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Allibar, at a meeting in Ludlow, Shropshire. With them was Camilla Parker Bowles; they
spent the next two days as her guests at Bolehyde Manor, where she was then living.
Diana was aware of the Prince’s closeness to Camilla; their affair had already reached
the pages of Private Eye, where it was hinted how much the Prince had been seeing of his
friend’s wife while Parker Bowles was on an assignment to protect Lord Soames as
Governor of Rhodesia. In November the ‘royal train’ scandal hit the newspapers – it was
reported that the Prince of Wales had spent the night with a blonde woman on the royal
train in a Wiltshire siding after a West Country engagement in his Duchy of Cornwall.
At first the press assumed it was Diana; Elizabeth ordered her Press Secretary, Michael
Shea, to issue a denial, which she no doubt believed. The editor concerned, Bob
Edwards, was generally condemned. Later he was told that there had indeed been a
blonde woman on the train that night but that it had been Camilla not Diana. Diana
must have had her suspicions, but she was in no position to confront the Prince. For the
moment she was prepared to put up with Camilla’s patronage in return for her good
opinion; naïvely she apparently thought that once the Prince was officially hers, her
older rival would fade away. James Whitaker, with whom Diana began a series of
conversations during this period, wrote that she was ‘doggedly determined’ to marry the
Prince. Her mother appealed to the press to leave her daughter alone; but privately
Diana told Whitaker she did not agree – ‘I like to think I get on well with most of you,’
she told him. ‘Already,’ Whitaker wrote, ‘she had learned to deploy one of the most
powerful assets in her armoury – how to handle the press.’
While the British press had made up its mind that Diana was ‘the one’, the Prince
apparently had not. He flew to India on an official visit and on his return did not see
Diana for a week. Elizabeth and Philip began to worry about the possible fall-out as a
result of their son’s dithering and its effects on Diana, whom they now regarded as
compromised both by his attentions and those of the press. Elizabeth wrote to a friend
saying how worried they were that he had not yet proposed. She did not, however,
personally interfere. Nor did her mother; it was not the family way. The Queen Mother,
according to one theory, was directly responsible for the Charles-Diana engagement in a
Machiavellian plot cooked up with her lady-in-waiting, Ruth Fermoy, to frustrate
Mountbatten’s attempt to strengthen the Mountbatten connection with the next
generation of the royal family by foisting his granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, on
Charles. It sounds plausible, but there is no evidence of any deep-laid plot involving
Ruth Fermoy, who, according to a courtier, was ‘always horrified at the prospect of the
engagement, asking “Is it true?”, and complaining “Nobody tells me anything.”’ The
Queen Mother, like the rest of Prince Charles’s family, was anxious for him to marry a
suitable girl and was prepared to take Diana at face value. As his closest family
confidante she felt that she should, for once, give him a push in the way of a decision.
One day at Royal Lodge she told him, ‘There’s Diana Spencer – that’s the girl you should
marry. But don’t marry her if you don’t love her. If you do, grab her because if you don’t
there are plenty of others who will…’ Ruth Fermoy, like most courtiers, does not seem to
have been prepared to share her doubts with her employer. The same applied to Diana’s