And that is their right. Whatever William and Harry may have confided about events before that, and particularly about the cruel suffering and tragedies of their parents’ marriage, to each other, to their families, or to the several therapists that we know they have consulted – that’s all private stuff. Their business …
Let us move on. The next parental embarrassments to send the two boys cringing mentally behind the bicycle sheds did not, at least, stem from deliberate intention on their parents’ part. They were cock-ups, the simple consequence of mindless idiocy – plus a good helping of adulterous animal lust.
In the late 1980s amateur radio enthusiasts – wireless ‘hams’ – would amuse themselves by listening in to people’s private telephone conversations with the aid of a portable radio scanner that you could buy for a few hundred pounds at any Currys or RadioShack-style store. In earlier decades the hams had tended to eavesdrop on police or air traffic control exchanges, but the growing popularity of the new mobile phones offered more inviting targets, like people talking to each other about sex.
By January 1990 Fleet Street was sitting on two such tapes that hams had plucked out of the ether, transferred to tape and sold to rival newspapers for undisclosed sums of money. On one, Prince Charles could be heard burbling various sexual innuendos and complaints to a woman who sounded like Camilla. On the other, Diana could be heard also indulging in sexually suggestive conversation with a man who referred to her affectionately as ‘Squidge’ or ‘Squidgy’.
Phonetic comparison of the Charles tape with Camilla’s answer-phone message confirmed that she was the lady with whom the Prince of Wales was giggling. When it came to the ‘Squidgy’ tape, the suspicion was that the male voice must be that of James Gilbey, a friend of Diana – and evidently a close one.
Stuart Higgins rounded up a posse of some colleagues who accompanied him early one morning to Gilbey’s house in Lennox Gardens, Chelsea.
‘We told him face to face,’ Higgins related in the TV documentary series Diana: Story of a Princess, ‘fairly aggressively, because we wanted to be provocative, “We have got a tape which we believe contains private conversation between you and the Princess of Wales in which you repeatedly call her ‘Squidgy’, and it is a fairly intimate conversation.” At which point he went completely white, got in his car and drove off.’
Higgins and his colleagues on the Sun took Gilbey’s silence and horror-struck blanched features as the confirmation they needed – but now what? Just north of Fleet Street, the editors and proprietors of the Daily Mirror were asking the same question about the recording that they had purchased, which would come to be known, in homage to the notorious Watergate bugging scandal, as ‘Camillagate’.
In neither newspaper establishment could the most cynical of the hacks quite believe what they were listening to. And in 1990 nobody was suggesting that such intimate royal conversation could possibly be published. After confabulations involving editors, proprietors and legal advisors at the highest level, it was decided that these embarrassing tape recordings should never see the light of day, and should be left to gather dust somewhere in a safe.
Diana’s ostentatious kiss and hug with Carolyn Bartholomew changed all that. By endorsing Andrew Morton’s intimate revelations in the Sunday Times, Diana had invaded her own privacy – and to an astonishing degree. If the Princess of Wales was willing to make public that she had been ‘Driven to Five Suicide Bids by Uncaring Charles’ – the headline on the opening instalment of the serialisation – what were a few chummy chucklings with James Gilbey?
On 24 August, ten weeks after the Sunday Times’s serialisation of Morton’s book, the Diana–James Gilbey tapes were duly published in the Sun, revealing to the world that the princess answered to the name of ‘Squidgy’, that Gilbey made her go ‘all jellybags’, that she referred to her ‘other half’ derisively as ‘His Nibs’, that life with Prince Charles was ‘real torture’, and that she sometimes caught the Queen Mother, then ninety-two, watching her ‘with a strange look in her eyes’. With her Sloane Ranger dialogue – the word ‘darling’ cropped up more than twenty times – and her superficial chatter about shopping and horoscopes, ‘the princess comes across,’ wrote Cambridge don John Casey, ‘as a bird-brained egomaniac’.
Diana also came across to her elder son as a good deal less innocent than William had been presuming.
It seems unlikely that the two princes, then aged ten and seven, heard about ‘Squidgygate’ when the tape was first published. At the end of August 1992 the family was secluded in the Highlands, in the privacy of Balmoral, where it was probably possible to control access to the news. But the Sun had put all twenty-three minutes of Diana’s intimacies on an 0898 number for people to phone in and listen to, so neither boy could have remained innocent for long once they got back to school among their fellow pupils.
September 1992 was when Harry – eight years old on the fifteenth – joined William at Ludgrove as a boarder. The Barbers’ anti-homesickness programme seems to have worked quite effectively with the younger brother, but trouble was now reported with William. He no longer seemed so happy at the school, and he appeared to have reverted to earlier patterns of behaviour. There were stories of the elder prince showing off and getting involved in ‘a number of scrapes’.
‘Squidgygate’ was as nothing, however, when compared to what came next. There could be no shielding William and Harry from
