Diana and Charles began dating in 1980, became engaged the following year and married at St. Paul's Cathedral on 29 July 1981. Charles was 12 years older, with different friends and expectations, and problems began to arise between the couple during their honeymoon.
Prince William Arthur Philip Louis was born in 1982 and Prince Harry Charles Albert David in 1984. Two years later, in 1986, it became known that Charles was seeing an "old flame" - Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana developed a number of disorders including bulimia nervosa, and reportedly attempted suicide. Despite public appearances and claims to the contrary by Buckingham Palace, Charles and Diana had now begun to lead separate lives.
In November of 1983, she stunned observers when she took the stage during a London charity event and made an unscheduled announcement. "Ladies and gentleman," she said, "I was supposed to have my head down the loo (toilet) for most of the day. I'm supposed to be dragged off the minute I leave here by men in white coats. (But) if it's all right with you. I thought I might postpone my nervous breakdown."
BBC TV Panorama transcript of the interview with the Princess of Wales; outakes:
QUESTION: What effect did the depression have on your marriage?
DIANA: Well, it gave everybody a wonderful new label - Diana's unstable
and Diana's mentally unbalanced. And unfortunately that seems to have stuck
on and off over the years.
QUESTION: Are you saying that that label stuck within your marriage?
DIANA: I think people used it and it stuck, yes.
QUESTION: According to press reports, it was suggested that it was
around this time things became so difficult that you actually tried to injure
yourself.
DIANA: Mmm. When no one listens to you, or you feel no one's listening
to you, all sorts of things start to happen. For instance you have so much
pain inside yourself that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because
you want help, but it's the wrong help you're asking for. People see it as
crying wolf or attention-seeking, and they think because you're in the media
all the time you've got enough "attention", but I was actually crying out
because I wanted to get better in order to go forward and continue my duty
and my role as wife, mother, Princess of Wales. So yes, I did inflict upon
myself. I didn't like myself, I was ashamed because I couldn't cope with
the pressures.
QUESTION: What did you actually do?
DIANA: Well, I just hurt my arms and my legs; and I work in environments
now where I see women doing similar things and I'm able to understand completely
where they're coming from.
QUESTION: What was your husband's reaction to this, when you began
to injure yourself in this way?
DIANA: Well, I didn't actually always do it in front of him. But obviously
anyone who loves someone would be very concerned about it.
QUESTION: Did he understand what was behind the physical act of hurting
yourself, do you think?
DIANA: No, but then not many people would have taken the time to see
that.
QUESTION: Did you allow your friends, your close friends, to speak
to Andrew Morton?
DIANA: Yes, I did. Yes, I did.
QUESTION: Why?
DIANA: I was at the end of my tether. I was desperate. I think I was
so fed up with being seen as someone who was a basket-case, because I am
a very strong person and I know that causes complications in the system that
I live in.
QUESTION: How would a book change that?
DIANA: I don't know. Maybe people have a better understanding, maybe
there's a lot of women out there who suffer on the same level but in a different
environment, who are unable to stand up for themselves because their self-esteem
is cut into two. I don't know.
QUESTION: What effect do you think the book had on your husband and
the Royal Family?
DIANA: I think they were shocked and horrified and very disappointed.
QUESTION: Can you understand why?
DIANA: I think Mr. Dimbleby's book was a shock to a lot of people
and disappointment as well.
QUESTION: What effect did Andrew Morton's book have on your relationship
with the Prince of Wales?
DIANA: Well, what had been hidden - or rather what we thought had
been hidden - then became out in the open and was spoken about on a daily
basis, and the pressure was for us to sort ourselves out in some way. Were
we going to stay together or were we going to separate? And the word separation
and divorce kept coming up in the media on a daily basis.
QUESTION: What happened after the book was published?
DIANA: Well, we struggled along. We did our engagements together.
And in our private life it was obviously turbulent.
QUESTION: Did things come to a head?
DIANA: Yes, slowly, yes. My husband and I, we discussed it very calmly.
We could see what the public were requiring. They wanted clarity of a situation
that was obviously becoming intolerable.
QUESTION: So what happened?
DIANA: So we got the lawyers together, we discussed separation - obviously
there were a lot of people to discuss it with: the Prime Minister, Her Majesty
- and then it moved itself, so to speak.
QUESTION: By the December of that year, as you say, you'd agreed to
a legal separation. What were your feelings at the time?
DIANA: Deep, deep, profound sadness. Because we had struggled to keep
it going, but obviously we'd both run out of steam. And in a way I suppose
it could have been a relief for us both that we'd finally made our minds
up. But my husband asked for the separation and I supported it.
QUESTION: It was not your idea?
DIANA: No. Not at all. I come from a divorced background, and I didn't
want to go into that one again.
QUESTION: Once the separation had occurred, moving to 1993, what happened
during that period?
DIANA: People's agendas changed overnight. I was now separated wife
of the Prince of Wales, I was a problem, I was a liability (seen as), and
how are we going to deal with her? This hasn't happened before.
QUESTION: Who was asking those questions?
DIANA: People around me, people in this environment, and ...
QUESTION: The royal household?
DIANA: People in my environment, yes, yes.
QUESTION: And they began to see you as a problem?
DIANA: Yes, very much so, uh,uh.
QUESTION: How did that show itself?
DIANA: By visits abroad being blocked, by things that had come naturally
my way being stopped, letters going, that got lost, and various things.
QUESTION: So despite the fact that your interest was always to continue
with your duties, you found that your duties were being held from you?
DIANA: Yes. Everything changed after we separated, and life became
very difficult then for me.
QUESTION: Who was behind that change?
DIANA: Well, my husband's side were very busy stopping me.
QUESTION: What was your reaction when news broke of allegedly a telephone
conversation between you and Mr. James Gilbey having been recorded?
DIANA: I felt very protective about James because he'd been a very
good friend to me and was a very good friend to me, and I couldn't bear that
his life was going to be messed up because he had the connection with me.
And that worried me. I'm very protective about my friends.
QUESTION: Did you have the alleged telephone conversation?
DIANA: Yes we did, absolutely we did. Yup, we did.
QUESTION: On that tape, Mr. Gilbey expresses his affection for you.
Was that transcript accurate?
DIANA: Yes. I mean he is a very affectionate person. But the implications
of that conversation were that we'd had an adulterous relationship, which
was not true.
QUESTION: Have you any idea how that conversation came to be published
in the national press?
DIANA: No, but it was done to harm me in a serious manner, and that
was the first time I'd experienced what it was like to be outside the net,
so to speak, and not be in the family.
QUESTION: What do you think the purpose was behind it?
DIANA: It was to make the public change their attitude towards me.
It was, you know, if we are going to divorce, my husband would hold more
cards than I would - it was very much a poker game, chess game.
QUESTION: There were also a series of telephone calls which allegedly
were made by you to a Mr. Oliver Hoare. Did you make what were described
as nuisance phone calls?
DIANA: I was reputed to have made 300 telephone calls in a very short
space of time which, bearing in mind my lifestyle at that time, made me a
very busy lady. No, I didn't, I didn't. But that again was a huge move to
discredit me, and very nearly did me in, the injustice of it, because I did
my own homework on that subject, and consequently found out that a young
boy had done most of them. But I read that I'd done them all. Mr. Hoare told
me that his lines were being tapped by the local police station. He said,
you know, don't ring. So I didn't, but somebody clearly did.
Richard claims that Diana was spied on for 15 years until the night she died ...
He says: "We were given a standing instruction to keep her in our sights. Even in the early days when she thought she could drive herself to visit friends, she was being followed everywhere - and not just by one car."
At her favorite London restaurant, San Lorenzo, every word the Princess uttered was recorded. Charles dismissed her as paranoid.
1. For Jean Norman, an Oxford-based typist, prying on other people mobile phone calls was a hobby. She switched on her radio scanner and heard what appears to have been the beginning of the Diana/Gilbey conversation. Her recording ends with a few remarks that appear on the beginning of another a tape recorded by Cyril Reenan, a retired bank manager. Reenan appears to have recorded the remainder of the conversation, and he realized when it ended that it was worth big money.
2. It emerged from Morman and Reeman that the recordings were not made at the time of the call but four days later on January 4, 1990.
3. It meant that a third party must have recorded the conversation at the time it occurred, then played the tape later through a transmitter on the Cellnet frequency so that Norman and Reenan would pick it up.
4. Audiotel International analyzed both tapes and concluded that though they were picked up by receivers tuned to the Cellnet frequency, they were not normal Cellnet signals. The data bursts on the tapes suggested "some kind of doctoring", the firm's report said. Pauses in the conversation were suspiciously lacking in interference and Andrew Martin, Audiotel managing director, concluded that they were unlikely to be the result of haphazard scanning. He added "The balance of probability suggest something irregular about the recording which may indicate a re-broadcasting of the conversation sometime after the conversation took place".
5. These conclusions were supported by a study conducted by communications consultant John Nelson and audio expert Martin Colloms. They decided that the recordings could not have been made by intercepting the signals from a cellular phone base station. There was a fifty-hertz hum on the tape, suggesting there had been a tap on the ordinary telephone line. A spectrum analysis showed this was made up in places of two separate signals, indicating that a tape of the conversation had been subsequently remixed. The Princess's voice was relatively poor quality for reception of the Cellnet Band. More significantly, there were "pips" or "data bursts" on the recordings at eleven-second intervals. These would have been filtered out at the nearest telephone exchange prior to the Cellnet transmission.
Collums and Nelson concluded the recording must have been made as a result of local tapping of the telephone line somewhere between the female party's telephone itself and the local exchange.
Richard also accuses the spy organization of being behind the release of the scandalous 'Squidygate' tape. He claims Diana's indiscreet phone calls to close friend James Gilbey was recorded my MI6 and retransmitted days later - over and over - until it was picked up and taped by radio scanner enthusiasts.
BBC TV Panorama transcript of the interview with the Princess of Wales; outakes:
QUESTION: Do you really believe that a campaign was being waged against
you?
DIANA: Yes I did, absolutely, yeah.
QUESTION: Why?
DIANA: I was the separated wife of the Prince of Wales, I was a problem,
fullstop. Never happened before, what do we do with her?
QUESTION: Can't we pack her off to somewhere quietly rather than campaign
against her?
DIANA: She won't go quietly, that's the problem. I'll fight to the
end, because I believe that I have a role to fulfill, and I've got two children
to bring up.
In July 1996, Diana and Charles announced their intent to divorce. Diana gave up the right to be Queen of England and to be called "Her Royal Highness." In return, she reportedly received a lump sum payment of more than $20 million in cash, another $600,000 a year to maintain her private office, and equal access to her children, Prince William and Prince Harry. The marriage ended on 28 August 1996.
Diana said she wanted to be a sort of ambassador, "a queen of people's hearts," and Prime Minister Tony Blair believed she should carry on her good works because "she earns a lot of respect and admiration." She crusaded against anti-personnel land mines with high-profile visits to Bosnia and Angola and continued her work with AIDS organizations and charities for children. An early 1997 London opinion poll revealed that only 21 percent of those surveyed believed the royal family was "concerned about people in real need."