Chapter Eighteen

The Beast Redux

Get on TV and tell the world she’s a liar.

—Rupert Murdoch to Piers Morgan, editor of the News of the World, August 1994

NO SINGLE FACTOR shaped the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales more than the decisions they made to involve the media. Newspapers witnessed the royal marriage; television brokered the celebrity divorce. Absent Andrew Morton and the Sunday Times, Prince Charles would have never decided to give a disastrously revealing interview to Jonathan Dimbleby of the BBC. Absent Dimbleby, Diana would have never planned her retaliation by agreeing to give an incendiary, irrevocable interview to Martin Bashir of the BBC’s Panorama program. And together, the interviews locked the royal protagonists into a course of no return.

Why did Charles agree to the Dimbleby interview? For the same reason public figures always fall into this sort of trap: a belief that they can somehow clear things up once and for all. In Charles’s case it was an irresistible urge to explain himself after all the smears he had had to sit through from Diana—an eagerness to be “repositioned.” He could have—and should have—simply sat it out. He was, after all, the future King. His was one of the few jobs in a media-driven age that allowed for taking the “long view” in the matter of popularity. His sister’s example should have been instructive. The fewer interviews Princess Anne gave, the more credibility she accrued—by seeming not to need public approval, the Princess Royal slowly but surely acquired it. Charles’s weakness has always been a desire to be “understood,” and he assumed that, once understood, he would also be loved. The Dimbleby project—a two-pronged effort, involving both a film and an authorized biography by one of the BBC’s most distinguished journalists—would be the cornerstone of a public relations offensive that would coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales. It bolstered a new policy of the Prince’s: making himself available for engagements at short notice, as a way of showing the world that he was as sensitive as his cash cow wife. He announced he was giving up polo (a good excuse, too, for the dispatch of his polo manager, Fergie’s father, whose imbroglio in a call-girl scandal had been adding to bad royal karma). A friend of the Prince’s strategically leaked it to the The Sun that Charles would use the time formerly spent on polo to see more of the boys during their summer holidays. Nice.

It’s easy to see why Charles became enamored of the idea of the rumpled, serious Dimbleby. The decision had its own mad integrity. Charles liked Dimbleby for precisely the reason he was dangerous. No one could say he was a toady. As an interviewer he is prosecutorial and anti-Establishment. Yet he is also a son of Richard Dimbleby, who was to the BBC what Walter Cronkite was to CBS. Jonathan Dimbleby is a member of a media dynasty just as Charles is heir to a royal one. Dimbleby, like Charles, is a holder of green views; in fact, he runs an organic farm of his own, near Bath. Charles began discussions with him in the summer of 1992 when he was still reeling from the Morton business. The two men bonded over long, philosophical talks as they tramped around Highgrove. The Prince, skeptical at first, was persuaded by these talks to provide what Dimbleby tells us are “many thousands of the letters which he has written assiduously since childhood”—and pages of his voluminous diaries. Charles also green-lighted cooperation from his closest friends and “some relatives.” In short, too much information—way too much. Here was something else the Prince and Princess shared: the blindness of privilege, an inability to see a decision from any perspective but their own.

Dickie Arbiter, the savvy voice in the press office at Buckingham Palace, had originally seen the twenty-fifth-anniversary film idea as something bland and harmless. He was in the process of setting up such a project when the Prince’s private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, told him, “The Prince has decided he wants to do something different: Dimbleby! What do you think?” Arbiter told him, “I think it sucks. It’s going to be warts and all.” But Aylard, a yes-man to his shiny shoes, replied, “That’s what he wants.”

“It still sucks,” Arbiter retorted. A close aide to the Prince also sounded out Max Hastings, a rural friend of Charles’s as well as the editor of the Royal-friendly Daily Telegraph, about the Dimbleby idea. “Absolute madness,” Hastings told him. “There’s only one thing anybody’s going to want to hear about it, and that’s the marriage and the consequences will be disastrous.” “But we’ve got to do something,” the aide said, and Hastings replied, “But this is the fundamental huge mistake at the heart of all your thinking—that this is a sort of public war which can be waged by public relations means.”

The June TV interview would precede the book. This was another mistake, because any corrective nuances in the 600-page volume would be too late to have any salutary impact by the time it lumbered out in October. Diana, for her part, awaited the release of both in trepidation. She knew this would be Charles’s statement as much as Morton’s had been hers.

“Charles: The Private Man, The Public Role” aired on June 29, 1994, heralded by a metaphor for its reception: a few hours earlier, a Queen’s Flight jet with Charles at the controls had overshot the runway on the Hebridean island of Islay and landed nose down in a bog.

Just as Dimbleby had promised, he gave plenty of airtime for the Prince’s philanthropy and diplomacy. He captured something touching about Charles by showing his awkward attempts to communicate with a bunch of underprivileged kids his Trust had sent to a holiday camp and his struggle to get on the wavelength of the residents of a decrepit public housing project in Birmingham. In a Bedouin tent on the edge of the Arabian Desert, the Prince of Wales was pictured sipping camel’s milk from a plastic cup; in Mexico, he faced down a plate of mushy lamb. “I always dread having something like that in case it is laced with chilis, which then rather ruins the rest of your day,” the Prince remarked. He was seen roaming the Scottish hills with William and Harry, a fair redress of the popular alternative picture of the heartless cad and deficient father of the Morton/Diana concoction.

Dimbleby’s “Charles” was the Prince his friends know: a slightly scatty, well-meaning chap with a self-deprecating sense of humor and some oddball ideas. His offhand suggestion on the program that Britain’s armed forces should become international mercenaries was one of several that made you glad we have seen the end of the Divine Right of Kings. And his statement that contrary to the small matter of his Coronation Oath he wanted to be “Defender of Faith, not the Faith,” created an ecclesiastical shit storm in the Church of England that continued for many weeks. But few really cared about any of that.

What almost everybody cared about was what Dickie Arbiter had feared. Most of the program was dominated by questions about the Prince’s marriage. Three quarters of the way through the interview, on a chintz-covered sofa at Highgrove, Dimbleby asked Charles whether after he married Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 he had tried to be “faithful and honorable” to his wife. “Yes, absolutely,” replied the Prince. Then he added the killer kicker: “Until it became irretrievably broken down, us having both tried.”

Wham! There it was: CHARLES: I CHEATED ON DIANA—the official confirmation, right from the royal horse’s mouth, contradicting years of Palace lies to the press.

Dimbleby bore ahead with a possible reason for this “breakdown.” “You were, because of your relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles from the beginning, persistently unfaithful to your wife and thus caused the breakdown?”

Hours of media training and preparation with Aylard and Arbiter elicited this portrait of a conscience on the march:

Well I, the trouble is, you see, that these things—again, as I was saying earlier—are so personal, that it’s difficult to know quite how to, you know, to talk about these things in front of everybody, and obviously I don’t think many people would want to. But I mean, all I can say is, there’s been so much of this speculation and feeding on every other kind of speculation so it all becomes bigger and bigger. But all I can say is, um, that, I mean, there is no truth in, in so much of this speculation. And Mrs. Parker Bowles is a great friend of mine, and I have a large number of friends. I am terribly lucky to have so many friends who I think are wonderful and make the whole difference to my life, which would become intolerable otherwise.

And she has been a friend of mine for a very long time and, along with other friends, and will be continue to be a friend for a very long time. And I think also most people, probably, would, would, realize that when your marriages break down, awful and miserable as that is, that, so often you know, it is your friends who are the most important and helpful and understanding and encouraging—otherwise you would go stark, raving mad. And that’s what friends are for.

“It’s so difficult to know how to play the media,” Charles said to Dimbleby.” I’m not very good at being a performing monkey.”

I’ll say.

Blundering candor and tortured obfuscation are a lethal combination. Dickie Arbiter did not know which was worse, the sound bite about adultery or the scene where Charles and Dimbleby are sitting among the choir stools of Westminster Abbey and Dimbleby asks, “Are you going to be King and the Heir to the Throne?”—and Charles dithers. In royal terms, the moment was as much of a disqualifier as Teddy Kennedy’s gift to his opponent in the 1980 election campaign when he could not immediately give CBS’s Roger Mudd an answer as to why he wanted to be President of the United States.

The Queen’s response to Dimbleby, according to Gyles Brandreth, was to “sigh, purse her lips, and murmur, ‘So it’s come to this.’” Sir Robert Fellowes was said to be so appalled he was “fit to be tied.” It is an index of the changed moral climate in Britain since the abdication that while the pompous commentariat went to town lecturing Charles about his morals, much of the public’s overwhelmingly negative reaction was based not on the adultery itself but on the Prince’s dumb naïveté in admitting it. “He is not the first royal to be unfaithful,” said the Daily Mirror. “But he is the first to appear before 25 million of his subjects to confess.”

The Prince’s blunder was the best thing that had happened to Diana in a year. Things had not been going well since she bowed out with her famous “retirement” speech in December 1993. Far from the paps respecting her decision and leaving her alone, she was now not just a princess. She was the ultimate forbidden fruit.

By formally withdrawing from public life, the Princess had increased the price of a Diana photograph by 25 percent. A set of pictures of Diana out shopping might bring up to £2,000. Diana in a bathing suit was worth £10,000, and that was only for UK rights—a good set of pictures of Garbo Di would command three times as much abroad as it did at home. She was top of the list as a cash cow.

A new breed of British celebrity magazine pushed demand even higher. I call them “fabloids,” because they combine the tabloid hunger for sensation with the requirement to always look fabulous. The softer-angled OK! and Hello!—English equivalents of In Touch and Us—were now competing with raunchier newcomers and the innumerable magazines that came with an exploding market of weekend newspapers.

In the nineties, a picture of Diana on the front page of a glossy magazine guaranteed a sales lift of at least 10 percent. The fact that in the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century the sales-hungry tabloid Daily Express still features Diana pictures and stories almost every Monday (Sunday is often a quiet day for news) is evidence of the amazing endurance of the Diana factor.

The irony was that by cutting back on her charitable commitments, Diana had put her halo in hock—and thereby had made intrusion more defensible. By refusing to replace Ken Wharfe with another police protection officer unless she was with the boys—on the grounds that all the cops were spies—she multiplied the risks. There was no one now between the pursuers and the pursued.

“Once she stopped having a police guard it was much more difficult for her,” acknowledges the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay, who became her new media champion. “She ran a daily gauntlet. They were parked in Kensington Court with their two-way radios and scanners monitoring her mobile phone calls.”

The language got worse, too. Jasper Conran recalls: “I had lunch with her once at San Lorenzo and I said ‘how do you put up with it? This is unbearable.’ She would go out, they used to say awful things to get a reaction, ‘Diana you are a cunt,’ horrible things. It would make her cry.”

The burly Wharfe had once wrestled an especially intrusive French photo hound to the ground in an incident on holiday known as the “battle of Lech.” But without Wharfe, Diana’s trip there in 1994 was ruined by a pap who snagged invasive pictures of her in a bikini, sun-bathing on her balcony. She was sighted, with her boys, weeping in the streets of Zurs.

In contrast, at a social event in California in the months following the Dimbleby broadcast, I was struck by how remote Charles seemed from any real conflict. It was a reception in Cerritos, Los Angeles, for the touring Royal Shakespeare Company, of which the Prince is patron. As the editor of The New Yorker at the time, I was listed as a host of the first-night dinner. Except for the fact that the Prince cracked his knuckles all through the performance of Henry VI, he seemed almost preternaturally serene. “Is it disconcerting watching your ancestors murdering each other, Sir?” I asked during the intermission. “They’re only distant relations” was his typically Charlesian reply. “As a matter of fact,” he said, consulting his program notes, “I think I am descended from Vlad the Impaler, that appalling Balkan horror.”

To be around Prince Charles is to see that very little is allowed to penetrate the royal shell. His life is swaddled round the clock by a squadron of brisk, officer-class apparatchiks whose job is to answer his whims and keep his spirits up. “I get the most terrific people,” he said to me. “They flake out after two years but they miss it, don’t they?” he added, turning to the crisp, attentive figure of his deputy private secretary, Sir Stephen Lamport.

“Definitely, Sir,” replied Lamport.

“I mean all the excitement,” said Charles.

“The excitement, Sir, yes,” said Lamport.

At one point I found myself with the Prince in one of those unpredictable eddies of silence that happen at a big social event. “They’re strange, aren’t they, in L.A.?” the Prince mused, cracking his knuckles again. “I mean, they all want to go to bed at 9. At the premiere of ‘Frankenstein’ they made me say something, so I was all prepared, you know, to wax on about the British film industry. But they made me do it before dinner because everyone just pushed off in their cars.” I explained that Hollywood, like New York, is all about work. The glamour is the myth. “Surreal isn’t it?” he said. No, I wanted to say to the Prince who fell to earth, you are the surreal one.

It’s possible, since he declined to read the newspapers anymore, that Charles didn’t even notice that Diana thoroughly upstaged him the night of the Dimbleby broadcast. But everybody else did. At about the moment the Prince of Wales was confessing his adultery on national TV, his wife was stepping out of a limo at Vanity Fair’s annual June fund-raising event for the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, wearing what fashion editors later called among themselves “her fuck-you dress,” a short, sexy, off-the-shoulder black chiffon number with a scarf panel wafting from the waist and black silk high-heeled Manolo Blahnik shoes. Come and get it! She had declined the invitation until two days before the event, when news of the adultery quote began to leak in promotions for the broadcast. That’s when one of the gala’s organizers, an old family friend of Diana’s, got a surprise phone call: “She said she wanted to come after all. I said, ‘What are you up to?’ And she said, ‘You’ll see.’” All became clear when the friend realized the gala was the same night as Dimbleby.

The three-deep photographers went crazy as Diana deftly paused before each of them on Vanity Fair’s red carpet. The dress’s previously obscure Greek designer, Christina Strombolian, told the fashion commentator Georgina Howell that the Princess “chose not to play the scene like Odette, innocent in white. She was clearly angry. She played it like Odile, in black. She wore bright red nail enamel, which we had never seen her do before. She was saying, ‘Let’s be wicked tonight!’” The pictures of her that blew Charles off the front pages the next morning provided the perfect context for discussing the only line in the Dimbleby broadcast that anyone remembered—the one about adultery. Here was, as The Sun put it, “The Thrilla He Left to Woo Camilla.”

What a shame Diana couldn’t have left it that way. At that golden moment, she was so far up on the high ground she might as well have been on Mount Olympus. As Charles floundered in a mess of his own making, Diana was proud that she was the only member of the Royal Family who understood the black arts of PR. And she was impatient with the Palace’s lack of understanding, as she liked to say, of how to “use” her. Nothing would have pleased her more than to be consulted by the Palace about the Royal Family’s imagery. It would have been smart, for instance, if Prince Philip had brought her into the discussions he chaired twice a year known as The Way Ahead Group, set up in the early nineties as a task force to ensure the monarchy’s survival and reshape its agenda for the twenty-first century.

Diana had made it her business to know every editor and chairman of every important media outlet—just as, back when she was a single girl, she had gotten to know the members of the royal Rat Pack who stalked her. She solidified her influence at the Mail by cultivating not just Kay but a separate relationship with his boss, David English, editor and chief executive of Associated Newspapers. When Mark Bolland joined Charles’s staff in 1996 to help rescue the Prince’s image from the Dimbleby debacle, calling on David English was one of the first things he did. How on earth, Bolland wanted to know, could he reposition the Prince more favorably with the Daily Mail’s readers? English corrected him: “One of your jobs is to teach the Prince of Wales that we were never against him, we were just for Diana…It was a commercial decision. Diana sells newspapers. Charles doesn’t.”

“The Prince found that totally depressing,” Bolland says. “He felt he was always doing this—remarketing himself to the press, doing the rounds of the newspaper editors to try and ingratiate himself. He said, ‘When I was young I did all this, but what’s the point? They still believe all the terrible things Diana says about me.’”

The Princess had no such reticence about her own media campaign. She used the lure of lunch à deux at Kensington Palace to arrange strategic meetings with key newspaper editors. An encounter with the Princess on her own turf became a full-on, multimedia experience combining all she had learned and wanted to project. “Everything went into the performance of Being Diana,” says Tatler magazine editor Geordie Greig, whose sister Laura was one of the original Coleherne courtiers. “When you met her you never felt more seduced, more glamorous, more famous, more intoxicated. Before she was famous she was an uninteresting schoolgirl—nice, polite, uninquiring, uninspiring. What made her change was being royal, rich, famous, watched, desired.” The most effective device in her seduction armory was to flatter the person she wished to manipulate with an indiscretion that made him or her feel (a) favored and (b) protective, as if her fragile privacy was suddenly in his or her (usually his) hands. That “instinct for co-option” again. “What’s it like, being Diana?”News of the World editor Piers Morgan asked her over their first KP lunch in 1996. “Oh, God,” she replied. “Let’s face it, even I have had enough of Diana now—and I am Diana.” Then, says Morgan, she nestled into the sofa, “radiating a surprisingly high degree of sexual allure.”

Diana never really understood that the willingness of the Daily Mail’s David English or the News of the World’s Piers Morgan to “back her” did not include any willingness to withhold a sexy story when they had one. Our heroine was not a strategist, as we have noted. Each battle she fought was seen as a discrete incident of any given day’s guerrilla warfare. I will do this picture to annoy that paper that did the mean one of me yesterday. I will give this story to that journalist to stave off the one that’s coming on Wednesday. She was better informed than the highest-paid flak on the machinery of her coverage on any hour of any day, but lacked the concentration to find its compass. And her belief that somehow the press were “hers” made every foreseeable revelation a nerve-racking ordeal.

Having laughed off the warning of her financial adviser Joseph Sanders about her obsessive pursuit of Oliver Hoare, she kept on phoning her elusive lover. The police were discreet about the harassment for months, but in the media climate of the nineties it was too good a story to stay leakproof for long. Toward the end of August 1994, eight months after the police warning, she was alarmed to be told by the other Lord Stevens, the owner of the group that published the Express newspapers, that the Sunday Express had heard about the calls to Hoare. Lord Stevens, whose Italian-Russian wife Maritza was one of Diana’s circle of glamorous foreigners, killed the story in his newspaper, but Diana knew it would be shopped around. She always believed the tipster came from “my husband’s side,” as she liked to call Charles’s aides then.

On Saturday, August 20, shortly after Stevens suppressed the story in the Express, the News of the World’s chief reporter had news for Piers Morgan. “Got a rather big one here, boss,” Gary Jones told Morgan. “Diana’s a phone sex pest.” The paper called Hoare for a comment for next day’s story. He was panicked into admitting “consoling conversations” with the Princess. He must have called Diana right away, since she immediately summoned her white knight, the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay, to give him her side of the story. Their friendliness had reached the point of inviting gossip about a closer relationship than source and journalist. Kay’s tips from Kensington Palace came so thick and fast, the rest of the press took to staking him out for leads to Diana’s whereabouts. Kay admits today that Paul Dacre, who succeeded David English as editor of the Mail in 1992, told Kay to take care. “I was in danger of becoming the story,” he says. On Saturday afternoon, just as Morgan was getting ready to break the phone-pest scandal in Sunday’s News of the World, Kay picked up the Princess at a rendezvous point near Paddington Station and drove her around for three hours while simultaneously absorbing her creative narrative about a boy at the Hoares’ son’s school who was the real “source” of the nuisance calls.

A page-one story headlined “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” appeared under Kay’s byline in Monday’s Daily Mail as the instant rebuttal of Morgan’s “Di’s Cranky Calls to Married Tycoon” salvo in the News of the World. The best line in Kay’s story was Diana’s “I don’t even know how to use a parking meter, let alone a phone box”—an artful bit of dumb-blonde positioning. She had produced a slew of fake diary dates to prove she was otherwise engaged when she was said to be talking to Hoare. (Her former chef Mervyn Wycherley tells me he has the menu books that show that when she said she was out, she was actually home.)

At first, the counteroffensive seemed to be working. News bulletins instantly started switching from the substance of the News of the World scoop to Diana’s furious Daily Mail denunciation. Morgan admits in his diary he was in “a cold sweat”: “I got up at 6 a.m. and read the Mail. It’s hideous, a full denial in every way and so gut wrenchingly emotive I can see no way of surviving this if we’ve got it wrong.”

What had Paul Johnson advised Diana? No. 1: STOP TALKING TO THE PRESS. Only a fool, he might have added, has herself as her own spin doctor. Her going to Kay and the Daily Mail had the effect, after the initial shock, of sending the pugnacious Morgan into overdrive. Worse, she had stirred his boss into taking an interest. Morgan was in the shower when Rupert Murdoch called him. On the phone from New York, the media mogul told his editor, “The poor girl is cracking up. Give her a bit of peace.”

Just kidding.

What Murdoch actually said was “Hi, Piers. I can’t really talk for long but I just wanted you to know your story is one hundred percent bang on. Can’t tell you how I know. So get on TV and tell the world she’s a liar!” Right, thought Morgan, she’s going to get it now. As Oliver Hoare and his wife retreated into dignified silence, the story played all summer in a dreadful point-counterpoint of tabloid warfare.

The net result was that the radiant Diana of the Serpentine was rendered as a nutcase who preyed on other women’s husbands. The episode had one benefit. She was so furious that Hoare hadn’t been willing to lie on her behalf that she finally cut him off. Richard Kay dropped the guillotine in the Mail in February 1995: “The truth is she views Hoare as a pretty spineless creature. Ever since his failure to help her over the nuisance calls business, the friendship has been a one-way street. He is very much more besotted with her than she is with him.”

Stuff happens. The other man in her life could not be disposed of so easily. James Hewitt, like Rasputin, surfaced again—and again. Now that the Waleses were on a clear path to divorce, Diana didn’t need any more stories that impugned her image as a scorned wife. The once-chivalrous Major Hewitt was not as clever as Rasputin. That was part of the trouble. He was not so much malicious as gullible. Given the treacheries, big and small, that followed in the wake of Diana’s failed marriage, you could argue that Hewitt was remarkably restrained until he was broke. From the moment he became Diana’s suspected lover in 1991, he had been trailed, taped, and photographed wherever he went, fending off tabloid offers of up to half a million pounds to tell his story. Diana seems to have forgotten how upsetting it is to be pursued by the media without PR machinery. In a sense, she had thrown Hewitt to the wolves, just as she had been thrown to the wolves in the siege of Coleherne Court. In 1994, when he was dumped out of the Army with an estimated £40,000 in severance pay and a £6,600-a-year pension, he was an easy mark for a smiling woman with a good line. He succumbed to the reportorial wiles of Anna Pasternak of the Daily Express in February, giving her a series of interviews that hinted at an affair without going so far as to confirm it. Pasternak then secured Hewitt’s cooperation to rush out her book Princess in Love, based on Diana’s letters giving all the torrid, explicit details and written with unintentional irony as a Barbara Cartland–style romance. For his dumb part in it, Hewitt received a not-so-dumb £300,000.

The news of Hewitt’s betrayal and the announcement of publication of Princess in Love in October 1994 was something Diana did not need. She was already in a state of anxiety about the imminent 600-page follow-up tome by Dimbleby, also to be published in October. (Among the book’s many grenades would be Charles’s hurtful assertion that he had never loved her.) She feared that Pasternak’s portrayal of her as a persistent adulteress would sully her reputation just when she was trying to build her defenses. On the day Princess in Love arrived in bookstores, in the first week of October, Diana came red-eyed to Simone Simmons’s healing session. “I hope his cock shrivels up!” she shouted. Hewitt’s wounding perfidy was added to her list of constant laments, but she was frightened, too. One of her terrors was how the Queen would react to the tell-all. It was a fear that Hewitt shared. Like some throwback to the lover of Anne Boleyn, he became obsessed by the fact that his affair with the wife of the heir to the throne made him guilty under the Treason Act of 1351 (still in force at the time and carrying the death penalty). He hid out from the press at the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson’s house and babbled his fears that like Barry Mannakee he might end up dead.

Four hundred years ago, Hewitt would surely have been beheaded by the royal axman; today the press has taken over that duty. In a peculiarly vicious and long-playing onslaught, the tabloids branded Hewitt the Love Rat, a shaming moniker that would stick to him even after he reclaimed a secondary notoriety ten years later in the twilight zone of reality TV.

Hewitt’s revelations caused the Queen less grief than Diana had feared; Major Hewitt and his silly book was a detail to Her Majesty in the melee of family secrets going down. She was too preoccupied with her son’s folly in giving Dimbleby such access to his diaries and private life. Charles had even allowed Dimbleby to see a number of official documents without consulting the Queen. She was so irate when she learned of it that she demanded their return forthwith.

It was the first time the Queen had been dragged into the confessional culture that seemed to have engulfed everybody, including the heir to the throne. It was well known that Charles, like Diana with Morton, had confirmed all Dimbleby’s facts for accuracy. The Queen did not appreciate the portrayal of herself as “detached,” of Prince Philip as “inexplicably harsh,” and of both of them as “unable or unwilling” to bestow on Charles “the affection and appreciation he required.” Dimbleby’s representation of Charles’s childhood left them winded with annoyance. “I’ve never discussed private matters,” snapped Prince Philip, questioned at the start of a historic visit to Russia with the Sovereign. “I don’t think the Queen has either. Very few members of the family have.”

In all the fallout, one consequence of Dimbleby’s efforts that is often overlooked was the demise of the marriage of Andrew and Camilla Parker Bowles. For reasons of habit, face, money, and religion (Andrew was Roman Catholic), the Parker Bowleses would have preferred to go on being married. The Brigadier had endured provocation over the years about his wife’s entanglement with the Prince of Wales. At Ascot after the Morton book came out, Parker Bowles was ribbed by the Duke of Marlborough’s brother, Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill, with the jocular cry of “Ernest Simpson, Ernest Simpson, why don’t you join us over here, Ernest?” It was a reference to Mrs. Simpson’s cuckolded husband, but at least such mockery had been confined to his own circle. There had always been what one friend of Andrew’s calls “a cigarette paper’s width of doubt” about the Parker Bowleses’ marital arrangement. Not anymore. He filed for a divorce. In doing so, he accelerated the emotional momentum that undermined any slim hopes Diana had to retrieve her own marriage.

“The great birthday party of Sarah Keswick has taken place at the Ritz,” Woodrow Wyatt wrote in his diary on October 22, 1995. “Camilla came to be with Prince Charles there. She is now acknowledged publicly as his mistress.”

At the end of the month, Diana was summoned to a meeting with the Queen and Prince Philip to discuss her future. A close adviser of the Princess tells me that the following exchange took place between Diana and her father-in-law: “If you don’t behave, my girl,” Philip told her, “we’ll take your title away.” “My title is a lot older than yours, Philip,” Earl Spencer’s daughter replied.

The divorce war had begun in earnest. Two weeks later, the Princess of Wales sat down at Kensington Palace to record an interview with Martin Bashir of Panorama, the BBC’s flagship news show. The date, as it happened, was November 5—Guy Fawkes Day, when bonfires and fireworks commemorate the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a thwarted attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament and the King of England.