Diana's Nightmare - The Family (6 page)

Unknown to Charles's supporter, even at that moment Diana was preparing to set off on another expedition that would guarantee her a place on the front pages.

THE Princess slipped out of Kensington Palace and flew across the Channel in the company of two friends, Hayat Palumbo and Lucia Flecha de Lima. She had met Lucia, the fifty-two-year-old wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Britain, during a tour of Brazil two years earlier. The two women sometimes met for a chat behind the pink geraniums at the Kaspia restaurant near Berkeley Square. Lady Palumbo is the wife of Lord Palumbo, a controversial figure in property development who has openly clashed with Charles. At the small airport at Le Bourget, a Renault Espace minibus, hired in her name, was waiting for the visitors. With Ken Wharfe at the wheel, they headed for the shops and the sights of Paris.

The purpose of Diana's trip five months earlier had not, of course, been to discuss frocks with the President. She had been invited to attend the Lille Arts Festival, which was featuring Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio. This had been Diana's first tour as an independent woman after the Squidgy Summer, and it had come only a week after she had returned from a lacklustre trip to Korea with her husband where, with the marriage well into injury time, the couple had studiously ignored each other, much to the embarrassment of their hosts.

Varying her usual routine of 'doing the job' and flying straight home, Diana started the French tour with two days in Paris. As she strode through Orly Airport in a Catherine Walker suit of emerald green, no one could have been oblivious to her new status. No fewer than eight members of the new court arrived with her in a British Aerospace 146 of the Queen's Flight. Her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, had taken over as lady-in- waiting, and Geoffrey Crawford joined Patrick Jephson to deal with protocol and the Press. Detective Inspector Ken Wharfe and Sergeant Dave 'Razors' Sharpe looked after security while Helena Roach, dresser, and Sam McKnight, hairdresser, took care of Diana's appearance. Mr Ron Lewis, of Kensington Palace, was in charge of the baggage.

Straight into the Work, she visited a centre for handicapped children in southern Paris and told an official: 'I can see their souls in their smiles.' The French could see the change in Diana, and they liked what they saw. She was, they reasoned, very similar to Danielle Mitterand who, although the President's wife, led an entirely separate life from her husband. At the Elysee Palace, Madame Mitterand stood in the freezing cold to greet Diana and once inside, they talked privately through an interpreter. It was after this meeting that President Mitterand made his entrance to welcome the Princess in person. The trip boosted Diana's self-esteem so much that she vowed to return as soon as possible for a more private visit.

Ostensibly no one was supposed to know about her second visit, let alone have access to her itinerary. Photographer Daniel Angeli, however, had been tipped off in the same manner that the British paparazzi had been given advance notice of her outing to Thorpe Park. Angeli was the man who had been guided to a hillside above St Tropez the previous August and provided indisputable proof of Johnny Bryan's affair with the Duchess of York. Suitably equipped, he was positioned outside the Houses of Chanel and Dior while the Princess shopped inside. He did not follow, however, when Diana went to inspect a Left Bank apartment on the Rue de l'Universite which her mother was keen to buy. Frances Shand Kydd had fallen in love with the abode during a dinner party at which she had been a guest the previous December. It was for sale at around £400,000, but after Diana had viewed it, she dropped negotiations.

The following day Angeli was in place outside the Marius and Janette restaurant off the Champs-Elysees to witness Diana's arrival for lunch with the French film star Gerard Depardieu. They ate lobster and sea bass and sipped Perrier water as the photographer waited patiently outside to record their separate departures. Diana went on a brief shopping expedition before accompanying Hayat and Lucia to Notre Dame, where Angeli had all the time he needed to photograph her as just another face among a crowd of ordinary mortals. He testified later that she left the tourist track to spend twenty minutes at the Roman Catholic Chapelle Notre Dame de la Medaille Miraculueuse, a detour that Mother Teresa would have applauded.

That night, Diana was out on the town once more to dine at the modestly-priced Brasserie Balzar and again the cameraman was on hand to record that Diana was with no one other than her girlfriends and detective. Her weekend to the City of Lights continued with a Sunday morning trip to the Pompidou Centre, where she viewed an exhibition of Matisse masterpieces before being driven by a British Embassy chauffeur on a sightseeing tour. That night she dined at the Ritz, exchanging pleasantries with movie-maker Steven Spielberg, before disappearing from even Angeli's view.

The need for apparent secrecy over, she returned to London on a scheduled British Airways flight. Angeli's rolls of film followed on a later plane, already bought by the
Daily Mirror
for £12,000, a modest sum compared with the estimated £1 million he made from the St Tropez pictures. But as the
Mirror
was well aware, this time it was buying no scandal, just another set of look-at-me pictures twelve years on from that first session in a kindergarten playground.

Back in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a titled lady of the Royal Family's closest acquaintance was drawing an interesting new comparison. Diana, she had decided, reminded her of the former American First Lady, Jackie Kennedy Onassis: 'The trouble with Charles is that he has some brains and he's got some bright ideas but he lacks his wife's allure. If he and Diana had carried on as they were halfway through the marriage, it would have been Camelot all over again. They'd have been unbeatable; it would have been like the Kennedys.

Everybody knew what was going on with Jack but so long as they stayed together, it was all right. He was the brain and she was the beauty. After Jack was assassinated, Jackie became the most desirable woman in the world. The Princess of Wales has taken over from Jackie Onassis; she will sell a magazine in Peru if she is on the cover.'

WITH such lucrative newsstand appeal, a new menace inevitably surfaced: the unscrupulous hoaxer out to make a killing. Fleet Street calls the summer months the Silly Season because, in the absence of hard news, frivolous stories are often printed. In May 1993 the Silly Season got off to an early start when readers of the
Sun
were astonished to discover details of an apparent row between Charles and Diana which, the paper claimed, had been transcribed from a recording made by MI5 at Highgrove the previous November. The couple were reported to have been arguing about the futures of their children, particularly where the princes would spend Christmas. Readers were invited to believe that 'the tape' was especially embarrassing to the authorities because the couple were talking not on the phone but face to face in their own home.

One passage of dialogue read:

Diana: For once stop being so self-centred. You still think of me as the person you married.

Charles: I stopped thinking like that years ago.

Diana: Yes, I suppose that would be a good indication of why we drifted apart, my dear.

Charles: Can I say anything right? Tell me what is it you want me to say?

Diana: Say something I want to hear.

Charles: I'm leaving.

Diana: Oh, don't be so bloody childish.

Charles: Oh God.

The embarrassment, as it turned out, was all that of James Whitaker, the
Mirror's
royal correspondent, who had secured the alleged transcript from a source he refused to name. He had tried to keep the contents secret for a book he was writing,
DIANA v CHARLES.
The so-called transcript was ridiculed by the Palace, which took the rare step of denouncing it as a fake. Senior Palace sources went further: they let it be known that reports of the royal couple being bugged by the security services were based on a hoax, clearly signalling the Royal Family's belief that the conversation never actually took place, it's completely made up,' the source told the
Sunday Times
, it's laughable. But the Prince is very angry at being a pawn in a tabloid circulation war.'

Some took it less seriously. TV scriptwriter George Evans described it tongue-in-cheek as 'dialogue any scriptwriter would be proud of', it is well constructed, flows beautifully and has lots of dramatic impact,' he said, if anything, it is almost too perfect. It reads like a script that has been honed to perfection after two or three rewrites, rather than an emotional argument.'

Although the
Sun
had published the 'transcript' first under the headline
MIS BUGGED CHARLES & DIANA BUST-UP
, billing it as a world exclusive, it transpired that the paper had carried out what Whitaker called 'a pretty successful spoiling tactic'. The
Sun
had obtained an advance copy through an American source 'by a piece of skulduggery'. The
Mirror
had planned to serialise the book a few weeks later but, seeing their rival's cheeky spoiler, they rushed into print with the authorised version the same night. The paper's thunder had been stolen and it was very much a lost cause. The Palace's categoric denial only added to a fiasco, which was labelled Tomatogate after Diana's unkind nickname for the somewhat florid Whitaker, The Red Tomato.

The royal reporter found himself struggling against a tide of disbelief when Sir Antony Duff, a former director- general of MI5, said he had been authorised to say that the stories of MI5 being involved in bugging members of the Royal Family were absurd. His statement followed a meeting between the current Director-General, Stella Rimington, and the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke. Whitaker's original claim that the 'row' had been recorded the previous November had been rebutted by a Palace statement that at no time during November, or early December for that matter, were the royal couple and their children in residence at Highgrove at the same time - making a nonsense of Charles's alleged quote: 'Quiet, you'll wake the children.' The author subsequently changed the fix on the date of the 'row' to October 28, but on that date it transpired that the Prince was in Manchester and Diana in London. When it was revealed that Whitaker hadn't actually heard 'the tape', it became clear that he had been misled. The reporter, not the royals, was the real victim of the hoax. As if psychic, he had entitled the bugging chapter in his book 'Dirty Tricks'. Tomatogate fizzled out when the
Mirror
ended its serialisation just three days after it had begun, in the final resort, all we could mount was a damage limitation exercise,' admitted Amanda Platell, managing editor of Mirror Group Newspapers in its post-Maxwell recovery.

The irony wasn't lost on those who had heard a genuine tape of a conversation between Whitaker and Major Ron Ferguson at the time it was disclosed that the Duchess of York's father was visiting the Wigmore Club, a West End massage parlour which offered the services of prostitutes to its clients. The call was picked up by a radio scanner tuning in to a mobile phone network in exactly the same manner as the Squidgy and Camillagate tapes:

Whitaker: All this animosity is calming down now, Ron. Soon it will be all over, and the pressure will come off. You have done brilliantly taking the advice I gave you on the first night and saying absolutely nothing. That is the only way, Ron.

Major Ron: I was not sure at the time, I confess.

Whitaker: It was the only way. Do you know, Ron, what has happened to you has made me feel ill - and I'm a journalist. Certain newspapers have behaved disgracefully.

Not only for the royals are taped phone calls an occupational hazard. Andrew Morton wisely uses a scrambler.

THE real Season, the one that carries By Appointment on it, began with the royals putting on a brave face. Fewer in number, they worked harder to keep up the myth that nothing had changed. This is the time of year when the Royal Family, either solo or en masse, lend their support to Britain's blue-ribbon sporting and social events. Starting with The Rose Ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel in April, the Season takes in the Derby, Royal Ascot, Wimbledon and the Henley Regatta, ending with Queen Charlotte's Ball in late September.

No longer the exclusive preserve of the well-bred and the well-connected, it has become a season for all men and their womenfolk. New Money values and corporate entertainment have chipped away at the elitist gloss. This is one of the things that rankles with the upper classes about the changing face of Britain. 'The Deb of the Year was so
declasse-
just a meat rack,' sighed a young Chelsea socialite. 'Many of the girls had come to London to buy some class, not to look for a husband which used to be the whole point. The
nouves
only have to pick up a copy of
Hello!
to see where to go these days.

'Henley was such a disappointment - there was a real outbreak of trogomania. Nobody obeys the dress code any more. You are supposed to wear skirts below the knee and have your arms covered. But I saw so many people wearing non-regulation outfits that it was disgusting. I thought, "My God, you're paying to be exclusive and it's not. You might as well pay the punter's price and just go in anything." All you needed to get into the Royal Enclosure at Ascot was for someone to put your name up and you got a pass. But it was so grotty that most of the people I know weren't there. It was full of company people trying to impress their clients. It used to be incredibly chic and now it's rubbish. This is why the whole thing about royalty has gone so down market. Looking to them to set a certain standard is a joke. It was common knowledge among the upper middle classes that some of them screw around, but now it's common knowledge on a daily paper basis. You don't have to be up there to know that Charles is having a leg-over or that Diana is seeing James Gilbey.'

It really hurt that readers of the
Sun
were just as well-informed about royal high jinks as the man in the top hat drinking Pimms at the Ascot bar. The millionaire rock star Phil Collins, a true son of the proletariat and a friend of Charles's through his work for the Prince's Trust, understood this perfectly. 'What's going on in the monarchy is nothing new,' he said, it's just that nowadays you can read about it.'