In 1986, around the time I became bodyguard to the two young princes, a rumor was circulating in both palace and police circles. It was whispered Diana had become ‘too close’ to her protection officer, Sergeant Barry Mannakee – and that a senior member of Charles’ staff had found them in a ‘compromising position’ on the eve of the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.
Nothing was ever proved but, nevertheless, he was summarily discharged for overstepping the invisible mark of propriety between Diana and himself, and assigned to other diplomatic duties. A year later he was dead.
The Queen had been aware of the relationship in the late Seventies between her daughter, Princess Anne, and her police bodyguard, Sergeant Peter Cross, who had also been removed from his job.
The last thing Buckingham Palace wanted was another scandal of this sort, and the rumor was enough to cost Mannakee his posting.
I didn’t want the same to happen to me. I knew Diana was not afraid to play off one admirer against another. She enjoyed beguiling more than one man at a time.
By the late 1980s, while deeply involved with James Hewitt, she was also embroiled with another charmer, the car salesman and gin fortune heir James Gilbey. He was obsessed with her, though she never felt the same adoration for him that she had lavished on Hewitt.
When Diana poured out her heart to Gilbey, as she often did to me, she would rage about Charles’s affair while oblivious to her own infidelities. It is little wonder the Princess was convinced the ‘Establishment’ was ‘out to get her’.
The Princess’ infatuation with the married art dealer Oliver Hoare was much more intense than her relationship with Gilbey. I didn’t like the man, and though Diana craved his company, Hoare resented my presence.
He probably thought I was spying on him. In fact, I took the view that Scotland Yard didn’t need to know of his existence, as long as he presented no security risk.
It is possible Diana chose Hoare because he was also a friend of Camilla and could keep the Princess up to date about her rival. She questioned him constantly, trying to understand what her husband saw in ‘the Rottweiler’.
Hoare spent hours in her private rooms at Kensington Palace.
One night in 1992, at 3.30am, all the smoke alarms went off in Kensington Palace. I raced towards the Princess’s apartment but before I reached the door I discovered the source of the false alarm.
Cowering behind a huge plant in the hallway, clutching a cigar, was Oliver Hoare. Diana, who hated the smell of smoke, must have sent him out of the bedroom.
It was not without a twinge of amusement at his expense that I advised him to put it out and go back to bed.
He looked almost pathetic as he gathered himself together and left.
Next morning, I tried to make a joke of the incident, suggesting that Diana and Hoare had been playing cards together in her room – perhaps strip poker. She blushed crossly, and I knew I’d overstepped the mark.