Diana

The couple’s sex life was virtually non-existent by then. Diana was only twenty-four: the contrast between the adulation she received in public and the total lack of appreciation she found when she returned home was hard to take. When asked by Peter Settelen, her voice coach, who taped their sessions, ‘There’s virtually no sexual relations between the two of you? . . .’ she replied, ‘Well, there was. There was, there was. But it was odd, very odd. But it was there, it was there and then it fizzled out about seven years ago ... Well, seven was Harry. It was eight ...’ Asked how she knew it was odd, she replied, ‘Instinct told me. It was just so odd. I just don’t know. There was never a requirement for it from [sic] his case. Sort of once every three weeks, and I kept thinking, and then I followed a pattern; he used to see his lady once every three weeks before we got married . . .’² It seems that sex never mattered very much to Diana, certainly not as much as expressions of love and appreciation. Her careful preservation of her virginity – ‘keeping myself tidy’ – hardly indicated a passionately sexual temperament. With the consciousness of Camilla in the background and her husband’s infrequent sexual advances, she was probably, like many beautiful and inexperienced women, insecure about her own sexual attraction. She liked to flirt and was immensely successful at it: men of all ages would go weak at the knees when she fluttered her eyelashes at them, focusing on them with her amazing blue eyes. Her lavatorial sense of humour, fondness for coarse jokes and fascination with other people’s sexual behaviour indicated a vicarious rather than a practical interest in sex.

The role of the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department officers in the life of the ‘principal’ they are entrusted to protect is a curious one. The men are SAS-trained in threat avoidance while driving, the use of a gun, fitness and awareness, regularly tested and expected to keep up with the latest intelligence. ‘From ’72 until recently the IRA was the biggest threat,’ one said. ‘You get the nutters, you always got the nutters, but your main intelligence was that the IRA said that members of the Royal Family, while working and representing the Royal Family, were a legitimate target.’ From the moment Diana symbolically entered the Royal Family on the night she went to stay at Clarence House, she became used to the presence of policemen dedicated to her protection.

Her private protection officer became part of her life: with her when she walked in the park, with her when she went shopping; wearing black tie he shadowed her at evening events, played informally with the children at home. One of Diana’s first protection officers, Graham Smith, who was on Britannia for the honeymoon, became a father figure to her; she visited him in hospital just before he died of cancer. Diana was absolutely open with her protection officers, almost to the point of embarrassing them. It was Graham Smith who warned one of his successors of the frankness he could expect. ‘He said, “Look, Ken, whatever I say it’s going to be confirmed by her because you’ll be a part of it.” ’ ‘In a way,’ Wharfe said, ‘this was probably one of Diana’s strengths but it was also a weakness. I’m not so certain it’s a good idea to keep telling people everything.’³ Naturally the ‘principal’ and the policeman would become close. In 1985 Diana, in her loneliness and longing for love, comfort and appreciation, became close, perhaps too close, to her protection officer Barry Mannakee. When asked about Mannakee, a member of staff recalled him as ‘Really a very nice man, very down to earth . . . genuine . . . a nice person to have around. He came across as being someone you thought “if there was a crisis, I’d be glad to have him standing next to me”.’⁴ There has been much gossip and rumour about Diana’s relations with Barry Mannakee. Diana, in the tapes she made with Peter Settelen, recorded in 1992 but broadcast on NBC, one of the major US networks, after her death, in the autumn of 2004, admitted to a crush on him: ‘I fell deeply in love with someone who worked in this environment. And he was the greatest fella I’ve ever had.’ ‘I was always walking around trying to see him . . . I just wore my heart on my sleeve and was only happy when he was around . . . I was like a little girl in front of him the whole time. Desperate for praise. Desperate.’ She even half-joked about running away with him (although he had a wife and children). When asked by Settelen, ‘What you’re saying is that there had been sexual ...?’ Diana replied ‘No’.⁵ A later lover, James Hewitt, claimed that she told him that a teddy bear on her bed had been given her by Mannakee, and that he had been her lover. Hewitt’s testimony, given in his second book about his affair with Diana, cannot be corroborated but any sexual affair was denied to Mannakee’s successor, Ken Wharfe, by the house staff who would have known of it had it happened. This may have been out of a loyal desire to protect Diana: the rumour in the Kensington Palace village alleged that Mannakee used to go and see Diana when Charles was not there, and that he really cared for her, comforting her and fulfilling her needs.

What had happened, or was witnessed on one occasion, was Mannakee in Diana’s sitting room, jacket off, having a cup of tea, laughing and joking and giving her a cuddle before he left. That was his downfall. As Diana told Settelen, ‘. . . it all got so difficult. And people got so jealous. Bitchy in this house [Kensington Palace]. And eventually he had to go . . . it was all found out and he was chucked out.’⁶ Word from the staff got to the chief protection officer, Colin Trimming, who worked principally for the Prince of Wales. Mannakee was removed from his post overnight and sacked from royal service a few months later. Not one of Diana’s staff believed Mannakee had slept with the Princess: ‘He was just stupid . . . familiar and arrogant’ was the general opinion. Did Charles know of it? Trimming was very much the Prince’s creature and recipient of his favours; it seems likely that, if asked why Mannakee had left so suddenly, he would have given ‘overfamiliarity’ as the reason. Certainly Charles knew enough about Mannakee to inform Diana when he was killed in a motorcycle accident two years later. He told her when they were travelling together in the back of a limousine en route to RAF Northolt to catch a plane to the Cannes Film Festival. Diana thought he had done it with deliberate cruelty. She fantasized about Mannakee, consulting clairvoyants in an attempt to contact him, having disturbing dreams about him, that ‘he was very unhappy wherever he’s gone to’. She found out where he had been buried (he had been cremated and his ashes scattered), and laid flowers for him. The dreams stopped.

The death of Mannakee has been resurrected as part of the investigation into Diana’s own death. Mannakee believed that he was in danger: ‘He thought that if ever anything happened [between him and Diana], something would happen [to him] and he was terrified.’⁷ Diana, always a fan of conspiracy theories, believed it too. She asked Andrew Morton to find out the truth. In fact, it had been a simple, tragic road accident: Mannakee had been riding pillion on a friend’s motorcycle, when an inexperienced woman driver pulled out of a side road, turning right across their path. Mannakee was thrown off, went through the car’s rear window and was killed instantly. It was not the type of ‘accident’ which could have been set up beforehand.

Into Diana’s life at this critical point, eager to be her new best friend, came ‘Fergie’ – Sarah Ferguson, the bouncing, cheerful and loud daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager, Ronald Ferguson, always known by Sarah as ‘Dads’. Fergie muscled her way into Diana’s life: ‘I met Fergie when Charles was getting near me,’ Diana told Morton, ‘and she kept rearing her head for some reason, and she seemed to know all about the royal set-up, things like that. She just sort of encouraged it. I don’t know, she just suddenly appeared and she sat in the front pew of our wedding – and everything like that. She came to lunch at Buckingham Palace and didn’t seem daunted by it all. I wasn’t quite sure how to take it ...’⁸ In royal life, as P G. Wodehouse put it, ‘nothing propinks like propinquity’. Contrary to perceived opinion, the Royal Family do not have a wide group of friends and tend to marry within the closed circle of people they actually meet who have been provided for them. The Queen herself met Prince Philip through his uncle, Lord Mountbatten; Diana was in essence ‘the girl next door’; Fergie’s passport to the royal circle was her father and, once again, polo was the entrée, as it had been for a succession of Prince Charles’s girlfriends, including Camilla Parker Bowles.

Fergie and Diana had indeed first met in polo surroundings – at the Cowdray Park tournament on the weekend when Diana, staying with the de Passes, had shared a hay bale with Prince Charles with such momentous results. Fergie, although with aristocratic connections, had not been born into a ‘great family’ like Diana and there was no stately home in the background, simply an agreeable Hampshire farm, Dummer Down. Like Diana, she was no intellectual and, as with Diana, her parents had separated, although later and under less painful circumstances than Diana’s. Fergie had had a more down-to-earth upbringing than Diana, ponies, gymkhanas and all the usual middle-class country pursuits. She had attended Queen’s secretarial college in South Kensington – the same institution attended by Camilla – graduating in 1977 with the perceptive report: ‘Bright, bouncy redhead. She’s a bit slapdash. But she has initiative and personality which she will use to her advantage when she gets older.’

Sarah Ferguson was a Sloane, living south of the Thames where she, like many other impecunious daughters of the middle class, shared a flat and commuted to a job north of the river. She had been doing a variety of jobs to make ends meet, although her finances were always precarious, her most recent job being acquisitions director for the Richard Burton gallery. She had been having a relationship with a racing driver, Paddy McNally, based in Verbier, and had longed to marry him while secretly realizing he had no real intention of marrying her. She had been hurt that, after being invited to Diana’s wedding, she was not on the more select list for the wedding breakfast but nonetheless, in her own words, she ‘stayed close to Diana, kept having lunch with her each week’.

It was Diana who provided her entrée into the royal circle. Ronald Ferguson’s credentials as the Prince’s polo manager would not have been enough in the snobbish ambiance of the court to qualify his daughter for official admittance into the inner circle. ‘A polo manager is not considered a gentleman in the household,’ said an observer; ‘it’s not the same level as the courtier.’ ‘Fergie’s a good girl. She’s got no harm in her. She’s just vulgar. It’s not her fault, that’s the way she was born and brought up. That’s the milieu. She was a chalet girl having an affair with her boss. She wanted to marry him, she was older than his children, he kicked her out. She cried on Diana’s shoulder.’ When Diana put in a request that Sarah should become one of her ladies-in-waiting, it was firmly turned down as ‘most unsuitable’. ‘Diana was furious,’ a witness said. ‘I think it was the first time she had been turned down ... she told me the courtiers, the Men in Grey – not the Queen – “they dared to turn down my request”, that sort of attitude. And I said, “She’s not exactly suitable, is she?” But that wasn’t the point . . . Diana decided she was going to show them. Diana promoted Fergie’s marriage to Andrew from Day One.’⁹ She invited Fergie to dinner at Kensington Palace to meet Andrew when they hit it off straight away, given as they both were to boisterous behaviour and ‘idiot jokes’.

Andrew was Diana’s favourite among her younger in-laws; they had almost grown up together, and she was sorry for him after the failure of his romance with the American Koo Stark. (Koo had been popular with everyone, Diana included, and had seemed set to become engaged to Andrew when a newspaper turned up some hazy stills of a lesbian shower scene in a film made by Henry Herbert, and Koo went the way of many of Charles’s hopefuls.) The friendship quietly developed: Andrew invited Sarah to a New Year’s house party at Sandringham and confessed his love. In February, after Fergie returned from a skiing holiday with Charles and Diana, Andrew proposed to her at Floors Castle, home of the Duke of Roxburghe. On 15 March the Queen gave her consent, four days later the engagement was announced and Fergie left 40 Lavender Terrace, Clapham, for ever. Press and public were ecstatic at this new royal romance – Fergie, it was agreed, was to be the ‘breath of fresh air’ the Royal Family needed.

Fergie was to refer to herself in her autobiography, My Story, as Diana’s best friend. This was a distortion of the truth. Fergie had hauled herself into the royal circle through Diana and from then on the two girls were in competition for royal and public favour. It had begun that February at Verbier, where Diana was not at her best, feeling sick and longing to stay inside, while Fergie, an expert skier, shone on the slopes and made everybody laugh with her antics. According to Fergie it was on this occasion that Charles, provoked by Diana’s moping, prodded her with the unkind question, ‘Why can’t you be more like Fergie’, a phrase which was to become a refrain. But Fergie did inspire Diana to be happier, to enjoy her lot and have fun.

On the day of the wedding, 23 July 1986, The Times leader greeted Fergie as ‘a level-headed and attractive young woman’, which was somewhat wide of the mark. Attractive yes, level-headed never, as a prank on the evening of Andrew’s stag night demonstrated. On 15 July, a week before the wedding, Andrew held his stag night attended by show-business celebrities like Elton John and David Frost. ‘I desperately wanted to gate-crash,’ Fergie wrote, but the house was impregnable with high walls and a squadron of guards. With Diana and a few friends they staged a hen night which involved wearing grey wigs, dressing up as policewomen and pretending to arrest a ‘prostitute’ at the gates of Buckingham Palace. They were put in a police van and driven down the Mall until one of the policemen recognized Diana: ‘Oh my heavens, it’s the Princess of Wales in drag!’ he exclaimed. The girls went on to Annabel’s, the fashionable nightclub in Berkeley Square, hoping to surprise Andrew there but, having inveigled themselves in, they found him gone. After stopping the traffic in Berkeley Square, they succeeded in tricking the policeman on the Palace gates and shut them in Andrew’s face as his car approached. Fearing an ambush, he screeched into reverse. ‘It was about then,’ said Fergie, ‘that I wondered if we had gone a bit too far.’ Technically the impersonation of police officers is a criminal offence, as some Members of Parliament pointed out.

‘The Princess was rather in awe of her [Fergie],’ one of her staff said. ‘Fergie had her own agenda and used to get Diana into trouble and then disappear.’¹⁰ The idea of going to Annabel’s dressed up as a policewoman would never have occurred to Diana. Nor would the equally silly incident of the two royal ladies poking the bottoms of friends at Ascot in 1987. ‘If you see where the photograph was taken – where the press stand when they take photographs at Ascot, the Royal Enclosure, well it was right there, so it was done as a photo op.,’ said Dickie Arbiter. ‘The Princess used to say wistfully that Fergie’s friends were much nicer – i.e. more fun – than hers were,’ said a member of her staff. ‘But when Diana cut her off, Fergie was desperate to get back in with her.’¹¹

The advent of bouncing, jolly, sporty Fergie with her mane of red hair and Rubensesque charms, made Diana’s life more difficult. At Sarah’s wedding, which was so obviously a marriage of love, observers noted that Charles and Diana did not exchange a word during the ceremony. ‘FABULOUS FERGIE ’ trumpeted one headline, while the ‘First Lady of Fleet Street’, Jean Rook, was less complimentary, calling her ‘an unbrushed red setter struggling to get out of a hand-knitted potato sack’. ‘They were always made out to be so close,’ Arbiter said, ‘but they weren’t close at all. Diana always wanted to be number one. She felt she was number one in their [the Waleses’] joint office and she was going to be number one when it came to the in-laws.’ As far as Diana was concerned, almost all Fergie’s initiatives were detrimental to her.

‘I wasn’t quite sure how to take it,’ Diana told Morton. Suddenly everybody said: ‘Oh, isn’t she marvellous, a breath of fresh air, thank God she’s more fun than Diana.’ So Diana was listening and reading every line. I felt terribly insecure. I thought maybe I ought to be like Fergie and my husband said: ‘I wish you would be like Fergie – all jolly. Why are you always so miserable? Why can’t you be like Grannie [the Queen Mother] ...’ I made so many balls-ups trying to be like Fergie. I went to a pop concert, Spider concert, David Bowie, with David Waterhouse and David Linley [Princess Margaret’s son by Lord Snowdon] . . . I went in leather trousers which I thought was the right thing to do, completely putting out of mind that I was the future Queen and future Queens don’t wear leather like that in public. So I thought that was frightfully ‘with it’, frightfully pleased to act my own age. Slapped hands. The same summer at Ascot I put a brolly up somebody’s backside. In my astrological chart Penny Thornton always said to me: ‘Everything you will do this summer you will pay for.’ I did, definitely. I learnt a lot.¹²

Two months before the Yorks’ wedding Charles and Diana had undertaken an official trip to Canada for Expo ’86, followed by Japan. In March that year, perhaps after comparing the uncomplicated happiness of his brother and fiancée with the tortured state of his own marriage, Charles had written to a friend: ‘It’s agony to know that someone is hating it all so much . . . It is like being trapped in a rather desperate cul-de-sac with no apparent means of exit . . . It seems so unfair on her . . .’¹³ In Vancouver, Diana, once again prey to her eating disorder, fainted by his side, only to receive minimum sympathy. Diana, it appeared, thought that he was convinced she had done it on purpose to gain sympathy and to distract attention from himself. When Charles spoke from the heart of ‘the soul of mankind’ and ‘the beauty and harmony’ that lay deep therein like the reflection in a ‘mirrorcalm lake’, the British press jeered, advising him to look at his own bald spot in a mirror. But when Charles had said, ‘... so often the beauty and harmony is obscured and ruffled by unaccountable storms’, he was undoubtedly referring to his own private life.¹⁴ Yet to their staff, the couple kept up appearances. Diana wrote a warm note after the tours to the butler who had looked after them, thanking him for his care. Referring to the Canada and Tokyo tours she said: ‘Both . . . were particularly demanding and your day started and finished long after ours and along with the jetlag and endless time changes must have left you feeling totally exhausted. Your support and endurance are vital to us and somehow you managed to appear calm and always there with a smile on our return. Both of us wanted you to know how enormously we appreciated everything you did for us while we were in Canada and Japan . . .’ Whatever her troubles, Diana endeavoured to keep a calm face in front of her household. The same could not be said for Prince Charles whose complaining letters to his friends left no doubt of his feelings. By November he was openly appealing to his friends for help: ‘Frequently I feel nowadays that I’m in a kind of cage, pacing up and down in it and longing to be free. How awful incompatibility is, and how dreadfully destructive it can be for the players in this extraordinary drama. It has all the ingredients of a Greek tragedy . . . I fear I’m going to need every bit of help every now and then for which I feel rather ashamed . . .’¹⁵

Help was, of course, forthcoming. Charles’s friends rallied to his side against ‘that tiresome girl’ who had tried to banish them. The Brabournes, the Romseys, the Palmer-Tomkinsons and Nicholas Soames reappeared in his life. Conveniently, the Parker Bowleses had moved from Bolehyde Manor to Middlewich House, which was even nearer to Highgrove. Now, even according to his official biographer, Charles once again began to talk to Camilla on the telephone, and they started to see each other at Highgrove. Conveniently also, Andrew Parker Bowles had a new appointment which kept him in London during the week. It would be true, as Dimbleby wrote, that Camilla Parker Bowles helped Charles out of the depression and sense of hopelessness he felt in the face of what had by now become the tabloids’ persecution of him: ‘In Camilla Parker Bowles, the Prince found the warmth, the understanding and the steadiness for which he had always longed and had never been able to find with any other person . . .’¹⁶ Unfortunately it would also be true that, while indulging in his affair, the Prince did not treat Diana with any more consideration than he had before, his nagging guilt turning him even more against her.

Diana, who had long suspected that her husband had ‘gone back to his Lady’ if not physically but in his heart, had somehow received definite knowledge of his rapprochement with Camilla. At the Marivent Palace on Majorca, where she and Charles were guests of the King and Queen of Spain, Don Juan Carlos and Doña Sofia, Diana called in her new protection officer, Detective Ken Wharfe. She was alone. ‘Everyone’s gone out, the Prince has gone out painting. I don’t want to go out,’ she told Wharfe. ‘I just thought you ought to know one or two things.’ ‘Golly, such as?’ Wharfe asked. ‘And she said, “Well, you know about Camilla, don’t you?” Which I did,’ Wharfe commented, ‘because my colleagues had said ... and I said, “Well, you know, Ma’am, I don’t really want to get involved with this, it’s not really my remit.” And she said, “Well, it may not be, Ken, but I’m telling you because I might go into, really, mood swings and then you’ll know why. It’s not because of anybody else, it’s because of her and I don’t know how to deal with it.” So I said, “What do you mean, deal with it?” And she said, “Well, I don’t know how to deal with it. It’s there and I can’t do anything about it. It’s not as if it’s just re-emerged, Ken, this has actually been here ever since I’ve been married and I accepted that it was a long-term friend and thought that it would just fade away.” I said, “Well, have you spoken to your husband about it?” and she said, “Oh, he wouldn’t listen, he doesn’t listen, it’s just a waste of time ...”’¹⁷ Diana sulked and Charles flew off early to Balmoral, the only place where he felt at peace and protected from the press.

Born into a services family in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in 1958, James Hewitt was educated at Millfield School and Sandhurst and then joined the Life Guards and attained the rank of major. Tall, with thick, reddish blond wavy hair and an athletic figure, Hewitt had good manners, a boyish charm and was attractive and attentive to women. He was also a good polo player and it was when playing for the army against Prince Charles, representing the navy, at the polo ground at Tidworth, Wiltshire, home of the 13/18 Hussars, in 1981 that he had first set eyes on Diana. She was in tears, crying, she later told Hewitt, because of her fear that Charles did not love her as she loved him. He had seen her again at Buckingham Palace on the day of the Yorks’ wedding, when he was in charge of security. She was sitting on the stairs, barefoot, animated and natural, chatting to some members of staff, her knees scrunched up under her chin, her fingers playing with her bare toes. Hewitt was struck by her loveliness: he was soon to see her again and be introduced to her at a drinks party given by her lady-in-waiting, Hazel West, and her husband, Buckingham Palace comptroller Lieutenant Colonel George West, at their St James’s Palace apartment. Hewitt had become known to the courtiers through his acquaintance with Sir Martin Gilliatt, the Queen Mother’s private secretary, who occasionally invited him to drinks in his room at St James’s Palace. He was surprised at the invitation as it was a small party and he would not normally have expected to have been invited. Asked whether Diana might have had a hand in it, he replied, ‘Hazel more or less let that slip, I think. I got on quite well with Hazel and George but only in passing. They wouldn’t normally have asked me to one of their cocktail parties.’¹⁸

In conversation at the Wests’, Diana told him of her fear of horses since a childhood accident and that she would like to conquer her fear and take up riding again. Hewitt, as she must have known, was a staff captain in the Household Division with responsibilities for running the Household Division stables. A few days later she telephoned him and the lessons began from Knightsbridge Barracks, conveniently close to Kensington Palace: Diana was chaperoned by Hazel West, the only one of her ladies-in-waiting who could ride and also with whom she was on friendly, relaxed terms. Later, apparently, Diana told Hewitt that she had only started the riding lessons so that she could see him: there had been an immediate attraction between them from the start. Again, asked about this, Hewitt demurred: ‘I can’t see that anyone would find me attractive [but] if you analyse it she was very keen and she had a busy schedule and she managed to squeeze in seeing me and she remained frightened of horses and she didn’t really enjoy it ...’¹⁹

Hewitt was very much Diana’s type – she had a weakness for men in uniform – and not being in any way intellectual was definitely unthreatening. According to his biographer, Anna Pasternak, Hewitt ‘had learned to respect and cherish women physically’ and had become an expert lover, beginning with a woman eight years his senior, a pupil at his mother’s riding school. Perhaps Diana sensed this and, suffering from her sexual rejection by her husband, felt that Hewitt, kind and unthreatening, was what she needed. Within a few weeks she had fallen in love with Hewitt (as she was to admit in her 1995 Panorama interview – ‘Yes, I adored him ... Yes, I was in love with him’) and he with her. It became a risky physical affair, beginning with meetings at Kensington Palace, and going on to snatched weekends at Highgrove and visits to his mother’s house in Devon.

Diana was sexually inexperienced. Before her marriage, she told Hewitt, there had been a moment or moments of the ‘quick fumble’ nature, but, as he put it, she had been ‘more of a virgin’ than her contemporaries. There could have been no real sexual passion in her encounters with Charles, spoiled as he was by experienced older women like Kanga Tryon and in any case already deeply committed to Camilla Parker Bowles. According to Hewitt, after many conversations on the subject with Diana, he thought that Charles ‘held a torch for Camilla and he fancied her and he wanted to sleep with her . . . he obviously didn’t want to sleep with Diana and she needed that. You know the chemistry is not there and you fall out of love, you don’t fancy the person and you probably feel a bit hemmed in. I think you just sort of reject them.’ At one stage she suggested to Hewitt – and to other friends of hers – that Charles said he might be gay. ‘That was his excuse to her.’

Hewitt was subsequently ostracized by senior army people for his temerity in having an affair with the wife of the heir to the throne but, in fact, it is difficult to blame him for that. ‘She was utterly charming and natural and fresh and vivacious and rather lovely,’ he recalled. ‘There was a certain chemistry straight away. Unfortunate, but there we are.’²⁰ At first Diana managed to hide her vulnerability. ‘She hid that very well, actually, but I became more and more a shoulder to lean on, and she then learned to open up to me and express her concerns and her fears and her worries and the fact that she was feeling worthless, and that sort of thing,’ Hewitt said. ‘I mean very early on in the [officers’ mess] places where we met she would try and be happy, try and be positive but there was an underlying unhappiness which one had to address . . . and then you talk it through and make it better.’²¹

Eventually the subject of bulimia came up. Hewitt had never heard of it and when Diana confessed she had this problem – ‘I’d have liked to have seen the look on my face at the time ... I think I was pretty revolted by it,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t really discuss it in depth with her and she said, “Actually, when I’m with you I don’t have it”, so there was no need. I mean, she explained the whole thing and I learned to cope with it. It was a shock and she explained that when she was unhappy she would go to the fridge and gorge herself and then be sick and then do it again . .’ During the periods they spent together, it did not happen – ‘I spent twenty-four/forty-eight hours with her actually side by side so I would have known, I believe that. But then in the intervening days it would happen again when she was back in Kensington Palace, so it was horrid. And you could feel it in her body. You could feel the effects of it . . . the flesh wasn’t firm, the skin didn’t fit the flesh . . .’²² As the bulimia became less frequent her body shape improved, as did her breath, which had held the telltale symptoms.

Subsequently, although the affair became known to inner circles via the Royal Protection Squad officers, no attempt whatsoever was made to stop it. Early in the relationship, Charles and Diana had come to some accommodation, comparing diaries to avoid the risk of one being caught by the other, or, at the very least, to avoid meeting each other. Diana ‘told me that they had a diary conference every week so she knew where he was and he knew where she was’.²³ According to Hewitt, it was Diana who initiated the physical affair. ‘Strange as it may seem,’ he wrote, ‘I had no real option.’ Diana was emotionally and physically fragile, racked by bulimia and painfully thin. ‘She was a woman deeply damaged by rejection,’ he said. ‘Whether it was true or not, she saw herself as being wholly alone in a hostile world . . .’²⁴ At the Palace, she told Hewitt, the only person who could really help her was the Queen. ‘Things were so bad at one stage that she did summon up courage to make an appointment to explain the whole situation. Diana said she met with a very concerned response. The Queen promised she would do what she could to take some pressure off her and later newspaper editors were asked not to subject her to too much scrutiny. But when it came to the issue of her marriage to Charles, the Queen said there was nothing she could do. It would be wrong to intervene.’²⁵ As Diana was to put it later, when she asked the Queen what to do, the Queen replied, ‘I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.’²⁶

The misery caused by her failing marriage continued to gnaw at her self-esteem. There were moments of happiness when she was with Hewitt. ‘She’d come down and stay [at Hewitt’s mother’s house in Devon] and she’d arrive with laughter and smiles and love and then on a Sunday evening she would be a bit gloomy but very little other than fun and laughter and enjoyment in the intervening time,’ Hewitt recalled of their weekends together.²⁷ Over the period from the summer of 1986 until just before Hewitt left for a tour of duty with the army in Germany, their relationship restored Diana to a measure of health and happiness. ‘He was good for her,’ a close aide of Diana’s at the time said; ‘he made her happy.’²⁸