It was not a one-way street. Hoare, too, according to his driver, Barry Hodge, seemed to be building his future around their liaison. A matter of weeks before Diana made her Time and Space speech, in October 1993, Hoare left his wife and moved into a friend’s apartment in Pimlico. The die was cast, the Princess was in touching distance of making a long-cherished dream come true. She was passionately in love with Hoare, or so she thought, and he had demonstrated his commitment to the relationship by leaving the marital home. As she engineered her exit from public life, she allowed herself and Oliver Hoare to be spotted in her car, where they were seen to sit talking for an hour. A watching journalist wrote coyly that Diana’s head ‘rested trustingly on Mr Hoare’s shoulder’. They had several safe houses where they could meet, so their rendezvous may have seemed risky, but it was also a way for them to back into the spotlight as a couple. This private meeting conducted in public seems to bear out the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s wry maxim: ‘It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.’
It now seemed possible for them to realize a future together. Yet that Christmas Diana made a brief appearance at Sandringham with the rest of the royal family before flying off to Washington to spend the remainder of the festive season with her friend Lucia Flecha de Lima and her husband Paulo Tarso, who had now been transferred to a diplomatic posting in America. Oliver Hoare was nowhere to be seen – at least in public.
During these few weeks it seems that Diana had strolled along a path familiar to so many star-crossed lovers and found herself in a sober place called reality. Practical matters had to be considered. At this point in her life money was an extremely sensitive issue – she was furious, for example, when a story appeared in early 1994 about her lavish annual expenditure on grooming. She still relied on her husband for finance and was very anxious to avoid adverse publicity that could substantially affect any divorce settlement, concerns that ultimately had a profound impact on her life. She was aware too that it was Hoare’s heiress wife Diane who controlled the purse strings in their marriage. As Diana understood it, Hoare did not, at that time, have the means to keep her in the manner to which she had become accustomed. Of course, if she had really been serious about buying a place in Italy and settling down to raise a new family, then these considerations should have been irrelevant.
The real issue, though, was that the rules of the game had been altered. And she didn’t like it. Until Oliver Hoare left his wife she had been able to play out a romantic drama of love and loss, hope and pain, without any ultimate commitment – just as she had with James Hewitt. However, once Hoare became available, the safe psychological boundaries that she had enjoyed were removed. ‘She was terrified once he was free for her,’ a friend of hers declared. Her reaction was by no means unusual. The Princess was, according to a relationship counsellor, behaving in the same way as many other women going through a separation. ‘They enjoy a relationship with a man who is unavailable, usually married, so that they can enjoy and suffer the emotional highs and lows of a romantic entanglement without making the ultimate commitment.’
In January 1994, within five weeks of the Princess’s famous speech, Oliver Hoare was back at home with his wife. Yet that did not stop Diana and the art dealer from continuing to see each other, meeting at their usual haunts, notably the Chelsea Harbour Club and, of course, Kensington Palace. In March he was photographed being driven into the royal apartment complex by the Princess after they had had a meal at a Chinese restaurant with Beatrix Flecha de Lima, the daughter of their friends Lucia and Paulo. While Diane Hoare was away in France, Diana paid a tearful ninety-minute visit to Hoare in late July, just as a newspaper was investigating claims that she had made silent phone calls to the Hoares’ home. Even after the phone call scandal broke, in August 1994, they continued to see each other, the art dealer spotted one day in January 1995, climbing into the boot of the Princess’s car.
Such exotic excursions aside, the sustaining, if mundane, reality of their relationship was the mobile telephone, her calls as frequent as they were intense. There were some days when she would call him twenty times on his mobile; a quiet day was just six or seven calls. If Oliver and his wife Diane were in the car together he would pull out the phone socket slightly so his mobile was effectively off the hook. ‘I would say Diana has pursued Oliver every single day for three years by phone calls, by their meetings,’ Barry Hodge, Hoare’s chauffeur for ten years, claimed on television. ‘But then it is not one-sided. Oliver pursued her.’ When he was away on business in America, for example, Hoare sent her a string of loving messages on her pager.
There was a darker side, however, as periodically the Princess made silent telephone calls to Hoare’s home, hanging up when his wife answered. This unnerving behaviour began in September 1992 – ironically at the same time as the Squidgygate tapes publicized the late-night conversations between Diana and James Gilbey. The calls continued for a year before Diane Hoare insisted that her husband instruct the police to trace them. In October 1993 the police equipped the Hoares’ telephone with a special device that could trace calls. It was not long before some of the calls were tracked to the Princess’s mobile phone and others to telephone lines inside her apartment in Kensington Palace and to public telephones in Kensington and Notting Hill Gate, not far from her London home. Shortly afterwards, the Princess discussed the matter with Ken Wharfe, but while she admitted making some calls, she insisted that she was not responsible for the majority.
Others were not so sure. The Princess was known to be a phone junkie, dependent on it to derive comfort from those closest to her, men or women. In the Hoare incident, her behaviour was markedly similar to the way she had acted during her relationships with James Hewitt and James Gilbey, the former army officer helpfully telling a Sunday tabloid that he too had suffered nuisance calls during his romance with the Princess. Even when it was James Colthurst she called (which could be as often as twenty times a day), if it was his wife Dominique who answered, Diana would hang up without identifying herself. ‘It’s important to realize that she telephones at times of distress, often in tears, and she only wants to speak to one person,’ Colthurst explained. ‘She would understandably feel embarrassed talking to someone who was not close to her. Everyone is aware of the loneliness of her position so we make allowances.’
This time she found herself exposed and publicly humiliated. In August 1994 the Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, splashed details of the ‘cranky’ calls across its pages and revealed that the police investigation had pinpointed Kensington Palace as the source. The Princess’s attempts to disguise her behaviour only inflamed the furore. A clandestine meeting in her car with her friend, the Daily Mail journalist Richard Kay, whom she regularly used as a conduit for her opinions, was photographed, effectively blowing her media cover. In his page-one story, headlined ‘What Have I Done To Deserve This?’ the Princess made a robust and defiant defence, asserting that there was ‘no truth’ in the allegations that she was a phone pest. For good measure she authorized the release of her official diary to prove her story. ‘Somewhere, someone is going to make out that I am mad, that I am guilty by association, that the mud will stick,’ she said. Foolishly, she rather undercut her case by claiming that she had no idea how to use a public phone box, a contention which was met with widespread ridicule. Conveniently, a schoolboy, who knew the Hoares’ sons, was later fingered as the likely culprit and accused of using phone booths in central London to harass the art dealer’s family. In fact, as the boy’s mother pointed out, the teenager was away at boarding school at the time. A year later, when Diana made her famous television appearance on Panorama, she emphatically protested her innocence, denying that she had made the nuisance calls: ‘But that again was a huge move to discredit me and very nearly did me in,’ she insisted to the BBC presenter, Martin Bashir, asserting that she had ‘found out that a young boy had done most of them’.
This claim, however, was exposed as a lie by her ea
rlier confessions to Ken Wharfe as well as to a handful of her women friends, including Elsa Bowker, whom she told that she had called Hoare seventy times. Her actions, while on the surface resembling those of a teenager going through her first crush, were much more self-destructive, following patterns of behaviour established during her unhappiest time with Prince Charles. Then, at its most extreme, she had cut or marked herself to get the Prince’s attention in a desperate plea for help mingled with self-loathing. Simone Simmons, her healer, maintained that she continued this practice of self-injury during her romance with Hoare, implying that she never progressed from the despair she felt during the first years of her marriage. ‘Diana’s arsenal lay within the kitchen cupboard, the slender tines of a fork her preferred weapon,’ she declared, allegations subsequently repeated in some articles and biographies. Ms Simmons’s claims, however, were flatly dismissed by Stephen Twigg, who worked on Diana’s body from 1988 until 1995: ‘There was never the slightest scratch on her body and, believe me, I would have noticed.’
While self-injury seemed to have been consigned to the past, Diana’s emotional insecurity remained. Her emotional life had the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy; she would desperately seek love, certain that she could not be loved, and if love was offered she would back away and even provoke rejection so that the relationship would end, confirming her sense of worthlessness. This would go towards explaining the silent telephone calls, which she must have known could only lead to rejection.
When Oliver Hoare, perhaps sensibly, declined to make any public statement either during the nuisance phone calls saga in August 1994, or when his chauffeur Barry Hodge went to the Sunday tabloid, News of the World, and sold his story about Hoare’s relationship with the Princess, his behaviour only confirmed Diana’s profound feelings of abandonment and rejection. ‘She was willing to give up everything for him, so imagine her devastation when he didn’t come to her assistance,’ observed Stephen Twigg. When Hoare returned a pair of her father’s cufflinks – she gave similar gifts to other men in her life – it was a recognition on both sides that the relationship was going nowhere. ‘That man let me down very badly,’ she commented bitterly – but in truth he had taken a considerable gamble to pursue and possibly cement their relationship.
‘I bet I could get Will Carling to ask me out,’ the Princess said in a light-hearted aside to her fitness trainer Carolan Brown as they worked out at the Chelsea Harbour Club, of which the England rugby captain was also a member. It was a few months before Carling’s marriage to TV presenter Julia Smith in June 1994, and Diana was in a mischievous frame of mind. ‘I might be able to stop that marriage happening,’ she mused, giggling at the wicked thought. Her idle, rather juvenile, contemplation would lead to a further tarnishing of her image as a wronged wife, but at the same time it was a development in her character.
‘She was young and naive,’ commented Carolan. ‘Basically living her life backwards because she had had no experience of the dating game. So she was flirtatious with everybody. Will Carling couldn’t believe his luck. She was desperate to win his affection and would flirt outrageously with him. But when he asked her out, she said no. She was like a giggly girl, flirting like mad and then playing hard to get. It was playground stuff.’ Those who had known her since her bachelor days agreed with the observation. ‘She was whisked off into this marriage aged twenty.’ Carolan continued, ‘and has lived in a vacuum for ten years. Now she is taking up those feelings that she left off as a teenager. She has a lot of catching up to do.’
Diana’s skittish behaviour was also a sign of the newfound confidence she felt in her body. Her training programme, based on ballet and step, ensured that she developed a long, lean shape, with an emphasis on standing tall and with confidence. In early 1994, after her morning workout she started seeing Carling for coffee and a chat. Soon after, Jenni Rivett took over her training from Carolan Brown, who was then expecting her first child. Jenni Rivett placed a greater emphasis on weights to change the definition of the body. ‘If you start to tone your muscles you feel good about your body and you feel in control of your life. That was very important for her,’ she explained. ‘She was inspired because she was getting so many compliments.’ On a trip to the Council of Fashion designers in New York in February 1995, Diana felt so confident with her body shape that she wore a backless dress to a star-studded gala. ‘Wait till you see how good I look,’ she told Jenni.
Just how important her body shape was to her was demonstrated when the paparazzi took pictures that suggested that she had cellulite on her thighs. She was so upset by the implied insult that not only did she allow her trainer to put out a statement denying that she had cellulite, but she embarked on a ferocious detox programme just to make sure.
Her growing interest in physical fitness naturally meshed with Carling’s own interest in the body beautiful; true to form with men she was attracted to, Diana immersed herself in what interested him. By his own admission he is an ‘anorak’ regarding weight training and exercise regimes. Soon the aggressive way Diana was pumping iron and lifting heavy weights concerned both trainers, who felt that she was becoming too Amazonian, forfeiting the lean elegant look she had worked so hard to achieve for an over-muscled appearance.
As a professional athlete, Carling took his fitness regime very seriously, regularly attending the BiMAL Medical and Sports Rehabilitation Clinic with his physiotherapist Alan Watson for a sophisticated breakdown of his body functions. Everything from lung capacity to heart rate was monitored and evaluated. Soon Diana followed suit and every Friday morning she too went along to the West London centre for a thirty-minute fitness check.
By now they had met for lunch a couple of times – on one occasion he and former Wales captain Ieuan Evans went to Kensington Palace – and Diana, as Carling wrote in his autobiography (imaginatively titled My Autobiography), was ‘particularly interested to hear some rugby stories’ and even asked him if he could arrange for her boys to attend an England training session at Twickenham. When the boys went to the headquarters of English rugby in March 1995, Diana came along as well. Besides showing a keen interest in his love of fitness and rugby, the Princess expressed concern about his marriage. Their conversations had progressed from light-hearted banter about astrology, the latest celebrity gossip and observations about world leaders – she considered Bill Clinton sexy but his wife Hillary rather over-ambitious – to affairs of the heart. Carling had not been married for a year and already the cracks were showing. When she asked him and he confirmed that he was very unhappy, the Princess proceeded to give him the benefit of her own experience in the rough and tumble of romance gone wrong.
It was not her abilities as a marriage counsellor that made the headlines, but as a marriage wrecker. Frequent telephone calls, specially installed private phone lines, secret meetings at Kensington Palace and fond nicknames – Diana would jokingly answer the phone as ‘Mrs Carling’ to the man she called ‘captain’ – these all made up some furtive agenda the Princess seemed to be pursuing. And, thanks to allegations made by Carling’s former PA, Hilary Ryan, they were splashed over five pages of a Sunday tabloid, the Sunday Mirror, in August 1995. ‘He did run around her like a puppy dog,’ said his former employee. ‘It was pretty pathetic.’
Others like the royal chauffeur Steve Davies, who caddied for Will Carling, took the same view, believing that she was simply toying with the infatuated rugby star. Carling, who had also made a habit of visiting Diana’s office at St James’s Palace, subsequently compounded his folly in early September by delivering rugby shirts for William and Harry to Kensington Palace after the scandal had broken, making himself an easy target for his detractors in the media. At the time the Princess was visiting her friend, Joe Toffolo, who was recovering in hospital after suffering a heart attack, and had become smitten with his surgeon, Hasnat Khan.
While the clandestine nature of the relationship between Carling and Diana bore a remarkable resemblance to her affair with O
liver Hoare, unlike Diane Hoare the media-savvy Mrs Julia Carling, formerly in PR, refused to remain silent. ‘This has happened to her before and you hope she won’t do these things again, but she obviously does,’ she told the Mail on Sunday. ‘She picked the wrong couple to do it with this time because we can only get stronger from it.’
Within a month, though, in September 1995, the Carlings had separated, the implication being that Diana had broken up the marital home. ‘It hurts me very much to face losing my husband in a manner which has become outside my control,’ announced Julia Carling, a standpoint that reinforced the headlines that were describing Diana as a ‘homewrecker’ and a ‘bored, manipulative and selfish princess’. For his part, Will Carling argued that his marriage was effectively over before his friendship with Diana was made public. ‘That assessment of our difficulties seems to me to be too glib, too much a convenient excuse,’ he wrote later in his autobiography.
In this cat fight, Diana gave as good as she got, letting it be known that she thought Carling had been a ‘fool’ and that the collapse of his marriage had had nothing to do with her. In fact, she told Max Hastings, she saw him mainly for the sake of the boys. While Diana was said to have dropped Carling ‘like a hot brick’ as soon as the scandal erupted, months later she was still going to considerable trouble to maintain their friendship. Days after her groundbreaking TV interview on Panorama in November 1995, where the omission of questions about her relationship with Carling was cause for considerable comment, she came close to delaying her trip to Argentina while, as her private secretary Patrick Jephson acerbically observed, ‘she scrabbled to find the right SIM card to go with the special mobile phone she had acquired to take Carling’s calls’. By then, however, she had, for nearly three months, been secretly seeing the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.
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