Diana's Nightmare - The Family (21 page)

Camilla: Happy, oh don't let's think about Christmas. I can't bear it.

His mistress clearly provided the Prince with loving security and, when his confidence deserted him, assured him that he was attractive to other people and clever, 'I got the impression that he felt very lucky to have someone as wonderful as her to love him,' said the listener.

Charles: 'Night, darling. God bless.

Camilla: I do love you and I'm so proud of you.

Charles: Oh, I'm so proud of you.

Camilla: Don't be silly. I've never achieved anything.

Charles: Yes, you have.

Camilla: No, I haven't.

Charles: Your greatest achievement is to love me.

Camilla: Oh darling, easier than falling off a chair.

Charles: You suffer all these indignities and tortures and calumnies.

Camilla: Oh darling, don't be silly. I'd suffer anything for you. That's love. It's the strength of love. 'Night-night.

When Charles rang off with a final 'I love you', the drinkers rewound the tape and played it again to make sure they hadn't been dreaming. Analysed in more detail, the conversation showed that Charles was a man who felt no guilt or shame in expressing his sexual needs to the woman he desired. He was dependent on her and the manner in which she freely encouraged him showed that she not only understood his need but reciprocated it. The tape was so explicit that a frisson of excitement ran around the room. The only problem was: what could they do with it?

NEW YEAR'S EVE. Diana hadn't spoken to James Gilbey for twenty-eight hours when she switched on the TV set in a private sitting room at Sandringham House. She was dressed casually in black jodhpurs, a pink polo neck sweater and black pumps. Downstairs, the other royals were gathering to see in the New Year. It had been a difficult day in the bosom of the Family. She turned up the sound on the TV and dialled Gilbey's carphone number: 0860 354661.

She and Charles had lunched with the Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother, but Diana hadn't felt much like even keeping up pretences. She had felt so wretched that she wanted to burst into tears. But she had managed to control herself, helped by the remembrance of Gilbey's frequent pep talks.

After lunch, she and Charles had gone out to tea with William and Harry, but the atmosphere between them was strained. Although they travelled back in the same car, with the princes behind in another, they talked very little. Charles told his wife that he wanted to spend the evening at Sandringham. Living with him, Diana decided, was real, real torture. She wanted 'to go out and conquer the world' or, less grandiosely, 'do my bit in the way I know how'. Charles would be left behind.

Gilbey, wearing a day-old pair of jeans, a pink striped shirt, apple-green pullover, green socks and brown suede Gucci shoes, was driving to spend the night with friends near Abingdon. He planned to go shooting the next day. When his car phone rang, he pulled into a lay-by on the downs outside Newbury to speak to the woman he called Squidgy.

Not far away in Oxford, Jane Norgrove, a twenty-five- year-old typist, tuned in a £95 second-hand scanner in her bedroom and switched on her tape recorder.

James: And so darling, what other lows today?

Diana: So that was it ... I was very bad at lunch. And I nearly started blubbing. I just felt really sad and empty, and I thought, 'Bloody hell, after all I've done for this f**king family.'

James: You don't need to. Cos there are people out there - and I've said this before - who will replace the emptiness with all sorts of things.

Diana: I needn't ask horoscopes, but it is just so desperate. Always being innuendo, the fact that I'm going to do something dramatic because I can't stand the confines of this marriage.

Gilbey slipped into his New Man role of confidant and comforter, reassuring Diana but urging her not to suppress her feelings. Her self-esteem was at stake, he pointed out, and she needed to take direct action in facing up to at least one of the problems. This is what the therapists call 'tough love'. Stop pitying yourself and fight back.

James: OK then, Squidgy. I am sorry you have had low times. Try, darling, when you get these urges - you just try to replace them with anger, like you did on Friday night, you know.

Diana: I know. But do you know what's really quite, umm .. .whatever the word is? His grandmother is always looking at me with a strange look in her eyes. It's not hatred, it's sort of interest and pity mixed into one. I am not quite sure. I don't understand it. Every time I look up, she's looking at me and then looks away and smiles.

James: Does she?

Diana: Yes. I don't know what's going on.

James: I should say to her one day, 'I can't help but ask you. You are always looking at me. What is it? What are you thinking?' You must, darling. And interestingly enough, one of the things said to me today is that you are going to start standing up for yourself.

Diana: Yes.

James: Mmmm. We all know that you are very capable of that, old Bossy Boots.

In another part of the house, the Duchess of York was preparing her children for bed. Although she had problems of her own, she was fully conversant with Diana's agony. At another time, she would say: 'No matter what hell I'm going through, it's nothing compared with my sister-in-law.'

Diana: The Redhead is being actually quite supportive.

James: Is she?

Diana: Yes, she had. I don't know why.

James: Don't let the (garbled) down.

Diana: No, I won't. I just talk to her about that side of things.

James: Do you? That's all I worry about. I just worry that you know she's sort of... she's desperately trying to get back in.

Diana: She keeps telling me.

Gilbey's own love life had been anything but smooth and, he told Diana, he and a friend had discussed the 'Transfer List'.

James: Mark Davis kept saying to me yesterday, 'Of course you haven't had a girlfriend for ages.' 'What's the Transfer List looking like?' He said, 'What about that woman in Berkshire?'

Diana: Oh God.

James: And I said, 'No, Mark, I haven't been there for three months.' He said, 'Have you got any other transferees in mind?' I said, 'No.'

Diana knew all about the Transfer List. There was a wine bar in Belgravia where the list was rarely off the menu. The progeny of earls and dukes, brokers and bankers from the City, rich builders and anyone who qualified for the title of playboy worked it like a singles bar. They discussed the young lovelies, some married, who had become available for one reason or another. Smooth transfers of affection from one partner to another was what the list was all about. But Gilbey wasn't really interested. His need for Diana came across time and again. He felt no guilt or remorse at expressing his desires to a married woman. He was, she told him, 'the nicest person in the whole wide world'.

James: (sighing) Squidgy . . . kiss me (sounds of kissing by him and her). Oh God, it's wonderful isn't it? This sort of feeling. Don't you like it?

Diana: I love it.

James: Ummm.

Diana: I love it.

James: Isn't it absolutely wonderful? I haven't had it for years. I feel about twenty-one again.

Diana: Well you're not, you're thirty-three.

It was obvious that Gilbey neither liked nor trusted the Duchess of York and, once again, he warned Diana about her motives.

Diana: Fergie said to me today that she had lunch with Nigel Havers the other day and all he could talk about was you. And I said, 'Fergie, oh how awful for you.' And she said, 'Don't worry, it's the Admiration Club.' A lot of people talk to her about me, which she can't help.

James: I tell you, darling, she is desperate to tag on to your coat-tails.

Diana: Well, she can't.

The couple arranged to meet with the help of Ken Wharfe. Diana would say she was going for acupuncture treatment on her bad back. Gilbey cautioned her: 'Squidge, cover them footsteps.' But he was impatient to see her again.

James: Kiss me please (kissing sounds). Do you know what I'm going to be imagining I'm doing tonight about twelve o'clock? Just holding you close to me. It'll have to be delayed action for forty-eight hours.

Diana: (laughs.)

James: Fast forward.

Diana: Fast forward.

When the call ended, Jane Norgrove removed the tape from her recorder and put it away. 'I didn't even listen to it - I just put the tape in a drawer,' she said, i didn't play it until weeks later and then I suddenly realised who was speaking on the tape. I knew it was Princess Diana.'

The secretary wasn't the only eavesdropper to hear Diana and Gilbey talking. Cyril Reenan, the Abingdon radio enthusiast, recorded a similar conversation, but he was quite sure that the date had been 4 January, 1990. If true, this meant that the call had been recorded elsewhere on New Year's Eve and re-broadcast. The conspiracy theory that MI5 or another branch of the secret service were trying to discredit the Princess of Wales stared with this disclosure.

'There were rumours about her (Diana's) marriage and I knew I had some astonishing news and I quite expected it to break in a day or so,' said Reenan. 'After all, if I had managed to pick up the conversation, surely someone else would have too.' When nothing happened, Reenan phoned the
Sun.
'I've got the biggest royal story since the Abdication of the King,' he claimed. Later, he would call it 'the biggest mistake of my life.'

A FEW days later, an early-morning conversation between Prince Andrew, speaking on a portable phone aboard his ship
Campeltown
just off the Dorset coast, and Sarah, back home at Sunninghill, was picked up on a £300 scanner and recorded.

Andrew: Are you feeling any better?

Sarah: Yah. I'm just sort of disenchanted, really, I just want to run away and stay with Mum in Argentina. Got to get away from everything. I just feel, I just want to run away. Preferably with you, but I can't do that. We're both chained to our stupid duties and ruining our lives together. But if that's what your family want then that's what they want. I've lost my spirit today. If they want to have another unhappy marriage they're going the right way about it.

Andrew: But darling, what have they done to make it unhappy?

Sarah: Well you've done it, haven't you? You've told them that we've had a discussion, a heated discussion.

Andrew: I didn't say we had a heated discussion.

Sarah: Well, you did. You told them that we were in opposition about something. You thought it was a bad idea and just tell me if I'm going mad or not, that's what you probably said to her. Anyway, never mind, forget about it. Speak to you later.

Andrew: All right, darling.

This call was recorded by 'a member of the public' in the Portsmouth area. This tape was also sent to the
Sun.
Reviewing the situation, Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor, noted: 'It is a very curious thing when three tapes of the Royal Family are produced within thirteen days. You must think there is probably a plot.'

Stuart Higgins, the robust young executive who had delivered Squidgy to the
Sun,
spelled out his editor's concern in greater detail, 'I can't believe that all these things are accidents and what amazes me all the more is that nobody among the authorities seems to have any kind of interest in conducting an investigation into it,' he said, 'I know we keep saying that, but they still don't. I would have thought it was a matter of enormous bloody concern, not just a sordid newspaper interest but from a proper investigation interest. I can't understand such adamant failure to investigate it. I've never been questioned by the police, never been asked by any authority where the tapes come from, where I'd kept them or if I'd been doctoring them.'

Another person who believed that a conspiracy was in progress was Lady Tryon. 'What I suggest is that people stop and think deeper about all these so-called revelations,' she said. 'I believe that republican groups are trying to undermine the country and bring the monarchy down. I suggest that the people and the Press are being manoeuvred by somebody to bring about the monarchy's destruction.'

THE faint-hearted turn back when they see the sign:
You Are Now Entering Sun Country.
It stands above the security doors guarding the spacious editorial offices of Britain's biggest-selling daily. This is Kelvin's Kingdom, HQ of the Currant Bun, as the staff fondly call their paper, on the sixth floor of News International's high-tech printing plant at Wapping on the River Thames.

MacKenzie had run the most profitable of Rupert Murdoch's titles for ten years, a feat which owed much to his rapport with the republican-inclined proprietor.

Murdoch's global duties as the head of The News Corporation, based in the United States, meant that he had to delegate some of his responsibilities at Wapping. On 3 January, 1990, the day before Reenan thought he taped his Squidgy call, Murdoch appointed Andrew Knight as chief executive of News International.

Knight had nurtured an aversion to bugging ever since he discovered that his home telephone had been tapped when he was editor of
The Economist
some years earlier. The bug was discovered when his then wife, Sabiha - later Lady Foster, wife of the architect Sir Norman Foster - made a call to discuss a dinner menu with an Italian chef. The line was very bad, punctuated by disconcerting phuts and clicks. Sabiha hung up to re-dial and heard a recording of her previous conversation being played back.

'It seems absurd that anyone should want to tap my telephone,' Knight said at the time.

When Reenan rang the
Sun,
he spoke to Stuart Higgins, who was working on the paper's news desk. 'He said he had something which he thought was potentially dynamite and which he described as very damaging to the monarchy,' Higgins recalled, it took me days to convince him that we should listen to the tape. I had no idea of its enormity until I heard it.'

Higgins, who had met Diana during his time as a reporter in the West Country, fixed up a meeting with Reenan and another
Sun
reporter, John Askill. He was fairly confident that he would be able to recognise the Princess's voice. Unlike most people in Britain, he had actually heard her speak. 'We met him at Didcot railway station in Oxfordshire and sat in his car,' said Higgins. 'He was in the driver's seat and his wife sat in the passenger seat. He played the tape on a rather battered cassette recorder but it was very bad quality. We had a cassette recorder with us and it was a bit clearer on that.