Jealousy and resentment of her phenomenal success as the principal royal attraction already colored Charles’s attitude toward Diana, and it began to affect him in other ways too, principally his growing dependence on Camilla who was his only true confidante on the subject of Diana and the only one capable of restoring his battered ego when the public repeatedly rejected him in favor of the princess. Charles’s resentment was shared by several of his aides and other royal courtiers at Buckingham Palace, who were beginning to realize that Princess Diana could be a much greater threat to the stability of the royal family than anyone had so far realized.
It was in 1986, led, as often happened, by
Daily Mirror
royal correspondent James Whittaker, that the press finally became concerned about Diana’s wasting figure. This grew more pronounced when she collapsed during the opening of Expo ‘86 in Vancouver. Charles wasn’t entirely certain that it wasn’t just another deliberate stunt to upstage him and grab the headlines. She had, after all, taken to outshining all the members of the royal family intentionally, even the Queen. At the state opening of parliament she turned out with her hair done up in a chignon which, as she intended, focused every scrap of attention, not to mention the press cameras, in her direction and away from the Queen. It made Elizabeth look a complete fool, as her irate sister, Princess Margaret, pointed out. The family was angered, but not overly concerned, at this demonstration of Diana’s ability to manipulate the media. After all, wasn’t she one of them? But it was already giving certain courtiers considerable cause to reevaluate.
What neither Charles nor the other observers at court had considered was that Diana might finally react to his adultery by taking a lover of her own.
The opportunity for her to do so had been there for the taking for almost a year. Royal Protection Squad Sergeant Barry Mannakee, a handsome thirty-seven-year-old, had become her official minder in 1985 and had quickly developed a special rapport with the princess. Soon afterward, at her suggestion, he was given the vital role of guarding Prince William, and became a firm favorite of the toddler.
Mannakee was married with two children and had seventeen years’ experience as a police officer when he met Diana. His maturity impressed her and in just a few weeks he had become her closest confidante and friend. “She trusted him implicitly,” said a former colleague, “and felt free to pour out all her woes to him. He became the recipient, or dumping ground might be a better term, for four years of stored up emotions and resentments. Until he came along, there was nobody she dared talk to.”
Diana was aware of the scandal involving Royal Protection Squad Sergeant Peter Cross and the Princess Royal, and had sympathized when Anne began an affair with Cross after her marriage to Mark Phillips collapsed. Cross had been transferred to other duties when his relationship with Princess Anne became obvious.
Diana told her biographer Andrew Morton that she reserved her fondest memories for Barry Mannakee, who became her bodyguard at a time when she felt lost and alone in the royal world. Wrote Morton, “He sensed her bewilderment and became a shoulder for her to lean on and sometimes to cry on during this painful period.”
For a woman with no self-worth or self-esteem, a trusted confidante like Mannakee was of enormous value. He was content to listen to her for hours on end, accompanying her on shopping trips or being at her side for long drives around the Balmoral estate when Charles disappeared on fishing expeditions. They grew very close. It was Barry, the son of working-class London parents, to whom Diana turned when she was unhappy or depressed. And it was Barry who would hug her when she was crying, and give her the reassurance she needed. Observers at the time believe it would only have taken a very small step for them to have become lovers. But despite various rumors and reports to the contrary, and a lurid account of a romance in at least one royal biography, their relationship did not become a physical one—although there were those in the palace who definitely believed otherwise.
Their friendship was terminated abruptly after Charles overheard Diana recounting details to Mannakee of the prince’s own affair with Camilla, and listened to the policeman counsel her on how best she should deal with it. The furious prince telephoned a senior officer in the Royal Protection Squad and ordered Mannakee’s immediate transfer from royal duties. There were several senior officers in the squad who resented Mannakee’s easy closeness to the future queen—after all, he was a mere sergeant—and were pleased to see him switched to the Diplomatic Protection Corps.
A friend at the time said that Diana was stunned by the suddenness of the transfer. “He was about the only one she could talk to at that time. It was quite natural that they should become such close friends. This really hit her very badly. It was frightening for her to see the power other people had to so dramatically affect her life.”
It was in 1985, I was told, that the British security services, in the shape of MI5 and Special Branch, embarked on the operation to bug all royal telephones and certain royal rooms. Ostensibly, it was said, the operation was launched purely to improve protection of the royals themselves; their personal conversations would not be stored or transcribed or passed to other intelligence organizations. In truth, after the Cross and Mannakee incidents, it was believed by the authorities that they could no longer rely on protection-squad officers to apprise them fully of what was happening with their charges. They were confident the new surveillance techniques would not intrude on the royals. Why should they? The royals were not told for many years that the new operation was even in place.
Perhaps because of her feeling of isolation at that time, Diana already suspected she was being spied upon, and blamed her husband and faceless palace courtiers. But in May 1987 she received the devastating news that Barry Mannakee had been killed in a road accident.
The news was broken to her by Prince Charles in a deliberately brutal and calculated way, designed to cause her the maximum of pain. A car was about to drop them on the airport tarmac for a royal flight to Cannes to attend the film festival. “Oh, by the way”, said Charles, “I got news from the protection unit yesterday that poor Barry Mannakee was killed. Some sort of motorcycle accident. Terrible shame, isn’t it?”
As the car stopped, Diana burst into tears. Charles pushed her out. “Let’s go, darling,” he said sarcastically. “Your press awaits you!”
Mannakee was a pillion passenger on a motorcycle being driven by a fellow police officer, Stephen Peat, which had collided with a car. Sergeant Mannakee died instantly. Peat suffered serious head injuries. Diana was convinced, from the moment she received the news, that Mannakee was the victim of an MI5 plot. “He knew too much about Charles and Camilla and what was going on,” she said. Even when she was told that a seventeen-year-old girl, Nicola Chopp, had been charged with driving without due care and attention, she refused to believe his death was the result of a simple accident.
“They have all sorts of ways of arranging these things,” Diana later told her lover Major James Hewitt. She confided in Hewitt that Barry Mannakee had been killed because they had developed too close a relationship and because she had told him too much about Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla. “MI5 and the people at the palace killed him. I am certain they killed him. One day it will be me they come for.”
“She maintained that belief the whole time I knew her,” revealed Hewitt. “She was also fearful for my safety, for at that time she wanted to leave Charles so we could marry. ‘You could be in danger, ’ she warned me, and hinted that someone might want to kill me too. We found two phone taps in Devon, where Diana and I stayed in my mother’s home, and I am sure they were aware of most of my conversations and meetings with the princess. I was often followed and sometimes we noticed an observer when we met.
“I received two direct threats on my life—both from someone I knew. He said it was in the best interests of my health if I ended my relationship with Diana. Or I could meet the same end as Barry Mannakee. Warnings to back off also came from a member of the royal family and Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson.”
The strength of Diana’s feelings for Barry Mannakee can be judged by the annual pilgrimage she made to the crematorium where his ashes are scattered. She even made attempts to contact him through a medium.
A former senior intelligence officer confirmed that Mannakee’s death could have been arranged, even though only one other vehicle seemed to be involved and a driver had been charged with an offense. “This type of fatal accident is not difficult to set up,” he said. “Clearly other people would have to be involved but witnesses, if there were any, would not necessarily remember seeing them.”
Diana certainly believed it had been stage-managed, and she blamed herself. “He died because of what he heard from me,” she told Major Hewitt.
The princess believed that given the morals of today’s royals it was a regular occurrence for the security services to have to clean up after some of their more bizarre romantic attachments. With her privileged vantage point right at the center of the royal family, Diana was in a position to know all of their secrets.
One of the earliest of the royal sex secrets, which ran in parallel to Prince Charles’s adultery, concerned her outwardly staid sister-in-law the Princess Royal. Diana was fascinated, but hardly surprised, to discover that Anne’s partner in adultery at the time Barry Mannakee was being transferred for “overfamiliarity” was Andrew Parker Bowles. Brother and sister—Charles and Anne—were sharing their beds with wife and husband—Camilla and Andrew.
Although Anne’s adulterous affair with Andrew Parker Bowles has no direct bearing on Diana’s death, it does help to illustrate the royal family’s absence of moral accountability. The royal prerogative for generations of Windsors has been the right to do anything that pleases them in pursuit of personal satisfaction and sexual fulfillment. Anyone threatening this right automatically becomes expendable.
Ordinary family values do not apply.
THREE
Like most women, Princess Anne never forgot the first man in her life, and when her marriage to Mark Phillips became unbearable after fifteen years, she found it easy to turn to her ex-lover Andrew Parker Bowles for emotional support and a shoulder to cry on. Their second-time-around romance coincided, totally coincidentally, with the collapse of Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana following the birth of their second son, Harry. The prince had by then committed himself completely to Andrew’s wife, Camilla, and the cuckolded colonel found himself at something of a loose end.
“Brother and sister and husband and wife. That’s what you call a special kind of mixed foursome,” said one royal observer at the time. “It was one of the best-kept royal secrets of the decade, and has taken nearly another twenty years to come out.”
Following her seduction by devoted royal courtier Andrew in 1969, Princess Anne enjoyed several steamy romantic flings before and after her first marriage—mostly at her own instigation. The collapse of her marriage to Mark Phillips had begun even before the birth of their second child, Zara, in 1981. The Queen refused Anne’s plea for a divorce, and rather than face a loveless and indefinite future, the princess and her husband chose to forge relationships outside their marriage.
Anne is often thought of as the staid one in the royal family, but friends say she was, and still is, a very sensual and tactile woman with a stunning figure which she usually keeps hidden under “sensible” clothes. She is almost paranoid about her privacy, and this has helped create the impression that she is something of a prude and rather straightlaced. “But the real Anne is exactly the opposite,” said a friend.
Andrew Parker Bowles was Anne’s first lover, and seduced the more-than-willing teenager shortly before her twentieth birthday. When her marriage went wrong in the eighties, it seemed natural to them both that Andrew provide love, affection and reassurance. He was the ideal person to help her through this sticky patch in her life.
Said a royal confidante, “It was a bizarre setup. Camilla already had Charles and Andrew, and Andrew had Camilla and was romancing Anne. It’s the nearest thing to incest you can imagine. All those secret trysts in their own and friends’ homes in the country. With their marriages on the rocks they just paired off again the way it was when they were all single. The only one left without a partner to play with was Diana, and the others didn’t care about that. It made her feel even more isolated.
“Ignoring the unsavory aspect, which has never been a problem with either sister or brother, Anne and Charles believed they were in a gossip-proof situation. Their secret relationships were with a married couple who were their best friends. And all three sides to this remarkable triangle were leading separate lives. Anne and Andrew had a number of favorite restaurants where they dined, and they frequently went to the cinema and theater. His appointment as commanding officer at Knightsbridge barracks gave them endless opportunities to be together.
“They would also meet at his then home, Bolehyde Manor in Wiltshire, for romantic evenings and weekends, sometimes at the same time as Camilla was keeping a rendezvous with Prince Charles at the home of a trusted friend, or at Highgrove. Diana hardly ever went there unless Charles insisted, preferring to brood alone in Kensington Palace.
“Andrew was probably the most public cuckold in the country, but very few were aware that he was enjoying a highly secret, renewed romance with the Queen’s daughter. If one says his wife’s lover’s sister it sounds even naughtier.
“When Mark and Anne were no longer able to speak to each other, let alone be in the same house, Andrew, who is godfather to Anne’s daughter, Zara, was a great morale-booster. She was at the stage where she couldn’t stand Mark any longer, and at one point ordered her staff to throw all his clothes into dustbin bags and dump them in the garage when he was away on a trip.
“It was then that Andrew became invaluable. Their renewed relationship may not have had the fireworks and passion of their first encounter, but it provided the gentle romantic tenderness Anne desperately needed. Andrew escorted her to balls, parties, or simply took her for dinner alone. The two have many common interests and have a very good understanding. He may have been just a shoulder to cry on, but it was a shoulder that Anne needed then and continues to rely on.
“In many ways they were well suited and could have made a perfect couple, though Andrew had his own problems—with Camilla. I think they both accepted that, had fate dealt them an alternative hand, things might have turned out very differently for them both, and even brought them together permanently that second time around.”
Said another royal insider who has known the princess for twenty-five years, “Andrew was Anne’s romantic mentor when she was not yet twenty—and he was an experienced lover ten years her senior. As a Household Cavalry officer and friend of Prince Charles, he was very eligible and widely tipped to become her husband. He was her seducer and the man who awoke all that astonishing passion in her. As lovers they were well suited, for she shared his strength of passion, and had he not been a Catholic they might well have become engaged. The Queen liked him well enough to make him her silver stick in waiting.”
Andrew was a supreme athlete both on the track and in the bedroom. He was a former national-hunt jockey and rode in the 1969 Grand National. “It was the talk of the mess that there wasn’t a frisky horse or woman he couldn’t handle. And he had a penchant for thoroughbreds. She could have had her pick of just about any man she wanted. There were a lot of young army officers at that time who would have given anything for a night with the princess.
“Her modesty, courage, and devotion to duty are well known to all, but she simply never puts her sexiness on display in public. She keeps her excellent figure hidden behind concealing clothes. And an almost obsessive demand for privacy in her off-duty life has kept this part of her personality away from the public.”
Her relationships were carefully conducted in private, and rarely prompted even a mention in the tabloids. The details of her affair with her personal detective Peter Cross were well known to the royal family, including Princess Diana, and the Queen feared at the time that a serious scandal might ensue. Suave, smooth-talking and something of a womanizer, Cross was already married with two daughters when he was transferred to duties with the Royal Protection Squad. “Peter was a bit green and gauche when he first joined the princess’s staff,” said a former servant, “but what he lacked in dress sense and social graces he made up for with his essential, down-to-earth masculinity which the princess simply adored.”
“Even though he was a royal detective,” revealed a former colleague, “he was not the most discreet of men. If he and Anne had been allowed to continue with their relationship, the palace was terrified he would brag about it and plunge the royal family into a major scandal.”
Cross was called to Scotland Yard for a meeting with Wilfred Gibson, the assistant commissioner in charge of royal protection, and sacked. He was accused of being overfamiliar with the princess, and was told he had “misunderstood her friendship.” Mark Phillips claimed that it was he who had Cross transferred to other duties after he discovered Cross’s true feelings for the princess, but the decision was actually made by Establishment figures who chose not to contradict Mark’s claims.
Even after Cross quit the force and joined an insurance company, his relationship with Anne continued. “It started with kisses and hand-holding,” revealed Cross later. But the affair quickly developed and they met once a month, either in an empty cottage on the Gatcombe Estate or at the home of Cross’s friend who loaned the lovers his keys. Mark complained about the embarrassing publicity, but all that earned him was the brunt of Anne’s legendary temper. Mark was told to mind his own business.
Eventually the affair dwindled into nothing and Cross began a new relationship; but for a few years he seemed to be the most important man in Princess Anne’s life.
“An army officer at Buckingham Palace amused the princess for a while,” explained a former aide, “then came her resurrected romance with Brigadier Parker Bowles.”
For a time it suited them both, but Anne was looking for someone new with whom to share her life. In 1986, Commander Timothy Lawrence was detailed to join Buckingham Palace as an equerry to the Queen. Aged just thirty and not very experienced with girls, he had a boyish air of innocence. Anne first saw him there on a visit to her mother: suddenly she was confronted by a new and eligible figure in military uniform, and romance gave way to a more urgent passion. Soon a new joke was making the rounds below stairs that the duties an equerry to the Queen had to fulfill were equivalent to a thirty-mile run—but without the boots, uniform or rucksack.
There is a consensus among Timothy and Anne’s friends that the well-mannered, career officer—known to his naval chums as Tiger Tim—was seduced by the princess. The tiger, they agreed, was no match for the royal tigress.
Tim’s feelings were so intense that he felt the need to commit them to paper. Four intimate letters proclaiming his passionate feelings for his royal mistress were stolen that April—and precipitated an official separation from Mark Phillips. Anne had valued the letters so much—reading and re-reading them over and over again—that she couldn’t bear to have them out of her sight. She carried them everywhere in her briefcase, and it was from there that they were stolen and passed to a tabloid newspaper.
This time, when she went to her mother pleading for an official separation, she found the Queen not only compliant but encouraging. She turned down Tim’s offer to resign as equerry and, as an apparent signal of her approval of her daughter’s lover, insisted he join their Ascot party and cruise with them on the royal yacht to Scotland.
In March 1991, the threat of a paternity suit by horsewoman Heather Tonkin ensured that Anne and Mark’s divorce—undefended after a two-year separation—should go through in August that year. The divorce itself was simple. But Anne’s demands on her husband were tough. Mark received a lump sum. In return he had to give up any claim to Anne’s, or the Queen’s, property. The princess had custody of the children and Mark had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The divorce severed virtually every connection between Mark and the royal family.
To most royals, it was as though he had never existed—the same royals, no doubt, who would wish in a few years time that the same could happen with Princess Diana.