The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham Read Free Book Online Page A

Mountbatten, known affectionately around the palace as the biggest queen in the royal family, had surrounded Charles with homosexuals during the period when he had been entrusted by Queen Elizabeth with her eldest son’s social upbringing. Diana did not like the clique that was similarly intended to be around her two sons and had systematically got rid of over forty gay members of her husband’s staff by forcing resignations or personally firing them. She may have then had a reactionary hostility toward homosexuality that was later to transform in maturity to the affection for some gay men and her public support for HIV victims, but whatever the reason, the prince’s aides feared her and her legendary hot temper.
    Diana in a fury became a screaming, door-slamming, foot-stamping harridan. Charles was determinedly and infuriatingly nonconfrontational. He would refuse to answer her questions or respond to her accusations, just turning his back and walking away from the fracas, leaving Diana even more spitting mad. “Above all else, she hated to be ignored,” said her former private secretary Patrick Jephson.
    Wendy Berry, their Highgrove housekeeper, remembered, “The prince’s indifference would have been crushing for anyone. He was so aloof and uncaring. I began to see the absolute desperation and frustration felt by both the prince and the princess, having to live within a marriage that was patently falling apart at the seams.”
    During their most blistering rows they didn’t care who heard them—even the children—and their language was straight from the gutter. Not for the first time the Highgrove staff watched as Prince Charles stormed out of the front door, jumped into his car and roared away down the drive. Diana was left at an open window screaming, “You’re a shit, Charles, an absolute shit.”
    On another occasion she threw a teapot at him and marched away yelling, “You’re a fucking animal, Charles, and I hate you.”
    Once, when she had answered him back with an expletive, he threw a wooden bootjack at her and shouted, “How dare you speak to me like that? Do you know who I am?” At times like this he could scarcely contain himself. American author Kitty Kelly reported that after one difficult exchange he stalked out of the room, strode into the bathroom, ripped the porcelain hand basin from the wall and smashed it on the floor. “You do understand, don’t you? Don’t you?” he asked his wide-eyed valet. Ken Stronach simply nodded.
    It both baffled and angered Charles that this sick, unstable and remarkably unsophisticated woman—which is what he truly considered her to be—could be the object of such universal public adulation. With seemingly so little effort she could manipulate the crowds who were to be his, and not her, future subjects. The public and press were aware only of Diana—they wanted only her photograph, her reaction and her attention. In three years she had single-handedly resurrected the Windsors’ tarnished image and virtually nonexistent popularity, and yet the royal family offered her nothing in return but their criticism—and secretly their envy.
    Jealousy and resentment of her phenomenal success as the principal royal attraction already colored Charles’s attitude toward Diana, and it began to affect him in other ways too, principally his growing dependence on Camilla who was his only true confidante on the subject of Diana and the only one capable of restoring his battered ego when the public repeatedly rejected him in favor of the princess. Charles’s resentment was shared by several of his aides and other royal courtiers at Buckingham Palace, who were beginning to realize that Princess Diana could be a much greater threat to the stability of the royal family than anyone had so far realized.
    It was in 1986, led, as often happened, by Daily Mirror royal correspondent James Whittaker, that the press finally became concerned about Diana’s wasting figure. This grew