The Firm: The Troubled Life of the House of Windsor. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ Fellowes, treading difficult ground, not for the first or last time, as both Diana’s brother-in-law and the Queen’s Private Secretary, asked Diana if she had had anything to do with the book. Diana swore she hadn’t and Fellowes believed her. The Duke of Edinburgh also challenged her and again she denied it; lying, as it turned out in both cases. The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission therefore duly issued a statement condemning the serialization, and was left feeling very foolish and exceedingly angry when Diana went straight round to Carolyn Bartholomew’s house (having telephoned the newspapers to ensure photographers would be waiting) and in a public show of approval embraced her on the doorstep.

      During Ascot Week, very shortly afterwards, while Morton’s book started vanishing from the shelves, the Queen, the Duke, Charles and Diana all sat down together at Windsor to discuss the situation and to see what could be salvaged from the marriage. This was the first time there had ever been a discussion of this kind. Parents of any couple having difficulties in their marriage would be naturally reticent about intervening, uncertain as to whether help would be welcome. But this wasn’t any couple. The breakdown of this marriage had huge implications for the monarchy and yet both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had held back and chosen not to get involved. Andrew Morton was the first person to discover that the Princess had been suffering from bulimia, and the detail in his book was obviously unparalleled, but plenty had already been written about the state of the marriage; it was no secret that Charles and Diana were leading separate lives, seeing separate friends and that the marriage was in trouble. Calling a conference now was too late. Diana had gone public, and, intoxicated with the power she had over the husband who had cheated on her, she announced that she wanted a trial separation.

      The Queen and Duke were sympathetic but were firmly against the idea of separation, and urged them both for the sake of the boys as well as Crown and country to try and find a way of making the marriage work. They all agreed to meet again the next day to talk further, but Diana didn’t show up.

      Two months later the Sun published a transcript of an amorous late-night telephone conversation allegedly between Diana and James Gilbey. Dubbed ‘Squidgygate’ because of the way Gilbey repeatedly referred to her as Squidgy or Squidge, it reinforced Morton’s message. Between endearments, she railed against the Prince and his ‘fucking family’ and said, ‘I’m going to do something dramatic because I can’t stand the confines of this marriage.’

      By Christmas her wish had come true. It had taken one final disastrous tour to Korea, and a botched weekend Charles had planned to have with the children at Sandringham, for the Prince finally to snap and agree there was no purpose in carrying on; the marriage was over and all hope that he and Diana might still be friends was also over. On 9 December 1992 the Prime Minister, John Major, announced their separation in the House of Commons. Julia Cleverdon, chief executive of Business in the Community, was with the Prince of Wales that day. She had worked closely with him for nearly ten years and in all that time, despite innumerable crises, she had never seen him so utterly miserable.

      Diana took the moral high ground. She seemed oblivious of the fact that she too had been unfaithful during their marriage. In fact, she had been the first to do so, and had had not just one lover but a succession. Charles had been unfaithful with one woman. The problem was that it was Camilla Parker Bowles, the same woman he had admitted to having been in love with before he and Diana ever met. In yet another example of the Prince’s unfortunate compulsion to tell the absolute truth he had gone out of his way to explain this to Diana, to reassure her that now that he was engaged to be married there was, and would be, no other woman in his life. And when Diana asked him point-blank if he still loved Camilla, he didn’t say, as anyone with an ounce of common sense would have said, ‘No. You’re the one I love. She and every other woman I’ve ever known is history.’ He said ‘Yes’ and went on to explain that Camilla was very special to him, but then so were a number of other women.

      For a man who is so sensitive and really quite clever at times, it was utterly crass. Diana was insanely jealous of her and it had nothing whatever to do with having a wobbly background and insecure childhood. Find me a young girl who is not jealous of her boyfriend or husband’s ex-lovers. Even if they have never met their predecessors they are jealous – jealous of the idea, jealous of the memories they have of each other; irrational, stupid, deeply destructive, I don’t deny, but true.

      

      An old family friend, who had also married a man much older than herself, tried to calm Diana. Yes, he’d had girlfriends and some quite serious, but he was thirty-two, that was to be expected. The thing to hang on to, she said, was the fact that it was none of them that he had married – the one he wanted to marry was her.

      There was just one glaring difference here between Diana’s situation and that of any other girl on the eve of her wedding; and Diana was no fool, she knew. Charles was Prince of Wales, he couldn’t marry them; he certainly couldn’t marry Mrs Parker Bowles – she was already married. As she said to Andrew Morton, ‘He’d found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb.’

      And so she became obsessed. A suspicious, insecure girl by nature she imagined an affair where none existed, she imagined him on the telephone to Camilla all the time, discussing his marriage, discussing her. The suspicion and the jealousy ate away at her. She had found a bracelet on Michael Colborne’s desk, with GF engraved on it, that Charles had given to Camilla over lunch two days before the wedding. The GF stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. It was with a collection of similar presents for other women who had been kind to him during his days as a bachelor. Diana simply saw it as a token of love and went berserk. Camilla gave Charles a pair of cufflinks and those were the ones he chose to wear on his honeymoon. Proof seemed to be everywhere. He might have stopped seeing her, she reasoned, but that didn’t mean he had stopped loving her. She told Morton that Charles and Camilla had slept together at Buckingham Palace two nights before the wedding. It was fantasy. The Queen had hosted a dinner and ball that night and Charles was up until the early hours with guests; Camilla was long gone; and on the following night he spent most of it talking to his mother’s lady-in waiting, Lady Susan Hussey, who he had known since the age of twelve. All sorts of wild ideas thrashed around inside Diana’s head and no amount of reassurance from her husband helped. She couldn’t exorcize the conviction that her husband loved someone else.

      The Prince of Wales was utterly humiliated by Diana: Her True Story. It painted the blackest portrait; it not only called him a cold and faithless husband and a bad father, but it also questioned his fitness to be king. So much of it was demonstrably untrue and so many stories were a distortion of the truth. People who were witnesses to the events remembered them in essence, but they had a twist to them which always put the Prince in a bad light. He was adamant, nevertheless, that there should be no retaliation and instructed his friends to say nothing.

      Charles has never publicly criticized Diana. Whenever I have pointed this out to people they say, ‘Ah, but he got his friends to do it for him.’ This is untrue. Some of his friends did feel that the injustice meted out to him by Morton’s book was intolerable and I, for one, was encouraged by several of them to try to redress the balance, but they were not thanked for their trouble and neither was I. I had been planning to make the television documentary that Jonathan Dimbleby finally made, to mark the Prince’s twenty-five years as Prince of Wales. I had had discussions with Christopher Martin, the producer of the Prince’s previous films – one on his views about architecture, the other about conservation called The Earth in Balance. Christopher and I had been to a private lunch at Highgrove to discuss it with him. Suddenly I was dropped from the project and discovered very much later the reason why. I had defended him too vigorously in the media.

      What Morton’s book had done, as none other had done before it, was point the finger at Camilla Parker Bowles as the principal cause of Diana’s unhappiness. Diana had seriously considered calling off the wedding two days before she walked down the aisle, he said, because of СКАЧАТЬ