After the divorce, Charles tried hard to return to life as a single man. Priority was given to achieving the rehabilitation of Camilla Parker Bowles—at this point one of the most detested women in Britain—for even then he was determined that they would one day live together openly as man and wife. Commander Richard Aylard, the Prince’s private secretary who had encouraged Charles to confess his adultery on television, was sacked, and Mark Bolland from the Press Complaints Committee was drafted to spearhead Camilla’s re-imaging.
It was no easy undertaking as, following the divorce, a survey of Church members revealed that more than half believed Charles should become neither king nor head of the Church if he remarried. Charles’s arrogant and near-contemptuous response to this was to issue a royal edict to all his staff that from that moment on, Mrs. Parker Bowles must be considered a nonnegotiable part of his life. It is a phrase still used by the Prince of Wales to this day whenever the subject of Camilla is raised. By the spring of 1997, Charles was openly living with his paramour at Highgrove and she rarely returned to her own house at Raybridge in Wiltshire.
Earlier in the year, Diana had decided to raise her game and, amid unprecedented publicity, launched her personal crusade, the emotional and passion-charged campaign to highlight the incredible cost of human life caused by anti-personnel land mines. It was a crusade that would embroil politicians of all persuasions and recruit government support at the highest levels, while incensing arms-trade profiteers and U.S. military chiefs.
In January, amid an unprecedented storm of international media attention, Diana arrived at the dilapidated Luanda Airport, close to Angola’s capital and declared the start of her crusade to clean up the world. In the rubble that still surrounded the airport she spoke with raw passion of her commitment to banning anti-personnel land mines once and for all, and promised to force a cleanup program that would reduce further innocent slaughter. As queen of people’s hearts, a humanitarian, she vowed to draw the world’s attention to the forgotten victims of war, the innocents killed or maimed by taking a single wrong step in a flower-strewn meadow, former children’s playground or ordinary village street.
In taking this step, Diana had carved out a dynamic new role for herself on the international stage. She had just as certainly ensured that Prince Charles’s role would be diminished accordingly. The prince had once enlisted prime minister John Major’s aid in his desire to stand alone on the royal stage. That was three years earlier, when Diana had fought back strongly, but lost. The palace, however, was no longer in a position to silence her or sidetrack her into the wings and obscurity. This time she meant to keep Charles out of the limelight for years.
The palace had made a classic mistake in forcing Diana to play second fiddle to the prince after their separation was suggested. It had only made her more determined to bounce back stronger when the right moment arrived. Freed by divorce from any obligation to the palace’s authority, Diana had used the intervening year to increase her own popularity and come up with her personal crusade plan. The Queen of Hearts campaign could not have been bettered by any public relations expert in the world.
At the time of the princess’s visit, 2,000 Angolans a month were losing limbs by stepping on uncleared land mines. Facts like this, and the sight of torn, blood-soaked bodies of children gathered into Diana’s arms, created a powerful message. Diana not only forced debate into the forefront of the political arena by going to Angola—and later to Bosnia—but caused the Red Cross appeal takings to soar to £1,200,000 and counting.
The previous Red Cross land mines appeal had failed to raise £50,000.
By June, the princess was able to report personally to Hillary Clinton at a private meeting in the White House that her crusade was already showing staggering results. It was Hillary who had first suggested the land mines campaign to Diana, explaining that she, even as the president’s wife, had achieved nothing for this issue. Diana told her of her plans for a trip to Bosnia, and the two women talked of Cambodia and Vietnam as being future countries to put under the campaign spotlight. Hillary Clinton insisted on her husband joining them to hear Diana’s news for himself. He was still backing her land mines treaty, he told her.
It was at this stage that Diana’s fate was effectively sealed. By the time it came for Bill Clinton to sign the treaty in Oslo in September, she would be dead, leaving the president free to renege on his promise—a move considered impossible while she was alive.
Sir Nicholas Bonsor, a former Foreign Office minister, told ITN, “For the princess to put herself so overtly at the head of a political campaign to abandon all land mines and deprive our soldiers of the use of such land mines was, in my view, wrong of her. I think it was dangerous for the royal family to have a member of its clan behaving in that kind of irresponsible fashion.”
Diana gave her reply in a speech to the London Geographical Society on June 12, 1997. She attacked “these ghastly conservatives,” as she called them, who had wrongly interpreted her visit to Angola as a political statement in favor of New Labour policy, and launched a full-scale attack on the arms trade. She vowed to continue her personal crusade and declared her utter refusal to let the issue drop. The Queen of Hearts stood squarely against the manufacture, sale and deployment of land mines.
By early summer, Diana’s love affair was running a poor second to her land mines campaign. In fact it had run into serious trouble. Dr. Khan told the princess in May 1997 that he was unable to continue their relationship as he felt he was obliged to marry someone of his parents’ choosing, as was Punjabi tradition. It was a tremendous blow to Diana, who had never before been dumped by a lover. She had offered marriage, to have his children, to change her religion to his and to learn his language, but all to no avail.
Hasnat Khan’s rejection triggered a spate of outings with another Pakistani admirer, millionaire electronics company chief Gulu Lavani, a fifty-eight-year-old divorced father of three. But friends say this was only a ruse to get Hasnat Khan to change his mind. For a brief period she allowed Lavani to dine and dance her, but he fell far short of what she really needed, and he was soon sidelined to join her other discarded boyfriends. She had spent the last two years of her life hopping from bed to bed, desperately searching for love, to be included as part of a family, and yet she found herself once more alone. Worshipped by untold millions but loved, simply and with genuine affection, by no one.
It made Charles’s announcement that he was throwing a ball at Highgrove to celebrate Camilla’s fiftieth birthday on July 17 even more galling. It was something he had never done for Diana in all the time they were married.
Diana suddenly found herself almost completely isolated. The royal family had no time for her. The princes were welcome in Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, but not Diana. She was starved of family love. Her father was dead, and even he had been like a stranger toward the end. She and her brother Charles were still barely on speaking terms. His attack on her mental stability still rankled and she had not forgiven his refusal to grant her a hideaway at Althorp. His treatment generally, she felt, had been shabby since she had lost the HRH title, meaning that he was no longer allowed, even at secondhand, to rub shoulders with the royal family. Her mother, she considered, was more critic than comfort, and Frances Shand-Kydd and the princess had finally stopped talking to one another a month before Diana had been abandoned by Hasnat Khan after Mrs. Shand Kydd told her, in very slurred words, that she should change her choice in men and “stop going out with fucking niggers.” “In just those words,” Diana told friends. Her relationship with her sisters was not a great deal better. Jane was married to Sir Robert Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, and was thus considered one of the enemy; and she and Sarah socialized less and less.
It seemed almost inevitable to Princess Diana that her next romance would be equally repugnant to her own family, the royal family and the faceless, gray-suited forces that unemotionally tended to the royals’ unbidden orders.
She was right.
EIGHT
The romance between Princess Diana and the Oscar-winning playboy film producer Dodi Fayed began aboard Mohamed Al Fayed’s £20 million yacht,
Jonikal
, which was moored in the harbor of Cannes in the south of France. Contrary to newspaper stories, Al Fayed had not invited Diana to holiday with his family. She had invited herself, and her two sons.
It was at a charity dinner during the winter of 1996 that the princess had asked him where he was going for his summer holidays. He told her he and his whole family would be going to St. Tropez where, apart from the villa in its eight-acre holiday compound, he had two magnificent yachts. Wistfully, she said, “I wish I could do something like that. I’ll bet my boys would enjoy it. I know I would.”
Al Fayed laughed and said, “So, why don’t you come along? The more the merrier.” To him it had been small talk, not an invitation, but three weeks before the Fayed family was scheduled to leave for their villa on the French Riviera, Princess Diana telephoned Mohamed at his office and said that she was very lonely and would like to go on holiday with his family and bring the two young princes.
When Al Fayed’s private Gulfstream IV jet, painted in the distinctive green and gold livery of Harrods, took off from Gatwick to carry the Fayed family to Nice Airport, Princess Diana, Prince William and Prince Harry were with them.
Diana, the consummate media manipulator, knew exactly what she was doing when she picked Mohamed Al Fayed to be her holiday host and protector. The overtly benevolent Egyptian is the man the British Establishment least wants as a fellow citizen. The cash-for-parliamentary-questions protagonist who owns Harrods and wielded an unhealthy control in parliament, looked set to be forging an explosive new bond with the mother of the future king. From the moment Diana stepped aboard his private jet, intense speculation gripped the globe.
There was a history between them. Ten years before, Al Fayed had revived the Harrods polo competition at the Guards Club in Windsor Great Park where his team, led by his son Dodi, had beaten Charles’s team. Mohamed Al Fayed had comforted Diana then. He had also been a good friend of Diana’s father, and had kept a fatherly eye on the princess ever since the earl’s death. Diana’s once-hated stepmother, Raine, who latterly had become a close confidante and whose advice the princess had grown to value highly, was a director of Harrods.
What the world did not readily appreciate is that Diana also enjoyed the raucous and earthy side of Al Fayed, and loved his wicked sense of humor. Now the man who arguably did as much as the Tories themselves to bring down the John Major government was host for ten days to the world’s most exciting woman—and his son was speeding south by private jet from Paris. For a long time the Egyptian entrepreneur had entertained the idea that his son was destined to marry the Princess of Wales, and their meeting this time, Al Fayed was convinced, would produce the romance of the century.
Dodi Fayed, sometime film producer, sometime Harrods’ apprentice boss, and then aged forty-one, reveled in fast cars and beautiful women and owned expensive homes all over the world. They included a dream mansion in Malibu, Los Angeles, apartments in London, Paris, the United Arab Emirates and New York, and the use of family estates in Gstaad, St. Tropez, Oxted in Surrey, a castle in Scotland and the Duke of Windsor’s former house in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. Add to this a flotilla of yachts, a Gulfstream IV jet, a fleet of cars—including Ferraris and a U.S. army armored truck—and a helicopter, and the picture of his truly opulent lifestyle begins to emerge.
Dodi’s mother was Samira Khashoggi, the sister of the Middle Eastern multimillionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and he had finished his education at the officer-training college Sandhurst. Dodi had been briefly married to, and divorced from, a model in 1986, and his name had been linked with numerous beauties. These included Brooke Shields, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, Tina Sinatra, Tanya Roberts and Patsy Kensit.
His allowance from his father at the time was set at £7.5 million a year—or £145,000 a week.
According to his father, Dodi did not even know the princess was in the family complex at St. Tropez until he called him in Paris. He was busy making love to a beautiful California model, Kelly Fisher, in his sumptuous Paris apartment off the Champs Elysées, and planning a party with friends to celebrate Bastille Day. But July 14 brought the urgent summons from his father that Princess Diana needed an escort and companion and Dodi, with Kelly Fisher still in tow, dashed immediately for Le Bourget airport where his pilots had already filed a flight plan for Nice.
Dodi had left behind his friends to celebrate Bastille Day without him, but Al Fayed promised him better entertainment. He would take his holiday party on his £20 million yacht, the
Jonikal,
to Cannes, and would rendezvous there with Dodi for the town’s annual Bastille Day fireworks.
Dodi’s own yacht, a converted motor torpedo boat, the
Cujo
, was moored along the coast and he reached Cannes harbor minutes before the
Jonikal
—195 feet in length, sleek, white and as impressive as anything that night afloat in the billionaires’ hangout—made fast its mooring ropes. Dodi immediately transferred to his father’s boat, leaving Kelly Fisher aboard the
Cujo
. The model later claimed Dodi had proposed to her and given her an expensive engagement ring, but when Dodi met Diana, friends say, it was obvious to anyone watching that all other bets were off. Dodi abandoned the yacht next day when they returned to St. Tropez, and moved into the villa. Kelly Fisher was to see very little of him during the following week.
Friends remember that, from the moment Diana and Dodi met, they had eyes only for each other. The day after he joined her, Diana’s good friend, designer Gianni Versace, was killed, and Dodi was able to provide a more-than-comforting shoulder to cry on. They quickly discovered that they liked each other, and that rapidly, that liking became something considerably deeper.
“Dodi was very laid-back,” said one friend. “One could truthfully say about him that he strolled through life. There was nothing pushy or aggressive in his approach to women. It was an approach bound to appeal to someone of Diana’s wary celebrity.”
Dodi was rich, well mannered and attentive and she could not help recognizing how favorably he compared to most of the previous men in her life. On top of this, she told a friend, “He is one of the few people in my life who wants nothing from me but my own happiness.”
The
Mirror
quoted another friend who revealed that Diana had admitted, “I trust him. I think he can provide absolutely everything I need.”
For Diana there was also the added pleasure of annoying the despised Establishment by fully embracing Mohamed Al Fayed and his family. More than that, she actually confided in them some of her most precious secrets. During her holiday, Diana talked openly to her hosts of her fears for her safety, and of the secrets she had locked away as insurance against assassination, said Mohamed Al Fayed. That the princess would willingly confide in the man who had personally wrecked the careers of Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken and destroyed the Conservative government, left palace courtiers aghast.
Mohamed Al Fayed later revealed what she had confided in them. “This was not play-acting. She was genuinely concerned that there were powerful people at court who meant to harm her. Who were determined to arrange her death and make it look an accident. She was very upset, and in tears, when she told us, and sobbed that she lived in the constant fear that the nightmare world of paid assassins was all set to engulf her. She even warned Dodi that she strongly believed that anyone who became too close to her would also find himself in danger. Dodi tried to brush it off with a light remark but she told him to treat the threat seriously. ‘People who get close to me are in mortal danger,’ she warned.”
But most of her time with them was very happy, he said. She told him and his wife Heini that this was the best holiday of her life. It would be hell going back to England and having to hand over the two princes to their father to join the royal family for their traditional Balmoral summer holiday. “She didn’t know that after that she was destined never to see them again,” he said.
On the day of Camilla’s birthday party, Diana made quite sure which photographs would swamp the front pages. They were of herself in a purple swimsuit, looking absolutely ravishing and relaxed, playing with her boys and with Dodi’s arm around her waist. Mohamed Al Fayed, in matching purple trunks, provided comic relief. Other pictures showed the couple cavorting on the boat and in the sea, and no one at the time could remember any set of photographs that had caught Diana in a happier mood. One could not imagine anything more different from the pictures which had been taken during her loveless fifteen-year marriage to Charles. For someone whose life had lacked fun and love for so long, the future was suddenly looking decidedly more rose-tinted, and Diana seemed determined to enjoy it. In one bizarre incident, she sailed close to the launch carrying the British royal press corps—the
créme de la scum
as they are known—and told them, “You are going to get a big surprise at the next thing I do.”
Diana told close friends that Dodi showered her with love and expensive gifts. “He’s so wonderful,” she confided. “He doesn’t need to give me expensive things. I’d willingly give myself to him for nothing.” Probably for the first time in her life, Diana was being treated like a princess. Had she finally found the love that she craved since childhood? The two princes were certainly impressed. They approved of Dodi’s visits to the local fun fair and his booking a local disco exclusively for them and the Fayed family. They liked the fact that he assumed the boys would stay up to participate in and enjoy it—which they did.
Diana should have returned to London on July 18, but stayed on a couple of extra days because she was so happy. Back in England, looking tanned and relaxed and unrecognizable from the pale, tearful figure of a year earlier, Diana told her stepmother Raine Spencer, “It was the best family holiday I’ve ever had.”
“She told me she had met someone special,” said Raine. “Someone who liked her for who, rather than what, she was.”
After Diana left on July 20, Dodi rejoined Kelly Fisher, who had been abandoned aboard the
Cujo
throughout the princess’s holiday, and two days later he flew with the bemused American to Paris, where she learned that her days of flying by private jet were over. Kelly was allowed to keep her ring, but the next day she was given a first-class one-way ticket back to Los Angeles. She threw a press conference, bad-mouthing Dodi and warning Princess Diana against trusting her playboy ex-boyfriend, thus earning herself a footnote in British royal history.
Having dropped Kelly, Dodi flew to London. Diana had also returned there after attending Versace’s funeral in Milan. How bizarre it was that, less than six weeks later, Diana would be murdered dressed from head to toe in clothes made for her by the late Gianni. As soon as she was back, Dodi invited the princess on their first real date, a secret tryst. That evening the Harrods helicopter whisked them to Paris where they had dinner before retiring to the most lavish and regal suite at the Ritz Hotel (owned by his father)—the £6,000-a-night Imperial Suite.
Dodi told Al Fayed that it was here, in the main bedroom decorated in a fusion of Egyptian and Empire styles, in a vast copy of Marie Antoinette’s bed at Versailles, gilded and canopied in ivory and green silk, that they first slept together. He marked the occasion by giving her a fabulous gold watch, surrounded by diamonds.
Back in London, after their brief trip to Paris, Diana spent virtually every free moment with Dodi at his apartment in London’s Park Lane or at Kensington Palace. When photographed arriving at his home, Diana walked in without a care who saw her. She seemed to be telling the world that her romance was for real and that she had nothing to hide. Dodi had their meals brought in on silver trays from the nearby Harry’s Bar.
When she was informed by a courtier that Prince Charles was expressing concern about the effect the new man in her life might be causing on their two sons, Diana said his worries were laughable in view of his own undisguised affection for a woman other than their mother. So rapidly was the love affair developing that Diana didn’t hesitate when Dodi suggested they fly down to join the
Jonikal
on August 1 and cruise some of the Mediterranean islands. She ignored criticism which followed her earlier holiday with the Fayed family, described as “irresponsible,” “unwise” and “controversial,” and told him she couldn’t wait to return to the yacht which she had found as sumptuous as the Royal Yacht
Britannia
, with swimming pool, gymnasium, saunas and Jacuzzis, and run superbly by a crew of eighteen. It had the style and luxury of a five-star hotel. The salon had six large sofas and still seemed spacious.
Despite occasional pestering by paparazzi photographers, the couple were able to laze aboard or swim off secluded beaches during their island-hopping cruise. They visited Corsica and Sardinia before flying back to London together in the Al Fayed jet.
The suave heir to Al Fayed’s vast fortune would make Diana an ideal husband, announced blonde Sky News presenter Tania Bryer, who had dated Dodi in the past. “He is warm and gentle. Not an aggressive macho sort. I can see why he appeals to Diana,” she said. “He is absolutely charming and one of the most genuine people you could meet.” Diana seemed to have come to the same conclusion. She was unconcerned about this latest scrutiny of her private life, and told friends, “I am in good hands.” A confidante of Diana was quoted at the time as saying, “Her friends are in no doubt that the princess is in love. It is the real thing.”