For all the millions of words that have been written about the People's Princess, no one has yet penetrated palace walls to reveal what has really happened to the Royal Family she left behind ten years ago. Until now. In the manner of his No. 1 New York Times bestsellers The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died, as well as such other bestsellers as his Jack and Jackie, Jackie After Jack, and Diana's Boys, Christopher Andersen (who was consulted by Operation Paget, Scotland Yard's official inquiry into Diana's Death) draws on important new sources to paint the first full portrait of a Royal Family still haunted by the ghost of Diana.
All the compelling elements of a true dynastic saga are here: power, sex, wealth, intrigue, betrayal, tragedy, and scandal. But so, too, is the Princess's legacy of love and compassion‹alive in the sons who have grown to manhood and are now forging a legacy of their own.
Among After Diana's many stunning revelations:
The many times Diana predicted with uncanny accuracy how she would die, why she feared for Camilla's life as well as her own -- and the surprising, never-before-revealed identity of the woman Diana really felt might one day be Queen.
New details about the hours and days after Diana's death: Charles's reaction the moment he saw Diana's body, how Camilla dealt with suddenly becoming the most hated woman in the world, and her secret eight-year campaign to replace Diana.
How William and Harry have dealt with the public and private pressures -- the troubling influence of theirsubstance-abusing aristocrat friends; from drugs to Nazi uniforms to lap dances and barroom brawls, fresh details about the Princes' wild behavior and the demons that still haunt them.
How Charles cheated on Camilla as well as Diana, and the intriguing other women in the Prince of Wales's life.
Despite Charles's heated denials, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to make Camilla Queen -- and the Palace power struggle that rages today.
Inside Operation Paget, Scotland Yard's ongoing probe into Diana's death -- why, ten years after, investigators were still shocked by what they found.
The day Charles was asked point-blank by Scotland Yard if he killed his wife -- and what he said.
The many beautiful young women in the lives of William and Harry over the past ten years -- including Will's longtime love Kate Middleton, her chances of one day becoming Queen, and why he fears she may meet the same fate as his mother.
William's obsession with speed, Harry's hunger for risk-taking, and a shared thirst for battle that could lead both Princes to combat in Iraq.
New information on whether the Queen plans to step aside and who she really wants to see succeed her on the throne.
Sometimes heartbreaking, often inspiring, always riveting, After Diana is more than just the first comprehensive, compelling biography of the House of Windsor as it is today. It is a bittersweet tale of love, loss, duty, and destiny. It is the story of a family.
He took a few steps toward the body, gasped, then reeled back as if struck by an unseen hand. Beatrice Humbert, the diminutive head nurse at Paris's Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, began to reach out to steady Prince Charles but stopped herself as he regained his composure. "He was absolutely white," she recalled, "as if he could not believe what he was seeing."
Humbert understood too well. Ever since Princess Diana had been brought in from the operating room where surgeons had tried in vain to save her, nearly everyone who walked into the second-floor room with its bright, freshly painted robin's egg blue walls struggled to keep from fainting. "It was just too much to take in," Humbert said, "too much, too much...." Charles was "crushed," said another nurse on the scene, Jeanne Lecorcher.
"I had always thought of him and all the royals as very cold and unfeeling, and like everyone else I knew that he really loved Camilla. So I was very impressed by how emotional the Prince became. Very impressed."
No one was more surprised by this reaction than Charles. He thought he had had ample time to rebound from the initial shock. After all, it had been thirteen hours since he was awakened at Balmoral Castle in Scotland with the shocking news that his ex-wife had been injured and her lover, Dodi Fayed, killed in a Paris car crash. The first person Charles called was not the Queen, who was also at Balmoral enjoying the summer holiday with her children and grandchildren, but his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. As she had done so many times over the years, Camilla reassured Charles that all would be fine. Diana was a young woman, Camilla pointed out, and they both agreed that she was in the best physical shape of her life; whatever her injuries, she was bound to pull through.
But she didn't. "My God, Charles," Camilla said, weeping, when he called back with the terrible news. "The boys!" She then grabbed a pack of cigarettes off the nightstand, lit up, and puffed away nervously as her lover sobbed over the phone. It was to be expected that Charles would be devastated over the loss of his sons' mother. They agreed that it would do no good to wake William and Harry now; best to let them get their last good night's sleep before hearing the news.
Charles and Camilla were also weeping for another, less selfless reason. "My darling," Charles asked her through his tears, "what is going to happen to us now?"
In the nearly five years since then-Prime Minister John Major announced before the House of Commons that the Prince and Princess of Wales were officially separating, the public had shown signs of finally warming to the long-despised Camilla. Just a few weeks earlier, in the wake of a highly publicized fiftieth birthday party Charles threw for Camilla, surveys showed that 68 percent of Britons thought it was time for the couple to marry.
With Diana and her new Egyptian-born boyfriend grabbing headlines that summer, Charles was more confident than ever that the tide was about to turn in Camilla's favor. On September 13, Camilla was to keep up the momentum by cohosting a celebrity-packed charity ball to benefit the National Osteoporosis Society. It was to be their debut as a couple at a major public event.
The ball was immediately canceled on news of Diana's death, as were the couple's plans to vacation at Balmoral in late September. In a single stroke, the chances of their ever marrying were obliterated. "If Charles intended at some future time to marry the woman who has been his mistress for twenty-five years," the Daily Mail wasted no time editorializing, "he knows, and Camilla knows, that this must now be put off to a date so far in the distance that some of their circle are actually using the word 'forever.'"
Once again Camilla, who finally divorced her husband Andrew Parker Bowles in 1995, had become the most hated woman in the realm. After all, it was Camilla who had destroyed the Prince of Wales's marriage and driven the much-admired Diana to suicidal despair. "They've got to blame someone," Camilla told one of her neighbors in Wiltshire, where she lived at Raymill, a converted mill house. "That someone is going to be me, I'm afraid."
Raymill, which Camilla had purchased for $1.3 million after her divorce, was conveniently situated just sixteen miles from Highgrove, the Prince's country residence outside of London. "If Camilla's car is seen near Highgrove for the next six months," said veteran journalist Judy Wade, "it could be the end of them. The public simply won't tolerate it." Toward that end, Charles and Camilla made a pact not to be seen together in public for the foreseeable future.
Camilla would indeed be held accountable for ruining Diana's marriage and causing the Princess untold heartache. But blame for the crash would initially-and falsely-be laid at the feet of overzealous paparazzi who pursued Dodi and Diana into the Alma Tunnel.
Camilla was not entirely convinced. "Are they certain it was just an accident, Charles?" Camilla asked him point-blank. "Could it have been intentional?"
"Whatever are you talking about?" Charles shot back. "Those bloody reporters are responsible."
While Camilla would never raise the issue again, Dodi's father was determined to. The flamboyant tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed, who counted among his trophy properties Harrods Department Store in London and Paris's Ritz Hotel, had long been at odds with Britain's establishment. The moment he received word of the crash at his palatial country house in Oxted, Surrey, Al Fayed echoed Camilla's sentiments: "Accident? Do you really think it was an accident?"
In the Arab world, this theory soon gained traction. Predictably, Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi wasted no time pointing a finger at both the English and the French for "arranging" the accident. But even respected journalists like Anis Mansour cried conspiracy. "The British intelligence service killed them," Mansour wrote. "They could not have let the mother of the future king marry a Muslim Arab."
Diana herself would have found it hard to believe. As a longtime thorn in the side of the monarchy and more recently the world's most visible crusader against the deployment of land mines, the Princess had made enemies of entire governments-including, it was suggested, her own. She had always numbered among her sworn enemies the faceless "Men in Gray" who wielded immense power behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace. But even more troubling, Diana had been warned that there were also rogue elements inside Britain's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies-MI5 and MI6-who deeply resented the idea of a future king's mother being romantically involved with a Muslim.
In 1995, after dismissing her royal bodyguards, Diana was driving alone through London behind the wheel of her green Audi convertible when she approached a traffic light. She put her foot on the brake, but nothing happened. Frantic, she kept slamming the brakes as the car rolled into the intersection. Unharmed, she jumped out of the car and took a cab back to Kensington Palace. Then she dashed off a note to her friends Elsa Bowker, Lucia Flecha de Lima, Simone Simmons, and Lady Annabel Goldsmith. "The brakes of my car have been tampered with," Diana wrote. "If something does happen to me it will be MI5 or MI6."
Just ten months before she arrived in Paris with Dodi, Diana predicted the circumstances surrounding her own demise with uncanny accuracy-in writing. "I am sitting here at my desk today in October," she wrote, "longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high. This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marry."
Incredibly, the woman Diana believed Charles was ready to commit murder for-the woman Scotland Yard would later confirm Diana identified in the letter-was not Camilla Parker Bowles. At the time, Diana was reportedly convinced that her husband had fallen in love with and intended to marry someone much younger and more attractive than Camilla-someone who had not only grown extremely close to Charles, but to William and Harry as well: the boys' nanny, Alexandra "Tiggy" Legge-Bourke. To accomplish this, Diana believed there was a conspiracy to remove both Charles's wife and his mistress from the scene. "Camilla is in danger," Diana told her lawyer, Lord Mishcon. "They are going to have to get rid of us both."
In her October 1996 letter, Diana decried what she viewed as sixteen years of mistreatment at the hands of the Men in Gray. "I have been battered, bruised, and abused mentally by a system for years now," she wrote, "but I feel no resentment, I carry no hatred. I am strong inside and maybe that is a problem for my enemies."
The Princess made it clear how she felt about her ex-husband. "Thank you Charles," Diana went on, "for putting me through such hell and for giving me the opportunity to learn from the cruel things you have done to me. I have gone forward fast and have cried more than anyone will ever know. The anguish nearly killed me, but my inner strength has never let me down...."
Diana signed the letter, put it in an envelope, and sealed it before handing it to her butler and confidant, Paul Burrell. "I want you to keep it," she told him, "just in case."
A few months later, Diana would offer a different scenario for her demise. "One day I'm going to go up in a helicopter," she said, "and it'll just blow up. The MI6 will do away with me." (Diana was convinced that MI6 had already done away with her devoted Royal Protection officer Barry Mannakee when it was suspected he might be having an affair with the Princess. He was killed in 1987, when a Ford Fiesta swerved from a side street and struck his Suzuki motorcycle. "It [the affair] was all found out," Diana told her voice coach Peter Settelen in 1992, "and he was chucked out. And then he was killed. And I think he was bumped off. But there we are. I don't ... we'll never know. He was the greatest fella I've ever had.")
This sad day in Paris, Mohamed Al Fayed knew nothing of Diana's prescient letter. Yet there was no doubt in his mind that Dodi and the Princess had been targets of an assassination plot. Flying his Sikorsky S-76 to Paris, Al Fayed arrived at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 3:50 on the morning of August 31 and was told his son had already been taken to the morgue. Ten minutes later, Diana was pronounced dead. On Al Fayed's orders, Diana's belongings were gathered up and shipped back to Surrey with Dodi's.
Even as Al Fayed's helicopter whisked Dodi's body off to be buried before sunset in accordance with Islamic law, Diana, whose son would someday head the Church of England, was given the last rites by the only cleric on duty at the hospital-a Roman Catholic priest.
In another odd twist, British Consul-General Keith Moss would give the nod for Diana's body to be "partially embalmed"-preserved from the waist up. The process was ostensibly done for cosmetic purposes. Given the lack of adequate air-conditioning inside the hospital and the nature of the Princess's injuries, French embalmer Jean Monceau told Moss that the body would soon be in no condition for viewing by the family unless action was taken. "It seemed," Moss later said, "the right thing to do under the circumstances."
Charles had, in fact, taken a keen interest in his ex-wife's appearance even before he left for Paris. At one point, he called Nurse Humbert at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital to tell her the Princess "would want to look her best" for the dignitaries coming to pay their respects that day.
Whether or not Charles's intentions were entirely innocent, the go-ahead for a partial embalming-made with the full approval of St. James's Palace-would add fuel to the conspiracy bonfires. The procedure makes a full autopsy impossible, since the formaldehyde used in embalming corrupts many toxicological tests. Specifically, it would be impossible to determine if, as was widely rumored, Diana may have been pregnant at the time of her death.
"We did nothing wrong," insisted Dominique Lecomte, one of the pathologists who did the embalming. But because of the procedure, Lecomte and fellow forensic pathologist Andre Lienhart were only able to confirm Diana's injuries instead of performing a full autopsy.
Since Prince Charles had seemed genuinely concerned about helping the Princess maintain her glamorous look even in death ("He was so sweet, he surprised me"), Nurse Humbert thought nothing of it when, over the phone from Balmoral, he asked if Diana was wearing her favorite gold earrings.
"But there was only one earring, on her left ear, Your Highness," she replied. "We cannot find the other." (The missing earring would eventually be found-eight weeks later, when forensics experts dug it out of the dashboard of the black Mercedes S280 in which she had been riding.)
"And there was no other jewelry-no bracelets? No necklaces?"
"No, Your Highness. No jewelry at all."
In asking the question-albeit in a far more diplomatic manner-Charles was eliciting the same information the Queen had already sought. Earlier that day, the Queen had placed her first call to Paris, but not to ask for medical details or about what might have caused the accident. She wanted to know if any of the major pieces of state jewelry that Diana sometimes traveled with were in her possession. "Where are the jewels?" an official from the British Consul's office had demanded of Humbert. "Madame," he repeated, "the Queen is worried about the jewelry. We must find the jewelry quickly! The Queen wants to know, 'Where are the jewels?'"
"The Queen had every right to ask that question," Charles told Camilla, still holed up at her home in Wiltshire. Diana still possessed several pieces of jewelry that belonged to the Crown, as well as Windsor pieces he had given her over the years, worth millions. "We can't," Charles said, making a none-too-subtle reference to the Fayeds, "have them fall into the wrong hands."
The Prince reported his findings to the Queen. Indeed, there were no items of Windsor jewelry on Diana at the time of her death-no rings, no necklaces, no bracelets. He then hugged his grief-stricken sons before leaving to board the Queen's Flight BAe 146 that would take him to Paris along with Diana's Spencer sisters Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes.
It was not a trip the Queen had wanted her son to make. Her Majesty had once been fond of Diana; tellingly, the Queen's warmly worded letters of encouragement to her daughter-in-law were invariably signed "Mama." But in recent years, the Queen had come to regard Diana more and more as a reckless, self-centered threat to the monarchy. Since the Queen had stripped the Princess of her royal status when the divorce was finalized the previous year, Diana had no official rank, no status. Therefore Her Majesty deemed it "inappropriate" for any member of the Royal Family to make the trip to claim the body. "The Spencers are her family, Charles," she told him. "They should be the ones to bring Diana back."
But Charles, who had spent years waging a public relations war against the media-savvy Diana, overruled the monarch. Appreciating full well the intensity of his countrymen's feelings toward Diana, Charles ignored his mother's objections and went ahead with plans to accompany the Princess's body back to England. "We must show Diana the respect she is due," he told his mother. "If we don't we will all be terribly sorry, I'm afraid."
By way of damage control, Charles would be taking along only one senior member of his staff: his deputy private secretary and media Svengali, Mark Bolland. A former director of Britain's Press Complaints Commission who maintained warm relations with most of Fleet Street's most powerful editors, Bolland had been hired the year before to boost Charles's standing in the public eye. An equally important part of Bolland's job was to remake Camilla's image.
"The press has been terribly cruel to her," Charles told his new spin doctor at a meeting in August 1996. "I want you to make people see Mrs. Parker Bowles through my eyes, let them see the marvelous woman I see. Once they do, I know they will love her the way I love her." To accomplish his daunting assignment, Bolland hatched a top-secret plan that would be known behind the walls of St. James's Palace as "Operation PB" (Operation Parker Bowles).
Behind the scenes, Camilla had played a key role in implementing Operation Parker Bowles. Just three months earlier, in late May 1997, she had asked Bolland to arrange a secret lunch at Highgrove with Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief image consultant, Peter Mandelson. With Camilla, Charles, and Bolland in attendance, Mandelson mapped out a strategy for the Prince of Wales to win back the hearts and minds of his people-and for Camilla to make herself acceptable to them as Diana's replacement.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from AFTER DIANA by Christopher Andersen Copyright © 2007 by Christopher Andersen. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Anonymous
Posted September 8, 2008
A nice little cube of propanganda against Diana. Too many author's these days do not write by Diana with an honest portrayal but instead use negative, unproven words such as troubled, paranoid, unbalanced, mad and mentally ill. In reallity, if she had been, she could not have functioned so utterly brilliantly in public. Besides, you find out that she was labeled as 'unbalanced' because she wanted her husband to be faithful or she was 'barking mad' because she did not think her husband could handle the job of being king. At the same time that whispering campaigns were being waged that the princess was mad and needed to be locked up, Diana goes on Panarama and states my enemies want me locked up...... After that Diana public exposed of what going on behind the scenes in Charles' camp, the whisperers publicly declared Diana was in the advanced stages of paranoia for thinking her enemies wanted her locked up. I think William and Harry would have turned out better men if Diana had lived to guide them into adulthood. Their obvious acceptance of Camilla can only point to a regular royal hatchet job on Diana to her two sons. Considering Camilla is the same woman that for all practical purposes ruins their parents marriage and caused their beloved Mummy so much pain it is odd. William and Harry are far too willing to accept Camilla as a respectable step-mum. Actually the book paints the picture that this is the way it should be. And that is the reason I gave it a poor rating.
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Posted September 25, 2007
Overall this was a good book about life after Diana for William, Harry and the royal family. It covers: William and Harry's lives (up until ca. March 2007), Operation Camilla and events leading up to the wedding of Charles and Camilla in 2005, and a look back at the marriage of Charles and Diana. The ladies in the young princes lives, Chelsy Davy and Kate Middleton, are also given considerable attention. The book isn't always laudatory about the young princes and covers the boys enjoyment of the good life of partying and looks into some of the escapades that perhaps the boys would rather forget (e.g. Harry in the Nazi outfit which William was said to approve of when they were shopping for costumes and William dancing in a boa during a night of revelry). What I didn't like about the book and found very tasteless is the gossip about Harry's paternity. Though the author rather earnestly presents the possibility that Hewitt is Harry's father he is on extremely shaky ground. He has a pic showing the 'resemblance' between the two--which is ridiculous since there is NO resemblance. Harry looks like his granddad Prince Philip in his facial features and a Spencer with red hair and as a toddler he bore a strong resemblance to his father Prince Charles at the same age. And the author's contention is based on some nonsensical reality show Hewitt went on 'under hypnosis' to make a fast buck. And the author keeps repeating it in several parts of the book. Harry is Prince Charles' case closed. And still another quibble is the obviously doctored photo of Kate Middleton and Queen Elizabeth--this is actually a picture of the Queen and Melinda Gates with Kate's head substituted. I don't know why the author didn't check the accuracy of this first. Plus, Anderson has 'pillow talk' between Charles and Camilla who always seems to be giving Charles advice. This is hearsay and unless a microphone was planted hard to believe. I also have trouble getting through the passages about how 'sensitive' Charles was after Diana's death. Charles didn't treat Diana very well (even having the 1997 birthday party for Camilla which was a major factor in Diana leaving England that Summer) so it's hard to believe he'd act so sensitively over the funeral plans after she died. All in all a good book, but I wish Anderson had left the ravings of Hewitt out and the wink wink nudge nudge about Harry's parentage. I find this very tasteless and ridiculous since there is NO resemblance between Harry and Hewitt.
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Posted August 20, 2007
I thought this book was good and helpful.
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Posted September 24, 2007
I did not mind reading this book is fact it was pretty enjoyable until it came to the question of Harry's father. I immidately loss my respect for the author. I do not think James Hewitt is Harry's father. Period! Harry poor fellow looks in many ways like Prince Charles -- the eyes and the nose and even his mouth. About the only snips that can be made is the color of Harry hair, which also is the same color as his aunts Sarah and Jane. I am also suspicous of a money-strapped James Hewitt suddenly deciding to claim that his affair with Diana as early as 1981. If that is true then why not question who is Prince William's father? Princes William does not look at all like Charles. William favors Diana. And as for a reciding hairline, Diana's father had thinning hair and bare patches too. There were quite a few date-type errors in the book as well. I was glad to note that the author clearly pointed out that Camilla is now the new Princess of Wales and will be crowned Queen when Charles is King. I also think Camilla is a fend for flaunting Diana's jewelry in public.
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Posted July 4, 2007
The first 22 pages of this book dealing with Diana's death were full of misleading statements, e.g. implying sinister reasons on why the ambulance in Paris took so long to reach the hospital, and inaccuracies, such as stating the card saying Mummy was on top of the lilies when it was on the roses from Harry. Reluctant to believe this book was a total waste of time and money, I did read some more, only to find a further lack of research and many, many innuendoes. I was left feeling suspicious of everything I read and decided not to finish the book.
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Posted July 2, 2009
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Posted January 19, 2012
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Posted March 2, 2009
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Overview
For all the millions of words that have been written about the People's Princess, no one has yet penetrated palace walls to reveal what has really happened to the Royal Family she left behind ten years ago. Until now. In the manner of his No. 1 New York Times bestsellers The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died, as well as such other bestsellers as his Jack and Jackie, Jackie After Jack, and Diana's Boys, Christopher ...