Pushed beyond endurance: Yes, Diana could be a difficult woman. But read this honest account by her loyal bodyguard of the true provocations she faced in her marriage and decide: how would YOU have coped?  

As Princess Diana’s royal protection officer, Ken Wharfe watched her bring up her two young sons — and deal with the frustrations of being married to Prince Charles. In the first part of our serialisation of his newly updated memoirs on Saturday, he told how he became part of the Royal Family. Here’s part two of our warm and intimate series . . . 

The Princess of Wales, I honestly believe, did not go to the birthday party at Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s house in Richmond with the intention of confronting her husband’s mistress, that night in 1989. 

Indeed, I am convinced she attended simply to support Prince Charles.

What happened that night was spontaneous — completely forgivable, many would say, but also a nightmare for me as her royal protection officer.

Diana had never been formally informed of her husband’s affair with a former girlfriend, the woman he increasingly regarded as his soulmate, Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. 

She did not need to be told: all the servants at Kensington Palace and Highgrove knew about it, and it was impossible for her to remain ignorant.

Lady Diana Spencer and Camilla Parker-Bowles at Ludlow Races where Prince Charles was competing, in 1980

Almost every guest at the party knew, too. They were there to celebrate the 40th birthday of Camilla’s younger sister, Annabel Elliot, and on the drive down to Richmond, the Prince made his displeasure at Diana’s presence plain, needling her constantly.

In the front passenger seat, I sat silent, not sure what to expect from the evening ahead. Diana had told me beforehand that she had no intention of kissing Camilla when they met. ‘I’ll stick out my hand and see if she takes it,’ she said.

By this time I had been her police protection officer for nearly two years, and had guarded her sons for more than a year before that. She trusted and confided in me, and it was not unusual for her to discuss her emotions and anxieties with me.

Many of the guests could not hide their surprise at her presence, but she was peerless at deflecting other people’s embarrassment and I soon retired to the kitchen, confident that the evening was going well and my presence would only inhibit her.

I’d been there for about 90 minutes when I heard the Princess calling me. She appeared at the door, tearful and distressed, saying that her husband and his mistress has slipped away together. 

She was determined to find them and confront them, and she wanted me to back her up.

‘Will you help me, Ken? I have had enough, this is too much. I am not going to be shown up in this way. I want to talk to her — now.’

Camilla Parker-Bowles and Lady Diana Spencer  at Ludlow racecourse to watch the Amateur Riders Handicap Steeplechase

My police duties did not include relationship guidance, but I tried questioning the wisdom of causing a scene. I had no desire to be dragged into a marital row, let alone one involving the heir to the throne, his wife and his lover, all in public.

But Diana would not be persuaded otherwise, and led me down some stairs to the basement of the house, a children’s playroom. 

Sitting in one softly-lit corner, deep in conversation, were the Prince and Camilla.

‘Please don’t go, Ken,’ Diana murmured, as the couple leapt guiltily to their feet. It was as though my presence was giving her strength for what she was about to say. 

But I felt I had no business eavesdropping on this deeply personal business and I excused myself, retreating to the foot of the stairs.

I found the whole situation extraordinary. What possible need could there have been for Charles and Camilla to conduct a clandestine meeting at a crowded party where the Princess was also present?

It was a terrible insult to Diana, and the only charitable interpretation is that the Prince believed their absence would not be noticed.

After a few minutes, Diana emerged. She seemed elated, and as she walked back into the party she held her head high. I admired her immensely for it.

A few minutes later, Charles and Camilla also appeared, looking shaken — whatever Diana had said must have hit home. 

But for the rest of the evening they circulated separately as if nothing had happened, and it was not until the car journey back to Kensington Palace that the pretence was dropped.

Over and over, the Princess asked her silent husband: ‘How could you do this to me?’ I sat in the front, staring forwards, not uttering a sound.

Diana was not strong emotionally. By her own account, she did not sleep that night, but cried without stopping. 

My heart went out to her. She was a young wife and mother who wanted desperately to be loved by her husband.

Prince Charles is not a bad man, but his treatment of her that night was unforgivable. From that moment, all Diana’s euphemisms about ‘that woman’ and ‘his lady’ were discarded.

The Prince and Princess Of Wales holding their baby son, Prince William, at home in Kensington Palace

Camilla became ‘the Rottweiler’, if she was mentioned at all. It wasn’t that Diana had given up her struggle for her husband’s affections, simply that she no longer had the stomach to keep fighting every day. ‘There comes a time when you don’t care any more,’ she told me quietly.

From the moment in 1986 that I transferred to the Royalty & Diplomatic Protection Department, after serving with the District Support Unit (the new, inoffensive name for the Special Patrol Group, following the early Eighties Broadwater Farm riots), I had seen that the Waleses’ marriage was in serious trouble. 

Charles was at best cold towards his wife, while she was sometimes hysterical and at her worst could be vile. Privately, she would later repent, but this was her only means of provoking a reaction.

The Prince was not prepared to give an inch to his demanding wife: as heir to the throne, he believed that his will was his birthright. If exercising that will meant upsetting his beautiful princess, so be it.

Frequently, he would announce that their private plans as a couple had been dropped, because he was entertaining friends.

‘Stuff your rotten friends,’ Diana would shriek. ‘They’re not my friends!’ Unmoved, the Prince would walk away and later tell his circle that his wife was indisposed by a headache.

To make matters worse, summer weekends were dominated by his passion for polo, which Diana regarded as recklessly dangerous and mind-numbingly dull. 

When she did take her sons to watch their father play, the photographers focused on her and the Prince would complain next morning, as he surveyed the papers, that she had been playing up to the cameras.

‘Quite the glamour girl,’ he would say disdainfully. The Princess would fly into a rage, at which point Charles, who hated confrontation, would disappear to tend his beloved garden. ‘Go on, talk to your plants,’ Diana would shout after him. ‘If only I was as important as your flowers!’

It was a polo accident that brought about an effective separation, in 1990. Charles fell from his horse and broke his arm, and Diana went to his bedside at Cirencester hospital, not far from Highgrove. A few minutes later, she left. Charles had made it clear her presence was not wanted. A few minutes later, Camilla arrived.

As we drove back to London, Diana confessed to me, quietly and sadly, without any hysterics but with absolute determination, that this was the final straw. She was no longer prepared to attempt anything for the sake of the marriage. 

Camilla as good as moved into Highgrove that day, and Charles let her treat it as her home — to the extent that, though a fervent anti-smoker himself, he even allowed his mistress to light up anywhere in the house.

The Prince made a slow convalescence. Nearly three months later he was admitted to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham for an operation on the broken arm. Diana visited and, once again, the encounter lasted mere minutes.

Leaving his private room, she walked along the hospital corridor and saw a middle-aged woman sitting outside the intensive care ward, sobbing. Her name was Ivy and her son was fighting for his life after a serious road accident.

Diana’s ability to talk to people she had never met was extraordinary, and I never saw it more vividly than on that day.

In one natural motion she knelt beside the woman and then put her arm around her, to comfort her.

‘He’ll pull through, I know he will,’ she reassured the woman, and from that day, whenever Diana visited Charles, she made a point of visiting Ivy too.

Her compassion was wasted on her husband, but the urge to give comfort had to escape somehow. What the Prince didn’t want, the public did.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall are seen after their wedding in the White Drawing Room at Windsor Castle in 2005

After leaving hospital, Charles escaped to the Queen Mother’s Highland retreat, Birkhall. While there, he was photographed for the first time during his marriage with Mrs Parker Bowles. 

The Queen Mother was also on hand, which confirmed Diana’s conviction that the Royal Family had sanctioned Charles’s adultery at the highest level.

By now, her relations with most of Charles’s family were at an all-time low. The Queen was chilly and distant, and concerned about how the Princess’s work with Aids patients would look to the media.

The Queen Mother, meanwhile, seemed to regard her with detached pity: Diana always thought any chance of friendship had been scuppered at the outset by her own poison-tongued grandmother, Lady Fermoy, who was a lady-in-waiting.

She found Prince Philip impossible, though in his own bluff way he tried to offer her an olive branch which she had slapped back in his face. 

She liked Andrew and thought Anne was stimulating company, though they could never have a sisterly chat.

Diana did, however, adore her Kensington Palace neighbour, Princess Margaret, who had been kind and understanding from the moment she joined the Firm.

Perhaps, with ‘Margo’s’ extravagant lifestyle, her sometimes tragic love life and almost Bohemian independence, the two women felt a bond of empathy.

That independent spirit sometimes made it almost impossible for me to guard Diana. During a skiing trip to Lech with her sons, she gave me a hell of a fright — though by the time I realised anything was wrong, the danger was past.

We’d had a tough day, dogged by paparazzi, and I went to my room at the Arlberg Hotel exhausted.

At 6am, the night-duty officer hammered on my door to inform me that the Princess was safe — news that was oddly unreassuring.

It transpired that minutes earlier the hotel’s doorbell had rung, and the young PC on duty had opened the front door to the Princess of Wales, in coat and hat.

She looked him in the eye, said ‘Good morning,’ and walked straight in, across the lobby and up to her room. She could not have left the hotel by that front door, since the night officer had the only set of keys. 

He was as well aware as I that the headline, ‘Princess Evades Police Protection — Gone For Hours’ was not one that would enhance career prospects for either of us.

We pieced together the mystery and I realised there was only one answer: she must have jumped from her bedroom balcony, 20ft up, into the deeply drifted snow below.

Sure enough, in the billows of white below her bedroom window, I found the perfect imprint of the Princess’s body, and footprints leading away to the town. All I could do was pray that no paparazzi had seen the leap.

When she woke, I scolded her roundly, but she never did tell me where she’d gone.

That wasn’t the only time she went missing on my watch. The other occasion was much more serious: for a few minutes I was afraid that she had also jumped, this time to her death.

In 1992, with divorce looming, the Prince and Princess took a holiday aboard a friend’s yacht in the Aegean. It was portrayed in the Press as a ‘love-boat cruise’, not so much a reconciliation as a second honeymoon.

The truth was starkly different. Diana was in no mood for pretence, and her attitude and behaviour made life impossible for everyone: the unlimited supplies of champagne and caviar were little consolation.

The royal couple were barely on speaking terms, and divided the yacht into two zones around their separate cabins, neither venturing into each other’s territory. Diana suspected, rightly, that Charles spent much of each day on the yacht’s satellite phone to Camilla.

The atmosphere was so tense that even William and Harry became concerned about their mother’s strange behaviour. It came to a head when the Prince’s protection officer, Colin Trimming, came to my cabin with worrying news that no one had seen Diana for a couple of hours.

She was not in her cabin, and Colin was afraid she could have thrown herself overboard.

Panic set in. The Prince was told and I saw genuine concern on his face. Colin and I were conducting a thorough search when I remembered seeing her, some days earlier, by the lifeboats. 

In one of them, crouched beneath the canvas cover, I discovered Diana. She had been sitting alone in there for hours, sobbing.

My first emotion was immense relief, then compassion. I told Colin to call off the search and climbed under the cover myself, spending the next two hours locked in conversation.

‘Ken, they don’t understand me,’ she kept saying. ‘They think I’m mad and they feel sorry for me, but they’re all in on it — they know he’s on the phone to the Rottweiler all day. It’s a sham, he’s only here with me because his mummy has ordered it. He’s pathetic and this is a floating hell.’

At that moment she was ready to order the captain to take her to shore, where she’d get a ticket at the nearest airport and fly home alongside hundreds of tourists.

I pleaded with her to see reason and avoid a scandal, but she insisted that, as a princess, she could do what the bloody hell she liked. I made one final appeal: ‘What about your sons?’

That made her relent. Suddenly, she saw the funny side — the Princess of Wales and her bodyguard, huddled together in a lifeboat.

‘Come on, Ken,’ she said, ‘we’d better get back. Otherwise that husband of mine will be cracking open the champagne, hoping that I actually did jump overboard and he can marry that hideous woman!’

• Extracted from Diana: Closely Guarded Secret by Ken Wharfe and Robert Jobson, published by John Blake Publishing on August 18 at £7.99. © Ken Wharfe and Robert Jobson 2016. To order a copy for £5.59 (offer valid to August 16), visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15.