Lady Colin’s rented apartment in Cundy Street was in the same block of flats in which Camilla and Lucia Santa Cruz had started off their London lives – it was where Charles and Camilla had met, in fact. Cundy Street was bed-sit land for the well-connected – and Lady Colin used her connections to great effect.
Jealous fits, bulimia and manipulative behaviour on Diana’s part, together with a succession of handsome young male ‘confidants’ and an empty marriage that was a sham – Georgie picked up all the suggestive rumours that were doing the rounds about the Princess of Wales, and she set them down boldly in her book Diana in Private, sensationally serialised in the Sun in March 1992, in contravention of Fleet Street’s unspoken agreement to keep shtum about royal negatives. By strange coincidence, the acting editor of the paper when it published this markedly pro-Charles and anti-Diana material – ‘Marriage Hell of Di’ – was Camilla’s weekly phone contact, Stuart Higgins.
Lady Colin’s allegations caused a storm and the portrait she painted of Diana’s less positive side was essentially accurate. But the truth was mingled with elements of sheer fantasy – the rumour, for example, that the princess’s former bodyguard and alleged lover Barry Mannakee had been bumped off by MI5 in a motorcycle accident.
But it was not so easy to undermine the credentials of the next author to ‘reveal the truth’ about the Waleses’ marriage. Tough and serious, Andrew Morton (thirty-nine, Leeds Grammar School, Sussex University) was a freelance journalist who had penned some insightful articles on the royals for the Sunday Times. His writing had caught the eye of Dr James Colthurst, an Irish-born surgeon who was Diana’s homeopathic and semi-spiritual advisor, and when Colthurst heard that Morton was starting on a biography of Diana, he suggested that the princess should collaborate. The doctor became the go-between.
Using the pseudonym of ‘Noah’, Morton would send a list of questions to which Diana would tape-record answers. The idea was that his real name should never cross her lips so she would be able to say, hand on heart, that she had never met or even spoken to this man who had decided to write a book about her on his own initiative. Morton later recalled picking up the first tape of the princess’s answers to his questions and listening to it in a transport café.
‘All around,’ he said, ‘everyone’s eating bacon and eggs chatting away, and I put these headphones on and turn on the tape recorder and listen to Diana talking about “bulimia nervosa”, which I’d never heard of, talking about her suicide attempts, talking about this woman called Camilla Parker Bowles. It was like entering a parallel universe – I walked out of that café thinking, Wow, what on earth have I heard? … It was the most incredible outburst of really innermost pain. Rage, frustration, anger – you were swept away with it.’
Morton transcribed it all – dynamite! When a few selected Fleet Street grandees were shown extracts from the text, they could not believe what they were reading. Morton had to produce sworn affidavits from friends like Diana’s former flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew before the Sunday Times would agree to serialise the book – to be called Diana: Her True Story – as well as give assurances that the message had been checked and approved at a higher level. ‘You can treat this book,’ Morton assured Stuart Higgins of the Sun, who had negotiated for subsidiary rights, ‘as though she has signed every page.’
Double dynamite!
When Prince Charles read the Sunday Times extracts that were faxed to him at Highgrove early on the morning of Sunday, 7 June 1992, he said he could hear Diana herself speaking. The staff, who had sneaked quick glances at the fax machine, were amazed at his calm.
‘In the staff areas,’ remembered housekeeper Wendy Berry, ‘everyone spoke in a hushed whisper, not sure what to say or do. Several … loyally declared they would never read the book or buy the Sunday Times again. But, of course, as the day continued, others made excuses to go out and buy copies of the paper secretly.’
Diana had brought Harry out from London for the weekend, and she finished breakfast early, leaving Charles at the table with his photocopied extracts and their weekend guests, whom Charles took for a courteous walk in the gardens. He then went straight upstairs to the princess’s room, carrying the incriminating faxes with him. Within minutes Diana came running down the stairs and out of the house, her face flushed and her eyes brimming with tears, heading back to London with the bewildered Harry.
Seven-year-old Harry was on his own because William, by now approaching his tenth birthday, had started at boarding school nearly two years before. One of the few things on which Charles and Diana had agreed in these troubled times was that Ludgrove, a small family-run boys’ prep school set in 120 acres of Berkshire countryside, was the ideal spot for their two sons to begin boarding school, which they would attend between the ages of eight and thirteen. Ludgrove had a tradition of two headmasters working side by side in tandem with their wives in a pastoral fashion that sought to encourage a communal, family ethos.
The school acknowledged that homesickness was a particular challenge to the small boys who were just arriving – ‘and if they are homesick,’ explains current headmaster Simon Barber, ‘there’s a massive support network from their own peer group and the adult
