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a move, but for the moment did nothing. At Ascot the disgraced Sarah took her
daughters to wave to their grandmother as the royal procession moved down the course
before the races. Elizabeth waved but inwardly she must have felt despairing at yet
another public manifestation of what the press now liked to call her ‘dysfunctional’
family. (On the following race day, Andrew loyally joined his wife and daughters on the
rails.) Guests at lunch at the Castle noted that Elizabeth, unsurprisingly, seemed to be ‘in
a pretty bad temper’. There was an awkward atmosphere and before lunch the Queen
stood alone with a semicircle of guests around her, none of whom were brought up to
talk to her. With the exception of Blair Stewart Wilson, the Master of the Household,
royal staff made no attempt to put the guests at their ease. When she did talk to her
guests, Elizabeth was less than her usual gracious self and in the royal box at the races
after lunch again no one spoke to her. At the end of the month the Waleses attended a
dinner to celebrate the Queen’s fortieth anniversary at which five British Prime
Ministers were present and in August after a brief, disastrous attempt at a family
holiday on the Greek millionaire John Latsis’s yacht, they joined the family at Balmoral.
While the Waleses’ marriage staggered on, superficially at least, fate was preparing
another distasteful surprise for Elizabeth. On 20 August the Daily Mirror published
compromising photographs of Sarah and John Bryan taken earlier that month while
they were on holiday with Beatrice and Eugenie at a rented villa in the South of France,
after which the term ‘financial adviser’ was to become the standard euphemism for
something completely different. Amazingly, at Balmoral nothing was said at breakfast
when Andrew, forewarned by his wife, went down to face his family, the newspapers
with their blaring headlines and explicit photographs scattered over the table. Elizabeth
and Philip digested them alone upstairs, before Sarah went in for a meeting with
Elizabeth at 9.30. Elizabeth, feeling utterly let down, was, Sarah recalled, ‘furious’.
While the general public was shocked that she could have carried on in that way with
her lover in the presence of her children, at the Balmoral family gatherings it was as if
nothing had happened. Sarah remained for a further three days, sitting in her usual
place beside Andrew at meals; but for her it would be her last holiday in the bosom of
the royal family. Andrew, in the face of incontrovertible evidence that Bryan and his
wife had deceived him, behaved as the gentleman that his wife’s two ex-lovers
emphatically were not. As John Bryan admitted, ‘Andrew really showed his colours. He
was just as supportive as could be…’
Four days later, the Sun delivered another body-blow with the publication of the
‘Squidgygate’ tapes. These recordings of a telephone conversation on New Year’s Eve
1989 between Diana at Sandringham and James Gilbey (a well-connected sports-car
dealer) in his car in an Oxfordshire lay-by made clear Diana’s feelings about her
husband and her resentment about her treatment as an outsider after all she had done
‘for that fucking family’. The Sun censored parts of the tape including references to a
media personality and some of the more explicitly sexual innuendo, but what remained
(added to what was subsequently published elsewhere) implied what amounted to an
affair or ‘heavy petting’. Gilbey’s relationship with Diana, for whom his pet name was