Within her marriage, Princess Diana had multiple affairs. She was starved for love and affection in her marriage, and she eventually began seeking out what she needed wherever she could get it. One of the biggest reasons why then-Prince Charles couldn’t or wouldn’t meet his wife’s needs was because his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles never truly ended. I tend to believe that Camilla and Charles probably hit pause for a year or two after Charles and Diana’s wedding, but the resumption of their physical affair predated Diana’s affairs with other men. Not to mention, even if Charles and Camilla weren’t having a physical affair for a time, they were absolutely having an emotional affair. He called her constantly, they would see each other often and Camilla was always around, lurking and interfering with the Wales marriage. Well, Hugo Vickers’ new biography of Queen Elizabeth II includes a completely bizarre reimagining of all of this, and wouldn’t you know, Vickers claims that Diana cheated first! Sure.
The real love story: Camilla’s husband [Andrew Parker Bowles] did not have a reputation for monogamy, and in the years before Charles’s first marriage, the prince returned to his lover. Soon, the world would get excited about Lady Diana Spencer, presenting it as a great love story, but the truth is that the real love story was Charles and Camilla. On paper, the virginal and aristocratic Lady Diana Spencer had seemed a perfect royal bride. When Charles began to contemplate her as a possible wife, he was much encouraged by his friends, including the Parker Bowleses.
Diana wanted to marry Prince Andrew: As a schoolgirl, Diana had a professed ambition: to marry her childhood playmate Prince Andrew. The truth is she hardly knew Charles, and called him ‘Sir’ until the day of their engagement.
Once Charles & Diana were married: Only in time did the problems surface – the eating disorders, the Press’s obsession with her, the suspicions about Camilla, the competition between wife and husband (she diverting attention from what he perceived as his vital work). Which came first – the illness or the unhappiness? The Queen came to find her tiresome. She thought things went wrong as the result of illness. It is possible that it was the other way around. One thing is sure: Prince Charles could not cope with her.
Prince Harry’s birth: The birth of Prince Harry in 1984 marked a watershed moment in the fast-declining marriage. Prince Charles emerged from the hospital and told the waiting crowd that he would soon have enough boys for a polo team. He then headed off to play polo. Diana suffered a severe bout of post-natal depression.
Diana & Barry Mannakee: Soon afterwards, the Waleses went up to Scotland to stay with Anne, Duchess of Westminster. During their stay, Charles went out to do some salmon fishing, while Diana read a book nearby. At some point, she put her book down and took a walk along the riverbank. Unaware of where she was, Charles cast – and caught Diana just above her eye with his fly, which had to be cut off. That day, her number three detective, 37-year-old Barry Mannakee, was on duty. It was he who accompanied the injured princess back to the house. She did not need to go to hospital, but she needed sympathy – and Mannakee gave it. Back in London, her regular protection team soon noticed a change in her behaviour whenever she was in Mannakee’s company, and became concerned about the implications. In due course, more and more of the people surrounding her started to notice that there appeared to be something going on between the two of them. Finally, her regular protection officers decided they had no choice but to confront her – a difficult conversation to have, but one they hoped could be resolved discreetly.
Diana admitted the affair: Although Diana at first denied she was having an affair, she eventually admitted it. Alarmed, the protection officers pointed out that Mannakee – who had married at 19 in 1966 – had a wife and two daughters. Continuing this inappropriate relationship, they stressed, would present inevitable dangers to her and to her reputation. The affair continued. The best solution, the protection officers decided, was to arrange for Mannakee to be transferred to non-royal duties – but they faced resistance from Charles, who liked the officer and wanted to keep him on.
Mannakee was the third person in Diana’s marriage!! Afterwards, his affair with Diana continued for a while, then petered out due to the complications involved in keeping it going. The princess moved on. It was the Mannakee affair that caused Charles to conclude that his marriage had ‘irretrievably broken down’, as he told Jonathan Dimbleby on camera in 1994. Realising his marriage had no future, he eventually rekindled his relationship with Camilla. This puts a different perspective on her infamous Panorama interview. When she told Martin Bashir that there were three people in the marriage, there were indeed three – but the third person at the start was Mannakee, not Mrs Parker Bowles.
Mannakee died soon after he was separated from Diana: The Mannakee affair had a tragic postscript. On May 15, 1987, he was killed while riding pillion on a motorcycle driven by PC Stephen Peet, which collided with a car at Woodford in east London. When Charles told Diana about Mannakee’s death – while they were flying to Monaco – she was desperately upset. Later, she came to believe his death was the result of a conspiracy by those around her – that he had, in effect, been killed for her own protection. This was grossly unfair.
Well, that certainly answers some questions I had about Vickers’ sourcing. Straight out of Charles and Camilla’s playbook, just like the old days when Camilla would take royal reporters out to lunch and tell them what was happening in Charles and Diana’s marriage. I’m sure some younger people will be intrigued by this reimagining, but many of us know the real story and/or we were around when all of this stuff went down originally. After all of these years, what does it matter, right? Diana’s dead, Camilla won, she’s wearing the crown. That’s why it’s funny and sad though – clearly, Charles and Camilla know that even after all of these years, their support is a mile wide and an inch deep. Diana is the ghost at the banquet. So they’ve decided to just continue smearing a dead woman.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, screencap from ‘Panorama.’
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