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.
Over and over again, though, it was inexplicable events affecting not just the Princess but others as well, that caused her antennae to start twitching. While curious if isolated incidents made friends and staff pause before carrying on with their lives, the Princess, as the recipient of much of this disturbing intelligence, was able to see the bigger picture, an unnerving pattern of puzzling phone monitoring, covert surveillance and mysterious burglaries. Examples abound: a detective friend of James Gilbey found himself speaking to an MI5 officer, when, in an idle moment in 1993, he checked Gilbey’s phone number against the police computer. The inference was that Gilbey’s phone was already under surveillance. At Kensington Palace, most staff operated on the basis that all their phones were monitored, a belief reinforced one evening in the mid-1990s by the experience of a uniformed officer who was using the police box at the end of the Palace drive to call his loved one. After he had finished the call and put down the receiver, the phone immediately began ringing. When he picked it up he was to hear the conversation he had just finished playing back to him. It was an unsettling experience, and the officer was quick to warn staff in the Palace compound to be on their guard.
Burglary seemed to be an occupational hazard for friends and staff of the Princess. When her chef Mervyn Wycherley resigned in January 1995, his home in Shropshire was broken into within days of his departure from Kensington Palace. The offices of Fergie’s divorce lawyers in London were burgled and files relating to her divorce tampered with, while the journalist Richard Kay, one of Diana’s confidants, had two burglaries at his home, and suspected at least the second one to be the work of professional snoopers. He later employed a private detective when he found himself being followed on several occasions by the same car. James Hewitt, even after his affair with Diana had ended, complained to her bodyguard Ken Wharfe that he was being followed by strangers and, rather melodramatically, that he was afraid that, like Barry Mannakee, he was a target for elimination. (Even Wharfe, himself a police officer, was to wonder if he too might become a target. When he published his own memoir of the Princess, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret, in 2002, he was utterly convinced that on several occasions he was followed from his North London home by undercover police.)
It was hardly surprising then that the covert activities of the secret services were often mentioned by Diana in her conversations. Far from a symptom of paranoia they were simply a fact of her dislocated life. When I interviewed David Puttnam he recollected: ‘It is absolutely true that on a number of occasions she spoke to me about being bugged, followed and that people were out to get her. She genuinely believed it. When someone chunters on about something a lot, you tend to dismiss it. It was far more paranoia than reality. Unquestionably though, her phones were tapped. That would get to her – and would get to me. She was probably being followed for her own good. So certain neuroses were being triggered by actuality.’
Puttnam was one of an ever-diminishing group of advisers, staff and friends surrounding the Princess. It was no coincidence that as her suspicions grew, her circle shrank, so that by 1995 she had pared down her staff to a handful of those she trusted, devising ever more convoluted tests to assess their loyalty to her. Perhaps the most bizarre was when she calmly informed Patrick Jephson that someone had taken a pot shot at her in broad daylight as she was driving through Hyde Park. The subtext was to see how seriously he would take her and how vigorously he would pursue the matter. Friends like Kate Menzies, Catherine Soames, Julia Samuel and others she had kno
wn since childhood fell by the wayside in favour of an eclectic, somewhat eccentric, collection of characters who danced attendance. ‘She let false friends and fraudsters into her life,’ observed Patrick Jephson, who argued that these dubious characters were filling the gap left by the absence of a husband or close family. That was not the whole picture, however. The Princess was also consulting, and captivating, worldly-wise, savvy and intellectual characters like Richard Attenborough, Douglas Hurd and Jacob Rothschild, as well as media figures like Clive James and David Puttnam. As Patrick Jephson noted, ‘Some of the advice she sought and received was of the highest quality – wise, humane, patient, and delivered with a rare understanding of her isolated predicament.’ All too often, though, their well-meaning advice was ignored, as the Princess relied more and more on her instincts, instincts which had proved accurate in the past, particularly with regard to her suspicions about Charles and Camilla. ‘The frustration for me,’ David Puttnam commented, ‘was that she was so good at listening and taking advice from you, that the disappointment was all the greater when she clearly didn’t. Personally I used to feel very let down.’
Inside Kensington Palace, her staff had also been gradually cut back so that by 1995 loyal retainers like the chef Mervyn Wycherley and before him the butler Harold Brown found themselves out in the cold. More and more, Diana’s life revolved around one man, her butler Paul Burrell, on whose devotion and discretion she came to rely utterly. ‘My role began to evolve in 1995 into personal assistant, messenger, driver, delivery boy, confidant,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘I stepped in at times when she chose not to use her chauffeur, PR guru or private secretary because she didn’t want professional eyes witnessing certain friendships, messages or private missions.’
Over the years he had gradually insinuated himself into her life so that by the mid-1990s he had become indispensable, their relationship unusually close and dependent. As Diana once told his friend, the lawyer Richard Greene, ‘He’s my everything. He knows who I am and what I want.’ It was an association of mutual need. ‘I couldn’t imagine life without the Princess,’ Burrell commented.
As Richard Greene observed, ‘It’s almost impossible to not develop some very powerful emotions when you are tucking somebody into bed every night. Paul was big brother, father, friend, and someone that she could safely flirt with because he knew how to keep the boundaries. When she wanted to feel like a woman and he was the only man around, he was there for her. She could be a little girl having a temper tantrum or be very strategic and focused. Paul would accept her for who she was and support her in each one of those roles. He was a chameleon for her.’
Burrell is himself a complex character; sexually ambivalent (he has admitted to a gay past – but as his wife Maria told the press firmly, ‘What’s in the past is in the past’), and in some ways feminine, he was typical of many royal servants in that he became institutionalized by the ritual and routine of royal life; but above all he craved the security of service. It was his profound need for security that impelled him to jump through any hoop, perform any service that Diana wanted, in order to remain in his post. Life with the Princess was uncertain – he saw all too many of the Princess’s staff and friends fall out of favour with her, usually for some perceived disloyalty, and either be dismissed from or leave her circle. Often though, Burrell was himself the architect of their departure, uncompromising in guarding his terrain. Darren McGrady, a chef at Kensington Palace, reflected the views of several former Palace staff I spoke to when he declared, ‘He [Burrell] was a shameless manipulator who would never hesitate to stab his colleagues secretly in the back if he thought he could sabotage their careers and further his own.’
Burrell himself had already passed the sternest, and possibly cruellest, of Diana’s loyalty tests when she sacked his wife Maria, who had worked as her dresser for a year. While Maria left Kensington Palace in stony silence, her husband stood by the Princess. Over the years, his marriage and family life always came second to his unswerving faithfulness to Diana.
He was more than her servant, he became her shadow. Indeed, his invasive presence earned him the nickname ‘Mrs Danvers’, after the sinister servant in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, from other inhabitants of the Kensington Palace compound. More than that, he became the Princess’s gatekeeper, filtering her phone calls and faxes, effectively manipulating and controlling her life through his own prejudices and perceptions. Thus her daily reality was distorted and coloured by Burrell, who was able to feed her existing anxieties, fears and worries with a word here and a warning there.
Ironically, Diana took immense satisfaction in the way she had pared back her staff, not realizing that by doing so she had merely concentrated power and influence into a handful of retainers. Her housekeeping practice was guided by her virtuous desire to place clear blue water between herself and Prince Charles. She had long been concerned by the sycophancy, size and self-serving nature of his court, continually astonished by her husband’s many and increasingly eccentric indulgences. She was not the only one. As Max Hastings commented in Editor: A Memoir:
If it had become publicly known that some other rich eccentric, such as Howard Hughes, had taken to carrying his own towels and lavatory paper to every house in which he stayed . . . it would be assumed that medical supervision could not be far off.
During their marriage Diana found it embarrassing that when she and the Prince of Wales went away he took more luggage than she did: ‘I am always appalled that Prince Charles takes twenty-two pieces of hand luggage with him. That’s before the other stuff. I have four or five.’ After her separation she wore it as a badge of honour that her administrative staff numbered just four while, as Patrick Jephson noted, the Prince employed thirty-five people. (Now there are eighty-five, including nine gardeners, four valets, three butlers, four chefs and two drivers.) In this climate of extravagance, laxity and excess, it was perhaps inevitable that it would rub off on his staff. As early as July 1991 Diana was sent a confidential report by the Waleses’ then deputy private secretary, Peter Westmacott, now Sir Peter and Ambassador to Turkey, about staff using the Prince’s name or St James’s Palace stationery to gain advantage. During his conversations with the Princess the name of Michael Fawcett, the Prince’s valet, was frequently mentioned. Indeed, when Diana raised the topic with her husband she later remarked to James Colthurst that it was one of the first times Prince Charles had ever taken her seriously.
Diana initially found Fawcett, a self-styled Mr Fix-it, convivial and amusing company, who would helpfully use his contacts – and discount – at Turnbull and Asser and other tailors to obtain shirts, ties and other items of menswear that she could give as presents to friends and members of staff. Over time, however, his role as the Prince’s gatekeeper, monitoring those who gained access to Charles – and that included the Princess – began to rankle. ‘Oh, we will see what the Prince has to say about that’ would be his stock reply to those who questioned him, a comment that displayed his proximity to the heir.
Fawcett had worked hard to reach such an exalted position. Like Burrell, he began life as a junior footman below stairs at Buckingham Palace, and he had battled his way to the Prince’s side by force of personality and imagination, creating for himself a vivid past that did not bear too close scrutiny. He told stories about his father losing millions on the Canadian stock market and of his mother being a minor member of the aristocracy.
A single incident captures well his blend of camp joviality, avuncular condescension and underlying aggression. When introduced by Ken Wharfe to a new Scotland Yard recruit, he looked the young man up and down, put a genial paw on the sleeve of the recruit’s rather modest acrylic sweater and said, ‘Don’t rub it, dear – you’ll go up in smoke.’
In many respects, Fawcett, a theatrical, court-jester character with an unfortunate bullying manner, was in the mould of Charles’s most famous valet, Stephen Barry, who worked for the Prince until 1981. Sociable, funny and frequently outrageou
s, Barry, who died of AIDS in 1986, was the only valet in memory to accompany the Prince on a royal walkabout, often gathering bouquets for his royal master. Like him, Fawcett did everything for the fastidious Prince, from drawing his bath, to laying out his large white towel lengthways so the Prince could wrap himself more easily, and even using the silver toothpaste-tube squeezer decorated with the Prince of Wales feathers to squeeze the royal toothpaste on to the royal toothbrush. He went one further than Barry, though. When the Prince broke his arm playing polo in June 1990 and was taken to hospital, Fawcett was given the honour of holding the royal bottle while his master provided a urine sample.
Diana began to feel that he had an unnatural hold over her husband, becoming increasingly concerned about the intimacy of their relationship. The Prince’s one-time private secretary, Major-General Sir Christopher Airy, was as bemused about the Prince’s relationship with Fawcett as the Princess. He could never fathom out why Prince Charles should be so much influenced by a man who was, in military terms, the equivalent of a sergeant. ‘Diana couldn’t work out what this relationship was between Michael Fawcett and her husband,’ commented Ken Wharfe. ‘She thought it was unhealthy. I think she firmly believed that.’ It was her constant refrain, voiced to her family and friends, including Vivienne Parry who recollected that, ‘Princess Diana would frequently say he’s got something on Prince Charles. She certainly told enough people. She told members of the Spencer family. Diana seemed obsessed by her husband’s relationship with Fawcett. My impression was that it was not a joke.’
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