Diana's Nightmare - The Family (27 page)

Higgins scribbled a banner headline across the layout pad on his desk,
MY LIFE IS TORTURE,
based on Diana's miserable disclosure to Gilbey: 'It's just so difficult, so complicated. He makes my life real, real torture, I've decided.' As five pages of the paper were being filled with the Squidgy transcript, omitting references to self-gratification and pregnancy, Diana took her children swimming at the Craigendarroch Hotel near the village of Ballater. As she tucked the princes into bed that night, the first of the TNT Newsfast juggernauts thundered down the covered van way from the Wapping press halls and out on to the highway. Unleashed from behind the razor wire, Squidgy was finally off and running.

'Do I like the Princess of Wales?' reflected Stuart Higgins. 'Yeah. During their courting, I thought she was absolutely beautiful and I still think so. I feel quite sorry for her now, although I think there is another side to her. The Prince of Wales's friends have got more interest in portraying her as perhaps being a bit more manipulating and scheming, but that's part of the process of growing up. The marriage was made in hell and they're both best out of it.'

At Balmoral, Diana would have completely agreed.

WITH mounting trepidation, the Princess faced the Queen, Prince Philip and Prince Charles at a private meeting inside the castle. The tables had been neatly turned but instead of backing down, Diana decided that attack was the best form of defence. Her suspicion was that her husband's allies were behind the Squidgy disclosures. She threatened to walk out on the Royal Family unless her demands were met. Upping the ante once again, she demanded 'a legal separation, a private income and her own court with a palace and staff', according to a Balmoral source. 'She tried to hold the Queen to ransom,' said the source. 'She said she would walk out when Harry started boarding school in September.'

But the Queen, summoning all her reserves of prudence, managed to instigate a shaky truce. She pleaded with Diana to think of the consequences to her children if she split up the marital home. Diana wavered. Faced with an openly hostile Prince Philip and an indecisive Prince Charles, she realised that the Queen was offering a sensible compromise. Reluctantly, she agreed to wait until Christmas and, in a major concession to her mother- in-law, she agreed to make a state visit to Korea with her Husband for the sake of appearances.

The Princess of Wales flew back to London satisfied that although she had given in, she had left no one in the Family in any doubt about her feelings towards her husband. 'She was so close to going but she stepped back out of respect for the Queen,' said a friend. Her Majesty breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to attend an event that she never failed to enjoy, the Braemar Games. After the marital arts she had been demonstrating at Balmoral, caber-tossing, hammer-throwing and stone-putting were child's play.

ONE of the two sections that Stuart Higgins had excised from the Squidgy transcript showed a hidden side of Diana's character which was considered too shocking even for intrepid readers of the
Sun.

James: I know. Darling. Um! More. It's just like sort of ... um ...

Diana: (Interrupting.) Playing with yourself...

James: What?

Diana: (Giggling.) Nothing.

James: No, I'm not actually.

Diana: (Giggling.) I said, it's just LIKE ...

James: Playing with yourself.

Diana: Yes.

James: Not quite as nice. Not quite as nice. I haven't played with myself actually. Not for a full forty- eight hours.

Diana: (Giggling.)

James: Not for a full forty-eight hours.

'People thought that this could not be Diana talking about masturbation on the phone,' said Harry Arnold. 'But it struck me as very like Diana because when you speak to her at Press receptions, which are unreportable, she often turns the conversation in a sexual way. I launched a trivia quiz called Royal Trivia which contained 1,400 questions about the Royal Family. I told the Princess of Wales about it at a reception in Australia. I said, "I have just launched a trivia quiz," and she said, "Sex Trivia I suppose. Is it?" And she laughed. I had to say, "No, Royal Trivia." But here is a woman who is quite aware of her sexual power.'

The Squidgy episode was fresh in Arnold's mind when he made a trip to Merseyside a few weeks later to check out the sexual power of another woman. He codenamed the assignment 'Secret Squirrel' after the tabloid epithet bestowed on Cyril Reenan. Arnold, who had joined the
Daily Mirror
as chief reporter, had received a call from a man he would identify only as 'Ordinary Joe'. The caller said he had a taped telephone conversation between the Prince of Wales and a mystery woman. Would the reporter like to hear it?

Fear of legal reprisals had kept the tape under wraps for nearly three years. 'He was frightened,' related Arnold after Camillagate had more than settled Diana's score with her husband. 'You have to understand that we are dealing with an Ordinary Joe who stumbled upon a conversation with Prince Charles. And, understandably, he was pretty nervous. It was only after the Squidgy tapes broke that he thought, "Well, they got away with that one". So he made the call. I think he felt that it was too big to keep to himself. I tend to understand that it was pretty frightening.'

Ordinary Joe met Arnold close to his home and, once a rapport had been established, showed him the scanner and the cassette recorder that had monitored the call. Then he played the tape.

'When I heard it, I was never in doubt for one second that it was the Prince of Wales,' said Arnold over a gin and tonic in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a favoured watering hole off Fleet Street. 'I have been covering the Royal Family for many years and have stood talking to Charles face to face on many occasions. But I did not know who the female voice was at the time.'

Arnold took the 'Secret Squirrel' tape back to Holborn Circus with him and Ordinary Joe came down to do a deal on his earth-shattering piece of merchandise. He returned to Merseyside £30,000 richer. 'Strangely enough, money was never paramount in his mind,' said Arnold as the roast beef arrived in a panelled enclave of the pub. 'Yes, it was a financial arrangement but his main concern was that he never wanted to be found out.

'The editor, Richard Stott, gave me the task of authenticating the tape and we certainly did not rush it. We had to establish that it had not been tampered with or spliced in some way, and that the people were not actors. We gave it to one of the top experts in electronics in this country who put it through every test he knew. Then we had an expert in phonetics, a professor, check the man's voice against known recordings of Prince Charles. He verified that it was one and the same man. The harder one was to get Camilla's voice because she had rarely if ever given interviews on tape. I carefully rehearsed what I was going to say and rang her number. By an extraordinary piece of luck, she was out but there was a recorded message of her voice on the answer-phone. I taped her voice three times and sent the tape off to the professor. He confirmed that the woman was Camilla Parker Bowles.

'I then researched every reference on that tape to names and places, sometimes one word. It was like a detective investigation. It took me three days to crack Northmoor because there is no village or town called that and there is a reference to "Nancy" - how do you check that? So I went back to square one and got cuttings out of the library of all his known friends and sorted through them one by one. I was going through stories about Hugh van Custem and found one that said he had sold his Northmoor stud farm.

'Nancy was much harder because her real name is Anne, Duchess of Westminster. She is an elderly lady and Charles says she might be jealous if he brought Camilla to her home. But I could see that she might be offended if she had taken a shine to Charles and he was to bring another woman into the house to sleep with, which is what was being proposed or considered. Then, when Camilla says, "The little green-eyed monster might be lurking" it took quite a few replays to catch those words. When she says "A's coming home" I had to listen several times to realise that she is saying the letter A for Andrew Parker Bowles. It was not easy.

'Richard had made a decision early on not to run the transcript, ever. I went home for the weekend and thought about it. By then, I was 1,001 per cent certain who they were. I'm a hard news reporter and when I came in on Monday I wrote a splash (page one lead story) which said, "The heir to the throne has been conducting an adulterous affair with the wife of one of his closest friends before and during his marriage to the Princess of Wales". Richard's hair stood on end and it was the fifth draft that they used after the lawyers saw it. I was never in any doubt from day one that we had got the goods on the Prince of Wales. It ended the marriage. But I wasn't at all gleeful about it.'

The story appeared in the
Mirror
on 13 November — the Queen's unlucky number. Although it held back references to Tampaxes and 'pressing the tit' on the portable phone, the public were told that, in response to 'Bye, my darling', from Camilla, the Prince had replied, 'Love you'. It was abundantly clear from this story that Charles was having an affair.

The next day was his forty-fourth birthday. He spent it alone. He was about to fly to Strasbourg on his first visit to the European Parliament, fulfilling a long-term ambition. Asked what he wanted to be, a much younger Charles had replied, 'I want to be King of Europe'. But he was only joking. After Camillagate, his primary concern was to ensure that he followed his mother on to the British throne.

The Way We Were: The Queen, happy and glorious, waves delightedly from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after Trooping the Colour in 1985. Diana, still the brightest star in the Family, watches Prince William's antics beside his grandmother. (
Alpha
)

Gone with the Windsors: Eight years later, Diana has disappeared from the Family line-up as a far less regal Queen presents Lord Linley's fiancee, the Hon. Serena Stanhope, to the crowd in June 1993. (
Daily Mirror
)

Flirt Skirt: Diana poses for cameramen at her kindergarten in the seethrough skirt that shocked Prince Charles before their engagement. This picture seriously challenged his girlfriend's 'Shy Di' image at the Palace. (
Rex Features
)