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 (7 page)
Stranger still, then, is the fact that in Hewitt’s bedroom, at his country home in Wiltshire, only one picture is on display. It is a framed photograph of Prince Harry. Clearly Major Hewitt has a good reason for favoring this photograph above all others to gaze at last thing at night and first in the morning. Perhaps it is simply that he retains a strong and lasting admiration for the spirited young prince. When I asked him he declined, very politely, to give an explanation.
Diana’s weekdays had become dictated by William’s school hours, for she saw it as her duty to drive him to school and pick him up each day. Newspaper editors universally approved of this, because her constant changes of outfit provided front-page pictures on an almost daily basis.
Charles was, for the most part, content with the one mistress, although he did sometimes have friends line up a female companion—an old conquest or a royal groupie—for his amusement. Diana, on the other hand, starved of love and male attention for so many years, was unable to resist playing the field, and for the rest of her life would encourage several suitors at any one time.
Their lifestyles evolved a regular pattern at that time. At weekends, if she and the boys made one of their infrequent trips to Highgrove, it was usually the signal for Charles to go hunting or to polo, his standard excuse for visiting Camilla. He seemed loath to be under the same roof as Diana, said the staff at Highgrove. Her revenge, always producing spectacular results, was to continue to upstage him on every possible occasion. When he made a speech on education she made one on AIDS. When he tried to seize a photo opportunity playing cello during a visit to an Australian music college, Diana stole the show by hammering out the opening bars to a famous Russian piano concerto on an old upright. She outshone her husband, and indeed the whole royal family, on every occasion and whenever it took her fancy to do so.
Even when it came to using their children to score points off each other, the princess had no scruples. Charles was en route to Italy for a holiday with Camilla when he was told that the three-year-old Prince Harry had been rushed to hospital for a hernia operation. He was personally reassured by Diana that it wasn’t necessary for him to fly home. There was no danger to their son. It was not until the next day that Charles discovered how easily he had been duped by his wife. Diana had spent the night at the hospital, sleeping in a chair “to be close to my little boy.” Newspapers labelled her “a saint,” while Charles was left fuming, once more classified as the villain of the piece.
But it seemed he had learned little from these experiences when Prince William was hit on the head with a golf club by another boy. He and Diana had rushed their separate ways to be by their son’s side, and later accompanied him to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London, where specialists had advised he undergo urgent surgery. Having been told there was nothing he could do until after the operation was completed and William recovered from the general anesthetic, the prince left, after strong urging from Diana, to fulfill a long-standing engagement at the Royal Opera House. Predictably for everyone except Charles, the headlines the next day demanded W
HAT KIND OF DAD ARE YOU
? Charles’s answer, by now just as predictable, was to withdraw even further from his family and concentrate more on his affair with Camilla.
HAT KIND OF DAD ARE YOU
? Charles’s answer, by now just as predictable, was to withdraw even further from his family and concentrate more on his affair with Camilla.
It still riled Diana when the prince paraded his paramour in front of friends, though she now rarely made a fuss. However, she felt some places should remain Camilla-free zones, and one such place was the memorial service for Leonora Knatchbull, the six-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Romsey, who had died of cancer. When she learned he had invited Camilla to attend this very private event, she was furious. Diana had cuddled Leonora when the brave little girl had watched the Trooping of the Colour from the balcony of Buckingham Palace shortly before her death. As she left St. James’s Palace, Diana was photographed in tears—tears of rage. In great distress, she made the point vigorously to Charles in their short drive to Kensington Palace, where she locked herself in the bathroom, still in tears. He was unmoved by her misery and went out, leaving the young princes to slide paper hankies under the bathroom door to their mother.
Early in 1991, Diana was forced to take the boys skiing alone because at the last moment Charles had pleaded an urgent need to prepare several speeches for forthcoming engagements. He chose to ignore heavy criticism both from palace advisers —who still hoped to project an image of family togetherness—and the press. He claimed duty had to take precedence, but in reality he was meeting with Camilla in Scotland, having been secretly supported by the Queen Mother who offered them the use of Birkhall, her house on the Balmoral Estate.
In private, all the royal women tended to sympathize with Prince Charles over Diana’s refusal to be compliant about Camilla. Royal men were traditionally entitled to enjoy their mistresses without the meddlesome and irksome interference or emotional opposition of their wives. Throughout this period Charles and his father, Prince Philip, found themselves in rare agreement, and were resolute in their shared belief that their bitterness over Diana’s recalcitrance was utterly justified. It was the princess, they maintained, who was being unreasonable in her refusal to accept the normality of Charles’s affair with Camilla.
Diana’s visit to Lech in January, when the boys had their first skiing lessons, had not gone by without one interesting relationship developing—that between Diana and her cousin by marriage. Viscount Linley—Princess Margaret’s son—was then single and, at twenty-nine, just four months younger than the Princess of Wales. He was there ostensibly as a chaperone, and stayed with Diana and the two princes. She was starved of affection and desperately missing James Hewitt, who was fighting with his regiment in the Gulf War.
Charles, a fanatical skier himself, was annoyed when he learned that Harry had already mastered the art of downhill skiing and that he had missed this experience in his adventurous young son’s development. He was also said to have been white-lipped with fury when told of the scurrilous rumors emanating from Lech which featured suggestions of provocative nighttime activities involving Viscount Linley and his wife. I am told that his cousin’s denials that anything untoward had taken place were not in themselves sufficient to calm his temper. Nor did they prevent the rumors from circulating. Charles was convinced Diana and his cousin had become lovers and denounced them, loudly, to his closest companions.
The mere thought of such scandalous tales bursting into the public domain spread panic around the corridors of the twin palaces. At the trial of butler Paul Burrell, the court was about to hear revelations about Diana’s close bond with David Linley when the case collapsed. Linley did become extremely close to the princess during the time they stayed together in Lech—and throughout 1991—and wrote many intimate letters to his “Darling Diana.” Only one letter survived. The others are believed to have been shredded by Diana’s mother, Frances Shand-Kydd, on the day after her daughter’s death in 1997.
The one intact letter was seized at Burrell’s home in Cheshire during a police raid in January 2001. It had been with her other “Crown Jewels.” The jury was invited to read the letter themselves in an attempt to prevent the contents, which were said to be extremely frank, being disclosed to the public. It was known, however, that the letter ended with the endearment, “masses of love from David.”
Had the case not collapsed it is almost certain that the letter’s contents, and possibly those of other letters which were understood to be equally frank, would have been revealed in open court when Burrell entered the witness box. The royal family was, understandably, extremely unhappy at the prospect of a close link being disclosed between Diana and another royal. It was an added reason to keep Diana’s “insurance” from falling into the public domain.
After the Burrell trial fiasco Viscount Linley, now a married father of two, said he and the princess were “nothing more than good friends.” “I didn’t have an intimate relationship with her,” he said. But at that stage, with the Queen having saved his reputation from being shredded in court, it is hardly likely he would have confessed to an adulterous relationship with his cousin-in-law!
At the time the letters were written, Viscount Linley was still living with his mother, Princess Margaret, in Kensington Palace. She and Diana had neighboring apartments in the same building.
The royal visit to India and the death of Diana’s father, Lord Spencer, were the two events which were ultimately to bring about the beginning of the end of the Waleses’ marriage.
Inexplicably, Charles and his aides turned down the opportunity to have his photograph taken with Diana in front of the Taj Mahal. He had once promised the Indian people that some day he would bring the Princess of Wales to see the incredible tomb built by the seventeenth-century emperor Shah Jahan for his late wife. Photographs taken with this ethereal vision in white marble as a backdrop might, alone, have convinced the world that the royal marriage still had a chance. But Charles’s defunct romantic antennae failed to divine this golden opportunity, and he chose instead to address a group of very unromantic business leaders in Delhi while Diana posed alone—abandoned, said the press—in front of this symbol of true love.
In truth, Diana had reveled in this fabulous solo photographic coup, but to the world’s media she felt it necessary to devise a “revenge” on the man they had described as her “neglectful and uncaring” spouse. The revenge she devised was painfully cruel to watch and was, without doubt, the most devastating public put-down of any man by his wife.
It came on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day and at the end of a polo match in Jaipur, and was executed, as royal reporter James Whittaker recorded, in front of 100 professional cameramen and 5,000 laughing Indians. Charles’s team had won, and he dutifully lined up with its members to receive the winner’s trophy from the princess.
Wrote Whitaker, “With triumph in her eyes, Diana waited until her husband’s lips were almost on hers; then she turned her head away. Not suddenly so as to allow Charles to pull back—no, it was much more calculating than that. Instead she moved her head to the left, slowly.
“Charles, who knew the world would see what happened next—television was there too—politely and gallantly tried to follow Diana’s turning head. He chased it all the way around until he could reach no further without falling over. He ended up kissing Diana half in midair, half on her gold earring.”
He was still fuming when he returned to England and told a sympathetic Camilla, “That’s the last time she holds me up to ridicule.” Both agreed it was time he went on the public relations offensive.
In April, after spending a week with Camilla in Milan, Charles flew to join Diana and the princes in Lech in Austria on their skiing holiday. Diana was ordered to stay out of the way and William and Harry were waiting outside the Arlberg Hotel for Charles’s arrival. The press was treated to two days of father-and-sons pictures, which made the world’s front pages, and Charles was able to congratulate himself on making the PR releases ahead of his wife.
Then came the news that Earl Spencer had died in hospital.
After a massive row, and finally only after the direct intervention of the Queen who personally issued an order to her daughter-in-law, did Diana agree to Charles flying home on the same plane as herself. But this was only, it seemed to everyone in retrospect, so that she would have an available fall-guy foil for the arrival pictures she had so carefully choreographed. At Northolt Airport she snatched away all his hard-won PR points of the previous two days and made him look an insensitive oaf. She simply waited until he had descended the airplane steps and was deep in conversation with an aide, before making her dramatic appearance.
Diana emerged from the doorway of the plane, carrying a heavy bag in one hand, took a couple of faltering paces, and paused at the top of the steps, looking grief-stricken, waiting for the flashbulbs to flare. It was, for the entire world to see, as though in her moment of personal tragedy the sad princess had no one to offer a helping hand—least of all her husband.
For the funeral—which Diana had, quite unrealistically, asked him not to attend—Charles insisted on sending his own wreath. The princess, who had not been to Althorp since 1989 for her brother’s wedding, and who had avoided meeting with her father on several occasions when he called at Kensington Palace, sent her own wreath too. On the card she wrote of “missing her darling daddy.” “She hardly ever saw him,” said Sue Ingram, Raine Spencer’s tight-faced assistant pointedly.
Unwanted by the Spencers, Charles flew to the funeral at Althorp alone in a Wessex helicopter of the Queen’s Flight. Diana traveled in a car driven by her personal detective Ken Wharfe, who recalled her telling him at the time, “He’s going to turn my father’s funeral into a charade, Ken. It’s so false.”
Afterward, Prince Charles managed to upset his namesake—Charles, the new Earl Spencer—by telling him how lucky he was to have inherited so young. The earl, who had just buried his father, said that in making this observation the prince did not seem to appreciate how he felt about his loss. “I wish I had inherited so young,” Charles told him with a characteristic lack of sensitivity. While he obviously did not wish his mother, the Queen, any harm, least of all her death, it is a glaring example of his tactlessness.
The prince left early by helicopter to return to Camilla in Gloucestershire, and sent Raine Spencer a handwritten five-page letter of condolence, while Diana, having agreed with her brother that Raine should perhaps consider alternative residential arrangements, returned to Kensington Palace with Ken Wharfe.
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