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eing met. The conversation, curiously, dated from December 1989, just a few weeks
before the Squidgygate tape. This one was labelled, inevitably, ‘Camillagate’, and its
effect on the public who read it was immeasurably greater. While Squidgygate may have
slightly dented Diana’s madonna image, the Camillagate tape made it quite clear that
Diana’s fears about Camilla being her husband’s mistress were completely justified.
While to the sophisticated Charles’s dirty talk about living inside his lover’s trousers or
being a Tampax appeared pathetic and puerile, the backbone of middle Britain was
shaken to the core. The mums and dads in the provinces, the traditional support on
which the monarchy had relied, hated it. The man at the Mirror whose job it was to
transcribe the tape told his colleagues, ‘This tape is going to stop Charles ever becoming
King.’ It was going to take a lot of living down. Much hypocritical nonsense was talked
about Charles’s adultery making him unfit to be King, but to many people it did seem
that Charles, like his great-uncle, Edward VIII, had put his private life before his public
duty in continuing his relationship with Mrs Parker Bowles.
For Elizabeth it was a nightmare. The war between the Waleses recreated the fears of
her father when he found himself at war with the Windsors – ‘two camps’, as Wallis had
described it. The fall-out represented a continuing danger to the image of the monarchy
as the two sides sought to win points against each other through the media. Elizabeth’s
concern was to minimize the damage. ‘Considered inaction’ has always been her
watchword. Diana represented a huge problem. Since Camillagate she enjoyed the
backing of the majority of the British public, who saw her as the wronged wife. With her
beauty, her modern attitudes, her caring rapport with the sick, her glamour and her
refusal to kow-tow to the Palace, she represented a walking reproach to the family. Like
the Queen Mother, she had that invaluable commodity lacking in ‘real’ royalty, the
common touch. Attempts by royal officials to downgrade her or limit her exposure
merely made them look ridiculous; through the newspapers, Diana could appeal to the
public over their heads. Elizabeth had too cool a head to support any kind of dirty tricks
campaign. ‘The Queen sees that she mustn’t be undermined,’ a courtier said. Diana, for
her part, was too clever to defy Elizabeth, who held the purse strings and had the
ultimate sanction over the whereabouts of the Waleses’ children. She knew that she
could telephone her mother-in-law without interference from the Private Secretaries,
and did so. None the less, Diana remained a loose cannon in the eyes of the Court,
viewed as unpredictable and with the capacity to cause immense damage. ‘They’re all
terrified of her at the Palace,’ a courtier said, and, apparently, unable to control her.
When she made her famous statement ‘withdrawing’ from public life in December 1993,
she insisted on making it as dramatic and public as possible despite all the efforts by
Elizabeth and even the Prime Minister to persuade her to make it low-key. Jeffrey
Archer, best-selling novelist and former Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party
(later convicted of perjury), was drafted in to make sure that it kept within limits. In the
end, Diana paid tribute to the ‘support and understanding of the Queen and the Duke of
Edinburgh’, conspicuously refraining from mentioning her husband. The inference was
therefore drawn that this too was somehow his fault, that he and his officials had forced