SIX
The excruciating embarrassment experienced by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles on publication of their secretly taped late-night chat was no more than any other couple would feel if a private lovers’ exchange were transcribed and printed in a major national newspaper. But this was not just any other couple. This was the married heir to the throne of England and the wife of one of his closest friends, and their silly, slightly dirty and very explicit conversation showed that they were heavily involved in an adulterous relationship.
Charles admits he needs her several times a week, and suggests it would be much easier if he just lived inside her trousers. But when she proposes that he turn into a pair of her knickers, he comes up with the idea of becoming a Tampax. Their talk is mainly about love-making and when they will meet again, and Charles tells her, “Your great achievement is to love me.” They then spend a couple of minutes telling each other “I love you” in the way lovers do when they want their partner to ring off first.
Charles was staying at the home of Anne, Duchess of Westminster, and Camilla was at home in the country on December 17, 1989, when their telephone conversation was recorded by the intelligence services. It was done just two weeks before the Squidgy Tape was made, and almost certainly by the same team. As before, the eleven-minute conversation was electronically cleaned before being rebroadcast to be picked up by an amateur radio buff. It was originally sold to an Australian publication before being passed to the
Sun
in London where it was guaranteed to have the greatest impact.
The most savage reaction was against Camilla Parker Bowles who received hate mail by the sack load and—after an extremely harrowing incident in a local supermarket where she was pelted with bread rolls by other shoppers—was forced to remain hidden in her home.
Diana, on the other hand, was delighted. Having suffered so recently from the Squidgy Tape, she could fully appreciate just how much anguish and misery her rival was going through. A woman with Camilla’s sheltered upbringing was bound to suffer much more from the full attention of the press. Camilla was in a purgatory of her own making, and Diana reveled in her public humiliation and disgrace. In addition to this, Mrs. Parker Bowles was suffering dreadful guilt pangs from the equally devastating effect the publishing of the tape had had on her husband—who was besieged by the press on a daily basis. Andrew managed to preserve his unruffled graciousness and charm, and said nothing. Camilla remained stoical but was unable to cope in public and went to pieces, holed up in her house. In four short weeks she lost twenty-five pounds in weight and aged a decade.
Camilla could only reveal her true feelings to one man—Prince Charles, whom she rightfully reasoned was the person most desperately in need of her reassurance and loving support. But she feared to tell him so on the telephone, for if one call could be bugged—the prince eventually learned that the secret service had twenty-eight highly intimate and revealing telephone conversations between himself and Camilla—then they figured, correctly, that they were still being monitored. However, they dared not meet face-to-face in case they were discovered by the press.
It was no consolation to either of them that Stella Rimington, the head of MI5, had set up an in-house investigation to identify the “rogue agents” who had secretly leaked the “Camillagate” tape. The results of her investigation were never released, and a government inquiry launched by prime minister John Major concluded a year later that the intelligence services had been cleared of spying on the royal parties. These results were, justifiably, met with virtually universal disbelief and derision by members of parliament and the general public alike. Charles, Camilla and Diana rejected the statement, and believed that they were still being spied upon.
Of the three of them, Diana now had the least to lose. Free of Charles after, in her own words, “twelve fucking diabolical years,” she had rarely been in higher spirits, and the “Camillagate” revelations, in fully confirming her stories of Charles’s involvement with Mrs. Parker Bowles, which had been dismissed by most Establishment figures as paranoid hysteria, had made her ecstatically happy. There was a new bounce in her step, and a renewed sparkle in her brilliant blue eyes. Diana was at her best ever, and clearly planning to make the most of her hard-won freedom.
She was absolutely convinced now that she could fulfill all her potential as Princess of Wales, naively believing that her split with Charles had not affected her formal position in the royal hierarchy and that it would remain equally unaffected by divorce, which at that time she would not openly admit to being an option. It certainly did not exist in Diana’s own somewhat blinkered version of her destiny. In her confused vision of the future, she would enjoy a solo role uncluttered by Prince Charles, all the while remaining married with her existing privileges intact. The confusion already existing in her mind was illustrated by her great joy at being free of Charles, which alternated with moments when she confided to friends that she still loved the prince as much as ever and still wanted her marriage to work.
For his part, Charles had little time to dwell on the future of his marriage. His future in history was being threatened by the public debates raging in the media and among churchmen and politicians following publication of the “Camillagate” tape. There had even been the most amazing backlash among his most ardent supporters in the Establishment. Those who had sympathized with the prince after the Squidgy Tape was released now stood back appalled, and even questioned his suitability to become king. Even his hard-core supporters were devastated.
In the first six days of March 1993, column inches in the British national press totalled 3,603 supporting Diana and just 275 for Charles. What frightened Charles’s supporters most was his apparent inability to fight back, for once again the prince was showing weakness in the face of adversity. In the spring of 1993, his official visit to Mexico was completely overshadowed by Diana’s five-day trip to Nepal, and at times it must have seemed to the beleaguered prince that the whole world was turning against him.
According to her personal protection officer at the time, Ken Wharfe, Diana went through a period of secretly hoping that the unthinkable would happen and the monarchy skip a generation—the crown bypassing Charles and going directly to Prince William. This scenario, Wharfe believed, agreed with her slightly twisted idea of justice.
Wharfe, and others close to the princess—who was now referred to by everyone as “the boss”—noticed a huge change in her following the separation. She had grown in confidence when coping with public events, but at the same time her confidence and trust in her inner circle of confidantes began to wane. It seemed that she felt she had been betrayed so many times in her life that it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to trust anyone. She became highly unpredictable, with spectacular mood swings, and it seemed to some of those in contact with her on a daily basis that she had grown a conviction that she was engaged in a personal witch hunt. She started to accuse those closest to her of treachery and deceit.
What Diana craved more than anything else at that time was to have a special place, a bolt-hole, call it what you will: somewhere she could call her own and hide when she felt vulnerable, free of neighbors, and even servants if she so chose, and out of the reach of the ever more intrusive camera lenses.
With little optimism—as they rarely communicated—she decided to ask her brother, Charles, if she could have the use of a property on the Spencer estate. He surprised her by offering her the use of Garden House, with its own swimming pool, and with a gardener and cleaner thrown in, for £12,000 a year. It was early in June that the earl wrote that he could see her need for a country retreat and was happy to help provide it. Diana was ecstatic, and while Ken Wharfe was checking out the security arrangements, she started talking to interior designers. But it was all a waste of time. Two weeks later, in a dispassionate letter, her brother wrote to tell her the whole deal was off. He was sorry, he wrote, but he just couldn’t help her. The police and press interference would be too much and would be wrong for his wife and children.
The princess was devastated, and when Charles telephoned she refused to speak to him. She could barely accept that her own brother could be so cruel. It was the start of a rift between them which widened with time, becoming virtually beyond repair later that year when Earl Spencer demanded the return of the Spencer family tiara, which her father had suggested she wear on her wedding day. It was something she still wore on state occasions such as the opening of parliament. It was time, he wrote, to return it to its proper owner—himself. His wife Victoria was the right person to wear it. Diana lost a tiara; the earl lost the respect and love of his sister.
Despite her enormous popularity rating among the people, Diana was a lonely woman who needed the reassurance and comfort that only a lover could provide. Unfortunately for her, the man with whom she was currently obsessed—Diana’s loves were always “all or nothing” affairs, and she became besotted with each man with whom she was involved—was still antiques dealer Oliver Hoare. He was married and, although he was understandably thrilled to continue a covert sexual relationship with such a stunning mistress, he had not the slightest intention of leaving his wife for her.
His time spent with Diana making love, and even the time he could spare to talk with her on the telephone was severely limited by the demands of his marriage and business. It was too limited for a woman with a great deal of spare time on her hands and a chronic need to be loved and constantly to be reassured. Diana was used to getting her own way most of the time, and believed some things to be hers by right. One of those things was her right to speak to her lover whenever she chose. This meant the Hoare home telephone in Chelsea received dozens of calls every day and every night. If they happened to be answered by Diane Hoare, as was usually the case, the princess would hang up.
Oliver Hoare begged his mistress to stop making the calls, and promised that he would call her at set arranged times each day and night—but this had no effect at all. As all men discovered when they entered into a relationship with Diana, they had to capitulate entirely to her terms. Hoare was no exception.
The calls continued unabated until October 1993 when Diane Hoare, in exasperation, called the police and made an official complaint. Over a short period over 400 calls were logged and all were found to be coming from individual private lines within Kensington Palace. Chelsea police contacted the head of the Royal Protection Squad, who in turn contacted Ken Wharfe. He told Wharfe it was believed the nuisance calls to Hoare’s home were being made by a disgruntled member of the princess’s staff.
An incredulous Ken Wharfe had to explain that it was the princess herself, and not her staff, who was making the calls. When confronted, an aggressive Diana admitted making some of the calls, but said she was not responsible for the majority. When the press, inevitably, got hold of the story, Diana felt she was being persecuted, explained Wharfe. She did not once show any remorse and did not seem to think she had done anything wrong. But having received a police warning, albeit with bad grace, Diana backed off and her obsession with Hoare began to cool.
Prince Charles and his supporters may have been privately delighted by Diana’s embarrassment, but they were in no position to take advantage of her fleeting fall in the public’s esteem. They were far too busy fighting off a concerted effort by some of the leading figures in the Church of England who questioned his very right to be king.
“Does he have the right to be trusted with the role of king, if his attitude toward matrimony is so cavalier?” asked the Archdeacon of York, the Venerable George Austin. “Prince Charles made solemn vows before God in church about his marriage, and it seems he began to break them immediately.”
Other senior bishops joined in, including the Bishop of Sodor and Man, who declared that the breaking of the marriage vows was an “indication of a moral flaw which should be worrying, I think. I do not happily accept the remarriage of divorcees in church.”
The Bishop of Kensington added, “To marry a divorcee would render his position untenable. If he were to marry a divorcee, he would have to renounce the crown.”
Such a concerted attack on a member of the royal family by such important church leaders was unprecedented, and was immediately compounded by the results of a survey taken of 100 members of the 574-strong Church of England ruling body, the Synod, made up of bishops, clergy and laity. Forty-seven percent thought the prince, unlike any of his predecessors in the previous 400 years, should not become supreme governor of the Church of England upon his accession to the throne, while twenty-seven percent thought he should not even become king if it were shown to be true that he had had an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
The Church’s reply to a Buckingham Palace–Downing Street assurance that the separation of Charles and Diana had no constitutional implications came through the former Bishop of Birmingham, the Right Reverend Hugh Montefiore: “The separated Princess of Wales cannot be crowned Queen. It would be abhorrent to a large proportion of the English people. The question is bound to arise whether the archbishop would in good conscience be able to crown her.”
It was clear to anyone that Charles’s popularity with the Church was at an all-time low and that his insistence on a divorce from Diana and a closer relationship with Mrs. Parker Bowles could make his position worse in the clergy’s eyes. Complete celibacy and a total commitment to good works, rather than pleasurable pursuits, was the lifestyle now demanded by the church to improve Charles’s tarnished image.