian sign. ‘He really made her zing,’ Penny recalled. Diana herself told James Colthurst: ‘He meant an awful lot to me. He was my father figure, everything. He just looked after me.’ Years later she went further, apparently confiding to the writer Anthony Holden that he was ‘the love of my life’. There was a degree of romantic hyperbole about her statement; throughout her adult life she was rarely without a man who was ‘the one’ for her. At the time though their closeness did not go unnoticed by senior officers, and after barely a year, in July 1986, Mannakee was transferred to other duties, much to Diana’s dismay. ‘I was wearing my heart on my sleeve and everyone was talking about us and giving him a very hard time,’ Diana said to Colthurst.

In a way the transfer came as something of a relief for Sergeant Mannakee who found her intense neediness difficult to handle. As a friend of his told me, ‘He was a frightened man, not for his life but his job. He was only a temporary inspector and he was concerned that the “affair” would have implications for his job.’

Tragically, Mannakee died in a motorbike accident in May 1987, less than a year after being transferred. When Diana heard the news – while she and Prince Charles were travelling to the Cannes Film Festival – she was distraught. The Princess had been so fond of him that on the anniversary of his death she made a point of
visiting the crematorium in Redbridge, where his ashes are scattered, hiding her face in a headscarf to avoid being recognized. Later, she used a clairvoyant to try to contact Mannakee in the spirit world. For a long time she believed that he had been assassinated by the secret services because of his proximity to her. Indeed, when I started work on Diana’s biography in 1991, an early request from her was to find out more about the true cause of his death. As luck would have it, an acquaintance of mine, then a newspaper crime correspondent, had been on his way home to Loughton, Essex, and arrived at the scene of the accident moments after it had occurred. He was able to confirm that it was nothing more sinister than a tragic accident involving a novice car driver and a motorcycle, on which Mannakee had been the passenger.

Diana, though, was never truly convinced, for she breathed the air of a world suffused with plots, rumour and hearsay, a bewildering reality where, as nothing was as it seemed, then anything could be believed.

Following the occasion in late 1991 when my office was broken into, Diana, James Colthurst and I bought scrambler telephones – which, to be honest, rarely worked effectively – while the Princess brought in a surveillance company, recommended by Colthurst, to check her sitting room for bugging devices. This was the first of many occasions where she had the apartment at Kensington Palace ‘swept’ for listening devices, while she herself several times pulled back the carpet in her search for evidence. While nothing was ever found, the possible presence of surveillance equipment became a standing joke, the Princess peppering her conversation with light-hearted references to MI5 and MI6. On the telephone, whenever she heard any clicking on the line she would say, ‘Hello, boys . . . time to change the tape.’

The Princess had been proved right about her husband’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, and the conspiracy to hide it from her, so perhaps she was correct in thinking that her telephones were or had been tapped. When, in June 1992, Prince Philip confronted her at Windsor Castle and told her, in the presence of the Queen and the Prince, that they had a tape recording of her telephone conversation with an unnamed man discussing
the serialization of
Diana: Her True Story
, the logical conclusion was that her telephones were indeed routinely monitored and the contents of her conversations held on file.

It could perhaps have been an elaborate bluff, but it was possible that it indicated rather too much knowledge about the book for that. A few weeks later, in August, contents of the now notorious Squidgygate tapes, of Diana’s late-night conversations with James Gilbey, illicitly recorded three years earlier, were published by the
Sun
newspaper. While the then MI5 boss, Stella Rimington, always officially denied any involvement with the telephone tapings, the fact that Camillagate – another late-night chat, this one between Charles and Camilla – and also a covertly recorded conversation between the Duke and Duchess of York, were published within the space of a year seems, even to the most credulous commentators, to be carrying coincidence too far. The only consolation for Diana was that the Camillagate conversation was proof to all and sundry that her suspicions about her husband were not the imaginings of a deranged woman.

Once the Prince and Princess separated in December 1992 matters took on a more sinister hue. Diana was alone, and acutely aware of the forces ranged against her. They may not have wished her harm, but they certainly did not support her in all that she wished for herself. Now, as though on cue, she began to hear all kinds of conjecture, from the apparently informed to the obviously spurious, that her life could be in danger.

In early 1993 Stephen Twigg heard from several of his well-connected clients that stories were circulating around their friends’ drawing rooms that the Princess might be the focus of unwelcome attention from Britain’s shadowy security services. ‘It was quite possible that someone, somewhere, might, in the atmosphere of animosity and anger that prevailed at the time, try to do something as stupid as to make an attempt on Diana’s life,’ Twigg commented years later. ‘It seemed that others felt as I did.’

He was sufficiently alarmed to tell Diana about these rumours during a massage session at Kensington Palace, and suggested that if she had any evidence that might be embarrassing to her enemies she should place it in the hands of someone she trusted, as
insurance. Moreover she should let her enemies know what she had done. It appears she took his advice to heart, giving various letters to friends for safekeeping. ‘In the climate at the time the idea she might be killed was not very fantastic and that remained the case, with various degrees of credibility, for the rest of her life,’ Stephen Twigg said to me years later. ‘She was aware of it. Her subsequent determination and drive to become the woman she wanted to be were all the more remarkable.’

Assailed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis by all kinds of lurid stories, some true, most speculation, the Princess could do no more than check their veracity as and when she was able, however bizarre they seemed. Thus, after dinner one evening in 1993, she asked a nonplussed Max Hastings, then the editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, if he knew about a scheme funded by his acquaintance, the Canadian gold tycoon Peter Munk of Barrick Mining, to hire David Wynne-Morgan, the public relations expert, to ‘get rid of me at any price’. This story, like so many, proved to be false.

While it became fashionable to dismiss Diana as paranoid or troubled, at the time she had perfectly legitimate grounds for concern. ‘The remarkable thing is how sane she was,’ Patrick Jephson maintained. ‘Under the most extreme provocation, again and again I saw her keep her temper – and even raise a laugh – when lesser people would have thrown a royal tantrum, a habit she proudly refused to copy from her husband.’

If she was suspicious, then so were the majority of the British public. The belief that the security forces were guilty of taping the telephone calls was so widespread that, in 1993, John Major, then Prime Minister, issued a statement declaring that the security services had no involvement in any interceptions of communications of members of the royal family. His assertion did little to stem the tide of speculation and rumour. A year later, in September 1994, the Labour Party demanded a parliamentary inquiry after a former Royal Marine claimed that he had led a surveillance operation which allegedly filmed the Princess and James Hewitt making love in the garden of the Devon home of Hewitt’s mother. Former Colour Sergeant Glyn Jones said that the operation took place in 1988 and involved planting listening devices and cameras, which
recorded the encounter. The Royal Marines – and Ken Wharfe, who said that the tiny garden made the alleged scenario a physical impossibility – dismissed Jones’s claims as ‘nonsense’. My own conversations with him make me severely doubt the plausibility of his evidence. None the less that did not stop the rumour mill working overtime, doubtless feeding Diana’s anxieties at the time.