Read The Murder of Princess Diana Online

Authors: Noel Botham

Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Leaders & Notable People, #Royalty, #Princess Diana, #True Accounts, #Murder & Mayhem, #True Crime, #History, #Europe, #England, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Communication & Media Studies, #Media Studies

The Murder of Princess Diana (10 page)

BOOK: The Murder of Princess Diana
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Courtiers at St. James’s Palace felt powerless to intervene, and feared an even worse reaction from the Church if the divorce were to go through, as Charles fully intended. They blamed the media for many of Charles’s woes; but above all they believed the real culprit to be Diana, and they loathed her for it.
Yet the more they tried to edge her out, the more she made them suffer. Her name was dropped from the royal family’s star list, and that year Royal Ascot was one major event to which she was not invited. Instead, on that day, Diana took her sons to Planet Hollywood, and scooped the front pages. When her invite to the Queen Mother’s birthday celebration did not arrive, she and the boys went go-carting. The front pages were all hers again. When the Queen made her first visit to a post-communist country—Hungary—Princess Diana went to Paris, shopping. It was no contest. What pictures of the Queen did appear were tucked away inside. The front pages were dominated by her estranged daughter-in-law.
Charles never felt himself to blame. What he had done was what male members of the royal family had done for centuries. It was, he believed, his God-given right by virtue of his birth to commit adultery if it pleased him to do so. The rules had altered, and he could not accept the new order of things. He had no understanding of what had changed, which is why he felt no remorse or contrition—only anger and frustration.
One telling remark, shouted during one of their worst rows, reveals the prince’s heartfelt exasperation best: “Do you expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?” he challenged Diana.
In December, when Charles arrived on an official visit to Southwark, south London, only two members of the public turned out to see him—plus thirteen photographers and ten reporters. At the same time, Diana made a trip to Belfast—unannounced for security reasons—and attracted more than 150 people, thirty photographers and ten reporters. Diana had recently revealed, in an emotional announcement, that she would no longer undertake official public engagements. Belfast was one of the last.
For Charles, his wife’s withdrawal from public duty could not come soon enough. The turnouts for his public appearances were pathetic, each one heaping further humiliation on top of humiliation, and when a tour of Australia was proposed he initially refused even to contemplate it. The Australian prime minister had already committed his country to becoming a republic at some time in the future, and Charles felt that in the present circumstances he would be risking poor public relations. His advisers, however, were desperate to get some favorable press and, knowing that British journalists were kinder to their royal subjects on a foreign tour, insisted. In January 1994 the prince reluctantly began the Australian tour, although no one believed he could do much for his popularity figures either at home or in his host country.
Then a miracle occurred during the prince’s first engagement at Tumbalong Park, Sydney. It came in the shape of a twenty-three-year-old anthropology student, David Kang, who pulled out a gun and ran toward Charles, who was on stage, firing into the air. The prince simply stood there, playing with his cufflinks, as Kang leaped to the stage, still firing his gun. Before the student could reach Charles, his foot caught in a cable and he fell heavily on the stage floor, where prize-winning guest Ian Kiernan, who had just been named Yachtsman of the Year, overpowered him.
Kang’s gun had only contained blanks, and he was making a protest about the Cambodian boat people. The effect on his pet cause remains unknown, but the effect on Prince Charles’s popularity rating in Australia was phenomenal. Recovering faster than anyone else, Charles had stepped to the microphone as Kang was dragged off stage and commented dryly, “It’s alright for you, at least you’ve all had a drink.”
Later at a press conference he glossed over the incident, saying that such alarms were all part of the job. His apparent bravery and casual rejection of any heroics mightily impressed the Australians who, two days later, turned out in the thousands to cheer their hero prince. A poll taken that day showed that sixty-six percent of Australians now believed him fit to be king and fifty-three percent believed he set a good example.
Back in England, as the year ran toward summer, there was little to cause excitement in either of the royal camps. Despite her decision to withdraw from public life—a decision forced upon her by the royal family behind the scenes and presented to the public as the princess’s own wish—Diana was rarely out of the newspapers, even though she was only undertaking mundane tasks like shopping, dropping the boys at school, visiting the hairdresser or eating out at a restaurant. The demand for her was insatiable.
Charles maintained his public duties and gradually, as the interest died down, was able to renew his regular meetings with Camilla. His continuing concern was his popularity rating which, despite a slight lift after the Australian incident, again stood at an all-time low in Britain. But unknown to all but his most trusted courtiers and staff, Charles was working throughout that spring on a combined television documentary and biography with broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby. Charles had been persuaded that cooperating in this venture, which would draw a line under his life to date and open the way for a new beginning, was a clever public relations gambit to boost his popularity. In reality, it was probably the worst PR decision he had made in his entire life.
In the television documentary, which was broadcast in the summer of 1994, Charles acknowledged his adultery with Camilla Parker Bowles. It was a serious miscalculation. The prince was not the first royal to be unfaithful, but he was the first to go on television and admit it to twenty million people. Nor was it clever of him to make it clear that he considered Diana to be little more than a hired womb.
The biography,
The Prince of Wales: A Biography
, followed in October. It certainly did not tell the truth about the prince’s love affair with Camilla, maintaining that it was not until 1987, or even 1988, after Charles and Diana had begun leading separate lives, that he renewed his friendship with Camilla, and these meetings occurred mostly only when other people were present. Dimbleby, based on what Charles had told him, presents this partial truth of the affair as being the complete story and in this way the public was deflected from knowing the full extent of Charles’s adultery.
One major repercussion of this ill-advised venture was the divorce of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles. They petitioned on the grounds that they had lived not more than ninety nights under the same roof in the previous three years. The twenty-one-year-old marriage took exactly three minutes to end in the High Court Family Division on January 19, 1995. The divorce did not improve Charles’s popularity rating in the polls; nor did the world-exclusive story in the
News of the World
the following week in which Charles’s valet of fifteen years, Ken Stromach, revealed that the prince and Camilla had systematically cheated on Diana for years, even making love at Highgrove when the princess was asleep in the marital bed.
“It is,” said the paper’s royal correspondent Clive Goodman, “a story the Princess of Wales understands only too well—and it will cut her to the quick.”
A photograph of Camilla at the Queen Mother’s home, Birkhall, with Prince William in the background, was proof that the senior member of the royal family had condoned—and abetted—Charles’s affair with Camilla, even while his sons were living under the same roof.
With these dual revelations, Diana had been given moral superiority by her husband and his mistress. She needed only to remain silent to retain this long-awaited advantage. But Diana wanted far more than the moral high ground. She wanted revenge, and there appeared to her to be only one satisfactory way for her to achieve it: by speaking out on television herself—and telling the public in her own words the horrors she had endured.
SEVEN
Rumors abounded that the Parker Bowleses’ divorce was all part of a plot by Charles to renege on his destiny, like his great-uncle Edward VIII, and go into exile abroad with his paramour, leaving the throne when it became vacant to his son William. After his television confession of adultery, the public believed him capable of any slippery scheme to fulfill his well-publicized personal ambitions. Less than half the country thought he was fit to become king. Perhaps worse for the monarchy, many didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
Instead of sitting back and enjoying the spectacle of Charles squirming to extricate himself from his self-committal to purgatory, Diana craved an opportunity to deliver the
coup de grâce
in person. Nothing else would quite satisfy in the same way.
Even after the publication of valet Stromach’s revealing memoirs, which more than underscored Charles and Camilla’s despicable treatment of her, Diana was not convinced the public understood the full extent of his perfidy. Even so, she did not let these thoughts stop her from embarking upon another and this time highly unsuitable affair. The new man in her bed was the captain of the English rugby team, Will Carling, a boy’s own hero, but also a newlywed.
Carling, scarcely back from his honeymoon with beautiful TV presenter Julia, had engineered a friendship with the princess’s driver, Steve Davies, simply in order to set up a meeting with Diana at the Harbour Club, the exclusive gym in Chelsea where she worked out. Soon, devoted wife Julia was being fobbed off with weak excuses when she called trying to fix lunch dates with her husband. For three days a week he was at Kensington Palace reveling in a torrid love affair in Diana’s bed.
Incredibly, Diana was able to juggle her love sessions with Will with her secret recording sessions with a BBC film crew; she had finally selected television as the medium for her exposé on her faithless husband and his mistress. She chose
Panorama
and BBC reporter Martin Bashir as her vehicle, and public confession as her weapon.
Throughout the program, broadcast in November 1995, she appeared to be on the verge of tears, and this impression was emphasized by her heavy eye makeup, dark clothes and the subdued lighting. Many of the takes were filmed several times, until the princess was satisfied with the effect, and her words, though delivered shakily, were clearly not the off-the-cuff responses suggested by the format, but carefully crafted statements. The whole interview was a masterly piece of theater, designed, with cleverly orchestrated pre-publicity, to wring the maximum sympathy and tears from the multimillion-strong viewing audience.
Two of her comments will particularly be remembered. That she doubted Charles was fit to be King, and that “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
If Diana’s intention was to expose the full extent of her husband and Camilla’s treachery and heap further contempt and loathing on them from an already disgusted public, then she succeeded brilliantly. But what she also did was to precipitate a divorce, and in a part of her heart Diana had always hoped that in some magical way Charles would one day tire of Camilla and return to live with her, “happily ever after” in true fairy-tale style. Her bravura television performance had ruled out that particular storybook ending and would no longer give her the opportunity to play the wronged wife.
What angered the men in the gray suits, however, was that Diana had developed the capability of outmaneuvering them.
Charles’s supporters rallied around, led by Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill, who accused Diana, in a television interview, of being in the advanced stages of paranoia, and said that the period of unhappiness which she had endured had led to instability and mental illness. Even her estranged brother apparently felt so distressed by Diana’s behavior that he wrote her a letter, saying that he felt she had some kind of mental illness which manifested itself in her traits of manipulation and deceit. He acknowledges that she is no longer a significant part of his life, and says he prefers it that way because her fickle friendship had hurt so many others.
Diana expected comments on her mental state from the likes of Nicholas Soames, a Prince Charles toady, but not from her own brother. Their estrangement, already deeply rooted, grew several degrees more frosty. It would last until her murder, and must leave Earl Spencer with an awful burden of guilt.
Following Diana’s
Panorama
appearance, the Queen called in the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury for talks. These resulted in her writing separately to Charles and Diana ordering them to divorce. The princess had provided her palace enemies with a compelling reason to cut her loose.
Panorama
had condemned her to a future as an unsupported solo act.
Commented author A. N. Wilson in the
New York Times
, “No one can deny that this was a skillfully organized attack on the institution of the monarchy itself. Not just on Prince Charles, not just on the Queen, whom Diana obviously hates, but on the monarchy. The example of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII should be enough to tell Diana that when it comes to fighting a war, the Establishment can get very nasty indeed, and that for all her undoubted popularity, if she continues to rock the boat in this way, the Establishment will simply get rid of her.”
The financial cost to Charles was high—£17 million—but he was ordered by the Queen not to fight the princess on her payoff, no matter how unjust he felt it to be and no matter how angry he became. Diana’s supporters always maintained that any one-on-one discussion about the divorce between Charles and Diana was very amicable. Charles’s people tell a very different story. The prince told an aide he had been shocked by Diana’s venom during their meetings. The aide said, “Charles said she told him, ‘You will never be king. I shall destroy you.’ ”
Diana showed little inclination to argue terms, however. It was almost as though she had no follow-up plan and that
Panorama
had been an entity in itself. Diana did not seem to have fully anticipated the reaction and how she would handle it. The only bitterness she felt, and it was bitterness tempered with raw anger, was over the loss of her royal title. To take away her HRH was, she believed, a petty, mean and spiteful move on the part of the Queen. Ken Wharfe revealed that she believed that her years of hard work had earned her the title. She begged the royals not to take it away from her. Her appeals, through some of the top courtiers at the palace, including her brother-in-law Sir Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, were completely ignored.
It was such a shabby punishment, and even though delivered with a golden royal slipper, it was still a kick in the face for Diana. Staff and friends nodded when they heard her most frequently screamed cry, “After all I’ve fucking done for that family.” This time every one of them agreed. Had she been allowed to keep her title, it may well have been the means of saving her life. As a visiting royal, the French authorities would have had no option but to protect her with a full security detail wherever she went—with or without her approval. Unlike her payoff price, though, it was not a subject for negotiation, she was told. There was absolutely no question of her being allowed to keep the title.
Until the eve of her divorce, she maintained to all and sundry that part of her still loved Charles and probably always would. But this version does not tally with that of some of her friends, with the recollections of Will Carling’s wife Julia, nor with the family of the man with whom she was becoming increasingly involved, heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan. To them all, it seemed that her craving for affection remained unabated.
The Carling affair had ended in the spring, after the cheating rugby star had confessed his adultery with the princess, and his wife sued for divorce. Diana had grown tired of Carling’s puppy-like devotion, and she gave him the royal elbow—something at which she was becoming increasingly skilled. As a child she had learned to play one parent off against the other. In adult life, her friends, both men and women, never knew when they were going to be crossed off her list or for what reason. Suddenly her private number changed, she didn’t answer their letters, and the Buckingham Palace general switchboard refused to connect them to her apartment at Kensington Palace.
If it was difficult for Diana’s staff, friends and boyfriends to keep track of her bewildering turnover in men, then it was even more complicated for her son, Prince William, still only fourteen. Any young man of that age could have found it difficult to cope, but it seems he managed to—a testimony perhaps to his strength of character. It was the Queen who first realized the enormous strain that William was being subjected to by the princess, and it was she, characteristically, who stepped in to help. She was extremely concerned, she told her aides, and feared at one point that her grandson was at risk of “cracking up like his mother.”
In her splendid biography of William, Ingrid Seward quotes Diana’s close friend Rosa Monckton as saying that the princess “told Prince William more than most mothers would have told their children. She had no choice. She wanted her sons to hear the truth from her, about her life and the people she was seeing, and what they meant to her, rather than read a frequently untrue version in the tabloids.”
The Queen’s answer was to arrange a weekly meeting with the teenage prince to swap stories about each other’s experiences over tea and buns at Windsor Castle, close to Eton College where William was a pupil. The Queen’s advisers applauded her personal effort to reduce the pressures on her grandson, as did their opposite numbers in St. James’s Palace, whose master, Prince Charles, seemed either less informed than his mother or less inclined to think the situation was causing damage to his eldest son.
The faceless men in the two palaces, however, were in no doubt that their future king was in extreme moral danger and being overloaded with the burden of acting as his mother’s confessor.
Diana’s confidant, Vivienne Parry, noted, “I’m not sure she was right to confide in him in that way. He was pretty level-headed but it must have been very difficult for him.” No one genuinely believed there was anything terribly wrong with William having access to soft pornographic magazines, as this was considered a normal development in a western teenage boy’s life. What was peculiar was that they were being ordered for him by his own mother, who instructed her staff what to buy. Diana believed that in doing so she was revealing herself as a modern, “cool” mum. But it was an extraordinary twist which few cared to speculate on with regard to its long-term effects.
In her dealings with Hasnat Khan, the princess had little to complain of to her son. There was no restriction put on Dr. Khan’s access to Diana either by telephone or in person, and William and her friends could rejoice that she was with someone who was making her happy. Through most of that year they had enjoyed a secret but intense love affair, and her feelings for this new man in her life had already become so powerful and obsessive that she was seriously talking of marriage.
She had met Dr. Khan, a talented thirty-six-year-old cardiologist, while visiting a patient at the Brompton Hospital. He was chief assistant to Sir Magdi Yacoub—one of the world’s greatest heart surgeons—and dedicated to his profession. An eligible, good-looking Pakistani, Dr. Khan tended to shun the limelight, and although he admitted falling in love with the princess, he had warned her from the start of their affair that he did not want it to become public knowledge. When they became lovers, Diana begged him to move in to Kensington Palace and live openly with her, but he was reluctant to acknowledge the seriousness of the affair and clung to his independence and privacy. To be close to the surgeon, Diana took to spending several nights a week at the Brompton Hospital, often accompanying Dr. Khan on his rounds before spending cramped nights of love on a single bed in the surgeon’s on-call bedroom.
So besotted did Diana become that she made a special pilgrimage to Khan’s home town in Pakistan to visit his parents and family in a bid to win their approval for marriage. Yet although they accepted her sincerity, the Khans advised her that it was their belief that Hasnat’s future happiness was better assured if he married a member of their own Punjabi clan, the Pathons.
Diana dreamed up crazy escape plans where they could run away together, marry and live happily ever after with him being a surgeon and her being a loving housewife. When he told her it was madness and that it could never work, she would sob inconsolably. His mother said the princess became so desperate to marry Hasnat that she planned to convert to the Muslim faith. Nahid Khan said, “Everyone knew she wanted to marry him, but my son felt it would be impossible. He believed they would not be able to go anywhere together. Their cultures were so different.”
She said Diana wrote letters full of love to the Khan family, but that Hasnat did not share the princess’s enthusiasm for marriage. As 1996 came to a close, and more details of their affair leaked to the press, Dr. Khan became increasingly uncomfortable. His medical ambitions transcended everything—including Diana—and he was starting to find that their relationship was interfering with his work. He feared that marriage to Diana would quickly transform him into a celebrity, and was convinced this would in turn prevent him continuing with his life-saving medical career.
BOOK: The Murder of Princess Diana
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