In 1991, a doctor cycled to Kensington Palace with a briefcase in his bicycle basket. Inside were a tape recorder and a list of questions from a journalist. But the woman waiting for them was the Princess of Wales, and every question was about her own life. She clipped the microphone to herself and talked about her marriage, her bulimia, and the woman she believed had taken her husband.

A year later, the Queen’s private secretary, who was also her own brother-in-law, asked her to her face whether she had helped with the book, and by the author’s account, she looked him in the eye and said, “No. ”

So how many lives was Diana really living, and who was keeping her secrets for her? The man on the bicycle was called James Colthurst, and he had known the Princess of Wales since a ski trip when she was about seventeen. He was a medical student then.

She had twisted her ankle, and he offered to look at it. That was the whole of the beginning: a sprain on a mountainside and a young man who knew something about bones. Out of it came a friendship that would outlast her marriage and outlive her. Colthurst came from an Irish landed family, the kind of family whose name is attached to a house rather than a company.

His older brother, Sir Charles Colthurst, would come to own Blarney Castle. James did not go into the family business of being a landowner. He became a doctor for most of his life. That would have been the only interesting thing a stranger could have said about him.

In October 1986 at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, he met a journalist named Andrew Morton. Morton wrote about the royal family for a living. What he did not have and could not get was the princess herself.

A royal journalist did not simply ask for an interview with the future queen. The palace would never have allowed it, and she would never have been permitted to say yes. So in 1991, the two men found another way. It helps to see how unusual this was.

In the royal world of the early 1990s, the family did not explain itself. Statements came from Buckingham Palace in a few dry sentences. Private secretaries handled the press. A princess did not brief a journalist, did not correct a newspaper, did not tell her side.

If she wanted her side told, she would have to find a way that left no trace of her hand in it. The arrangement was simple, and that was its genius. Morton wrote questions. Colthurst carried them.

He would arrive at Kensington Palace for what looked to anyone watching like lunch with an old friend. He came on a bicycle. In the basket sat a briefcase, and in the briefcase sat a tape recorder. Kensington Palace is a royal residence in London, and within it the Prince and Princess of Wales had their own apartments, numbered 8 and 9 and combined into a single residence.

It had its own staff, its own entrances, and its own sitting room. That sitting room would see more than one secret recording in the years that followed. This was the first. Colthurst later described what happened when he arrived.

“I pedalled in with a briefcase in the bicycle basket,” he remembered. “She snatched the questions away from me and then clipped the microphone onto herself, and the tape recorder was on. ”

The picture is worth holding for a moment. The most photographed woman in the world, sitting in her own palace, talking into a small machine with a clip microphone fixed to her clothes.

No camera crew, no press secretary, no lady-in-waiting. Only a friend from a ski slope and a list of questions written by a man she could not be seen to meet. Sometimes Colthurst did not even need to stay. “I’d cycle in.

The recorder was in the briefcase,” he said. “I’d clip the microphone on and she’d finish them off. ” She would keep talking after he had gone, alone in the room, and he would collect the tapes and carry them back across London to the journalist. Why the bicycle?

And why the friend? Because the method gave her something she valued more than any interview: distance. Morton never sat in that room. If anyone asked whether she had spoken to him, she could say that she had not, and in the narrowest sense, it would be true.

Years later, her publisher would use a single word for what the arrangement bought her. The word was deniability. What she said into the machine was not small talk. Colthurst later listed the subjects that came up as the sessions went on: the suicide attempts, Camilla, the bulimia.

These were things no one in her family had ever spoken of in public, things the palace would have gone to great lengths to keep out of print. She was handing them one cassette at a time to a journalist she had never sat down with. Morton, for his part, could never name his true source. For five years, he denied that she had given him anything and stood by the book alone.

That word sits at the center of this story. Over the next six years, the Princess of Wales would build a whole second life on it. There would be men the palace did not choose, carried through doors the palace did not watch. There would be a false name on a hospital switchboard, a wig, a borrowed jacket, a car with a man folded into its boot.

There would be telephone calls that someone else was recording and telephone calls she would deny making. And each secret would have a keeper, a friend or a servant or a stranger who held it for her until the day it came out. Almost none of it was confirmed while she was alive. Some of it she denied to the faces of her own family.

The record came out in pieces over decades, from people who had sworn to keep quiet and then, one by one, did not. The final piece, the truth about how her most famous interview was obtained, would not arrive until twenty-four years after her death. For that, the story has to go back ten years, to a cathedral, a dress, and an audience of hundreds of millions. Diana Frances Spencer was born on the 1st of July 1961 at Park House on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

Sandringham is the Queen’s private country home, and Park House stood on its land. The Spencer family rented it. So the future Princess of Wales grew up as a tenant of the woman who would one day be her mother-in-law, a child playing on royal ground before she had any idea of what royal ground would cost. The Spencers were one of the oldest families in England, with their great house at Althorp.

Her father, Viscount Althorp, who later became the eighth Earl Spencer, had served as an equerry to two monarchs. An equerry is an officer who attends a king or queen in daily life, arranging, escorting, standing a pace behind. He had served George VI and then Elizabeth II. His daughter was raised close to the throne and, in a sense, she was raised to stand near it.

Park House itself was a crown house built in 1863 for the household of a Prince of Wales, a short walk from Sandringham House. It was a grand place for a childhood, and not a happy one. She was the fourth child, born eighteen months after the death of a longed-for son, a baby boy named John who lived about ten hours. In 1967, when she was six, her mother left the marriage.

The next year, her mother lost a custody case for the children, a case in which her own mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence for the husband. Society gave Frances a name that stuck for decades: they called her the bolter. The child at the center of it remembered it in her own blunt words years later on Morton’s tapes. “The biggest disruption was when mummy decided to leave,” she said.

“People took sides. ” Morton told her memory of the day in a single image: the sound of a car engine revving and then slowly fading as her mother drove through the gates of Park House and out of her life. At night, she remembered, she could hear her younger brother sobbing, crying for his mother. “I could never pluck up enough courage to get out of bed,” she said.

The nannies, in Morton’s words, changed with alarming frequency and ranged from the sweet to the sadistic. Keep that little girl in mind through everything that follows. She learned early that grown-ups kept secrets, that families took sides, and that the person who leaves is the one who gets blamed. In 1975, her father became Earl Spencer and the family left Park House for Althorp.

She was not raised to sit on a throne. Before the engagement, she shared a London flat with friends and worked at the Young England kindergarten in Pimlico, looking after small children. The press pursued her relentlessly and nicknamed her Shy Di. She was nineteen.

The courtship was short. The couple are generally reckoned to have met properly in 1977, when Charles was briefly involved with her elder sister Sarah. By the reckoning of biographers, he had met Diana only around a dozen times before he proposed. Prince Philip, by one account, pressed his son by letter to decide about her one way or the other.

Her grandmother, Lady Fermoy, was blunter. “Darling, you must understand that their sense of humour and their lifestyle are different,” she told her, “and I don’t think it will suit you. ”

The engagement was announced on the 24th of February, 1981, at Buckingham Palace. The ring was a large sapphire encircled by diamonds from the royal jeweller Garrard.

That day, in a television interview, the young couple were asked whether they were in love. “Of course,” she said. Prince Charles added a phrase that would follow them both for the rest of their lives. “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” he said.

She later said the remark traumatised her. She later told Andrew Morton’s tapes about the proposal itself, in a voice the public would not hear for more than twenty years. “So he said, ‘Will you marry me? ’ And I laughed.

”

The wedding came on the 29th of July 1981, and it was built on an enormous scale. Some 3,500 guests filled St. Paul’s Cathedral. An estimated 750 million people watched on television around the world.

The bride arrived in the glass coach, trailing a train of some 25 feet. She was twenty, the groom thirty-two. Within a year, on the 21st of June 1982, she gave birth to Prince William, and on the 15th of September 1984 to Prince Harry. Two sons born within a little over three years of the vows.

The public saw a fairy tale, and the palace had every reason to keep selling it. A marriage that large could not simply be allowed to fail. There was one guest that day the cameras did not linger on. Camilla Parker Bowles sat in the congregation, dressed in grey and pink.

The bride later said she saw her as she came up the aisle. Behind the doors, by the later accounts of both husband and wife, the marriage was failing almost from the start. On Morton’s tapes, she dated her bulimia to the period of the engagement. “The bulimia was appalling,” she said, “absolutely appalling.

” The cycle of eating and purging that she described was hidden from the cameras that followed her everywhere. The rise in public was dazzling all the same. The tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1983 made her a global star, and the couple took the infant Prince William with them. Through the 1980s, she became the most photographed woman alive, a face on magazine covers in every country that had magazines.

“The whole world were focusing on me,” she said on the tapes. “Every day I was in the front page of the papers. ”

Inside the household, a different arrangement was taking shape. By the middle of the 1980s, the Prince and Princess of Wales were living largely separate lives.

They kept separate staffs and separate diaries. They had Kensington Palace and Highgrove, his country house in Gloucestershire. The marriage became two households sharing an address. Courtiers carried messages between them.

Joint engagements went on, choreographed for the cameras, while in private the two principals went their own ways. This was the condition in which the princess’s second life began. The palace was presenting one marriage to the world while two separate lives went on inside it. It is a strange school for a young woman: a court that expects you to perform a happy marriage in public while everyone in the building knows it is not happy at all.

She learned its lessons faster than anyone expected. The first of them was that some things could be done quietly as long as no one wrote them down. The first person she let past the official life was a man whose job was to stand beside her and watch everyone else. In 1985, a police officer named Barry Mannakee was assigned to protect the Princess of Wales.

Members of the British royal family are guarded by protection officers, bodyguards drawn from the Metropolitan Police. A protection officer sees more of a royal’s private life than almost anyone, including very often the royal’s own spouse. That closeness is the point of the job. It is also its danger.

In a divided household, it was a danger with a particular edge. By the middle of the 1980s, the Wales household had split into two camps, his and hers, each with its own private secretaries, press officers, equerries, and valets. Loyalty ran along those lines. A bodyguard assigned to the princess was in practice one of very few people in the building who spent his whole working day on her side of the divide.

For a young woman who felt, by her own later account, unwanted inside her own marriage, that was not a small thing. Mannakee became her protection officer that year. What happened between them is known in any detail only from her own words, and those words came out years later and under strange circumstances. By her own account, she fell in love with him.

On recordings she made in the early 1990s, she spoke of being deeply in love with someone who worked in this environment. She never named him on those tapes, but the account has attached itself to his name ever since. “I was only happy when he was around,” she said. The palace noticed something, whatever it was.

In 1986, Mannakee was moved, transferred out of royal protection to the diplomatic protection squad, the unit that guards embassies and visiting dignitaries. According to the record, his managers had judged his relationship with the princess to be inappropriate. In her own words, as she later remembered it, he had been “chucked out. ”

This was the first lesson of the second life, and it was a hard one.

A man she wanted near her had been removed by people she could not argue with. No one announced it. No one explained it. He was simply gone from the roster, and someone else was standing a step behind her at the next engagement.

Notice who made the decision. As far as the record shows, it was managers, the anonymous machinery of police protection, judging that a line had been crossed. The palace did not need to accuse anyone of anything. It only needed to move a name from one list to another.

She would meet that machinery again and again, and she would learn to work around it. There was worse to come. On the 15th of May, 1987, shortly after ten at night, Barry Mannakee was riding as a passenger on a Suzuki motorcycle driven by a fellow officer, Steven Pete. On the A11 road in Woodford, northeast London, the motorcycle collided with a Ford Fiesta.

Mannakee died of a spinal cord injury. An inquest found that his death was an accident. The inquest was the end of the official record. It found no one to blame and nothing to explain.

For the police and for the palace, the matter was closed. A man who had once guarded the Princess of Wales had died in an ordinary road accident a year after he left her side. And that was all that anyone outside a very small circle would know for years. On her later recordings, she called his death “the biggest blow of my life.

”

There is no paper trail for the rest of it. There are no letters in an archive, no diary entries quoted by a biographer, no testimony from the officer’s family describing what he felt. The story of Barry Mannakee and the Princess of Wales exists almost entirely as the story she chose to tell about it to a voice coach with a video camera five years after he died. That makes it impossible to say what the relationship actually was.

It makes it possible only to say what it was to her. The tapes on which she spoke about him were made with a voice coach at a time when her marriage was coming to its end. She was talking, in a sense, to herself. She had no reason to invent a love affair with a dead man and every reason to keep it quiet.

That is not proof of what happened between them. It is evidence of how much it mattered to her. And what it was to her matters for everything that follows. Here, for the first time, is the pattern: a man close to her but outside the circle the palace approved; a relationship conducted in the gaps of an official schedule; a secret kept by a handful of people; and then the institution moving quietly and finally to end it.

She did not stop looking for those gaps. If anything, she became better at finding them. The next man would not be a police officer the palace could reassign with a signature. He would be an army officer with his own career, his own friends, and his own reasons to keep quiet.

And the secret this time would last for years. In the summer of 1986, the Princess of Wales began taking riding lessons from an officer of the Household Cavalry, the mounted regiment that guards the sovereign, the soldiers in plumed helmets and polished breastplates who ride through London on ceremonial days. Its officers are often drawn from the same world as the royal family’s friends. They ride, they shoot, they move in the circles where a princess might plausibly need a teacher on horseback.

For a woman looking for a reason to spend time with someone, there could hardly have been a better cover. A riding lesson needs no explanation. It goes in a diary as an hour of exercise, and the people who see it there think nothing more of it. There was a mirror in it, too, though no one would see it for years.

The man Camilla Parker Bowles had married in 1973, Andrew Parker Bowles, was also an officer of the Household Cavalry. The two halves of the Wales marriage would each, in their own way, find their private lives in the same regiment’s world. His name was James Hewitt. He was born on the 30th of April, 1958, three years older than her.

The lessons gave them a reason to be seen together, and the reason became a relationship. It would last, by the usual reckoning, for roughly five years, from 1986 to 1991. This was the longest secret she had yet kept, and it was kept the way such things always were at court. A few friends knew.

A few staff knew. The protection officers who saw everything knew. And no one outside that small ring said a word for years. In 1991, Hewitt went to war.

In the Gulf War, he commanded a squadron of Challenger tanks. In June of that year, he was mentioned in dispatches, a formal recognition in the official account of the war. While he was in the desert, she wrote to him. The letters were never meant for anyone else, and for years no one else saw them.

But one line from her correspondence would surface in 2003, read out by Hewitt’s own lawyer, and it gives a glimpse of what that year felt like from her side. Reportedly writing about the arrival of his letters, she said: “Boy, oh boy, does the earth shake when I get a letter from my desert friend. Screams of delight, tears, you name it. ”

It is a single line, offered by an interested party, and it should be weighed as one.

It is also, if genuine, the voice of a woman in love. By the end of 1991, the relationship was over. In public, nothing had ever happened. That silence held for three more years, and then it broke in the worst way.

In the early autumn of 1994, a book called Princess in Love was published, reportedly written in just five weeks, written by the journalist Anna Pasternak with Hewitt’s cooperation. It told the story of the affair from his side. The British press turned on him at once. He was called a cad and a love rat.

He did not entirely disagree. “I never wanted to be a cad,” he said years later, “but I guess I am. So if you’ve been handed a bunch of lemons, make some lemon juice. ”

She did not deny him in the end.

On the 20th of November 1995, a year after the book, she was asked about him directly on the BBC programme Panorama. Her answer is one of the most quoted things she ever said: “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.

”

The cost to Hewitt was not only his reputation. The dates of the affair started a rumour that has never quite died, and the rumour concerns a living man who had no say in any of it. Hewitt has denied it on the record. In 2002, he said that Harry had already been born by the time of the affair.

In 2017, he said the same again. Those are the dates, and that is his answer. Numbers can measure a secret like this one, even if they cannot explain it. It began in 1986 and ended in 1991, some five years conducted in the gaps of an official diary.

Three years after the end, a book laid it open. Nine years after that, in January 2003, Hewitt tried to sell 64 of her letters, reportedly asking £10 million. In May 2017, he suffered a heart attack and a stroke. By his own account, after the affair ended, he had at one point considered taking his own life and was stopped only by his mother’s insistence on going with him to France.

Sixty-four letters is a great many letters. Each one was written by a married princess to a serving officer, and each one was a risk she chose to take. Their existence was itself a secret. And then, when he tried to sell them, it was a scandal of its own.

Hewitt, in other words, paid for the secret long after she had stopped keeping it. That would become a pattern, too. The people who held her secrets for her rarely came out of it unscathed. There is one more thing to notice about this chapter of her life.

The affair with Hewitt overlapped with the years when the palace’s official account of the marriage was at its most confident. Joint engagements went ahead. The fairy tale was still on sale. Behind it, both partners were living lives the public knew nothing about, and the staff of two households were quietly keeping both sets of secrets at once.

While the cavalry officer was her private life, she was also, by one friend’s account, capable of something far stranger. She could slip out of the palace altogether, into a London night where no one would think to look for her, dressed as a man. By the account of the actress Cleo Rocos, one afternoon around 1988 began with lunch at the Bombay Brasserie and ended in a South London pub. Everything in that chapter rests on that account.

Cleo Rocos was the comedy partner of the television star Kenny Everett. She told this story in a memoir called The Power of Positive Drinking, published in 2013, a quarter of a century after the night it describes. No one else who was there has confirmed it. One man who knew one of the people involved has firmly denied it.

So it is told here as what it is: one woman’s memory of the strangest evening of her life. By her telling, after lunch the group went back to Kenny Everett’s flat. They watched The Golden Girls on television. The Princess and Everett danced to the Gipsy Kings.

It was, in Rocos’s version, the kind of afternoon a young woman in her twenties might spend with funny friends, if that young woman had not also been the future queen. Then the talk turned to the evening. Everett and his friends were planning to go to the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, a pub south of the river that had for decades been one of London’s best-known gay venues. According to Rocos, the princess asked to come.

“We were going out to the Vauxhall Tavern,” Rocos told an interviewer. “She tried on a leather cap and put aviators on and tucked her hair up and said, ‘I want to come too. ’”

Everett, in this account, tried to put her off. “It’s full of hairy gay men,” he warned.

“Sometimes there are fights outside. ” The man who answered him in Rocos’s story was Freddie Mercury, the singer of Queen. “Go on,” he said, by her telling. “Let the girl have some fun.

”

What followed, if it happened, was a costume. Rocos says they dressed her in a camouflage army jacket that belonged to Rocos’s brother, a leather cap, and dark aviator sunglasses, with her famous hair tucked up out of sight. Then they looked at her, scrutinising her in the half-light. Rocos wrote: “We decided that the most famous icon of the modern world might just pass for a rather eccentrically dressed gay male model.

”

The plan, as Rocos describes it, was small. She wanted the thrill of going in undetected, to order one drink, and would leave right away. She promised. By this account, she did exactly that.

The group walked into the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. People recognised Kenny Everett and Freddie Mercury. Nobody recognised the princess. She went to the bar and ordered.

“Nobody even slightly rumbled her,” Rocos said in a later interview. After about twenty minutes, they left. The princess kept the outfit on in the cab back to Kensington Palace, and later she sent the clothes back folded, with a note saying she had had a fabulous time. It is a wonderful story.

That is part of the problem. Peter Freestone was Freddie Mercury’s personal assistant. He has said plainly that Mercury had very little to do with Kenny Everett after 1980 and that he never actually met Princess Diana. In his view, the tale belongs with the other legends told about Mercury.

Mercury died in 1991. Everett died in 1995. Freestone put the tale alongside one of the wilder myths about Mercury’s parties, a story about dwarves carrying bowls of cocaine on their heads. In his view, the princess at the tavern belonged in the same drawer.

When Rocos’s book came out in 2013, the story was quickly reported. One report said only that it was said to have taken place in 1988. So the night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern stands where it should, as a claim with one witness and one denial. The account dates it to 1988, when she would have been twenty-six or twenty-seven.

One report gives her age as twenty-seven. The building at least is real, and it has its own history. The Royal Vauxhall Tavern was built between 1860 and 1862 and opened its doors in 1863. On the 8th of September 2015, it was listed by Historic England, which makes it a protected building in law.

It was the first building in the country to be listed for its importance to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history. Historic England described it as one of the best-known and long-standing venues in the capital for LGBT people and as a site of resistance to homophobia during the HIV and AIDS crisis in the 1980s. That is the decade of this story. The listing does not mention any princess.

Why does the story matter if it cannot be proved? Because whether or not every detail is true, the people who told it found it entirely believable. A cap, a pair of glasses, one drink at a bar where no one bowed. Whatever the truth of this particular night, it is a picture of an hour in the world without the world knowing she was in it.

Set it beside everything else in her life in 1988. The cavalry officer was a secret by then. The protection officer was dead. The marriage was two households sharing an address.

And here, by one account, was the Princess of Wales standing at a crowded bar in a borrowed army jacket, unrecognised, for about twenty minutes. Whether or not it happened, it is the purest picture anyone has drawn of what she wanted, which was twenty minutes of being nobody. And the appetite carried a risk she did not yet fully understand. A woman who believes she can pass unseen grows careless about who might be watching.

She believed she could slip in and out of her own life without being recorded. On the last night of the decade, she picked up a telephone and learned that she could not. On New Year’s Eve 1989, the Princess of Wales picked up a telephone at Sandringham and talked to a friend for a long time. Sandringham belonged to the royal family in the fullest sense.

It was the Queen’s private estate in Norfolk. Park House, where she had been born, stood a short walk away. She had come back to the land of her childhood as a member of the family that owned it, and she felt, by the evidence of that call, entirely alone there. The friend on the other end of the line was James Gilbey.

He came from the Gilbey family and had known her since childhood. In the late 1980s, the two had reconnected. When the story broke, newspapers would describe him as a thirty-three-year-old dealer in Lotus sports cars. He was speaking that night from a car phone.

Beyond the conversation itself, the record of their friendship is thin, and nothing more should be read into it than the tape contains. What the tape contains is quite enough. The timing matters. At the end of 1989, by the usual reckoning, the relationship with James Hewitt was still going on.

It would last until 1991. The princess’s private life, in other words, was not one secret but several, held by different people in different places, none of whom necessarily knew about the others. The cavalry officer had his part of her life. The old friend on the car phone had his.

The palace, which thought it knew everything about her, had neither. He opened the transcript with a question. “And so, darling, what other lows today? ” She told him.

She had been at lunch, and she had nearly cried. “I was very bad at lunch and I nearly started blubbing,” she said. “I just felt so sad and empty and thought, ‘Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this family. ’”

The full sentence, as published, carried a swear word in the middle of it.

It is the sound of a young woman at the end of her patience with the people around her, said to someone she trusted in what she believed was a private conversation. She talked about the Queen Mother, the matriarch of the family. “It’s not hatred, it’s sort of pity and interest mixed in one,” she said. “Every time I look up, she’s looking at me.

” She talked about the soap opera EastEnders. She talked about spiritualism, describing a conversation with the Bishop of Norwich in which she had told him she was aware that people she had loved and who had died were now in the spirit world. She worried aloud that their meeting might be discovered. Gilbey called her darling again and again.

He called her by a pet name, “Squidgy” or “Squidge,” over and over. At one point, by one account of the transcript, he asked, “Isn’t it absolutely wonderful? ” And she answered, “I love it. ”

In the published extracts, a woman complains about the family she married into, and a man tries to cheer her up.

If the call had been made by anyone else in the country, it would have been forgotten by the morning. It was, in other words, the most ordinary kind of conversation: a lonely woman and an affectionate friend talking late into a holiday night about family, television, the afterlife, and when they might next meet. The only extraordinary thing about it was who she was. That, and the fact that someone was listening.

In the late 1980s, mobile telephones and car phones used analogue radio signals. To an ordinary radio scanner, those signals could be audible. People who spent their evenings twiddling the dials of such machines sometimes stumbled across private calls. Most of what they heard was dull.

Very occasionally, it was not. Two people later claimed to have recorded this call. One was Cyril Reenan, a seventy-year-old retired bank manager from Abingdon in Oxfordshire, a man who had worked for the Trustee Savings Bank and who listened to the airwaves as a pastime. His tape of the conversation was made on the 4th of January 1990, which, by most accounts, means he picked up a rebroadcast of a call that had already taken place days earlier.

The other was Jane Norgrove, a twenty-five-year-old woman from Oxfordshire. “It was just me,” she said later, “recording a telephone conversation in my bedroom. Nothing more and nothing less than that. ”

By their own accounts, both had been listening in from home.

That is the unsettling thing about this chapter of her life. The most carefully guarded woman in Britain, inside the most carefully guarded house in Norfolk, had been overheard by people with no connection to the court at all, sitting in their own homes on a winter evening. Reenan at least did not like what he had. “I didn’t know what to do with it once I’d got it,” he said.

“I was stuck with it and I was frightened of it. ” He would later say that if his son had warned him the tape was dangerous, he would have burned it or scrubbed it out. He did not burn it. The tape ended up with The Sun, the tabloid newspaper.

Think about what had just happened from her side, though she did not yet know it. She had spent years learning how to keep things quiet. She had friends who held her secrets, staff who looked away, a schedule that left gaps she could slip through. And now a private conversation on the last night of the decade from inside the Queen’s own house was sitting on a cassette in a newspaper office, waiting.

There is a second tape that belongs beside this one, and it makes the story stranger. Thirteen days before her call, on the 18th of December 1989, another private conversation was recorded. It was between her husband and Camilla Parker Bowles. Two calls from the two halves of the same marriage, captured within a fortnight of each other.

Both would surface in the press within months of each other years later. Whoever was listening that December had caught the whole marriage at once. For now, both tapes stayed out of print. The newspaper that held hers made a decision that would shape the next chapter of her life.

It decided to wait. For more than two years, a recording of the Princess of Wales lay in the hands of a newspaper that did not print a word of it. Why The Sun waited is not fully explained in the record. What is clear is that for those two years and more, a recording that could have ended her public reputation sat in a newspaper’s possession, and she did not know it was there.

Through the rest of 1990 and all of 1991, she went on with her official life: the tours, the speeches, the hospital visits. She went on with her private life, too. She did not know that someone already held a piece of it. Perhaps the risks seemed too great.

A newspaper holding a royal tape could not easily prove the voices were genuine, nor explain how the call came to be recorded. Whatever the reason, the cassette sat. Then, in the summer of 1992, everything changed. A book had been published in June that put the state of the Wales marriage on every front page.

The old reticence was gone. On the 23rd of August 1992, The Sun ran the story on its front page. It first called the scandal “Diana. ” The rest of the press soon settled on another name, taken from the pet name on the tape: Squidgygate.

What followed was a new kind of humiliation. The newspaper did not only print a transcript; it set up a premium-rate telephone line so that readers could hear her voice for themselves. The cost was 36 pence a minute. About 60,000 people called it.

They heard roughly thirty minutes of edited tape, the princess’s private voice sold by the minute on a recording she had never known was being made, from a holiday night two years and eight months earlier. Its full length was itself disputed, put at twenty-four minutes by one account and forty by another. A retired bank manager of seventy and a young woman of twenty-five had made it, by their own telling, from their homes. The words on the tape were bad enough for the palace.

Even worse was the question of how the tape had come to exist at all. In 1993, a company called Audio-Tel International examined the recording. It found something odd. There were short bursts of data on the tape, the kind of electronic pips that mobile phone networks used, but they appeared too fast and too loud.

Its conclusion was that the tape might have been doctored and the call rebroadcast. Two engineers, Nelson and Columns, went further. They argued that the recording could not have been made the way Reenan described, by a scanner catching a mobile phone signal. They pointed to a 50 Hz hum on the tape, a sound typical of mains electricity rather than radio.

They found frequencies higher than a scanner’s filters would allow. And they noted that the Cellnet base station that should have carried the call was not operating until the 3rd of March, 1990. Their conclusion was that the data bursts were not genuine but were added later to the tape, to make what may have been a local telephone tap sound like a radio interception. Cellnet’s own internal investigation, according to the record, replicated their findings.

If that analysis was right, then someone had tapped the line, recorded the call, and then rebroadcast it so that amateurs with scanners would pick it up and believe they had stumbled on it by chance. Who would do that? Here, the record runs out and speculation begins. Some people pointed at the security services.

Lord Rees-Mogg suggested that MI5 might have recorded royal calls while protecting the family against threats from the IRA. The home secretary, Kenneth Clarke, dismissed suggestions of MI5 or GCHQ involvement as “wild. ” The Queen herself reportedly asked for an MI5 investigation, and by one account it concluded that whoever was behind it had a political motive rather than a financial one. Ken Wharfe, her protection officer, later said that an investigation had identified all those involved, but that he could not say more for legal reasons.

None of it has ever been proved. And the security service theory remains just that, a theory. There is a second humiliation in the story that is easy to miss. The public did not only learn what she had said.

It learned how she spoke when she thought no one was listening: her pet names, her jokes, her complaints about the family she had married into. Her private voice, the one Colthurst’s tape recorder had captured the year before for a very different purpose, was now on sale by the minute to anyone with a telephone. What can be said is what the tape did to her. Wharfe wrote that it lent credence to the princess’s belief that the establishment was out to destroy her.

She had always suspected that she was watched. Now there was a cassette to prove that, at least once, she had been. Set the two December tapes side by side, and the pattern is hard to ignore. Two calls from the two halves of the same marriage, recorded thirteen days apart.

One surfaced in August 1992 at the height of the scandal over the book, and damaged her. The other surfaced in January 1993, a month after the separation, and damaged him. Whether anyone planned that timing, the record does not say. This matters for everything that follows.

From the summer of 1992, she lived with the knowledge that a private telephone call could end up on a premium-rate line. She knew that someone, somewhere, might be listening. In the years ahead, she would speak of bugs and phone tapping, and some would call it paranoia. Squidgygate was the reason it did not sound like paranoia to her.

And yet, by the time The Sun printed the tape, she had already done something far more dangerous to the palace than any phone call. She had done it deliberately, with her own voice, into her own tape recorder, and she had done it months before. The book that broke the silence that summer was hers. The tapes that Colthurst carried home in his bicycle basket held a voice the public had never heard.

The official princess was the one the public heard reading speeches. This was the voice of a woman of twenty-nine and thirty, talking about her life to a machine in an empty room, in the plain words she used with friends. Morton never sat across from her. He wrote the questions, read the answers, and built the book from them.

Publicly, the two of them maintained for years that the book’s sources were her family and friends. What the tapes held was a different history of the marriage. She talked about the engagement and the proposal. “So he said, ‘Will you marry me?

’ And I laughed,” she remembered. She talked about the illness that had begun in the same months. The honeymoon was spent partly aboard the royal yacht Britannia, and there, she said, it had been constant. “The bulimia was appalling, absolutely appalling.

It was rife. It was four times a day on the yacht. ”

She talked about fame and how it had felt from the inside. “The whole world were focusing on me,” she said.

“Every day I was in the front page of the papers. ” She talked about despair, about Camilla, and about the attempts she had made to harm herself. These were the subjects Colthurst would later list when he described the sessions: the suicide attempts, Camilla, the bulimia. He remembered something else about how she spoke when the questions reached those places.

“When she got to the heavy issues,” he said, “there was a sense of release in her, of unburdening. ”

She would say much the same things in public years later, on television. There, she would describe how depression after the birth of her first child had led her to harm herself and to the bulimia. But in 1991, no one outside a tiny circle knew any of it.

The cameras that followed her saw a slender, smiling young woman in beautiful clothes. The tapes described what that slenderness had cost. There were also things she did not do. She did not go to a newspaper.

She did not sell her story. She did not, at this stage, appear on television. She chose a single author, a single intermediary, and a single book. And she shaped what went into it through the questions she answered.

Even at her most indiscreet, she kept control of the channel. The tapes also carried the story of her childhood, of the mother who had driven away from Park House and the little boy crying for her at night. The princess who seemed so polished on the front pages was on the tapes still, in some ways, the six-year-old lying awake at Park House. That, too, was something the palace had never let the public see.

From the palace’s point of view, of course, the tape recorder had a very strong agenda. Its contents, published, would demolish the official account of the marriage. The institution had spent a decade presenting the Prince and Princess of Wales as a working couple. The tapes said that the marriage had been in trouble very early, that the bride had been ill from the start, and that the husband’s heart, by her account, had always been elsewhere.

Colthurst, meanwhile, was the perfect keeper. He was a doctor, not a courtier or a newspaperman. If he was seen at the palace, he was an old friend who had come for lunch. His bicycle was the most innocent vehicle in London.

It was precisely because he looked like nothing at all that he could carry everything. The marriage was by then visibly strained even in public. On the 11th of February 1992, during a tour of India, she was photographed sitting alone in front of the Taj Mahal. The picture went round the world.

It was reported that her husband had once visited the place as a bachelor in 1980 and said he would one day bring his bride. Whatever he had or had not said, the photograph spoke for her, and she knew exactly how it would be read. Behind that public image, the book was already being assembled, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Before publication, she wrote to Colthurst: “Obviously, we are preparing for the volcano to erupt.

” She told him: “Thank you for your belief in me. ”

Volcano is her word, and it is exactly the right one. A volcano builds for years under the surface, and when it goes, it changes the shape of everything around it. She had been building toward this since the engagement.

She knew the eruption was coming because she had lit the fuse herself. That letter is the clearest proof of what the book was. It was not a journalist’s intrusion that she suffered. It was an operation that she ran, through a friend, in secret, with full knowledge of the explosion it would cause.

She chose the method because it kept her hand hidden. Her publisher’s later word for it, deniability, is exactly right. There was a deep irony in her method. She was using the court’s own tools against it.

The palace had spent a decade managing appearances, keeping private realities out of view, saying nothing in public while staff briefed in private. She had watched it done, and now she did it herself. She kept her voice out of the book while filling every page with it. She also took a very real risk.

If her role came out while she was alive, she would be the princess who had betrayed her own husband and the institution in print. She would have handed her critics the one charge she could not answer. So everything depended on the secret holding, and on one more thing. If anyone ever asked her directly whether she had helped, she would have to say she had not.

On the 7th of June, 1992, The Sunday Times began to serialise a book under a headline about five suicide bids. The headline read: “Diana driven to five suicide bids by uncaring Charles. ” Nine days later, on the 16th of June, the book itself was published. It was called Diana: Her True Story.

Its publisher was Michael O’Mara Books, and it ran to 224 pages. The reaction was ferocious, and much of it was aimed at the author. Critics came, as Morton later put it, “from all sectors of society. ” The Archbishop of Canterbury criticised it.

So did members of parliament and newspaper editors. Some bookshops and supermarkets refused to stock it. The chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, the body that policed newspaper behaviour, publicly condemned the press. In one wording of his attack, the papers were “dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.

” That chairman, Lord McGregor, had not come to his anger by himself. He had been assured by the palace that the princess had not cooperated with the book. The assurance had come through one man. Sir Robert Fellowes was the Queen’s private secretary, the official who manages her diary, her correspondence, her relations with government and the press.

He had held the post since the 19th of October 1990. He was also married to the princess’s elder sister, Lady Jane Spencer. They had wed on the 20th of April, 1978, at the Guards’ Chapel in London, and the little bridesmaid that day had been Diana. So when he asked her a question, he was asking as the Queen’s most senior adviser and as her brother-in-law.

The question was simple. Had she cooperated with Morton’s book? The answer was no. By Morton’s telling, she looked Fellowes straight in the eye and told him a bold-faced lie.

Fellowes, by the account of his obituary in The Telegraph, chose to believe the Princess of Wales when she assured him that she had not cooperated. He passed her denial to Lord McGregor. McGregor went public with his fury at the press. The weight of the establishment came down on the newspapers, on the author, on anyone who claimed to know the truth of the marriage.

All of it rested on her single word. Consider the position she had put him in without his knowledge. Fellowes was not a gossip or a newspaperman. He was the senior official of the monarchy, the man whose word went out on the Queen’s behalf.

When he told the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission that the princess had not cooperated, that statement carried the weight of the institution itself. If it turned out to be false, it would not only embarrass him personally; it would mean that the palace had been used to mislead the body that policed the press. She would keep the secret for the rest of her life. Morton kept it, too.

Publicly, the line held that the book came from her friends and family, people who had spoken with her blessing but not in her voice. Some at court may have had suspicions, but suspicion was not proof. And the princess never gave anyone proof. What happened to Fellowes when the truth finally emerged belongs to a later chapter, after her death.

It is enough here to know that it did emerge, and that when it did, according to his obituary, he offered to resign. It is worth pausing on what that means. The most senior courtier in the land had staked his word on hers to the man responsible for policing the press. He had done it because she was family and because he chose to believe her.

When it turned out that she had lied, he believed that the only honourable course was to resign. A lie told to protect a secret had fallen, years later, on the person who had believed it. That is the hidden arithmetic of every secret in her life. Someone always had to carry it.

Colthurst carried the tapes. Morton carried the denial in print. Fellowes carried it into the office of the man who policed the press. She told the lie once, to one man, and it travelled from there through the whole structure of the court.

From her side, it is not hard to see why she did it. The book was the only way she could find to tell her version of the marriage. To admit her part would have been to hand the palace a weapon against her, to let it say that she had betrayed the family. The whole method, the bicycle and the briefcase and the questions from a man she never met, was designed so that she could deny it.

When the moment came, she did what the method had been built for. But the method had a cost the bicycle could not carry. Someone had to stand in front of the denial and vouch for it. That person turned out to be a member of her own family.

The royal family did not respond to the book only with silence. Prince Philip, her father-in-law, later wrote her a series of letters trying to mediate between the couple. In one of them, by Morton’s later account, he told her: “I cannot imagine anyone in their right minds leaving you for Camilla. ” The family was trying, in its own way, to hold the marriage together, even as the book she had secretly written was pulling it apart.

Through the summer and autumn of 1992, the pressure on the marriage became unbearable. The book was followed by the tape. The palace was now managing not one scandal but two. In the press, the two households were openly at war.

By the end of the year, the fiction could not be kept up any longer. In December, the Prime Minister stood up in the House of Commons to tell the country the marriage was over, in words carefully chosen to promise that nothing would change. At three o’clock on the 9th of December 1992, John Major rose in the House of Commons with a statement from Buckingham Palace. He read it in the flat voice of official announcement.

“It is announced from Buckingham Palace that, with regret, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate. Their Royal Highnesses have no plans to divorce, and their constitutional positions are unaffected. ”

Every phrase was doing a job. “No plans to divorce” because divorce raised the old shadow of 1936, when a king had given up his throne to marry a divorced woman, and because the heir to the throne would one day head the Church of England.

“Constitutional positions unaffected” because the monarchy needed the country to believe that the marriage could end without anything else changing. The separation was being presented as a private sadness with no public consequence. The months leading up to it had been a slow public collapse. That November, on a tour of South Korea, the couple had looked so visibly miserable that the press nicknamed them “the Glums.

” It turned out to be their last joint overseas tour. In the newspapers, the rival briefings from his camp and hers had grown so open that the period earned its own name: the War of the Waleses. There was another reason the separation could not be presented as one-sided. The other half of the marriage had a hidden life, too.

In January 1993, the second tape from that December of 1989 surfaced. It was the recording of Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, made thirteen days before her own call with Gilbey. It was published first in a magazine called New Idea on the 13th of January, and then in the British press on the 17th. Where Squidgygate had humiliated her, the tape the press called Camillagate humiliated him.

And on the 29th of June 1994, he gave his own account. In a television documentary with the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, he admitted that he had been unfaithful once it became clear, as he put it, that the marriage had irretrievably broken down. It was the mirror of everything she had done in secret, now done openly by him. Both halves of the Wales marriage had lived double lives.

Only the methods differed. For an institution that had spent a decade presenting a happy marriage, there was something almost complete about this. The fairy tale sold to 750 million television viewers in 1981 had turned out to contain two hidden lives, two secret tapes, two sets of confidants, and two households that had briefed against each other in the press. Neither partner had been the only one keeping secrets.

The court had been keeping them for both. She was now a separated woman living at Kensington Palace, still Princess of Wales, still mother of the future king. And even before the separation was announced, she had begun another set of secret recordings. This time, the man with the recorder was a voice coach named Peter Settelen.

He had been hired to help her with public speaking, to make her more confident at the lectern. Between September 1992 and December 1993, the sessions were filmed on video. On camera, she talked about her life and her marriage. It is a striking choice.

She had just lived through a summer in which a secret recording of her voice had been sold on a telephone line. And within weeks of that, she sat down in front of a video camera and began, once again, to talk about her private life. The difference, as with the Morton tapes, was control. These recordings were hers, made by someone she had hired.

She trusted the machine as long as she believed she owned what it captured. What she said on those tapes was in places even more raw than what she had given Morton. She talked about the protection officer she had loved and lost. She talked about loneliness.

“There’s just nobody to physically scream at,” she said, “or someone to put their arms around me. Just listen when I cry. ”

She also gave her account of something she said her husband had told her. In her telling, he said: “I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.

” These are her words about his words, and they should be taken as such: the account of a woman describing her own marriage to her voice coach. The tapes then vanished from the story for years, and their later history is a small mystery of its own. Recorded in 1992 and 1993, they were seized by police in 2001 from the home of her butler. Her brother, Earl Spencer, contested who owned them.

In 2004, they were returned to Settelen. That same year, an American network broadcast extracts. And in 2017, twenty-four years after the last session, a British channel broadcast more. Nine years, in other words, from the first session to the police raid, and a quarter of a century to the British broadcast.

Their survival carries its own irony. She made the Settelen tapes to learn how to speak in public. In the end, they became one of the main ways the public would hear her speak in private. A voice coach’s training sessions turned into a document of the marriage that no palace press office could edit.

In 1993, the tapes were simply another secret: a private record of what she really thought, sitting in a voice coach’s possession. The two separated halves of the marriage were now telling their stories through rival channels. He had a biographer and a documentary maker. She had a book that officially was not hers, and a set of videotapes that nobody knew existed.

It was the War of the Waleses carried on by other means, and both sides were keeping something back. Separated, under siege in the press, and still living inside the palace walls, she was more alone than ever. And loneliness in her life tended to look for a telephone. Within months, someone was keeping a log of the calls she made.

On the 13th of January 1994, the telephone in Oliver Hoare’s London home rang at quarter to nine in the morning, and no one spoke. Four minutes later, at eleven minutes to nine, it rang again. Five minutes after that, at six minutes to nine, it rang a third time. In the afternoon, at twelve minutes past two, it rang again.

In the evening, at five minutes to eight and then at nineteen minutes past eight, it rang twice more. Each time, by the account later reported, the caller said nothing at all. Hoare was a dealer in Islamic art. In 1994 he was forty-eight, about sixteen years older than the princess.

He was a friend of Charles and of Camilla, and he is said to have tried at one point to reconcile the Prince and Princess of Wales. At some point, he and the princess became close. How close, and for how long? The accounts disagree.

One report speaks of a relationship lasting four years. Another dates it to 1992 to 1994. On television, later, she would speak only about the telephone calls. One explanation offered at the time was a simple one.

He was an old friend, and if his wife answered the telephone, the caller may simply have hung up. That would account for silence. It would not account for the number. The calls, by the reported count, numbered about 300.

When they began is also disputed. One account dates the first of them to September 1992, just before the separation was announced. Another places the start in 1993. Hoare, at first, reportedly feared they were linked to terrorism because of his business in Middle Eastern art.

The police were brought in, and the police, according to the findings later leaked to the press, traced the calls. They traced them, by the published account, to telephones inside Kensington Palace, to payphones near the palace, to the princess’s own car phone, and to the home of her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale. In August 1994, the News of the World published the story. The princess, by the paper’s account, had been making silent calls to a married man’s house.

For a woman whose public sympathy rested on her account of her marriage, it was a disaster. The calls made her look obsessive. A tabloid editorial asked, without any irony: “Is the Princess of Wales going mad? ”

The story raised a question that would follow her for the rest of her life: whether she could be believed about anything.

Her private secretary in those years was Patrick Jephson, who would serve her for eight years in all. Her response was immediate. She said no. She denied it flatly, and with a joke.

“I don’t even know how to use a parking meter,” she said, “let alone a phone box. ” She produced her diary to show that on some of the dates in question she had been away. And she went further, framing the leak itself as part of a campaign against her. “Whoever is trying to destroy me,” she said, “is inevitably damaging the institution of the monarchy.

”

Notice the shape of the denial. It was funny. It was specific. And it turned the accusation back on her accusers.

It was also, as she herself would later admit, not true. She had done this before. Two years earlier, she had looked her brother-in-law in the eye about the book. Now she looked the whole country in the eye about the calls.

The denial bought her time, but not belief. And a year later, on Panorama, she would admit that she had in fact called over a period of six to nine months, though not, she insisted, in an obsessive manner. The truth, as so often in her life, came out in her own words, long after she had denied it. The log itself is a strange document to read.

Six calls on one winter day, three of them inside ten minutes in the morning. Whatever her reasons, and whatever the truth of the relationship, it is the record of a woman who could not leave a telephone alone. It is also the record of a household in which every number dialled could be traced. The palace telephones that carried her calls were the same telephones that betrayed them.

One more claim belongs here, and it should be held at arm’s length. A magazine account reports that Hoare was brought into Kensington Palace hidden in the boot of her car. It is the same claim, almost word for word, that would later be made about a different man in her life, and that man’s story is far better sourced. Whether the boot carried Hoare as well is something no witness has ever sworn to.

The silent calls have a later echo, too. In 2024, reporting by The Times linked the leak of the police findings to the wider story of corruption between some police officers and some newspapers in the 1990s. It is reporting, not a finding, but it is a reminder that every secret in her life had a market, and that someone was always willing to sell. Hoare died in August 2018, aged seventy-three, some twenty-four years after the story first broke.

The calls also showed, once again, how little of her life was truly private. A police inquiry had traced numbers to a palace, a car, and a sister’s house. The findings, which should have stayed in a police file, ended up in a Sunday newspaper. The machinery that was supposed to protect her had become one more way for her secrets to escape.

By the end of 1994, her credibility was in question in print. The tapes, the book, the cavalry officer’s story in print, and now the telephone log had all come out in the space of two years. To the newspapers, she was a woman who could not be trusted to tell the truth about her own life. To herself, by her later accounts, she was a woman surrounded by people who wanted to destroy her.

Both views contained some truth. And she was about to prove, more completely than ever before, how well she could keep a secret when it really mattered. In the late summer of 1995, in a hospital corridor in Chelsea, she met the man she would hide more carefully than any of them. On the 27th of August, 1995, by his own later account, a heart surgeon at the Royal Brompton Hospital met the Princess of Wales.

It was a bank holiday Monday, the last of the summer. She had come to the hospital to visit a friend’s husband. The friend was Una Toff, an Irish nurse who had been close to the princess for years, a confidante as much as a companion. Her husband Joe was recovering from a triple heart bypass.

The Royal Brompton in Chelsea was Britain’s leading centre for heart and chest surgery, and its most famous surgeon was Sir Magdi Yacoub, the Egyptian-born pioneer who had built the country’s heart transplant programme. The doctor the princess met that day worked in his team. His name was Hasnat Khan. He was born on the 1st of April 1958 in Jhelum in Pakistan, the eldest of four children.

His father Rashid owned a glass factory and had studied at the London School of Economics. His mother Nahid was a traditional Pashtun matriarch, and her views would matter a great deal before this story was done. Khan had qualified in medicine in 1984, worked in cardiology at Mayo Hospital in Lahore, trained further in Sydney from 1987, and come to London in 1991. By 1994, he was a surgical registrar at Leeds General Infirmary.

By the summer of 1995, he was a registrar at the Royal Brompton under Yacoub. Colleagues remembered him as quiet, with a dry sense of humour, and entirely unimpressed by celebrity. He spoke of working ninety-hour weeks. He did not move in her world and showed no sign of wanting to.

Look at the contrast with the men who had come before. The protection officer had been part of her household. The cavalry officer came from the regiment that guarded the sovereign. The art dealer was a friend of her husband’s.

Every one of them, in one way or another, belonged to the royal world. Khan belonged to a hospital. His world was night shifts, operating lists, and the steady pressure of a great surgeon’s team. If he had heard of court etiquette, he gave no sign that he cared about it.

She noticed him at once. According to the biographer Kate Snell, she turned to her friend and said: “Una, isn’t he drop dead gorgeous? ”

The numbers of that first meeting say something about both of them. He was born in 1958, she in 1961.

On that August day in 1995, she was thirty-four and he was thirty-seven. She was nearly three years into a separation and still almost exactly a year away from her divorce. And over the following three weeks, by the accounts of those around her, she returned to the hospital almost every day, ostensibly to visit Joe Toff. Twenty-one days of a princess walking the corridors of a London hospital to see one patient, and it was soon clear: one doctor.

One American news report later dated their meeting to 1994. Khan’s own account, given to police years afterward, puts it in late August 1995. That is the date the record supports. Three weeks is a long time to visit one patient.

The staff of a busy heart hospital could hardly fail to notice the Princess of Wales in their corridors day after day. Some of them, by later accounts, did notice and kept quiet. A hospital is a place used to discretion. Its people see the famous at their most frightened and do not speak of it.

In that sense, it was the perfect place for her to fall in love. A building full of people trained to keep secrets. To her healer, Simone Simmons, she spoke about him almost immediately. “I think I’ve met my Mr.

Wonderful,” she said. Simmons recalled her describing his “dark brown velvet eyes that you could just sink into. ”

About two weeks after they met, the two of them drove out of London together. The destination was Stratford-upon-Avon, where Khan’s uncle, Professor Jawad Saeed Khan, lived.

It was a long drive for a first outing, and Khan later described it in a few plain words. “We drove up there, drove back, and found this wonderful connection. ” He said she was “very ordinary in many ways, a normal person with great warmth. ”

Very ordinary, for a woman whose every public step was photographed.

That may have been the most seductive thing anyone could say. Here was a man who, by every account, was not dazzled by who she was. He worked absurd hours. He was serious about his work.

And he seemed to see her as a person rather than a princess. According to the biographer Kate Snell, she said: “I’m no longer lonely. I know what love is now. ” It is a line reported through a biographer, and it should be held as such.

But it is consistent with everything her friends said about this relationship, from the first weeks to the last. This meant something new for the second life she had built. Every earlier secret had been something kept from the palace. This one would have to be kept from the whole world.

In the autumn of 1995, she was the most famous woman alive, separated, watched by photographers wherever she went. She had just survived the book, the tapes, the telephone calls. And now she wanted something she had never had before: a private love affair with a man who had no interest at all in being famous. There is a small irony in the calendar.

Within days of her meeting Khan, a television reporter had his first meeting with her brother, at the end of that same August. Two men had entered her life in the same week. One was the man she would soon say, according to Kate Snell, had ended her loneliness. The other was already preparing the deception that would only be fully understood a quarter of a century later.

For now, all she knew was that she had met someone, and that to keep him, she would need to be cleverer than she had ever been. The most photographed woman in the world was about to try to conduct a love affair without a single photograph. She would need help, and a different name. When the Princess of Wales telephoned the Royal Brompton and asked for Hasnat Khan, the switchboard, by several accounts, heard another name.

She left messages, by several accounts, as “Dr. Armani. ” It was a small disguise, almost a joke, the name of a fashion house dressed up as a colleague. But it worked.

A busy hospital switchboard took messages for doctors all day long. One more doctor asking for a surgeon would draw no attention. The princess, who could not walk down a street without being recognised, could, for a few seconds on a telephone line, become nobody at all. That was the method of the whole affair: make the extraordinary look ordinary, hide in plain sight.

She went further. According to one account, she wore a black wig to slip into a jazz club with him. The club has never been securely named, and the story comes through later reporting rather than any sworn testimony, but it fits the pattern of a woman who, by one friend’s account, had once tucked her hair under a leather cap to buy a single drink in a South London pub. Disguise was not new to her.

Now it had a purpose. The real problem was the palace itself. Kensington Palace had gates and staff, and a royal household notices who comes and goes. If Khan was to come to her, he could not simply walk through the front door.

The solution, according to her butler, Paul Burrell, was the boot of a car. Burrell later said that he drove Khan into Kensington Palace, hidden there, into the private world of apartments 8 and 9. A heart surgeon folded into the luggage space of a car, carried into a royal palace by a butler. It is one of the most extraordinary images of her whole hidden life.

It rests on Burrell’s word, and Burrell is a witness to be weighed carefully, but it has been repeated by biographers and by later reporting. The palace had been built for exactly this kind of discretion, though no one had intended it for her purposes. Apartments 8 and 9 had staff entrances that the photographers could not reach. A household that had spent years keeping its principals apart now quietly kept one of them company.

Once inside, the palace became the safe place. Khan himself said so years later in a sworn statement. “Kensington,” he said, “was the only place we could have any real privacy, as they could not get to us there. ” Here the walls that had confined her for fourteen years finally served her.

The same palace that had once watched her every move now hid her best-kept secret. By the accounts of Burrell and of the writer Tina Brown, Khan sometimes came straight off long shifts and slept there. The staff were told not to disturb him. In the morning, he was driven back to the hospital or slipped away by taxi.

Tina Brown’s phrase for it was that Khan “virtually moved in. ”

She went to him, too. He lived in a modest rented flat in Chelsea, the home of a man who spent most of his life at work. By the accounts of Burrell and Simmons, she would go there late at night and leave before dawn.

They described her doing his washing up and putting away his laundry, a princess delighted by the simple domestic chores of an ordinary life. It is reported through her butler and her friends, but it is the picture her friends kept, and it says a good deal about what she was looking for. She drove herself. The accounts disagree about the car, and the make does not matter.

What matters is the picture of the Princess of Wales alone at the wheel at night, driving across London to a doctor’s flat and then back again before the city woke up. For a woman who had once needed protection officers, equerries, and a press office to go anywhere, it was a kind of freedom she had never known. All of this required keepers. Burrell was the most important of them.

He was the man at the door, the driver of the car, the one who knew who was in the palace on any given night. He carried messages. Years later, he would be tried at the Old Bailey on charges of stealing her possessions, and acquitted in November 2002. But in 1995 and 1996, he was the hinge on which the secret turned.

There is an echo here worth noticing. The same claim about a car boot had been made about Oliver Hoare in a single magazine account. Whether the story attached itself to both men, or whether she used the same method twice, the record cannot say. What it does say, through the much stronger sourcing around Khan, is that by the mid-1990s the princess had worked out how to bring a man into a royal palace without anyone at the gate knowing he was there.

And the palace itself, the second story of her life, had changed its meaning. For fourteen years, it had been the place where she was watched. The staff knew her habits. The police knew her movements.

The household knew her moods. Now the same rooms became the one place where she could not be photographed. The one place a man could sleep without a lens at the window. The building that had confined her became the instrument of her secret.

Look at the shape of this secret compared with the others. The cavalry officer had been hidden by the ordinary discretion of a few friends. The silent calls had not been hidden at all, only denied. This relationship was managed like an operation, with a false name, a disguise, a car boot, a butler, a private entrance.

It was the most elaborate secret of her life. It was also, for a time, the most successful. For months, while the newspapers searched for her next scandal, the man she loved was walking the corridors of a Chelsea hospital, unrecognised, and sleeping in her palace, unseen. But the hospital itself was becoming a risk.

She was there too often, at too many strange hours. And in late November 1995, a photographer caught her leaving it in the small hours of the morning. She needed a story, and she needed it fast. Late in November 1995, the Princess of Wales borrowed a photographer’s telephone outside a London hospital and called a Sunday newspaper.

It was about ten days after the most famous television interview of her life. Her face was on every front page, and now a photographer had caught her coming out of the Royal Brompton in the middle of the night. The obvious question was why. Her answer was to get there first.

She took the photographer’s mobile phone and called the News of the World, the paper that had broken the story of the silent calls the year before. She spoke to its royal correspondent, and she gave him a story. She went to the hospital, she said, to sit with patients. “I try to be there for them,” she told him.

“I seem to draw strength from them. They all need someone. I hold their hands, talk to them, whatever helps. ”

The paper ran it under a headline that would follow her for years: “My secret nights as an angel.

”

It was a brilliant piece of misdirection. In a single phone call, she turned a potentially explosive photograph into a story about her compassion. The man she was really visiting, according to her biographers, was never named in it. Was the story false?

Not entirely. And that is what made it work. The record of her hospital visits in these years is real and well documented. At the Royal Brompton, an eight-year-old girl named Danielle Stevenson, recovering from heart surgery, was visited by the princess five times.

A hospital spokeswoman, Ava Slade, said she came as often as three times a week. She would, in the spokeswoman’s words, “bounce in unannounced in jeans and trainers. ” She gave the little girl the palace’s direct telephone number. Slade said she gave the patients “this magic.

”

There was more. In the winter of 1994, she had gone to a shelter called Off the Streets to comfort about forty people, prostitutes, addicts, and the homeless, with a social worker named Paul George present. There she recognised a young man of twenty-three called Ricky, whom she had met before on the Strand. She paid incognito visits to people sleeping rough near the Centrepoint shelter.

And a few months before her death, she took her two sons there. To avoid photographers, she used elaborate security, changing cars on the way. Think about the little girl with the palace telephone number. An eight-year-old in a hospital bed, recovering from heart surgery, holding the private number of the Princess of Wales.

It was a private kindness. It is one of the many small, undramatic things she did in private that only came out after her death, when people who had known her began to speak. So the angel nights, if her biographers are right, were a cover, and the cover was made of something real. That is the double life at its most refined.

She hid a love affair behind a charitable story that happened to be true. It also shows how well she understood the press by now. She knew a photograph without a story would be filled by the worst possible story. So she supplied one at once, in her own words, to the very paper most likely to run it.

The newspaper got its exclusive. She kept her secret. It was a trade, and for a while it worked. The press, however, did not entirely believe her.

The story also produced, in one writer’s phrase, a darker image of the princess as an “ambulance chaser,” someone drawn to illness and death. And it was about to get worse. On the 23rd of April 1996, at Harefield Hospital west of London, she spent two hours in an operating theatre in a blue surgical gown and cap, watching Sir Magdi Yacoub operate on a seven-year-old boy named Ano Wambo from Cameroon. A Sky News crew filmed it for a documentary about a children’s heart charity called Chain of Hope.

It was reported to be the sixth operation she had watched. The numbers of her hospital life tell their own story. An eight-year-old girl visited five times, at up to three times a week. About forty people comforted in one winter night at a shelter.

Two hours in an operating theatre with a boy of seven, at what was reportedly the sixth operation she had seen. There was no doubt she was spending a great deal of time in hospitals. The only question was why. The reaction was harsh.

The Sun suggested that if she was so interested, she should train as a nurse. The Daily Mirror’s banner asked: “Is Diana off her trolley? ” The agony aunt Claire Rayner, herself a former surgical nurse, said: “I am appalled. I would not have allowed it.

” A spokeswoman for the Royal College of Nursing pointed out that she had worn heavy make-up and had not followed the usual theatre rules, with jewellery and a watch on show. She defended herself in her own terms. “I gather information much more from visual contact, not from reading books,” she said. And of the surgeon: “I hope that more will develop and other children will benefit from the professor’s magical talent.

”

Look at the two sides of the hospital story together. In private, she sat by the bed of a little girl and gave her a telephone number. In public, she stood in an operating theatre with a television crew and was mocked for it. Both were real.

Both were her. The difficulty was that the public only ever saw one side at a time, and drew its conclusions from whichever side it happened to be shown. Whether Khan was in that theatre, the record does not say. He worked in Yacoub’s team, and that is all that can be stated.

But the newspapers’ instinct that something did not add up was right, even if they could not say what it was. A princess was spending her nights and days among heart surgeons. The papers saw an obsession with illness. Her biographers would later point to one man.

And the angel story had come at a strange moment. It ran ten days after the interview that had made her, for a while, the most talked-about woman in the world. That interview, too, had a hidden history. It had been won, it would turn out, with forged paper.

On the 31st of August 1995, a BBC reporter named Martin Bashir sat down with the Princess of Wales’s brother, Earl Spencer, master of Althorp. Bashir was a reporter for Panorama, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme. He wanted something no journalist had ever had: an interview on camera with the princess herself. And he had decided, it would later be found, that the way to her was through her brother.

What Bashir told Earl Spencer, according to the inquiry that examined it a quarter of a century later, was alarming. In August 1995, he said that Spencer was a target of the tabloids, and that there were people in his own household selling information to the newspapers. He had, he claimed, evidence. The evidence was forged.

Bashir had asked a graphic designer named Matt Wiessler to mock up bank statements. The fake documents appeared to show payments to people close to the family. One set named Alan Waller, a former employee of the Spencer household. Another named Patrick Jephson, the princess’s own private secretary, and Richard Aylard.

The documents were designed to suggest that these men were being paid to spy, to leak, to betray. None of it was true. The statements were made up from start to finish. At a second meeting on the 19th of September 1995, Spencer was told still more.

He wrote down what Bashir said, thirty-eight points of it: a long note of claims about the people around his sister. That note would survive, and it would matter enormously decades later. That September, Earl Spencer introduced his sister to Martin Bashir. The man who led that inquiry, Lord Dyson, would put it plainly.

“By showing Earl Spencer the fake Waller and Jephson and Aylard statements and informing him of their contents, Mr. Bashir deceived and induced him to arrange a meeting with Princess Diana. ” That behaviour, he found, was in serious breach of the BBC’s own producer guidelines on straight dealing, the 1993 edition. Elsewhere in the report, Dyson wrote that “by his deceitful behaviour, Bashir succeeded in engineering the meeting that led to the interview.

”

Dyson was careful to set out how it worked. The fake statements, he found, were “the key that opened the door. ”

The figures of the deception are few and stark. A first meeting on the 31st of August, a second on the 19th of September, with a note of thirty-eight points.

Three names on fake statements: Waller, Jephson, and Aylard. One designer to make them. And a set of rules, written in 1993, that the whole operation broke. The details matter because of who was named.

Patrick Jephson was her own private secretary, the man who ran her office and her diary, who had served her for years. To suggest that he was being paid to betray her was to suggest that the person closest to her working life was a spy. Alan Waller had worked for her brother. The fake documents went straight at the two things she feared most: that the people around her were not loyal, and that her private life was being sold.

Jephson and Waller would eventually receive damages from the BBC, but that was more than a quarter of a century away. In the autumn of 1995, none of them knew that their names had been put on forged paper and shown to the princess’s brother. Earl Spencer, for his part, had reason to listen. A warning that people inside his own household were selling stories would not have sounded strange to him.

It would have sounded like confirmation. That is what made the forgeries so effective. They told the family what it had already feared. Here, the double life turns inside out.

For years, she had been the one keeping secrets, using intermediaries and cover stories and deniable methods to control what the world knew. Now, at the very moment she was building her most elaborate secret, the hidden romance with Khan, a stranger was using exactly those methods against her. A forged document, a trusted intermediary, her own brother, a cover story, and a target who did not know she was being deceived. What she knew, and when, is a question that would occupy an inquiry decades later.

The documents went to her brother, not to her directly. But the climate Bashir was feeding, of spies in the household and people paid to watch her, fell on ground the Squidgygate tape had already prepared. She had every reason to believe she was being watched, because once, at least, she had been. Years later, Hasnat Khan would say it plainly.

Bashir, he said in 2021, had “filled her head with rubbish. ” After meeting him, Khan said, she became paranoid, “with talks of bugs and phone tapping. ”

There was a later document, too, that would be read in this light. In October 1996, she wrote a letter to Burrell which surfaced only in 2003.

In it, she wrote: “I am sitting here at my desk today in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high. ” She went on to say that this phase of her life was the most dangerous, and that someone whose name was later blacked out in publication was planning an accident in her car. It is a document of her state of mind, not a prediction. It shows a woman frightened that the people around her meant her harm, at a time when a reporter had been feeding exactly that fear through her brother.

The inquest in 2008 found no plot of any kind. She would also, in December 1995, write a short note on Kensington Palace paper about Bashir and the documents. Lord Dyson’s report would later reproduce it. But in the autumn of 1995, none of that was visible.

What was visible was that the Princess of Wales had agreed to speak on camera, and the BBC was going to have to get its cameras into her palace without anyone noticing. By November, the cameras were inside her sitting room, disguised as a delivery. On the 5th of November 1995, while Britain lit its bonfires, a BBC crew carried equipment into Kensington Palace under the cover of a new hi-fi system. The setting was her own sitting room.

Four years earlier, a doctor’s tape recorder had sat there. Now it held the lights and cameras of the national broadcaster, carried in under a false description. The room had become, without anyone outside knowing it, the recording studio of her second life. What was carried into the palace that evening would do more damage to the monarchy than any of the fireworks outside.

The crew came disguised as installers of a new sound system. The interview was recorded in her own sitting room, the same kind of private room where the Morton tapes had been made four years earlier. The secrecy around it was extraordinary. The BBC’s own board of governors was kept unaware.

So was Jim Moyer, the corporation’s royal liaison, whose job was precisely to manage relations with the palace. The finished tape was kept under constant watch, with security guards present during the editing. The interview was broadcast with very little warning to the royal family. It went out on the 20th of November 1995.

In Britain, nearly 23 million people watched. Worldwide, the estimate was some 200 million across about 100 countries. When it ended, the National Grid recorded a surge of 2,800 megawatts as a nation got up to put the kettle on. Fifteen days separated the bonfires from the broadcast.

What she said has become part of the language of her marriage. She said there were “three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. ” She spoke about depression after the birth of her first son and how it had led her to harm herself and to bulimia. She spoke about James Hewitt and confirmed, in the words that would be quoted for decades, that she had adored him, that she had been in love with him, and that he had let her down.

She admitted, too, that she had made the calls to Hoare over six to nine months, though not in what she called an obsessive manner. And she said that she would like to be “a queen of people’s hearts. ”

It was a phrase made for headlines, and it got them. It was also, in its way, a claim to a kind of power the palace could not grant or take away.

The court controlled titles and styles and apartments. It could not control what the public felt about her. The words about Hewitt carried a particular weight. A year earlier, his side of the story had appeared in a book.

Now she confirmed it herself, in front of the nation, in a few short sentences. She took the secret back by telling it in her own voice. It was the same instinct that had driven the Morton tapes. If her story was going to be told, she would be the one to tell it.

Look at what this was. For four years, she had told her story in secret, through intermediaries, behind deniable methods. Now she told it herself, with her own face, on the national broadcaster. It was the opposite of the bicycle and the briefcase.

It looked like the moment she finally stopped keeping secrets. And yet the interview was itself built on secrets. It was recorded in secret, edited in secret, and broadcast with almost no warning. It also left one thing out completely.

She talked about a husband, a cavalry officer, a telephone pest, and a marriage with three people in it. In none of the lines quoted from it since does she speak of the surgeon who, by her butler’s account, was then sleeping at her palace. The most public confession of her life seems to have left the most private secret of her life untouched. There was also an irony that no one watching could have seen.

The calls about the affair with Hewitt, the despair about her marriage: all the secrets she chose to confirm that night were secrets that had already leaked. She confirmed only what was already out. The one secret that had not yet leaked, she appears to have kept. The interview did one more thing that is easy to overlook.

It turned her private record into a public one in a single hour. Things that had been the subject of rumour, books by others, and tabloid splashes were now confirmed in her own voice, with her own face, on the record forever. Whatever the palace had hoped to deny on her behalf, it could deny no longer. The palace’s response was swift.

In December 1995, the Queen wrote to both her son and her daughter-in-law, urging an early divorce. The damage the interview had done was too great. The fiction of a separated but intact royal marriage could not survive it. On the 22nd of December 1995, the princess wrote a short note on Kensington Palace paper.

In it, she said: “Martin Bashir did not show me any documents, nor give me any information I was not previously aware of. ” She also wrote that she had agreed to the interview without any undue pressure and had no regrets concerning the matter. In 1996, an internal BBC inquiry led by Tony Hall cleared Bashir. Much later, Lord Dyson would reach a more careful judgment about her decision.

It was his view that she would probably have agreed to be interviewed anyway, whatever Bashir had done. That is a judgment, not a fact, and it cannot be proved either way. It sits alongside his finding that the route to her had been paved with forged paper. The palace now faced a problem it could not solve.

A separated princess, still the mother of the heir’s heir, had gone around the entire royal machine to the national broadcaster. She had told 23 million people that her husband had been unfaithful, that she had been ill, that she had loved another man. There was no statement the palace could issue that would undo it. The only remaining move was the one the Commons statement of 1992 had promised would never be needed.

Divorce. For now, though, she had spoken. She had told the world about her marriage, her illness, her lover, and her loneliness. She had chosen to speak, and the cost of speaking was a divorce.

Meanwhile, the one man she had not named was quietly being asked about a wedding. In 1996, the butler of Kensington Palace walked into a Carmelite church in Kensington with a question no one had ever asked on behalf of a princess. Paul Burrell, by his own sworn evidence years later, had been sent on an errand. The princess wanted to know, he said, if it would be possible to arrange a private wedding: a Christian princess and a Muslim surgeon, a woman still technically married or soon to be divorced, and a man who, as far as the record shows, had not been told that the question was being asked.

Burrell took it to a priest named Father Anthony Parsons. Khan, by Burrell’s account, knew nothing of it. Burrell told the inquest more. She called Khan her soulmate, he said, and the one she had.

He said she had considered giving him rooms at Kensington Palace and a second home in Pakistan. All of this is Burrell’s account, and he is a witness to be weighed. He is a contested witness. But he was the keeper who knew the most, and on this subject his account has been broadly consistent with the other primary voices.

The secret had already cracked once. On the 26th of January, 1996, The Sunday Mirror ran a front-page headline: “Di’s driver and a dishy doc. ” It reported dinners at a Greek restaurant in Stratford-upon-Avon called the Greek Connection. One of them, the manager, Lazarus Sefariades, told the paper, had lasted four and a half hours over moussaka and strawberries.

It was the first time the relationship was named in print. Even so, the secret went on. She took it further than anyone expected. She travelled to Pakistan for the first time in February 1996, with Lady Annabel Goldsmith.

In May 1996, she went again, staying with Jemima and Imran Khan. Imran was a distant cousin of Hasnat. During that visit, she went to the Khan family home in Model Town, Lahore, and took tea with his mother, Nahid, and the elderly women of the family, including a grandmother the family called Nanny Upper. By Tina Brown’s account, she had not told Hasnat she was going, and he was absolutely outraged when he found out.

Jemima Khan, whose house was the base for those visits, later wrote about it in Vanity Fair. The princess, she said, was “madly in love” with Hasnat Khan and wanted to marry him, even if that meant living in Pakistan. She also explained why it would never happen. “For a son to marry an English girl,” she wrote, “is every conservative Pashtun mother’s worst nightmare.

”

His father, Rashid, reportedly put it another way, by one magazine’s account. His son, he said, believed they were simply too different. “She is from Venus and I am from Mars. ”

She studied the Quran.

Stories that she had converted to Islam were published, and she denied them. She is reported to have consulted a London imam about the practicalities of marriage across faiths. And by the accounts of Kate Snell and Simone Simmons, she approached Yacoub himself about finding Khan a post abroad, with Australia the place most often named, so that they might live together away from the cameras. When Khan learned that she had gone to his employer, he was reportedly furious.

Meanwhile, the formal end of her marriage arrived. The decree nisi came in July 1996, and the divorce was final on the 28th of August 1996. She kept the title Diana, Princess of Wales. She lost the style Her Royal Highness, the formal address that marks a member of the royal family.

The settlement was confidential, but the press reported a lump sum of about £17 million. A year and a day after Khan said they had met, she was a single woman. A single woman, but not a free one. She remained the mother of a future king.

She remained the most photographed woman in the world. The divorce had changed her title and her income. It had not changed the cameras. And the cameras were at the heart of Khan’s objection.

And still he would not marry her. His reasons, when he finally gave them, were simple and devastating. In a statement to police in 2004, later read to the inquest into her death, he said: “My main concern about us getting married was that my life would be hell because of who she was. ” He went on: “I knew I would not be able to live a normal life, and if we ever had children together, I would not be able to take them anywhere.

”

In May 1997, she made her third trip to Pakistan. On the 18th of June, she met Mother Teresa in the Bronx for about forty minutes. In the summer, after a holiday with the Al Fayed family at Saint-Tropez, she ended it with Khan in two meetings. By his account, she told him there was no one else.

“I was surprised when she said there was no one else,” he said later. He learned about Dodi Al Fayed from the radio. The new relationship was conducted in full view of the cameras, the opposite of the old one. In late August, aboard the Al Fayed yacht Jonikal, a photographer named Mario Brenna caught the couple from a distance.

The picture that became known as the Kiss was reportedly sold to The Sunday Mirror for about $2 million. On the last day of her life, a Repossi ring was bought for about $23,000, by evidence given at the inquest. Rosa Monckton testified that the princess had said any ring from Dodi would go on her right hand. Her friends read the new relationship in a single way.

Simone Simmons believed it was meant to make Khan jealous. Rosa Monckton, her close friend, told the inquest that Dodi was a distraction from the hurt. Both are their views, and they are views. In the early hours of the 31st of August 1997, she and Dodi Al Fayed left the Ritz Hotel in Paris at about twenty minutes past midnight in a Mercedes driven by Henri Paul, with a bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, in the front.

At about twenty-three minutes past midnight, the car struck the thirteenth pillar of the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. She was pronounced dead at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital at about four in the morning. French investigators found that the driver’s blood alcohol was more than three times the French limit. In 2008, an inquest in London returned a verdict of unlawful killing, caused by the driver’s negligence and the pursuing vehicles.

It found no evidence of any plot. She died with almost none of her secrets confirmed. The book was officially her friends’ book. The surgeon was a rumour in one Sunday newspaper.

The interview had been freely given. Her denials still stood. And the people who had kept her secrets for her began, one by one, to speak. In October 1997, a few weeks after the funeral, Andrew Morton published a new edition with four extra words in its title.

The funeral had been held at Westminster Abbey on the 6th of September, and its scale matched the wedding sixteen years before. About 2,000 mourners filled the Abbey. In Britain, 32. 1 million people watched on television.

Around the world, the audience was put at between two and two and a half billion. More than a million people lined the streets of London. Among the mourners inside, in dark glasses, was Hasnat Khan. She was buried on the island in the lake at Althorp, the house her family had moved to when she was a girl.

The days around it carried their own strange symmetry. Mother Teresa, whom she had met in the Bronx that June, died on the 5th of September, the day before the funeral. In the space of a week, the world lost two of the most photographed women of the age. Only one of them had spent years hiding a private life from the cameras.

For the people who had kept her secrets, the funeral was a different kind of ending. The woman whose confidences they held was gone. The promises they had made were made to someone who could no longer release them, or hold them to account. Some kept quiet for the rest of their lives.

Others, it turned out, did not. Within weeks, the first of her secrets was out. Morton’s new edition was called Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words. The title said what he had denied for five years.

The princess had not merely allowed her friends to speak. She had been the source. The tapes were hers. The voice was hers.

The questions had been answered by her own mouth, into a recorder carried on a bicycle. Morton, after years of denial, now acknowledged her role as the book’s main source of information. The reaction was divided. Some accused him of breaching confidentiality and exploiting the tragedy of her death.

Others praised his candour. Both sides agreed on one thing: the book that had been officially her friends’ book was, and had always been, her own. The new edition also confirmed something else by implication. Every time she had been asked about the book in her lifetime and denied it, she had been protecting this.

The bicycle, the briefcase, the distance from the author: all of it had worked exactly as she intended, for as long as she lived. For one man, the revelation was not a matter of literary debate. Sir Robert Fellowes had told the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission in 1992 that she had not cooperated. He had done so on her word.

Now her word was publicly shown to have been false, and his assurance with it. According to his obituary, when the truth came out, he was mortified and felt duty bound to offer his resignation to the Queen. The Queen turned it down flat. He stayed in his post until February 1999.

He died in 2024. The lie told in 1992 had found him five years later, in the months after her death, when she was no longer there to explain it. Other keepers began to speak. In 2001, the biographer Kate Snell published Diana: Her Last Love, an account of the relationship with Hasnat Khan.

The surgeon, who had been a single rumour in one Sunday newspaper in 1996, now had a book written about him. Khan himself said nothing. He refused every approach from the press. Her friends told their parts, too, in time.

Her healer, Simone Simmons, published her own account, Diana: The Last Word, in 2005, written with Ingrid Seward. It was Simmons who had heard about Mr. Wonderful in the first weeks of the affair, Simmons who remembered the dark brown velvet eyes, and Simmons who believed, as she wrote, that the princess had taken up with Dodi Al Fayed only to make Khan jealous. Every friend’s book is a version, and should be read as one.

But together, they began to sketch the outline of a life that the palace’s own record had never shown. Paul Burrell’s turn came in a courtroom. In 2002, he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of stealing her possessions. In November of that year, he was acquitted.

The next year, he published a memoir, A Royal Duty. In it, he revealed some of what he had kept for her, including the letter she had written to him in October 1996, describing her fear of an accident in her car. He also told of the errand to the priest, and of the man in the boot of the car. The butler who had held the back door of her hidden life now opened it to the public.

James Hewitt’s turn came the same winter. In January 2003, he tried to sell sixty-four of her letters. The reported asking price was £10 million. The letters that had been the private record of a five-year relationship had become, eleven years after it ended, an item for sale.

There is a pattern in these years that is worth naming. The people who kept her secrets while she lived were almost all of them people who had something to lose by telling. The journalist would be accused of exploiting her. The butler had a reputation to restore.

The cavalry officer had a name to clear, or a price to set. Each of them told their piece of the story for their own reasons, in their own time, and each piece filled in another corner of the life she had hidden. Notice, too, who did not speak. Hasnat Khan said nothing.

The men who had loved her most, or helped her most, tended to keep the deepest silence. The secrets that came out first were the ones held by people with a reason to tell them. What none of them could give was her own voice. The book said she had spoken.

But apart from a few lines quoted in print, the public had never heard her speak the words. The paper record was opening. Next came her voice. In 2004, American television viewers heard the Princess of Wales describe her own proposal, seven years after her death.

The network was NBC. It had obtained clips from the tapes Colthurst had carried to Morton in 1991, and it broadcast them. Her voice, recorded in her sitting room thirteen years earlier, came out of television sets across America. “So he said, ‘Will you marry me?

’ And I laughed. ” The bulimia, four times a day on the yacht. The whole world focusing on her, every day on the front page. The same year, the same network broadcast extracts from the other secret recordings: the videotapes she had made with her voice coach, Peter Settelen.

The programme was called Diana Revealed. The tapes had been seized from Burrell’s home by police in 2001, fought over by her brother, and returned to Settelen in 2004. Now America saw her on them, talking about her marriage, about loneliness, about the protection officer she had loved. Britain did not see them for another thirteen years.

2004 was also the year the official investigations reached the man she had loved most. On the 24th of September, Hasnat Khan gave a statement to the police inquiry into her death. He had kept silent for seven years. The inquiry, known as Operation Paget and led by Lord Stevens, interviewed him once.

He would keep silent in public for longer still. His own life had moved on in the meantime, after a fashion. In May 2006, his family arranged his marriage to a woman named Hadia Sher Ali. In November 2007, he left the National Health Service for a post in Malaysia.

The marriage would end in a divorce filed in July 2008. But the statement now existed, and in time it would be read aloud. That moment came at the inquest in London, which opened in 2007 and heard evidence into the spring of 2008. Burrell gave evidence about the wedding plans and the priest, about the soulmate and the one.

Then he left and refused to return. On the 3rd of March 2008, Khan’s statement was read to the court. The world heard, for the first time, in his own words, why he would not marry her. His life, he said, would be hell because of who she was.

He could never have taken their children anywhere. Before the hearings, he had wavered over whether to attend at all. “My lawyers advised me I do not have to attend,” he said that January. “If that’s their advice, I won’t go.

” He refused even then to say anything that might seem to judge her, since she was not here. He said it would be “very unfair” to make a comment about her. And he said what he hoped the inquest would do: “I hope the inquest clarifies everything. I hope people will move on.

”

He spoke a little more to the press that January, briefly and painfully. “Sometimes I feel like screaming,” he said. “There have been very bad times. I have moved on, but it keeps coming back.

” And he explained why he had kept the secret so long. “I’m loyal to her, not because she was a celebrity, but because I’m loyal to all my friends. ”

On the 7th of April 2008, the inquest returned its verdict: unlawful killing, caused by the negligence of the driver and the pursuing vehicles. There was no plot.

The trail of what came out next can be counted in years and audiences. In 2004, the NBC broadcasts. In 2008, an inquest verdict on the 7th of April. In 2013, Cleo Rocos’s memoir, with its story of a leather cap and a borrowed jacket, and Jemima Khan’s essay in Vanity Fair, called “The Real Diana.

” In 2017, a British television audience of three and a half million for the Settelen tapes. Each year added a voice, and each voice added a secret. Jemima Khan’s essay told the Pakistan side of the story: the visits to Lahore, the tea in Model Town, the hopes that came to nothing. Her verdict was that the princess had been madly in love and would have lived in Pakistan to marry him.

Sixteen years after the princess’s death, the friend who had hosted her wrote down what the princess herself had never been able to say in public. The 2013 story of the jacket and the aviator glasses was widely reported. That August, Khan spoke again, briefly, to reject a feature film about his relationship with her, starring Naomi Watts. He called it “based on hypotheses and gossip.

” He said he had never given his approval for it. And he gave the simplest description of what they had been to each other that anyone has ever given. “There wasn’t any hierarchy in our relationship,” he said. “She wasn’t a princess and I wasn’t a doctor.

We were friends. ”

Then, on Sunday the 6th of August 2017, Channel 4 broadcast the Settelen tapes in Britain under the title Diana: In Her Own Words. Some of her friends had opposed it. It drew an average of three and a half million viewers, the channel’s highest rating of the year.

British audiences heard her say, at last: “There’s just nobody to physically scream at, or someone to put their arms around me. Just listen when I cry. ”

That same summer, Morton published a twentieth-anniversary edition of his book, with still more of the original transcripts. Colthurst spoke, too, in later interviews, about the bicycle, the briefcase, the microphone.

He remembered his last telephone call with her before her death. She had been laughing, he said, almost uncontrollably, about a poem someone had given her. Nearly twenty-five years had passed between the first session with the voice coach and that broadcast. In that time, the woman on the screen had become a memory for some and a name in history books for others.

A generation had grown up who had never seen her alive. They met her for the first time through the recordings she had made in secret. By 2017, nearly every secret in this story had come out. The protection officer.

The cavalry officer. The Gilbey heir. The book. The art dealer.

The surgeon. The disguises. The angel nights. One question was still open, and it concerned the moment she had seemed to stop keeping secrets altogether.

How had the interview really been obtained? On the 20th of May 2021, the BBC published a report it had commissioned into the most famous interview it had ever broadcast. The inquiry had been set up on the 18th of November, 2020, and placed in the hands of Lord Dyson. His report was dated the 14th of May, 2021.

It was published six days later, and it said what the BBC’s own internal inquiry of 1996 had failed to say. Martin Bashir, Dyson found, had acted deceitfully. He had commissioned fake bank statements and shown them to Earl Spencer, and he had used them to win access to the princess. It was, in the report’s words, a serious breach of the BBC’s producer guidelines.

Of the inquiry led by Tony Hall in 1996, which had cleared Bashir, Dyson was scathing. It was, he wrote, “woefully ineffective. ”

“Without justification,” the report found, “the BBC had fallen short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark. ”

The BBC’s director-general, Tim Davie, did not argue.

“The BBC accepts Lord Dyson’s findings in full,” he said. “We can make a full and unconditional apology. ”

Bashir had already left the corporation that month, citing ill health. Tony Hall, who had led the 1996 inquiry, later admitted that giving Bashir the benefit of the doubt had been wrong.

The money that followed can be counted. In March 2022, Patrick Jephson, her private secretary, received substantial damages, reported at about £100,000, which he gave to Tŷ Hafan, a Welsh hospice for children. In July 2022, Tiggy Legge-Bourke received substantial damages, too, reported at about £200,000, for baseless allegations. In September 2022, Alan Waller received a settlement reported at £60,000.

That same July, Tim Davie announced that the BBC would never show the interview again, and would never license it to any other broadcaster. There was one more name in the settlements that reached back into the darkest document of her last years. The October letter to her butler, the one about the brake lines and the head injury, had, in its published form, named a woman called Tiggy. The BBC’s payment to Tiggy Legge-Bourke in July 2022 was for baseless allegations.

The record does not say exactly how the fears in that letter took shape. It does show that by the time she wrote it, a reporter had spent a year feeding her family false stories about the people around her. The responses from her family were blunt. Prince William said that the BBC’s failures had contributed to his mother’s “fear, paranoia and isolation.

” Prince Harry spoke about a wider culture of the media and the ripple effect that he linked to her death. And Hasnat Khan, breaking his silence again that January, said that Bashir had “filled her head with rubbish,” and that after meeting him she had become paranoid, with talk of bugs and phone tapping. The report did more than criticise a reporter. It found that the corporation itself had fallen short, and that its own inquiry of 1996 had failed to get to the truth of what had happened in its own building.

Dyson’s report changed the shape of her story. For twenty-five years, the Panorama interview had been the moment she took control. It was her voice, her words, her decision, the opposite of the secrets and the denials. And it turned out to have been reached through a deception practised on her own brother, using forged documents that named her own private secretary as a traitor.

The detail of how it was done came from her brother’s own paper. Earl Spencer had kept his note of the meeting of the 19th of September 1995: the thirty-eight points of what Bashir had told him. Twenty-five years later, Lord Dyson’s inquiry examined that meeting and that note in detail. Her note of the 22nd of December, 1995, now read differently.

“Martin Bashir did not show me any documents,” she had written, “nor give me any information I was not previously aware of. ” That was true, as far as it went. The documents had gone to her brother. The information had arrived through him.

She signed a note clearing the man who had deceived her family. Dyson’s view was that she would probably have agreed to the interview anyway. Perhaps she would. She wanted to tell her story, and she had been finding ways to tell it since the bicycle in 1991.

But the fear she spoke of in her last years, of people watching her and plotting against her, had been fed, at least in part, by forged paper. Some of what she feared was real. A telephone call had been recorded and sold. Some of it had been planted in her mind by a man who wanted an interview.

That is the cruellest twist in the whole story of her secret life. She had spent years learning how to deceive the institution around her. She was skilled at it. And at the very moment she believed she was finally speaking freely, she was herself the target of a deception more elaborate than any of her own.

Forged papers. A trusted brother as the unwitting go-between. A cover story. And a note she signed in good faith, clearing the man responsible.

The record that finally showed which was which arrived in May 2021. She had been dead for twenty-four years. Twenty-four years after her death, the record finally showed how much of her fear had been real, and how much had been put there by someone else. Lay the secrets side by side, from the bodyguard to the bank statements, and a pattern appears that neither she nor the palace ever admitted.

The public story of the Princess of Wales is that she was watched. She was watched by a court that did not trust her, by a press that followed her everywhere, by a husband’s household that briefed against her, and by strangers with radio scanners in their bedrooms. All of that is true. The tapes prove it.

The forged statements prove it. But the private record shows something the public story left out. She was also the keeper of secrets, and a remarkably skilled one. She ran a love affair, by her butler’s account and her biographers’, through a false name and the boot of a car.

She dictated a book and denied it to her own brother-in-law, leaving the Queen’s private secretary to offer his resignation over her word. She turned a midnight visit to her lover’s hospital into a story about holding the hands of the dying. She disguised herself, by one account, as a man to buy one drink in a South London pub. She used the palace’s own methods, the silence, the intermediaries, the deniable channel, and she used them better than the palace did.

So who deceived whom? She deceived the palace about the book, the press about the calls, the world about the surgeon. The palace deceived the public about the marriage for a decade. Her husband lived a second life of his own.

A reporter deceived her brother, and through him, her. Strangers with scanners and newspapers with premium-rate telephone lines took her private voice and sold it. Nearly everyone in this story kept something from someone. She was simply the one whose secrets were, in the end, all published.

She learned them in a hard school. The marriage she entered at twenty was presented to 750 million people as a fairy tale, while, by both partners’ later accounts, it was failing from the start. The household around her kept two sets of secrets at once, his and hers. The court said nothing in public and briefed in private.

She watched it done for a decade, and then she did it herself. And she paid for it, as did the people around her. Fellowes paid with his honour. Hewitt paid with his name.

Mannakee, by her own account, lost his place beside her. Khan paid with years of silence and the knowledge that his privacy had been the price of hers. Her sons grew up inside it all. She kept a cavalry officer’s secret for five years.

She kept a book secret until she died. She kept a surgeon secret from the whole world, by the accounts of those around her, through a car boot and a hospital switchboard. She kept her deepest fears on tapes she made in secret. And she kept, in the most public interview of her life, the one secret that mattered most to her.

When anyone asked, she said no. What did the double life give her? Perhaps the only privacy she ever had. A woman whose face was on every front page could not have a private life in the ordinary way.

So she built one in the gaps: in a bicycle basket, at a hospital switchboard, behind a borrowed pair of sunglasses. The secrets were not only deceptions. They were the walls of the only room she ever owned. Did any of it make her happy?

For a time, by Kate Snell’s account, she said she was no longer lonely. The surgeon who did not care that she was a princess. The friend who carried her voice across London. The afternoon, if it happened, when nobody in a crowded pub knew who she was.

Look at the keepers once more. A doctor on a bicycle. A butler at a back door. A voice coach with a video camera.

A healer who heard about Mr. Wonderful. A brother who believed a reporter. A courtier who believed his sister-in-law.

Each held a piece of her life, and almost none of them held the whole of it. That was how she wanted it. A secret divided among many keepers is a secret no single keeper can give away. Most of the people in this story are still alive.

The King married Camilla in 2005, and she was crowned beside him as Queen in May 2023. Hasnat Khan worked on as a heart surgeon, returned to Britain for a time as a consultant at Basildon in 2013, married again in 2017, and in 2025 became chief executive of a heart institute in Lahore. James Hewitt survived a heart attack and a stroke in 2017. Hoare died in 2018, and Robert Fellowes in 2024.

The pub in Vauxhall is a protected building now. The Panorama interview will never be broadcast again. And the secret of the cassettes from the bicycle basket, the ones that started it all, came out within weeks of her funeral. Long after her death, James Colthurst described what it had been like to sit with her while she recorded the first of them.

When she reached the heaviest subjects, he said, the suicide attempts, Camilla, and her bulimia, there was an unmistakable sense of release, of unburdening. It had all begun with a friend pedalling up to the palace with a tape recorder hidden in his basket, and a woman who could not speak freely anywhere else clipping a microphone to herself and starting to tell the truth. It took twenty-four years after her death for all of it to come out.

It began with a friend, a bicycle, and a secret she kept until the day she died.