56
chance that Prince Charles was unaware of the reasons for Mannakee’s abrupt removal from his
post, and he may have even requested the move himself (Brown, 2008, p. 258). However, if Prince
Charles had really known of Diana’s relationship with Mannakee, there is little reason to think that
he would have cared, because in court circles it would have been regarded as yet another instance
where Diana did not know how to behave (Bradford, 2007, p. 147).
Furthermore, in 1986, Prince Charles revived his relationship with Camilla, and Diana, who had
suspected that Prince Charles had gone back to Camilla even earlier, now had definite knowledge
of their relationship (Bradford, 2007, p. 154). Had Camilla simply disappeared from Prince Charles’s
life, she might have faded from his imagination, but due to Diana’s obsession with her she was a
constant presence in their life, and Diana had kept Camilla in Prince Charles’s thoughts with her
constant complaints and questions (Smith, 2007, pp. 163-164). While the public was unaware of
Camilla’s reappearance in Prince Charles’s life, Diana knew without a doubt that Camilla was
spending much time with Prince Charles (Morton, 2010, p. 156). Although at the time, Diana did not
mention Camilla by name, she began voicing her unhappiness about the situation (Smith, 2007, p.
164). Consequently, the crisis in the marriage became a matter of comment for the press (Morton,
2010, p. 157).
However, in November 1986, Diana began taking riding lessons with James Hewitt, and as a reaction
to Prince Charles’s behaviour and as a means of attracting attention, she soon began an affair with
him (Snell, 2013, p. 27). Nevertheless, by the time Prince Charles became aware of the affair, it was
a source of relief rather than anger as Diana might have hoped (Bradford, 2007, pp. 154-155), and
during the five or more years of the affair, the Palace never tried to stop Hewitt from seeing Diana:
it seems that Hewitt had Prince Charles’s blessing to be Diana’s lover (Brown, 2008, p. 270). Diana
acknowledged the affair in her 1995 Panorama interview (Smith, 2007, p. 175), during which she
admitted that they had been in love (Bradford, 2007, p. 156). Six months into their affair, in the
spring of 1987, Diana told Hewitt about her bulimia (Smith, 2007, p. 176), and during the affair,
Diana’s health and overall happiness improved and her bulimic episodes became less frequent
(Bradford, 2007, pp. 158-159). Furthermore, the affair helped Diana maintain periods of civilized
relations with her husband and as a result there were no more public scenes with Prince Charles for
57
a time (Brown, 2008, p. 276). It took nearly five years before anyone in the press knew anything
about Diana’s relationship with Hewitt, but in February 1991, the press named Hewitt as Diana’s
friend and other news on the topic followed, even though no one went as far as to actually claim
that they were lovers, but for Diana the hints were enough and she ended their relationship
(Bradford, 2007, pp. 204-205). The affair, though rumoured in the press, was not confirmed until
Hewitt himself told of the affair to Anna Pasternak (Brown, 2008, p. 291), who in October 1994,
published a book titled Princess in Love, which detailed Hewitt’s affair with Diana (Bradford, 2007,
p. 265) and profoundly embarrassed Diana, Prince Charles and the entire Royal Family (Smith, 2007,
p. 268).
By 1987, the marriage between Prince Charles and Diana was dying, and the main concern of their
staff was to conceal it from the public, both for the sake of the monarchy and the children (Bradford,
2007, p. 160). However, Prince Charles and Diana did not fight as frequently at this point in the
marriage as they had before, because they rarely communicated with one another in private and
when they did, their communication was stripped of basic civility except when the boys were
present (Smith, 2007, p. 178). By then Prince Charles had already mentally and physically withdrawn
himself from Diana, and it had become increasingly difficult for him to bear her presence (Bradford,
2007, p. 165). As a result, the public illusion of a happy marriage became harder to maintain, and it
was at this point that the press assigned Diana her role as a heroine and began to make harmful
statements about Prince Charles (Smith, 2007, p. 178). Prince Charles and Diana began to spend
increasingly more time apart, and press speculation on the state of the marriage increased, as the
press realized how much time the couple had in reality spent apart, including their sixth wedding
anniversary (Bradford, 2007, p. 166). During that time, the press was so preoccupied by the state of
the marriage that it took little notice of what the couple did in their official roles, which in particular
annoyed Prince Charles, who, as a result, became even less tolerant of Diana’s obsession with her
press coverage, and his irritation at the distress she experienced over negative articles about herself
became a major conflict between them (Smith, 2007, p. 182). Meanwhile, the general public hoped
that the apparent troubles in the royal marriage were just a phase and not the beginning of the end
and they did not believe the rumours circulating in the press, while the Palace refused to comment
on the state of the marriage, wishing to conceal the truth for as long as possible (Bradford, 2007, p.
167).
58
According to Smith (2007), by the autumn of 1987, both Diana and Prince Charles were profoundly
unhappy, and a sort of truce between the couple was agreed on: Prince Charles and Diana were to
continue with separate but discreet social lives, while working harder to present a united front by
taking on more joint engagements. However, because Prince Charles and Diana irritated each other
if they were together for any extended period, they structured their schedules to minimize the time
they would both be at Highgrove or Kensington Palace. In addition, they showed little interest in
each other’s activities, their phone conversations focused primarily on the children, and sometimes
they would not talk to each other for weeks (pp. 182, 196). Furthermore, Diana still outshined Prince
Charles on every public occasion they shared, and the resulting jealousy that Prince Charles felt
about Diana’s success with the public, and the lack of recognition he extended to her as a result was
to be one of the main causes of the failure of the marriage (Bradford, 2007, p. 179).
During this time, Diana’s moods continued to fluctuate (Smith, 2007, p. 196) and her bulimia grew
steadily worse, as the strains in her marriage intensified (Bradford, 2007, p. 182), and, as a result,
during the spring of 1988, Diana began treatment for her bulimia with Dr Maurice Lipsedge, a
specialist in eating disorders (Morton, 2010, p. 161), who helped Diana enormously (Bradford, 2007,
p. 185). Before Diana had begun treatment, she had been regularly sick four times a day, which had
reduced to once every three weeks, worsening only whenever she was staying with the Royal Family
at Balmoral, Sandringham, or Windsor or with Prince Charles at Highgrove, when the tensions and
pressures triggered a more serious recurrence (Morton, 2010, p. 162). Even so, Diana’s symptoms
continued to the end of her life (Smith, 2007, p. 189).
The 1989 Christmas at Sandringham was apparently unusually unfriendly: Diana’s unhappiness over
the family Christmas was once again apparent, and she increasingly saw herself as a victim of the
Royal Family and a rebel to the royal way of life (Bradford, 2007, pp. 193-194). It was during this
time that, under circumstances that to this day remain unclear, telephone conversations between
Diana and James Gilbey, a man Diana was seeing at the time, and Prince Charles and Camilla, were
secretly recorded and later sent to several London newspapers (Smith, 2007, p. 200). The
conversation between Diana and Gilbey, later dubbed “Squidgygate”, was recorded on New Year’s
Eve (Bradford, 2007, p. 193). When Diana learned that the conversation between her and Gilbey
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