The royals - Kitty Kelley [223]
“The bulimia… the business of overeating and then vomiting—that thoroughly revolted her,” said one of the Queen Mother’s friends. “The image of the future Queen of England riding the porcelain chariot was, well… I’m afraid she couldn’t get beyond the picture of the Princess of Wales crouched over a toilet bowl purging herself of puddings by throwing up.”
“A traitor entered our house,” the Queen Mother told Ruth Fermoy, her lady-in-waiting. Lady Fermoy agreed, but sadly—the “traitor” was her own granddaughter.
“Flesh and blood and family count for little when you’re a royalist,” said Ruth Fermoy’s goddaughter, “and Ruth was a royalist to her core. She turned on Diana when she separated from Charles, whom she absolutely adored. She said it was the saddest day in her life. Despite what has been written about her and the Queen Mother engineering the marriage, Ruth told me that she didn’t want Diana to marry Charles. She had warned her at the time of what she would encounter by joining the royal family. But Diana was helplessly in love and assured Grandma Ruth, as she called her, that she wanted to dedicate her life to Charles….
“Diana mended things a little before Ruth died—but just. I was there when she visited Ruth’s flat in Eaton Square for the last time, and I felt sad for her when she left because Ruth said she still didn’t forgive Diana for what she had done.
“But then neither did Diana’s mother. She [Frances Shand Kydd] told me, and these were her exact words: ‘I know Charles has hurt Diana terribly, but I love him and I refuse to take sides.’ That’s from Diana’s own mother.
“And as for the Queen Mother… well, she unleashed her dogs, and it’s been bloody hell for Diana ever since.”
In public, the Queen Mother, who avoided any unpleasantness, never snarled, barked, or growled. For that, she “unleashed her dogs,” who were the emissaries she designated to communicate her opinions to the press. She, like her daughter, insisted on maintaining the myth of never granting interviews, although both talked to favored writers. After the Prime Minister’s announcement about the separation, Lord Wyatt stepped forward to comment on the behavior of the Princess of Wales.
He was identified as “a close personal friend of the Queen Mother,” so readers of the Sunday Times were expected to know whose sentiments were being expressed:
Princess Diana could never have won a university place, but she won a prince and failed to keep him. She is addicted to the limelight her marriage brought. It’s like a drug; to feed her craving she will do anything, even if it meant destroying the throne she solemnly swore to uphold.
Within weeks Diana was portrayed as a woman more sinned against than sinning. A transcript of her husband’s intimate telephone conversation with his mistress was published on January 12, 1993. The secret recording, known as Camillagate, was made on December 18, 1989, a few days before the secret recording of Diana’s telephone conversation with James Gilbey, known as Squidgygate. Both conversations had been picked up by men, both hobbyists who claimed they scanned the airwaves in their spare time like ham radio operators. But those who tend to conspiracies hinted at something more sinister: they said that publishing transcripts three years after the conversations were recorded suggested more than mere coincidence. They speculated that the furtive interceptions had been carried out by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, to embarrass the royal family and destabilize the monarchy.
The embarrassment was profound. In the words of one writer, the public was “well and truly shocked” to hear the prospective Supreme Governor of the Church of England declare his passion for another man’s wife. “I want to feel my way along you, all over you and up and down you and in and out… particularly in and out,” Charles told Camilla. “I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier….”
During the late night conversation, Charles proposed living inside Camilla