How Diana lover's bedroom cigar set off Kensington palace smoke alarm at 3.30am as she undertook a series of ill-fated affairs 

The Princess’s infatuation with the married art dealer Oliver Hoare was very intense

Scotland Yard advises all protection officers never to become too close emotionally to their VIP. Detachment is essential, in order to focus fully on security. 

With someone as warmly sympathetic, confiding and vulnerable as Diana, Princess of Wales, this ideal can be difficult to maintain.

In 1986, around the time I became bodyguard to the two young princes, a rumour was circulating in both palace and police circles.

It was whispered that the Princess had become ‘too close’ to her protection officer, Sergeant Barry Mannakee - and that a senior member of Charles’s 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 rumour was enough to cost Mannakee his posting.

He was killed in a road accident in the East End, in 1987: he was a passenger on a motorbike that was struck by a car. The Princess’s lover, James Hewitt, would claim, without a shred of evidence, that Mannakee had been murdered by a rogue British intelligence officer.

Hewitt also claimed, long after his affair with Diana was over, that she had admitted to him that the bodyguard had shared her bed. She kept a brown teddy in her bedroom, which had been a gift from him. 

This affair was said to have started in 1985, when Prince Harry was less than a year old and Diana was suffering from post-natal depression.

But whenever Barry’s name came up in our conversations, the Princess told me with complete straightforwardness that allegations of an affair were untrue, spread as part of a smear campaign by Prince Charles’s camp.

Diana was not averse to embellishing the truth, but I believed her then and I do still.

Undoubtedly Mannakee, who was nearly 15 years older than Diana, became more than just a policeman to her: he was a close friend, a good listener whom she saw as a father figure.

VERY IMPORTANT PASTIES ON QUEEN'S FLIGHT

Whenever we went to official engagements in the West Country, Diana was always keen to get hold of some Cornish pasties — proper ones, not the pale imitations sold in London

 For a woman who, it would later be claimed, suffered from bulimia, Diana usually had a healthy appetite.

Whenever we went to official engagements in the West Country, she was always keen to get hold of some clotted cream and Cornish pasties — proper ones, not the pale imitations sold in London.

Pasties were among her favourite treats, and she also liked to bring some home for her sons.

Quite often, my first job on a visit to Cornwall was to instruct my counterpart from the local Special Branch, Detective Inspector Peter Rudd, with his first mission of the day — shopping for Cornish delicacies.

On one occasion, DI Rudd took his assignment rather too seriously. Instead of returning with the customary half-dozen pasties and a pot of cream, he sent a local distributor into a panic by brandishing his badge and demanding several boxes, each containing two dozen pasties, and two giant vats of clotted cream.

As we flew back to London on a BAe 146 of the Queen’s Flight, the aircrew looked a little surprised by our cargo — it looked as though we had just made a royal visit to the local supermarket.

There were so many pasties that, when we got back to Kensington Palace, Diana decided to hand them out to the policemen on the gate.

After that I was rather more cautious about instructing police officers to gather local snacks for the Princess. 

Having been in much the same position, this has always struck me as the most convincing answer to the rumours.

When Prince Charles broke the news of Mannakee’s death to Diana, they were travelling to RAF Northolt, for a flight to Cannes and an official visit to the film festival.

She burst into tears. But that is not proof of any affair - it was the natural reaction of a highly emotional woman learning of the death of a close friend.

Equally, Hewitt’s suggestion that the policeman was murdered because of his intimacy with the Princess is the stuff of romantic thrillers.

What I can confirm is that Diana was not afraid to play off one admirer against another. She enjoyed beguiling more than one man at a time.

By the late Eighties, while deeply involved with Hewitt, she was also embroiled with another charmer - 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.

Diana was not afraid to play off one admirer against another. She enjoyed beguiling more than one man at a time

This double intrigue meant she had to rely on trusted friends to provide more safe houses, places where she could spend hours with a male admirer, confident of absolute privacy away from the prying eyes of servants — though with her faithful protection officer always close at hand.

She often used the elegant London home of Mara Berni, owner of her favourite restaurant, San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place. Her close friend Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador, also gave her the run of her home.

It was in Mara’s house, close to Harrods, that she would meet some of the mystics and fortune-tellers she liked to consult.

Diana would spend hours locked away with these people: I regarded them with suspicious cynicism, but the Princess told me that she didn’t mind when each one predicted a different future: she simply wanted solutions - any solutions - to the problems in her life.

Despite my warnings, Diana spoke for hours at a time with her lovers via her mobile phone, which she called her ‘talking brick’.

Given the itinerant lifestyles of the Prince and the Princess, not to mention their illicit love affairs, the mobile became an essential tool for both of them, and Diana in particular was almost addicted to hers.

Royalty protection officers did not monitor phone calls, but some branch of the intelligence service routinely did. 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.

In one incriminating call, she went still further, despairing at the hostility she felt from her husband’s family — ‘after all I’ve done for them’. It was a cry that I had heard many times.

In the same call, she warned Gilbey that she could not afford to get pregnant with his child, and he burbled affectionate nonsense, calling her ‘darling’ 53 times, and ‘Squidgy’ or ‘Squidge’ 14 more.

PRINCESS USED FERGIE TO PAVE THE WAY FOR OWN DIVORCE

She was canny enough to realise she needed a partner in crime... Gullible, malleable, rarely careful of consequences, and eagerly willing to please, Sarah was useful to Diana

 At the time of Diana’s Squidgygate phone call with her lover James Gilbey, in January 1990, Diana had been talking of nothing but escape from ‘The Firm’ for many months.

Seeking a co-conspirator, as well as a sympathetic ear to hear her tales of a loveless marriage, she had rekindled her friendship with the Duchess of York.

By now, the royal wives were meeting for lunch once a week. In one sense, this showed the Princess at her most scheming and manipulative. She was canny enough to realise that if she was to bolt, she needed a partner in crime, and in Sarah she found the perfect assistant. Gullible, malleable, rarely careful of consequences, and eagerly willing to please, Sarah was useful to Diana.

The bond was forged naturally, because Diana had helped to engineer Sarah’s entry into the wealth and fame of the Royal Family by encouraging her romance with Andrew, and also because both women were outsiders, locked in unsatisfying marriages.

True, Diana felt this more deeply than Sarah, who at least initially believed the false promises and enthusiastic welcome she had received from senior members of the Firm, particularly the Duke of Edinburgh.

On the other hand, Diana — unlike Charles and Andrew — was not frightened of Prince Philip, or ‘Stavros’ as she privately referred to him.

Soon, the two sisters-in-law were as thick as thieves. I repeatedly advised the Princess against making this alliance, not because I disliked Sarah, but because I saw she was a bad influence on Diana. Senior members of the Queen’s Household were equally concerned. 

They thought the Duchess of York, whose indiscreet dalliances were well-known inside the palace, was in danger of self-destructing, and bringing down the wife of the heir to the throne with her.

But Diana knew what she was doing, I now see. She listened to Sarah, and realised the Yorks’ marriage was close to collapse. Andrew’s adolescent pursuit of golf, fast cars and parties that were not always very high-class, as well as his long absences in the Royal Navy, showed that he had failed to face up to fatherhood.

Sarah sought comfort elsewhere and Diana was shrewd enough to appreciate it was only a matter of time before the volcano erupted. Even given the precedent of the divorces of Princess Margaret and Princess Anne, Diana knew that if she was ever to escape the gilded royal cage, she would need Sarah to open the door first. 

All of this was captured on tape by the security services — who then broadcast it repeatedly on radio frequencies monitored by amateur hams and scanners. Clearly, the secret agents could not take the tapes to the newspapers themselves . . . but they certainly knew how to ensure that someone else did.

Little wonder the Princess was convinced that the Establishment was ‘out to get her’.

Sure enough, the recordings were published, and even made available to the public via a phone-in line. Trying to gauge how embarrassing this all was, Diana dialled the number herself, to listen to her own phone call. 

Shortly after that recording had been made public, another illicit phone recording fell into the hands of the redtop tabloids. Extracts were published from a conversation between Charles and his mistress, Camilla, the contents of which were both intimate and distasteful.

At one point, the Prince voiced a desire to be his lover’s tampon, and in that moment ceded the upper hand to the Princess. All public sympathy was with her again.

She revelled in the role of victim and, clutching a copy of the newspaper that had published the incriminating transcript, summed up her feelings to me: ‘It’s game, set and match, Ken.’

Charles felt humiliated, and those closest to him said they had never seen him so low: one confided to me: ‘He’s hit rock bottom.’

Cartoonists lampooned the Prince, and one sketch, featuring him talking dirty to his plants, particularly amused the Princess. She collapsed into fits of giggles on seeing it.

But she also told me she had been genuinely shocked by some of the baser comments in the recording. ‘It’s just sick,’ she said repeatedly.

At one point in a recorded phone call, the Prince voiced a desire to be Camilla's tampon, and in that moment ceded the upper hand to Princess Diana. All public sympathy was with her again

The Princess’s infatuation with the married art dealer Oliver Hoare was much more intense than her relationship with James 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, though, 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.

An Old Etonian, Hoare was a friend of Charles: the Prince often stayed during the summer at the chateau belonging to Hoare’s mother-in-law, in the heart of Provence.

Diana had first met him during Ascot week in 1985, when Hoare and his wife were staying as guests of the Queen at Windsor Castle. The Princess was instantly attracted to him. 

Darkly good-looking, with thick, wavy black hair that he wore long, he was confident around the Royal Family where others in the room were anxious to please. Diana later confessed to me that she had felt a little shy when, at Windsor, she shook his hand for the first time, and had blushed as she flirted with him. That conversation ended abruptly when Charles and the Queen Mother joined them.

When the Waleses’ marriage moved closer to open warfare, Hoare and his wife began to act as intermediaries. It is possible that 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, and soon he was more than a mere intermediary.

Oliver Hoare spent hours in Diana's private rooms at Kensington Palace, and soon he was more than a mere intermediary

But he and his wife still invited Charles and Camilla to dine at their home, though he never mentioned this to Diana, knowing she would see it as a betrayal.

One night in 1992, at 3.30am, all the smoke alarms went off in Kensington Palace. I hared 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. In retrospect, this was the beginning of the breakdown of our professional relationship.

We went through periods of barely speaking: formal greetings, polite but brief answers, plenty of ‘Yes ma’ams’.

After a couple of stressful trips abroad, Diana was taking out her irritation on me. That, and the fact she had stopped being open about her movements, made me uncomfortable, as did the growing influence of Oliver Hoare.

She was difficult, petulant, prone to snap at any moment. The breaking point came, pathetically, in a row over parking. Diana, in a foul temper, pulled up on double yellow lines on Kensington High Street, and announced she was going shopping for CDs.

I warned her that, if traffic wardens turned up, I’d let them tow away the vehicle, rather than cover up her driving offence. Tears welled up, and moments later she burst out of the car in a rage.

‘That is it,’ I said out loud. I knew that we’d reached the end.

It seemed ridiculous that a relationship that had lasted so many years could end in a row over illegal parking, but after the antics of the previous few weeks I felt that any posting would be an improvement. 

There was no point in chasing after her: she had no money with her, something common among royalty, and would need cash to pay for anything she wanted to buy. I knew she’d soon be back.

Sitting in the car waiting for her return, I began mentally to compose my resignation letter.

As expected, she was back within minutes, asking for cash. I dutifully handed over some notes, and went with her to the shop to pay. Minutes later, as we pulled up outside Kensington Palace, I told her calmly: ‘Ma’am, I have decided to resign as your personal protection officer.’

The Princess said nothing. She stepped out of the car and walked, head bowed, through the gates. She did not look back.

Adapted 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 £5.99 (offer valid till August 16), visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640. P&P free on orders over £15.