Princess Diana and Prince Charles: the Martin Bashir Interview Fallout SHARE AFP / Getty Images The Princess of Wales is interviewed by the BBC's Martin Bashir (R) on Nov. 20, 1995 Nov. 20, 1995: Princess Diana admits, during a TV interview, that she had an affair with her riding instructor The infidelity itself was hardly news, but when Princess Diana admitted on British TV that she had been unfaithful to Prince Charles, it “ plunged the monarchy into the greatest crisis since the Abdication ,” the Daily Mail said, referencing King Edward VIII’s 1936 abandonment of his throne to marry a divorced American socialite. On this day, Nov. 20, in 1995, the BBC aired Diana’s first solo press interview — a stroke of independence made possible by keeping her meeting with BBC’s Martin Bashir secret from Buckingham Palace . She took the opportunity to address the tensions within her marriage, her struggles with postpartum depression and bulimia, and the fact that she had been intimately involved with a man other than the Prince. Charles had admitted to his own infidelity on a TV documentary the previous year.

His longtime affair with Camilla Parker Bowles was no secret when Diana told Bashir, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” Rumors of her five-year affair with cavalry officer James Hewitt, whom she’d hired as a riding instructor, had already made news as well, partly because he’d profited from the story by collaborating on a tell-all book, Princess in Love . In the interview, Diana said, “Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.” In her surprise that Hewitt betrayed her, some saw the same naïveté that a young Diana, barely out of her teens, had worn like a veil on her wedding day. Following Diana’s death in a 1997 car crash, Joyce Carol Oates wrote an essay for TIME in which she linked “the drama in the princess’s life” to “her often desperate search for love” and her utter devastation when her husband failed her. Oates wrote: Of Diana at the time of the wedding, it was said by a former classmate that she was “one of the few virgins of her age around.

She was a complete romantic, and she was saving herself for the love of her life, which she knew would come one day.” There is no evidence that Diana would have behaved other than devotedly to her husband and family if she hadn’t been forced to acknowledge that her husband wasn’t only having a clandestine affair with another man’s wife, but had been having this affair for years. By the early 1990s, when Charles and Diana were already leading separate lives, a biography of Diana revealed that, just a year after her wedding, she had attempted suicide over her suspicions about Charles’ relationship with Camilla. On a 1985 visit to a London hospice, according to TIME , “she let slip a telling comment. ‘The biggest disease this world suffers from,’ she complained, ‘[is] people feeling unloved.’ ” That was no excuse for airing dirty laundry, however — at least not to the Royal Family. Within a month of Diana’s interview, her press secretary had resigned and the Queen had sent Charles and Diana a letter urging them to divorce quickly .

Read the 1997 special report on Diana’s death, here in the TIME Vault: Death of a Princess Princess Diana, in TV Interview, Vows a 'Fight to the End' - latimes Princess Diana, in TV Interview, Vows a 'Fight to the End' November 21, 1995 |WILLIAM D. MONTALBANO | TIMES STAFF WRITER LONDON — After 15 unhappy years, a dutiful princess whose fairy tale ended in tears took her case to the court of world public opinion on Monday. Diana, Princess of Wales, declared herself a renegade. In an extraordinary television interview, the estranged 34-year-old wife of Britain's Prince Charles acknowledged for the first time her affair with a British army officer and told of a married life of such regal misery that it led her to self-mutilation and bulimia. Vowing to outlast unrelenting media pressure and palace intrigue aimed at discrediting her, Diana said she will fight to maintain her public role and to raise her elder son to be king. What's the problem with Diana? BBC reporter Martin Bashir asked gently. "She won't go quietly," she said.

"That's the problem. She'll fight to the end. I have a role to fulfill and I've got two children to bring up." More than 200 million people in more than 100 countries watched the hourlong interview, in which Diana calmly spoke of her husband's longstanding affair with a married woman. And she confirmed reports of her own affair with British cavalry officer James Hewitt, who wrote a book in which he described their relationship. Beginning in 1989--two years after Charles and Diana had begun living separate lives--Hewitt was "a great friend of mine," she said. "He was always there to support me. I was absolutely devastated when this book appeared." "Did your relationship go beyond a close friendship?" the interviewer probed. "Yes, it did." "Were you unfaithful?" "Yes, I adored him. I was in love with him." Married to Charles in 1981, Diana said she was thrust uncomfortably into a popularity contest with her husband in which she was more sought-after. By 1986, she said, she learned that Charles had resumed an affair with Camilla Parker- Bowles, the wife of an army officer.

"I was aware but not in a position to do anything about it," Diana said. "There were three of us in the marriage. That made it a bit crowded." Unhappiness consumed her, Diana said. She felt lost and alone. "There's no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it," she said. Diana said she suffered for years from bulimia, a disease in which compulsive eating is followed by vomiting. At one point she was accused of wasting food by a member of the royal household, whom she did not identify. The separation was announced Dec. 9, 1992. "The fairy tale had come to an end. It had a huge effect on me and Charles. I felt a deep, deep, profound sadness. My husband asked for a separation and I supported it. I did not want it," she said. Then, Diana said, Charles' entourage launched a campaign against her. "My husband's side worked very hard to discredit me. Letters got lost. Trips abroad were blocked. Life became very difficult for me. It was a campaign waged against me." Diana said she gave the interview in an effort to make her views clear. "The perception that has been given of me has been confusing, turbulent.

In some areas people may doubt me. I want to reassure the people that matter to me--the man in the street--that I will never let them down," she said. Diana told the interviewer that she does not want a divorce but does not think she will be queen of England. "I'd like to be queen in people's hearts. But I don't see myself as queen of this country. I don't think many people would want me to be queen. When I say many people, I mean the Establishment that I married into." She agreed to the interview, conducted secretly earlier this month, without informing the palace or even her closest aides--an affront to the strict protocol that envelops Britain's Royal Family. There was no immediate reaction Monday night from Buckingham Palace. British tabloids, always hungry for news of the royals and often more lurid than accurate, described Charles as outraged. "The prince is absolutely shattered," said the Daily Express of Britain's future king. When the interview ended, electricity demand surged nationwide as viewers switched on lights and turned on their kettles for a cup of tea.

Usage rose 1,000 megawatts; when Prince Charles bared his soul in a television interview 18 months ago, demand rose 700 megawatts. MORE: washingtonpost.com: International Special Report: Princess Diana, 1961-1997 Washington Post Foreign Service Tues., Nov. 21, 1995; Page A01 LONDON, Nov. 20 -- Princess Diana tonight bared her private life to a nationwide television audience here, confirming many, though not all, of the stories told about her during the past five years: unfaithfulness to Prince Charles after their separation; physical damage she inflicted on herself; her bulimia; her secretive cooperation with a "tell all" book on the couple's unhappy marriage; and her firm conviction that the royal household has been -- and remains -- determined to ruin her standing with the British public. In an hour-long interview with BBC television, her first ever, she said she has known for years of Charles's own affair with another woman ("There were three of us in the marriage. It was a bit crowded.") but nevertheless said she does not want a divorce.

At the same time, she said she does not expect to become queen. "The establishment that I married into," she said, has "decided that I'm a non-starter." Later, she said: "I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts, but I don't see myself being queen of this country." The interview -- which was taped this month without the knowledge of Buckingham Palace or Charles -- was in essence a response to an interview Charles gave last year, in which he admitted that he had committed adultery with his longtime love, Camilla Parker-Bowles, just as the book with which Diana cooperated was a response to a book apparently authorized by her husband. The American rights to Diana's interview were purchased by ABC, which will air it Friday. The princess portrayed her public relations contest with Charles since their formal separation in December 1992 as a "chess game" or "poker" match, with the stakes being the affection of the British public. Indeed, she said, the royal family's resentment of her all along stemmed in part from the fact that she attracted more attention than Charles, even before they were separated. Now, she said, that resentment has become a "fear.

They see me as a threat of some kind. . . . I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it's the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it? Where is she going to use it? Why do the public still support her?" Most of the questions tonight concerned previously published reports -- in books or in newspapers -- that have come out in the past few years. Calmly and with little hesitation, the Princess of Wales responded to every question put to her, including a much-anticipated one about a book written last year by a former army officer -- James Hewitt -- in which he claimed to have had an affair with her while serving as part of her Kensington Palace staff: "Did your relationship go beyond a close friendship?" she was asked. "Yes it did, yes," she responded. "Were you unfaithful?" asked the interviewer, Martin Bashir. "Yes, I adored him," she said. "Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down" when he published his book.

"It was very distressing for me that a friend of mine, who I had trusted, made money out of me. I really minded about that. And he'd rung me up 10 days before it arrived in the bookshops to tell me that there was nothing to worry about, and I believed him, stupidly. And then when it did arrive, the first thing I did was rush down to talk to my children. And William {the couple's oldest son} produced a box of chocolates and said, Mummy, I think you've been hurt. These are to make you smile again.' " One rumor that the princess did try to put to rest was that she had had an intimate relationship with a longtime friend, James Gilbey. In August 1992, the tabloid press here got hold of intercepted cellular phone conversations in which he professed love for her and called her "Squidgy." While expressing great affection for Gilbey, and confirming the accuracy of the tape, she said tonight that they did not have an affair.

Diana said the stress of becoming Princess of Wales at 19, and the royal family's lack of appreciation for her contribution to the monarchy, was a factor in her bulimia and several attempts at "injuring" herself. "Well, anything good I ever did nobody ever said a thing, never said, Well done.' . . . But if I tripped up, which invariably I did, because I was new at the game, a ton of bricks came down on me. . . . There were lots of tears, and one could dive into the bulimia, into escape." "Yes," she said, "I did inflict injury on myself. . . . I hurt my arms and my legs." She did not elaborate. Asked whether Charles understood her problems, she said flatly, "No." She said it was Charles who asked for the separation, which was formally announced by Prime Minister John Major. "I heard it on the radio," she said. "The fairy tale had come to an end." After that, she said, the "agendas" of everyone around the royal family changed. "I was a liability.

How are we going to deal with her?' " She said palace officials blocked her public engagements and made sure that "letters" to her "got lost." She said, without specifics, that there was some discussion in the royal household of having her "put away" somewhere. Instead, she said, stories about her were leaked to the press in an effort to destroy her reputation, including a story about how police were investigating a series of harassing, hang-up phone calls made by her to a friend and London art dealer, Oliver Hoare. Tonight, while saying that she did call Hoare from time to time, she denied doing so "obsessively" or very often. As to the future, she said she wondered whether Charles could "adapt" to being king. "There was always conflict on that subject with him when we discussed it, and I understood that conflict, because it's a very demanding role, being Prince of Wales, but it's a . . . more demanding role being king." And of her own future, the princess said she wished to become an "ambassador" to the world, particularly to distressed people.

Asked why she was giving the interview, she said: "Because we will have been separated three years this December, and the perception that has been given of me for the last three years has been very confusing, turbulent, and in some areas I'm sure many, many people doubt me. And I want to reassure all those people who have loved me and supported me throughout the last 15 years that I'd never let them down." Scholars and lawyers and supporters of the monarchy remain deeply concerned about the possibility that Charles and Diana will never get divorced, since that would mean Diana would become queen when, and if, Charles becomes king (and head of the Church of England). The prospect of two admitted adulterers arriving in separate coaches for a coronation and of the monarchy continuing to be fodder for the world's tabloids is horrifying for those who wish the monarchy to continue. The fallout from her interview tonight will undoubtedly continue for months. Indeed, the surprise announcement last week that she was giving an interview set off a flurry of subsidiary controversies before anyone knew what she would say. Buckingham Palace was reported to be furious that she had given no notice of the event to the queen or to officials there.

Her own staff was equally chagrined that she hadn't informed them: One, her press secretary, resigned in humiliation today. © Copyright 1995 The Washington Post Company Princess Diana told Camilla 'I sent someone to kill you' claims Prince Harry biographer | Daily Mail Online comments As he turns 30, a brilliant new book by a top royal biographer exposes the inner torment of Prince Harry. On Saturday, in this exclusive Mail serialisation, Penny Junor revealed his wild binges, tensions with the Middletons and his many flirtations. Today, we uncover the toxic upbringing that shaped his life... Harry and William were just eight and ten when they went on their first holiday without their parents in the summer of 1993, almost two years after Charles and Diana’s very public separation. The recent revelations about their parents had been beyond extraordinary. Squidgygate, a 30-minute tape recording of Diana having a flirtatious conversation with her lover James Gilbey, had been followed just a few months later by Camillagate.

It was an 11-minute tape of their father’s late-night phone ramblings to his mistress which could be distilled to just one thought: the heir to the throne wished that he could always be with the woman he adored and mused on the possibility of turning into a Tampax to achieve it. At the boys’ boarding school, Ludgrove, every effort had been made to ensure that the most lurid headlines were kept out of sight. But there were more than 180 boys at the school aged between seven and 13 and it was impossible to keep it from every one of them. The stress that Harry and William were under is simply unimaginable. Scroll down for video Mother love: A hug for two-year-old Harry from Diana during a family holiday in Majorca in 1986 and the prince, aged four, with his downcast mother on Necker, the island privately-owned by Sir Richard Branson in the British Virgin Islands So they were certainly in need of a break when they went to Polzeath in Cornwall with their good friends the van Straubenzee boys, whose parents rented the same clifftop house there every year.

On that first visit, Harry cut his leg on some barnacles and started to cry. The poor little boy was in agony. His leg was bleeding profusely and the salt water was making it sting. In the absence of his mother, father or even a nanny, his Police Protection Officer, Graham Cracker, stepped in. ‘Harry, pull yourself together and stop whingeing,’ he said brusquely. ‘It’s just a scratch.’ When a concerned Mrs van Straubenzee tried to intervene, he batted her away. ‘He’s perfectly all right.’ It’s a small vignette and hardly the most traumatic of incidents. But it took place against a backdrop of appalling family misery and is indicative of a childhood in which the young Prince was left, not for the first time, bereft of every child’s most basic requirement: a mother’s reassuring comfort. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Those who know Prince Harry generally agree the fact he is never going to be king is a good thing. It’s always said with an affectionate laugh because people love Harry. But he’s always had a wild, unpredictable streak to him, even as a little boy.

His detractors say he’s not very bright — and there was a time, granted, when he behaved like a mindless Hooray Henry with no self-control. A time when one wondered whether the terrible combination of his mother’s death and the chaos of his childhood had set him on a dangerous and perhaps irreversible downward spiral. Wildly emotional, Diana expected little Harry to comfort her Not only did he lose his mother at a desperately difficult age, just two weeks before his 13th birthday — he lost her in a spectacular manner that made headlines around the world. There can surely be few whose hearts were not broken by the sight of Harry as a little boy walking so bravely behind his mother’s cortege. But even before her death he’d endured the misery that comes with a broken home, warring parents and a dad who was often absent. Like his brother, he had to endure his parents’ very bitter divorce, the revelation of their affairs and even their most intimate secrets, from Diana’s eating disorder and self-harming to Charles’s excruciatingly embarrassing phone conversations with Camilla. It wasn’t just that his mother wasn’t there to comfort him when he hurt his knee.

What was far worse was that she expected him to comfort her as she ricocheted from one terrifying emotional outburst to the next. Some were played out on the front pages of the national newspapers. Others I am revealing here for the first time. Contrary to what Diana believed, there was no campaign to discredit her following the separation. In fact, quite the reverse. Charles had given specific instructions to his staff to say and do nothing to reflect badly upon the Princess. Last moments: The Prince with his mother on a jet ski in St Tropez weeks before her death in Paris in 1997 He made it blindingly clear that no matter what Diana did or said, she would always be the mother of his children and anything that hurt the Princess would hurt them. For all that, Diana saw conspiracies everywhere and sent anonymous, unnerving and sometimes poisonous messages to a range of people, including her Private Secretary Patrick Jephson and 28-year-old Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who’d been hired by Prince Charles to look after the boys following the separation. Even Camilla had threatening telephone calls from her. They were always made in the dead of the night, when Camilla was alone in her country house in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve sent someone to kill you,’ Diana would say. ‘They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them? ‘I’ve sent someone to kill you,’ Diana would say. ‘They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?’ The Prince picked up many of Diana’s cast-off staff — and she drove him to distraction in many ways. Charles found conversations with her difficult and upsetting. He seemed to provide a focus for her anger; but he did care very much that she should be looked after. He worried about her and was always there at the end of a telephone, right to the end, when things went wrong with a love affair or the children or even the Press. She would ring him up in tears and he would do whatever needed to be done to sort out the problem. A lot has been written about his parents’ marriage and why it failed, but the facts need to be reiterated because it affected Harry deeply. The man he is today is a product of that broken home and all that he heard and felt during his childhood. The marriage did not fail because of Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman Diana famously called the third person in her marriage.

It failed principally because it was a tragic mismatch. Each had married the wrong person, unable to provide the other with even a fraction of what they thought they needed. Her eating disorder, she later told author Andrew Morton, began just one week after Prince Charles proposed. She became moody and wilful, angry and suspicious — and Charles couldn’t understand it. First steps: The toddler Prince has a barefoot run while a cheeky Harry, aged three, sticks his tongue out at waiting photographers in the backseat of a car He found it difficult to cope with her mood swings and his own moods became increasingly unpredictable and volatile. Mental illness is not an exact science. The root cause of bulimia is believed to be major trauma in early childhood, but the trigger is usually some sort of emotional stress in the present. In Diana’s case that trigger was the loneliness and uncertainty she suffered when she moved after her engagement from a giggly, all-girl flat in Fulham to a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace. Bulimia dogged her for most of the rest of her life, and destroyed any chance of happiness that she and Charles might have had.

The arrival of Prince William the year after their marriage brought some respite but it didn’t last long, as she plunged almost immediately into severe post-natal depression. By the time of Prince Harry’s birth two years later, however, she felt she was better. She believed she no longer needed professional help and stopped seeing her psychiatrist. But although she put on a brave face in public, behind closed doors she and the Prince continued to have volcanic exchanges. She sacked all the nannies her boys loved She was convinced his friends were conspiring against her. She didn’t want anything associated with his old life to be around them — not even his old Labrador, Harvey. Charles was so desperate to make her well he did everything she asked. And though it distressed him greatly, everyone went — including Harvey, who was sent off to see out his days with the Prince’s comptroller at his house in Kent. The irony was that by then the Prince and Princess of Wales were an unbeatable double act, a sensation around the world, thanks largely to Diana’s beauty and her unparalleled ability to charm, communicate and empathise with ordinary people. At home it was a different story.

As the years rolled by with no let-up in her behaviour, Charles became hardened and at times downright callous in his attitude towards her. When she became hysterical, made dramatic gestures or self-harmed, he walked away. Not because he didn’t care — but because he knew he couldn’t help. And what of Harry in this maelstrom? Perhaps unsurprisingly, for the first two or three years of his life, he was known as the quiet one. William, by contrast, was exuberant and cheeky — some would say, completely out of control. His behaviour didn’t change until Diana broke his heart by getting rid of his beloved nanny, Barbara Barnes, whose bed he climbed into every morning. Sadly, Diana saw the nanny — whom she herself had hired — as a threat. She loved her boys more than anyone else on earth — but she wanted them to love her better than anyone else, too. She wanted 100 per cent of them, in the same way that she had wanted 100 per cent of Charles, to the exclusion of all others.

Heartbreaking: William, Harry and Charles stand alongside the hearse at Diana's funeral in 1997 Her love for them was almost obsessive, and it was possessive. One of her favourite phrases was: ‘Who loves you most?’ The real problem was that Diana had never been properly mothered herself and therefore didn’t know how to be a mother. She behaved more like a big sister to William and Harry — at times, the nannies must have felt as though they had three children to look after. Certainly her relationship with Barbara Barnes deteriorated — as Diana’s relationships often did — until finally, without a thought for her children’s psychological wellbeing, she peremptorily relieved her of her post. Had Diana only been able to take a step back she would have realised that what she was doing to William and Harry was precisely what had happened to her when she was a child. When she was just six years old, her parents divorced and her mother Frances left the family home for a man with whom she felt she would be happy; she had every expectation that her four children would follow. But her own mother gave evidence against her in court during custody proceedings and custody went to their father.

She planned a final bombshell for the royals As a child Diana knew nothing of this and surmised that her mother didn’t want her. She felt worthless and unwanted. Now Barbara Barnes had gone from William and Harry’s lives with no explanation either. Two other nannies followed, but neither stayed for more than two or three years. Jessie Webb (who came out of retirement to help William and Kate with Prince George) vanished from the household when Harry went to boarding school at the age of seven. She had looked after him for two years after William started boarding, at a time when things were particularly difficult at home. She was another one who was frozen out by the Princess. Finally Olga Powell, who had been deputy to both nannies, stepped into the role. She was a 52-year-old widow with no children of her own, and, fortunately for the boys, became their rock of security in the desperately difficult years to come. Although the Princes — and Harry especially — were happiest at Highgrove, Diana disliked the country. Consequently they spent most of their week in the family’s apartment at Kensington Palace.

Despite her carefully projected image as a hands-on mother, they spent most of their time in the top floor nursery suite, where they ate, slept and lived for most of their childhood. Nevertheless, the walls were badly soundproofed and they were painfully aware of their parents’ frequent rows. By the mid-Eighties Charles had given up all hope of ever being able to change things. He was once again seeing some of the friends Diana had disliked, while she was separately seeing her own friends. They spent more and more time apart. It was his old friend Patty Palmer Tomkinson who — worried about how unhappy Charles was and how dramatically he had changed — put him in touch again with Camilla, knowing that she had always been able to make him laugh. Call of duty: Harry stands alongside the Duchess of Cornwall on the balcony at Buckingham Palace during a Lancaster Bomber flypast in 2008 more videos Sickening video shows moment boy shoots his classmates DID SHE GET HER FINAL WISH? Diana had said she wanted to be interred in the family crypt at Great Brington, Northampton, alongside her father and grandmother, but it was deemed that the small churchyard would be unable to cope with the volume of visitors.

So after the funeral, her coffin was driven slowly to nearby Althorp, her ancestral home, past thousands of spectators on the roadside, while the Prince of Wales, William and Harry and the Spencers all made the journey in the Royal Train. Diana was buried instead on an island in the middle of a lake on the estate where, in life, she had been refused a home. It has become a shrine and her brother has turned the old stable block into a permanent exhibition in her memory, which the public can visit. But there are some who think her body was later quietly placed where she had wanted to rest. Slowly, Charles began the long haul out of the abyss. Along the way, they became lovers once more. It was an easy, happy, uncomplicated relationship. Diana’s five-year relationship with James Hewitt, by contrast, was not. Although he was not the first, this was the most enduring of her love affairs and she made no attempt to keep him secret from her children. By all accounts she positively encouraged a relationship between them, yet she nevertheless was having an affair at the same time with James Gilbey, whom she had known from her teens.

Then in 1991, when Hewitt was deployed to Iraq during the first Gulf War, and despite the risk, she sent him more than 100 loving, hand-written letters. Every day she anxiously watched the news, terrified that he was going to be killed — while Harry, not quite seven years old, snuggled on the sofa beside her, trying to comfort her but no doubt confused by her anguish. When Hewitt, still besotted with her, returned home the following year, Diana abruptly ended the affair, as she ended so many of her relationships with both men and women, friends and family. She simply stopped taking his calls. He retired confused and hurt. Diana didn’t attempt to hide her dalliances — or her emotions — from her children. By the late Eighties and early Nineties, when Harry was still very young and impressionable, Charles and Diana could barely tolerate being in the same room together. There were blistering rows, tears and hysterics, rage and fury, all heard to some degree by everyone in the house. What is surprising is that Diana confided in her boys and sought comfort from them even though they were still so young.

Given the distress she suffered as a nine-year-old when her own parents divorced, she of all people would have known just how painful it is for a young child to see a parent in distress. Yet she seemed unconcerned that William and Harry should see the full range of her emotions. Nor did she hesitate to use them as pawns in her war with their father. In 1991, she quietly booked a holiday for herself and the boys with a few other friends in the Austrian resort of Lech and alerted the Press. Diana had an affair with James Hewitt (left), whom she had adored, and she had been devastated when he co-operated with a kiss-and-tell book. Squidgygate, a 30-minute tape recording of the Princess having a flirtatious conversation with her lover James Gilbey (right), had been followed just a few months later by Camillagate The date she chose was half-term, when she knew Charles would be unable to come. He was hosting a shooting weekend for 18 friends at Sandringham which she knew he would never be able to call off.

It was not the first time, nor the last, that the boys were used as pawns in their on-going war. The years of separation were not happy ones for the Princess. She developed a passion for Oliver Hoare, an art dealer friend of the Prince of Wales, whom she had met through her husband. He was often seen arriving at Kensington Palace and there was much gossip. The marriage did not fail because of Camilla Parker Bowles, the woman Diana famously called the third person in her marriage. It failed principally because it was a tragic mismatch Hoare was married and not inclined to leave his wife. He tried to cool the relationship, at which Diana started making silent telephone calls to his wife at home. Eventually Mrs Hoare contacted the police and the calls were traced to Kensington Palace. The story found its way into the Press, much to the fury of the Princess, who blamed her husband and one of his staff for leaking it, convinced that they were out to smear her name. It had actually been leaked by a boy who was at school with one of the Hoare children.

In September 1995, at the age of 13, William arrived for his first term at Eton College, one of the best — and certainly the most famous — public schools in the world, having successfully passed his common entrance exam. The whole family turned out to take him, Charles, Diana, and Harry, putting on a display of unity and smiles for the inevitable Press and the curious public. That very day the Princess had been on the front pages again with yet more revelations about her love life. After Oliver Hoare, she had fallen for the England rugby captain, Will Carling. Diana had taken the boys to watch him play, he was a regular visitor to Kensington Palace and he had given them each rugby shirts that were no doubt their pride and joy. Who knows whether they had known the true nature of their mother’s friendship with him. But on that first day of the Michaelmas term, every man and woman in the country was left in little doubt.

Julia Carling was convinced Diana and her husband were more than just good friends and ended her marriage to Will in a bitter, protracted and very high-profile manner that ensured the tabloids had plenty of material to keep their readers titillated and Diana’s name in the news. On the evening of November 20, 1995 Panorama viewers watched transfixed as one of the most explosive and deadly 58 minutes of television unfolded in front of their eyes. Diana, Princess of Wales, sitting forlornly in Kensington Palace, wiped away the occasional tear as she talked to journalist Martin Bashir about her bulimia, her self-harming, her cries for help A few days after saying goodbye to his brother, Harry went back to Ludgrove for the start of the new term, no doubt relieved to be back with his friends and the safe cocoon that the routine of school provided. What neither he nor William knew (nor anyone at Buckingham Palace or St James’s Palace, nor even the Chairman of the BBC, which screened the programme) was that their mother had plans actively under way for one final bombshell that would hit right at the heart of the institution that was her children’s future.

On the evening of November 20, Panorama viewers watched transfixed as one of the most explosive and deadly 58 minutes of television unfolded in front of their eyes. HRH Diana, Princess of Wales, sitting forlornly in Kensington Palace, wiped away the occasional tear as she talked to journalist Martin Bashir about her bulimia, her self-harming, her cries for help. She talked about the Prince’s obsession with Camilla — ‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded’ — and ‘the enemy’, her ‘husband’s department’ that tried to undermine her. She admitted she had held those telephone conversations with James Gilbey, and said that she had made calls to Oliver Hoare, but not 300. She’d had an affair with James Hewitt, whom she had adored, and she had been devastated when he co-operated with a kiss-and-tell book: ‘The first thing I did was rush down to talk to my children. And William produced a box of chocolates and said: “Mummy, I think you’ve been hurt.

These are to make you smile again.” ’ For someone whose first instinct had been to rush down and make sure her children were all right when Hewitt’s innocuous book hit the shelves, this was an inexplicable interview to have given. A few hundred people might have seen Hewitt’s book. This interview was seen by over 20 million viewers; it was picked up by just about every newspaper and news magazine in the world, and by every radio and television news bulletin. She developed a passion for Oliver Hoare (left), an art dealer friend of the Prince of Wales, whom she had met through her husband, after she fell for the England rugby captain, Will Carling (right). Diana had taken the boys to watch him play This was dynamite, and she knew it. It was pure, unadulterated theatre, as those who knew her recognised, but the wider audience saw her as a victim; a sinner perhaps, but a sinner whose only sin was to love, and certainly more sinned against than guilty of any crime herself. She knew the media would go crazy; she knew it would strike the man who had spurned her where it hurt most.

But was she forgetting that man was also her children’s father? In those 58 minutes she had taken a swipe at all the people William and Harry loved best. And she had talked about things that neither ten-year-olds, nor even 12-year-olds, want to hear, and certainly don’t want their friends to hear either. But at times like this, Diana wasn’t thinking like a mother. She was the child still nursing those feelings of abandonment and emptiness that she had carried for so much of her life; hell-bent on self-aggrandisement and self-justification — and ultimately, self-destruction. Expensive rehab clinics are filled with the children of broken homes and bitter divorces, some of whose experiences pale beside Harry’s. What almost certainly saved him and his brother was the army of people employed to look after them. But while their nannies could keep them occupied and the protection officers could keep them safe, no one could protect them from the emotional extremes of their mother. TOMORROW: Debauchery that nearly killed his Army career Extracted from Prince Harry: Brother, Soldier, Son by Penny Junor, to be published by Hodder & Stoughton on Thursday, priced £20.

© Penny Junor 2014. Order at mailbookshop.co.uk or on 0808 272 0808, P&P is free for a limited time only. A very tragic affair: The true story of Princess Diana and her heart surgeon lover | Daily Mail Online A very tragic affair: The true story of Princess Diana and her heart surgeon lover By GEOFFREY LEVY and RICHARD KAY Last updated at 15:24 22 December 2007 From the quiet of his home in Pakistan, surgeon Hasnat Khan is pointedly ignoring the parade of witnesses giving evidence at the Diana inquest in London. He knew it would not be long before he was dragged into the prurient proceedings as the man she said she wanted to marry. He knew friends of the princess would feel compelled to name him as Diana's real love, not the coke-snorting, high-living Dodi, with whom she spent her final weeks, and with whom she died. All in all, the exposure was the very opposite of what he wanted.

And nothing betrays the cultural differences which took him back to his homeland after 12 years working for the NHS at the Royal Brompton, Harefield and St Bartholomew's hospitals than the acute discomfort he feels at remaining a central figure in the Diana story. How clearly we can now see the clashing values of two contrasting cultures, two very different lives. No, not Hasnat and Diana, but Hasnat and her previous lover, James Hewitt. In the copper-haired former Life Guards Captain Hewitt, we see betrayal, indiscretion and disclosure. He was the man who turned his affair with Diana, especially her painful BBC1 Panorama admission that she "adored him", into an endless, money-spinning career during which, with every passing year, the outpouring of his intimate revelations has become increasingly distasteful. In Khan, now 48, we find integrity, discretion and dignity, a quiet withdrawal from the episode, bottling up his emotions, avoiding the limelight, eschewing the financial fortune that he could so easily have made from an epic love affair which was always doomed to end in their parting.

It may not be fashionable to admit it, but who can blame the followers of Islam for thinking they just might have something to teach the Western world after all? Discretion these days is a word from a bygone age, but to Hasnat Khan, living in modern Britain, it was the most crucial element of a love affair with Diana that lasted two years, until shortly before her death. To Diana, marriage to the burly, heavy-smoking Pathan (the Northern Pakistani clan from which his family originates) was a dream she did not see as impossible, despite cautionary advice to the contrary from close friends such as the then Brazilian ambassador's wife, Madame Lucia Flecha de Lima, who gave evidence to the inquest this week by video link. Diana studied the Koran and kept a copy by her bedside. And she discussed what life would be like for her in Pakistan with her friend Jemima Khan, who had married the country's cricketing hero, Imran Khan - a marriage that was later to break up. Diana even spent days mugging up about the human heart and its problems using Gray's Anatomy, the classic medical book, so she could talk to Hasnat about his work.

There are no pictures of them together, no personal testaments. However, what we do know is that Hasnat desperately did not want to hurt her. "He's a reasonable man and it was crystal clear to him that being married to the Princess of Wales and working in London couldn't work," recalls one of his friends. "He knew it would turn him into the appendage of a celebrity when all he wanted was to be a good surgeon, take care of his patients and have a quiet life. "As Diana's husband, the distractions would have been overwhelming. His idea of relaxing after a day in the operating theatre was a quiet drink in the local pub. "Can you imagine him doing that with the Princess of Wales as his wife?" Hasnat gently explained to Diana many times that the only possible chance the marriage had of succeeding was for them to live in Pakistan, but he was not convinced that she would be able to come to terms with life there, far away from her family and friends and, crucially, parted for long periods from her sons, William and Harry. The fact that she accepted his argument - albeit reluctantly - is a measure of her high regard for his integrity.

She realised his reluctance to consider marriage seriously led him, increasingly, to be too busy to see her. Scroll down for more... And then, to huge surprise in her circle, she suddenly plunged into an affair with Dodi Fayed. From this state of gloom, suddenly she was having fun, and her friends were divided as to what was behind the new relationship. Some saw it as being merely "on the rebound"; others that she was "getting back" at Prince Charles for giving Camilla Parker Bowles a widely publicised 50th birthday party. However, the majority were convinced she was seeing another Muslim to make Dr Khan jealous in the hope of winning him back. Nothing we might hear from the inquest in evidence extracted from witnesses called by Mohamed Al Fayed's expensive QC, Michael Mansfield, about the burgeoning romance between the princess and Dodi can match the intensity of the love affair that existed between Hasnat and Diana. It began, as these things do, by chance - a distraught telephone call to Diana from her long-time acupuncturist and friend Oonagh Toffolo, then 66.

Her husband, Joe, was critically ill and had just had a triple heart bypass at the Royal Brompton Hospital. Oonagh was in need of comfort and support. Diana raced to the hospital. Scroll down for more... It was August 31, 1995 (ironically, exactly two years to the day before her death) and among the people she met there was the handsome, reassuring Hasnat Khan, who had performed Joe Toffolo's operation. At that time, he was the senior registrar under the famous Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub, the world's number one heart surgeon. After that visit, Diana went to see Joe Toffolo almost every day until he was discharged on September 17. Perhaps it was just chance, but most days she also bumped into surgeon Khan, whose swarthy good looks had already led to giggling comparisons with the actor Omar Sharif by the nurses. When Oonagh had first told Khan that Princess Diana was coming to visit her husband, his chief worry was that he "wouldn't recognise her". By the time Joe Toffolo was ready to go home, the surgeon and Diana had become friends.

In the final days in hospital, Khan and Diana would visit him together. For two young and unattached people, it was just a short step from friendship to becoming lovers. Khan soon found himself being emotionally consumed by the princess. But while he was enjoying the excitement of this thrilling romantic adventure with a princess, he was never entirely comfortable with it. He was 36 and had already been engaged to marry twice - both by family arrangement to distant cousins - but each time it had been broken off. In Lahore, his upright parents remained anxious for him to marry the daughter of an equally upright family. In London, he was being secretly smuggled into Kensington Palace in butler Paul Burrell's car. On days when Khan wasn't working but Diana had an early engagement, she would leave him sleeping in her bed as she slipped away. When he was working, urgent messages would often arrive for him via the Royal Brompton Hospital's switchboard. A certain "Dr Armani", a woman with a pronounced American drawl, would be seeking him and would sometimes become quite upset if he wasn't available. "Dr Armani", of course, was Diana.

She used a variety of names and accents, including Brummie, to reach Dr Khan incognito during his working day. Rarely was there a special reason: she just wanted to hear his voice. She would call after they had only just parted, having been together all night. Dr Khan had an old car with a rickety exhaust and the princess refused to ride in it in case it broke down and they were discovered together. So they used her BMW or Burrell's Vauxhall Astra. There were discreet dinners in out-of-the way restaurants, visits to his uncle, Omar, and his English barrister wife, Jane, at Stratford-on-Avon. Soon she became a regular visitor, washing up and bringing presents for the children as she tried, desperately, to behave like one of the family. One evening, they slipped into Ronnie Scott's, the dark and smoky Soho jazz club, with Diana disguised in a black wig. Another time, as a joke, he took her to a pub in Middlesex called ... the Prince of Wales. She loved the subterfuge.

But as the months went by, especially for a man dedicated to his work with dreams of a professorship, Khan was beginning to find Diana a difficult lover. On one occasion, she tried desperately to reach him while he was in the middle of a heart transplant operation. They had been together the night before and she flatly refused to accept that he couldn't speak to her. For ages she argued with the switchboard operator, refusing to take "No" for an answer. Only when it was made stonily clear that Dr Khan would not be interrupted and was not coming to the phone did she give up. When Diana went to Pakistan, ostensibly to visit Imran Khan's hospital, she put on a virginal white shalwar kameez and drove to the hot and dusty Lahore suburb of Jhelum to meet Hasnat's parents. They were no backstreet family - they lived in an elegant, four-storey, pale yellow colonial house. Eight members of the family turned out to greet her. They drank Earl Grey tea. At one point, the electricity went off. She made a good impression on them, and they on her. Hasnat's businessman father Abdul Rasheed Khan remembers Diana's visits to his home. "She was humble.

I liked her demeanour," he recalled this week. However, Mr Khan senior said his son had told the family that marriage to the princess was unlikely to work. "She is from Venus and I am from Mars," the doctor reportedly told his father. "If it ever happened it would be like a marriage from two different planets." She made a particular friend that day of Hasnat's grandmother, Nanny Appa, and the two women began writing to each other. Diana stored the old lady's letters - translated into English by one of her relatives - in a special cupboard. While the affair remained secret, Hasnat was happy, but the moment the spotlight fell on him the hopelessness of the situation began to make him uneasy, and suddenly the princess's spell that he'd been under was broken. However, by this stage, Diana's love was turning into obsession and he found himself almost never free of her attention. When he increasingly refused to take her calls at the hospital, or didn't respond to those she made to his flat, she would despatch Paul Burrell at night to find him, carrying her letters. Not once did Burrell find the softly-spoken surgeon with another woman, as Diana suspected.

Instead, he was usually sipping a Guinness in his local, the Anglesea Arms in South Kensington, or eating a hasty meal at Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. What made Diana more persistent was her realisation that nothing - not even her - was allowed to stand in the way of his medical ambitions. By now, as far as Khan was concerned, the romance was doomed. They parted, agreeing to be friends, but Diana found it impossible to let him go. For the first week she wrote, she telephoned, she drove round to his apartment in Neville Street, Chelsea, and waited in her car. Pointedly, when he saw her car, he hurried off the other way to avoid her. He'd had enough. "He wanted to move on with his life," a friend says. And then suddenly he was reading in the newspapers about her new romance with Dodi Fayed. He suspected her motives all along. If she was hoping to win him back, it was not going to work. As Diana was making her last fatal car journey with Dodi into the Paris underpass, Khan, the man she really loved, was on holiday in Lahore, staying with his family. It was there he heard the news.

He no longer loved her but the shock was immense because, a friend explains: "He felt responsible for her death because, but for him, she wouldn't have been with Dodi in the first place." When he returned to London he found the usual pile of letters, but two of them looked different. He opened them first.

Question: Of whom did Princess Diana say ‘Yes I adored him’. ‘Yes I was in love with him’?
Answer: James Hewitt