Diana sat alone in her pink armchair at Kensington Palace, microphone hidden in her blouse, phone off the hook. The world thought she was living a fairy tale. She was secretly recording her revenge. And the tapes? Smuggled out on a bicycle.
On the second floor of a red brick warren that Londoners call Kensington Palace, a young woman sat alone in a room decorated with dusky pink armchairs, floral wallpaper climbing toward the cornice, and a soft white carpet that muffled every footfall.
She had taken the telephone off the hook.
A small body microphone was clipped to the lining of her blouse, hidden beneath the fabric, invisible to anyone who might knock.
She was thirty years old, famous beyond reasonable measure, and for eleven years had performed the role of the Princess of Wales in front of an audience that at her wedding had numbered 750 million people.
In this particular room, she was performing for nobody.
Opposite her sat Dr. James Colthurst, a tall, quietly spoken Irish-born physician she had known since a teenage skiing holiday in the Swiss Alps.
He had arrived at the palace gates on a bicycle, a small cassette recorder concealed in his briefcase.
Across six sessions in 1991, she spoke into that microphone for approximately seven hours, describing in a flat, exhausted voice the bulimia, the suicide attempts, the cold husband, the confrontation with Camilla, the disease the palace had diagnosed and declined to treat.
She described the particular quality of isolation produced by being publicly loved and privately abandoned.
“When each session ended,” Colthurst later recalled, “I packed the cassettes into my briefcase, rode out through the palace gates, and carried her testimony through London traffic to a handover point in South London, where the journalist Andrew Morton was waiting to receive it.”
She was afraid her friend would be deliberately knocked off his bicycle.
She was afraid her apartment was being monitored.
She had it swept for listening devices multiple times, and the absence of bugs did not reassure her, because the absence of bugs did not mean the absence of surveillance.
She was, by her own account on those tapes, a woman living inside a fairy tale that was in fact a nightmare, conducting from within it the most successful single-handed assault on royal mythology in the history of the British monarchy.
The palace that was her prison was about to become her weapon.
—
Kensington Palace did not begin its life as a seat of royal power.
Its story starts in 1605, four years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, in the very first year of the Jacobean era, when a two-story red brick mansion was built by Sir George Coppin in what was then the sleepy green-aired village of Kensington, several miles west of the filthy, fog-choked center of London.
Coppin died in 1619, and the property passed through several hands before being acquired by Sir Daniel Finch, the second Earl of Nottingham, who renamed it Nottingham House and enlarged it into a gracious country seat befitting his status.
His name quietly survives on the palace grounds to this day.
Nottingham Cottage, the low-ceilinged grace-and-favor apartment where Prince Harry once lived with Meghan Markle, stands on the original estate.
What changed everything was the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which deposed the Catholic King James II and replaced him with the Protestant Dutch stadtholder William of Orange and his wife Mary II, James’s daughter.
The newly crowned joint monarchs urgently needed a London palace.
Whitehall, the traditional seat of royal power, was a health catastrophe.
Damp, smoky, rank with the smells of sewage and decay, it was a death trap for anyone with respiratory problems.
William III suffered severely from chronic asthma.
His physicians insisted on clean country air.
In 1689, spotting Nottingham House during what was essentially a royal house hunt, he purchased it from the Earl of Nottingham for $20,000, roughly $3.5 million in today’s money.
The commission went to Sir Christopher Wren, then Surveyor of the King’s Works and arguably the most celebrated architect in England, fresh from rebuilding St. Paul’s Cathedral.
His clerk of works was Nicholas Hawksmoor, who would later design many of London’s finest Baroque churches.
Rather than demolishing Nottingham House and starting from scratch, Wren and Hawksmoor preserved the Jacobean core and added four new pavilions, one at each corner of the existing structure.
They produced a building that was more aristocratic country house than overwhelming palace fortress, deliberately domestic in scale and oriented westward toward the village and open fields.
Mary II threw herself into the project with a passion that surprised everyone.
She personally directed the renovations while William was preoccupied fighting the Nine Years’ War in France and the Low Countries, overseeing every decision about the new rooms and approving the garden designs.
In 1691, a catastrophic fire tore through the southern range of the newly built Great Court, destroying much of it and triggering an almost complete remodeling of the approach to the royal apartments.
The marble staircases were rebuilt from scratch, laid with new balustrades by the Huguenot ironworker Jean Tijou, who had also worked at Hampton Court.
Mary never saw the finished palace.
She died of smallpox at Kensington on December 28, 1694, aged thirty-two, having spent the final days of her illness refusing to let her physicians tell William how serious her condition was, so that he would not be distracted from state affairs.
William fainted when she died.
He had to be carried from the room.
He spent the remaining eight years of his reign at Kensington, retreating there as a place of mourning as much as governance, building the Dial Room as a personal observatory, and walking long hours in the gardens that he was slowly transforming in the Dutch style he remembered from home.
His own death on March 8, 1702, came from a fractured collarbone sustained when his horse stumbled on a molehill at Hampton Court.
The fall led to a fatal chill contracted in the King’s Gallery at Kensington.
Jacobite sympathizers thereafter raised a toast to “the little gentleman in black velvet,” meaning the mole whose work had felled the Protestant king.
—
Queen Anne, Mary II’s younger sister, succeeded William and brought a very different temperament to Kensington.
Where Mary had been energetic and hands-on, Anne was increasingly infirm, suffering from gout so severely that at her coronation she had to be carried in a chair.
In 1704 and 1705, she commissioned what became one of the most striking additions to the palace: the Orangery.
Designed principally by Hawksmoor but extensively modified by the flamboyant Sir John Vanbrugh, who had previously designed Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, the Orangery was conceived as both a winter shelter for Anne’s precious citrus trees and a setting for summer parties of considerable magnificence.
It was fitted with underfloor heating, its tall white Corinthian columns flanking enormous south-facing windows featuring carvings by the master wood carver Grinling Gibbons.
Anne also annexed an additional thirty acres from neighboring Hyde Park to enlarge the palace gardens, beginning the process of creating what would eventually become Kensington Gardens.
The Hanoverian monarchs who followed Anne transformed the interior of the palace into one of the great artistic statements of the Georgian age.
George I, who arrived from Hanover in 1714 speaking almost no English and disdaining the British court, nevertheless spent lavishly on the state apartments.
He commissioned a systematic refurbishment that would define the palace’s character for the next three centuries.
He entrusted the work to a then largely unknown artist and designer named William Kent, whom he had met in Italy and who was about to become the dominant creative force in Georgian England.
Kent’s work at Kensington represents the most complete surviving example of his art.
The Cupola Room, largest of the new state apartments, became a tour de force of trompe l’oeil classicism, with Kent painting the walls with illusionistic niches containing gilded classical statues, half-domes that do not exist, garter stars and royal ciphers embedded in the coffered ceiling.
The effect was so convincing that first-time visitors routinely tried to touch surfaces that were flat painted plaster.
His masterpiece, however, was the King’s Staircase, completed in 1724, which functions as the grand ceremonial approach to the state apartments.
Kent covered its walls and ceiling with a teeming crowd of forty-five life-sized figures: Yeomen of the Guard, Turkish servants, court ladies, dwarfs, and gentlemen painted in that same trompe l’oeil technique to create the illusion that the court of George I is physically present, looking down from a colonnaded gallery at whoever is ascending the stairs.
Among the forty-five figures, Kent included himself, recognizable by his brown turban and artist’s palette, staring with cheerful self-congratulation at the viewer who had come to admire his work.
Caroline, wife of George II, was one of the most intellectually formidable queens consort Britain had ever seen.
A philosopher in her own right, a friend of Linnaeus, Newton, and Swift, she annexed a further three hundred acres from Hyde Park in 1728, hired the innovative garden designer Charles Bridgeman, and set about creating the Kensington Gardens that still exist today.
Bridgeman excavated the Round Pond in front of the palace’s south facade and damned the River Westbourne to create the Serpentine, a sinuous, supposedly natural-looking lake that was in reality an entirely artificial piece of garden engineering.
The total cost of the garden remodeling reportedly came to $20,000, roughly equal to the original purchase price of the entire palace.
George II was ultimately the last reigning monarch to make Kensington his primary London residence.
After his death in 1760, his grandson George III chose to live at Buckingham House, which would eventually become Buckingham Palace.
Kensington entered a quieter phase as a home for secondary royals rather than the sovereign.
The next person to make Kensington the center of her world would be a child who was not allowed to walk downstairs without holding an adult’s hand.
—
The most dramatic and historically resonant chapter in Kensington’s pre-Diana history belongs to Queen Victoria.
On May 24, 1819, in the room now known as the North Drawing Room, a plump, blue-eyed baby girl was born.
She would grow up to reign for sixty-three years and give her name to an age.
Her father, Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, was the fourth son of the deranged George III.
He was besotted with the child.
But he died of pneumonia when Victoria was just eight months old, leaving his German-born widow, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, effectively alone in a foreign country with an infant who was, after the three uncles ahead of her in the succession, heir presumptive to the British throne.
Into this situation stepped Sir John Conroy, an Irish-born former equerry of the Duke of Kent’s household.
Charismatic, calculating, and deeply ambitious, he attached himself to the widowed duchess with a tenacity that has led historians to speculate about the exact nature of their relationship, though it was never proven to be romantic.
Together, the duchess and Conroy devised the system that royal historians have ever since called the Kensington System.
A set of rules so extensive and so psychologically punishing that the historian Lucy Worsley has called it “one of the most controlling environments any future monarch has ever endured.”
On its surface, the system was presented as a protective protocol for a vulnerable heir.
The future queen must be shielded from assassination attempts, from disease, from unsuitable friendships, from any influence that could compromise her development.
Every day was rigidly scheduled.
Victoria was educated by private tutors in the palace, never attending a school or mixing freely with children her own age.
She was never permitted to walk downstairs without an adult holding her hand.
She was not allowed to be alone at any time.
She shared a bedroom with her mother every single night until the morning she became queen.
Underneath the protective rationale, the Kensington System was about something far more sinister: control.
Conroy and the duchess calculated that if Victoria reached the throne isolated, uncertain, and wholly dependent on them, they could effectively continue to govern through her even after she came of age.
The plan nearly worked.
Victoria grew up profoundly lonely, describing Kensington Palace as a place of sad childhood memories and writing in her journal that she had been raised in “an unfortunate position” that left her “without true friendship or freedom.”
The palace she inhabited, with its gorgeous painted staircases and gilded state rooms, was, in her experience, a prison with very good wallpaper.
The system finally broke on June 20, 1837, the morning after the death of William IV.
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Chamberlain arrived at Kensington at 5:00 a.m., were kept waiting for an hour by the duchess, and were then brought to the young queen.
She was eighteen years old, barefoot and in her dressing gown.
She received them alone in her sitting room.
Eyewitness accounts describe her as composed, clear-eyed, and entirely in command.
The opposite of the trembling, pliable figure Conroy had tried to mold.
She moved to Buckingham Palace almost immediately, stripped Conroy of his influence, and exiled him from her inner circle.
One and a half centuries later, another young woman would arrive at Kensington Palace and discover that its most enduring architectural feature was not the staircase or the Orangery, but the capacity of its walls to contain a captivity that looked from outside like a fairy tale.
—
Kensington Palace is not a single building in any meaningful sense of the phrase.
Unlike Buckingham Palace, which presents an imposing uniform facade, or Windsor Castle, which is unambiguously a fortress, Kensington is a rambling, organically evolved complex of interconnected apartments, wings, and annexes spread across multiple floors.
There is no single grand entrance, no sweeping courtyard, no obvious ceremonial approach.
Instead, the palace resembles a large, wealthy street of interconnected townhouses that happen to share walls.
Each apartment has its own front door, its own staircase, its own personality.
The public-facing state apartments with their painted ceilings and gilded rooms are today open to visitors, but they float above the private residential sections like a very grand piano nobile, separated by architecture and protocol from the domestic floors below.
Diana and Prince Charles moved into the combined Apartments 8 and 9 following their wedding on July 29, 1981.
Originally they occupied only Apartment 8, but this proved too small once children, staff, and security requirements multiplied.
Apartment 9 was conjoined to create a three-story home of approximately twenty rooms spanning over ten thousand square feet.
The ground floor was occupied by domestic staff, security officers, and the logistical infrastructure that kept a working royal household running.
The second floor was Diana’s main living domain: a drawing room for correspondence and meetings, a private room with a television and comfortable sofas where she received friends, and a formal dining room for official lunches.
The third floor she dedicated entirely to her sons, creating a lavish nursery suite for William and Harry with individual rooms for each boy, their nannies, and the mountains of toys, books, and bicycles that the princes accumulated through childhood.
The household also featured a private gym, a greenhouse, an outdoor garden, a rooftop terrace, and access to the palace helicopter pad.
Diana commissioned her mother’s interior designer friend, South African-born Dudley Poplak, to create interiors that expressed her own personality rather than palace convention.
The results were conspicuously warm, domestic, and unregal, which was entirely the point.
The room on the second floor featured dusky pink armchairs, a soft white carpet, and floral wallpaper running to the cornice.
The shelves were lined with personal photographs, favorite paperback novels, and the miniature pigs and frogs she collected.
The formal drawing room was painted a rich sunny yellow and hung with paintings of landscapes and flowers rather than ancestral portraits.
The dining room had a round table covered in white linen, bamboo-framed rattan chairs, and warm terracotta walls hung with a single large oil painting.
Not a dynastic statement, but a comfortable place for lunch with friends.
Darren McGrady, who served as Diana’s personal chef from 1987 to 2000 and lived in a separate apartment within the palace complex, later described the family’s section of the palace as feeling genuinely lived in, even cozy.
“More like a family home than a royal residence,” he said.
—
This domestic intimacy was precisely what made Diana’s second-floor sanctuary so effective as the setting for the most subversive project in the history of the British royal family.
It was a room designed for comfort, for private conversation, for the dropping of masks.
The phone could be taken off the hook.
The door could be shut.
A small microphone could be clipped to a collar and disguised in the lining of a sofa.
In that intimate, purposely unpalatial room, Diana sat alone and began to speak.
By the early 1990s, Diana had been living inside what she privately called a nightmare for nearly a decade.
The public saw a radiant, compassionate woman who had come to personify the possibility that the royal family could be both ancient and modern, beautiful and emotionally accessible.
Behind the walls of Kensington Palace, the reality was harrowing in ways she had never allowed to surface.
Charles had never severed his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.
A truth Diana had suspected before the wedding and confirmed within months of the ceremony, famously telling Andrew Morton that she had known on her wedding day, watching Charles’s face, that he was thinking of someone else.
The marriage that the world regarded as a love story was, in her experience, a sustained act of institutional theater performed for an audience of millions.
Diana had developed bulimia nervosa, which she would later describe on the tapes as a reaction to “pure pressure, stress,” a means of exerting control over her body when every other aspect of her life felt controlled by others.
The disorder began very shortly after the engagement, when she was nineteen years old and being scrutinized by every fashion photographer in Britain.
At its worst, it manifested in four or five purging episodes a day.
She described the disease as “a secret I inflicted on myself because my self-esteem was at a low ebb.”
The palace, when it became aware of her struggles, responded not with support but with a deeper conviction that she was mentally unstable.
She had attempted suicide multiple times.
She threw herself against a glass display cabinet.
She cut her wrists with a razor blade.
She hurled herself down a staircase at Sandringham while pregnant with William.
When she told Charles she felt desperate and suicidal, he reportedly responded, “I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me.”
Her apartment at Kensington, for all its cheerful Dudley Poplak decor and the laughter of two young boys on the upper floor, was a place of profound and gathering loneliness.
She often ate alone at the round linen-covered table in the dining room, the formal setting a painful contrast to the absence of company.
She spent long hours on the phone working through a dwindling circle of trusted friends, because the palace’s institutional machinery had made maintaining outside relationships increasingly difficult.
Andrew Morton would later describe her daily life as almost monastic.
In bed by 8:00 p.m., the palace quiet around her.
No husband.
No social life.
Just the particular silence of a famous and entirely isolated woman.
—
Diana understood with a clarity unusual in someone who had never been trained in media strategy exactly what was happening and what it meant.
She said on the tapes in 1991, with a weary flatness that conveyed the toll of years of double performance: “The public side was very different, obviously, from the private side.”
Everyone still believed in the fairy tale, and she knew it was a nightmare.
Morton recalled that she also understood, and this was the crucial insight that transformed her from victim into strategist, that the fiction could only be punctured by her own voice.
No proxy could do it.
No friend’s account.
No sympathetic journalist’s profile would carry sufficient weight.
It had to be her, in her own words, speaking about her own experience.
The only question was how to get those words out of Kensington Palace without the institution knowing.
The plan that became *Diana: Her True Story* germinated over several years before it crystallized into something actionable.
Its origin was a chance encounter in October 1986 at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London.
Dr. James Colthurst was working in the X-ray department when royal journalist Andrew Morton arrived to observe Diana opening a new CT scanner.
Morton recognized immediately that Colthurst represented something invaluable: a private friend with natural, unobserved access to Kensington Palace.
Morton’s problem was structural and almost comical in its physicality.
At six foot four inches tall, with a face well known to palace press officers, he could not enter Kensington Palace without being immediately recognized and his purpose immediately suspected.
What Morton and Colthurst devised over the following years was a relay system of elegant simplicity and real operational sophistication.
Morton would write out his interview questions and pass them to Colthurst, who would cycle to Kensington Palace with the recording equipment concealed in his briefcase.
A perfectly natural activity for a friend paying a social call.
The choice of cycling was not accidental.
A bicycle was chosen precisely because it could not be traced, followed, or identified the way a car could be.
A man arriving at the palace gates on two wheels was simply a friend coming for lunch.
Inside the palace, the sessions followed a careful protocol.
Colthurst would arrive.
Diana would take the telephone off the hook and close the apartment door.
Colthurst would clip a small body microphone to Diana’s clothing.
If anyone knocked, Diana would quickly remove the microphone and hide it inside the sofa cushions until the interruption passed.
The questions Morton had prepared would form the spine of each session.
But Diana spoke freely and discursively, moving between answers, following her own thoughts, occasionally overcome by emotion, but always returning to the task.
When the recording was complete, Colthurst would pack the tapes into his briefcase and ride them to a handover point in South London, where Morton would be waiting.
—
Colthurst later recalled the atmosphere of the project.
“She was enormously enthusiastic to have her story out there. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
He continued: “I’d cycle in, the recorder was in the briefcase. Nothing surprising there. I’d go in and we’d normally have a few questions before lunch. We’d have lunch, then we’d come out. I’d clip the microphone on and she’d finish them off.”
The whole operation had the quality of Cold War espionage transposed into the corridors of a royal palace.
Scramblers were used on phone communications between Morton and Colthurst to prevent interception.
Tapes were hidden in a briefcase threading through London traffic.
Meetings took place in public parks and suburban restaurants where the principals could speak freely.
Morton has since said that during this period he was looking for danger in the shadows, aware that if the operation was discovered before the book was published, the entire project would be suppressed and Diana would be left far more exposed than before.
Diana’s paranoia during the taping period was palpable.
As subsequent events would reveal, it was not entirely unfounded.
She was deeply afraid that palace security services were monitoring her apartment, a concern she expressed to multiple friends and which she addressed by having the apartment swept for listening devices.
She was also genuinely worried that Colthurst would be deliberately knocked off his bike.
A fear he has confirmed Diana expressed seriously in private conversations.
Her fears were not irrational.
During this exact period, royal telephone conversations were being covertly recorded and eventually leaked.
The Squidgygate tapes of Diana’s intimate conversations with James Gilbey, and the Camillagate tapes of Charles and Camilla’s notorious “Tampax” phone call, had both been captured, almost certainly deliberately, by parties unknown.
A later inquest into Diana’s death heard that the Queen had ordered Buckingham Palace to be swept for bugs after these scandals and that the affair had triggered high-level discussions involving the heads of MI5 and GCHQ.
Diana pressed record anyway.
What she said into that microphone would prove more damaging to the House of Windsor than anything MI5 had ever intercepted.
—
The seven hours of recordings Diana made in her Kensington apartment constitute one of the most candid acts of self-disclosure by a major public figure in the twentieth century.
She opened her account of the marriage from its very beginning.
What she described was a catastrophe that had been visible to her from the moment she walked up the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
She called the wedding “the worst day of my life.”
She described discovering that Charles had ordered a bracelet engraved with “Gladys” – one of the coded nicknames he and Camilla used with each other – to be given to Camilla as a farewell gift before the wedding.
When she confronted Charles about the bracelet, he admitted it.
She went to her sisters in floods of tears, asking them if she should cancel.
Their response, delivered with the bleak practicality of women who understood the machinery she had already been absorbed into, was: “Your face is on the tea towel, so you’re too late to chicken out.”
On the wedding morning itself, as she was being dressed in the famous Emanuel gown with its twenty-five-foot train, Diana described feeling a strange calm overtake her.
Not serenity, but a kind of dissociation.
A sense of watching herself from outside.
“I was a lamb to the slaughter,” she said on the tapes, adding that she had seen Charles’s eyes searching for Camilla’s face in the congregation.
The most dramatically charged moment Diana recounted was her decision, three years into the marriage, to confront Camilla directly at a birthday party in February 1989 for Camilla’s sister, Lady Annabel Elliot.
She arrived at the party in a state she described as controlled fury.
At some point during the evening, she found herself alone in a room with Camilla and did what every royal protocol had been designed to prevent her from doing.
“I knew Charles and Camilla were in the house,” she said on the tapes. “I thought, right, this is the moment.”
She told Camilla directly: “I know what’s going on between you and Charles, and I just want you to know that.”
Camilla, according to Diana’s account, tried to deflect, telling her that she had everything she could ever want.
Two sons.
A palace.
A husband.
Diana’s response was four words that carry the entire weight of a decade of marital grief:
“I want my husband.”
—
Diana spoke about her bulimia with clinical directness, tracking its onset to a specific moment during her engagement.
Prince Charles put his hand on her waistline during a fitting and said with casual cruelty, “Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?”
What made Diana’s account so devastating was not the clinical description of the illness itself, but the institutional response to it.
The royal family and palace courtiers did not respond to her bulimia as a symptom of an impossible situation.
They used it as evidence.
If Diana was mentally unwell, then her complaints about Charles’s affair, her isolation, her unhappiness were simply more evidence of instability rather than legitimate grievances requiring a legitimate response.
Morton later observed: “Checkout girls in the supermarket get more training for their jobs than Diana did. And that antipathy was allowed to go on for ten years.”
Diana spoke on the tapes about five suicide attempts over the course of her marriage.
She described throwing herself against a glass display cabinet.
Cutting her wrists with a razor blade.
Cutting her chest and thighs with a lemon slicer.
Most harrowing of all, she described throwing herself down the staircase at Sandringham while pregnant with William.
A desperate act that ended not in emergency medical intervention, but in Charles stepping over her and walking out of the room.
One of the most emotionally raw passages in the Morton recordings concerned Diana’s feelings for her former royal protection officer, Barry Mannakee.
Assigned to her security detail in 1985, he was a warm man from East London who, by Diana’s account, saw her as a human being at a moment when almost nobody in her world did.
“When I was twenty-four or twenty-five, I fell deeply in love with someone who worked in this environment,” she said without initially naming him. “It was all found out and he was chucked out, then was killed. That was the biggest blow of my life, I must say.”
When the palace discovered the closeness between them in 1986, Mannakee was transferred out of Diana’s protection detail without explanation.
On May 15, 1987, riding as a passenger on a colleague’s motorcycle, he was killed in a road traffic accident at the age of thirty-nine.
All of this, every word of it, was now on cassette tape in a briefcase on its way across London.
—
*Diana: Her True Story* was published on June 16, 1992, by Michael O’Mara Books.
It immediately detonated with the force of a controlled demolition.
Morton had protected Diana’s involvement with extraordinary care throughout the process.
No direct quotations carried her byline.
All the revelations were attributed to close friends, palace sources, or the biographer’s own research.
Buckingham Palace’s response was instant and brutal.
Morton was labeled a self-promoting hack, and the book was dismissed as a fabrication built on the testimony of disloyal staff and embittered hangers-on.
Charles’s supporters, led by Jonathan Dimbleby, who was already working on what would become his own authorized biography of the prince, characterized the book as a deliberate act of psychological warfare.
An attempt by a disturbed woman to destroy her husband’s reputation and manipulate the public.
The problem with the palace’s strategy was that it depended entirely on the public believing Diana had had no direct involvement.
That fiction was sustainable only as long as Morton stayed silent.
What the palace did not know – and could not know – was that Diana had made a separate set of tapes during the recording sessions.
Not just the interview cassettes that Colthurst had smuggled out, but a parallel archive of her own responses recorded in her own voice.
Morton had agreed to keep them sealed until after her death.
She had also, before publication, written to Colthurst in a letter fizzing with contained exhilaration.
“Obviously, we are preparing for the volcano to erupt,” she wrote, “and I do feel better equipped to cope with whatever comes our way. Thank you for your belief in me and for taking the trouble to understand this mind. It’s such a relief not to be on my own anymore and that it’s okay to be me.”
The volcano erupted precisely as she had planned.
*Diana: Her True Story* became the bestselling royal biography in history at that point, selling millions of copies across dozens of languages.
Public opinion swung decisively and permanently toward Diana.
Charles and Diana formally separated on December 9, 1992, an announcement made in the House of Commons by Prime Minister John Major.
An unprecedented constitutional event.
Morton kept his word for five years.
It was not until after Diana’s death in Paris on August 31, 1997, that he revealed she had been his primary source.
The updated edition, *Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words*, published later in 1997, included an eighteen-thousand-word transcript of Diana’s own recorded voice.
The words she had spoken alone in her Kensington apartment, pressed onto cassette tape, couriered through London, and kept secret for six years while they rewrote history.
—
The Morton tapes were not Diana’s only secret recordings made at Kensington Palace.
Beginning in 1992, Diana hired a former *Coronation Street* actor turned voice coach named Peter Settelen to help her improve her public speaking, charging $50 per session.
Settelen brought a video camera to the sessions – standard practice for voice coaching – and Diana, once the camera was running, began to speak with a frankness that made the Morton recordings sound guarded by comparison.
She captured approximately fifty hours of material across twelve tapes by the end of the recording period in late 1993.
On the Settelen footage, she was archly funny about Charles’s courtship.
“He was all over me like a bad rash,” she said.
She confirmed that she and Charles had met only thirteen times in total before their engagement was announced.
On the subject of Charles’s affair with Camilla, she relayed what he had allegedly told her: that he refused to be “the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”
She described intercepting Charles’s phone calls to Camilla, sitting outside his study, pressing her ear to the door, occasionally listening in on an extension.
She recounted how she had once overheard what she described as phone sex talk between the two of them, with Charles seated on a lavatory.
She spoke about seeking help from the Queen and being refused.
Going to her mother-in-law directly and asking her to intervene in Charles’s relationship with Camilla.
The Queen declined, telling her that the situation was not something she could become involved in.
Diana left the meeting more isolated than when she had entered it, with the knowledge that the most powerful woman in Britain would not use that power on her behalf.
—
Beyond the recorded interview tapes lay a third category of Diana’s secret material at Kensington Palace.
A locked mahogany box she kept in her private quarters.
The same room where so much else had happened.
She referred to it privately by the dramatic code name: “the Crown Jewels.”
Authors Dylan Howard and former detective Colin McLaren, who conducted the most comprehensive independent investigation of the box’s contents, described it as “a record of her knowledge of scandals that could finish Britain’s monarchy.”
The box contained an eight-inch pile of divorce papers.
A signet ring that had belonged to her former lover, James Hewitt.
Handwritten personal notes – journals essentially – that Diana had composed during the most turbulent period of the marriage, documenting events, conversations, and her own emotional state in real time rather than in retrospect.
It contained perhaps the most explosive single item: an audio recording apparently made by a former senior valet in Prince Charles’s household in which the valet alleged he had been the victim of a homosexual rape by a more senior member of the prince’s staff.
The allegation, according to documents later referenced at Diana’s inquest, had reportedly been settled quietly with a payment of $50,000 to the alleged victim and had been suppressed within the household.
Diana had apparently obtained the recording and kept it as insurance.
Paul Burrell later claimed the box also contained an extensive cache of handwritten letters from Prince Philip to Diana.
Letters that, according to Diana’s close friend and spiritual healer Simone Simmons, contained language calling the princess a “harlot” and a “trollop” and accusing her of doing “untold damage to the monarchy.”
Philip acknowledged the letters existed but denied the most extreme characterizations of their content.
At Diana’s inquest, the coroner formally requested that Lady Sarah McCorquodale, Diana’s sister, who had been present when the box was opened, search the family seat at Althorp for the Philip correspondence.
It was never produced.
Diana called the box her “insurance policy.”
A phrase that captured exactly what it was.
Its very existence was a form of deterrence.
As long as those materials were intact and their location was known, she had leverage.
The key to the mahogany lock was hidden inside the cover of a tennis racket in her apartment.
A domestic detail that suggests both the practicality of her concealment methods and the slightly improvised quality of her covert archive.
—
When Diana died in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997, the Crown Jewels entered the most contested chapter of their existence.
In the days immediately after her death, Paul Burrell, her personal butler – whom Diana had often called “my rock” – returned repeatedly to the Kensington Palace apartment.
He later admitted at the Old Bailey that he had removed approximately 310 items from the apartment for safekeeping, fearing they would be destroyed.
Six months after Diana’s death, in March 1998, Burrell and Lady Sarah McCorquodale together located the key hidden in the tennis racket cover.
They opened the mahogany box in the apartment and confronted the Crown Jewels directly.
Lady Sarah later testified at Diana’s inquest that she had taken the box home to her family’s estate in Lincolnshire.
But the testimonies diverge at this point.
Lady Sarah said she gave the box’s highly sensitive contents to Burrell for safekeeping.
Burrell said the documents were eventually transferred to Althorp.
The box itself, the materials inside it, and the Philip letters have never been publicly produced.
The conflicting accounts became the beating heart of the sensational Burrell theft trial at the Old Bailey in October 2002.
He stood charged with stealing 310 items of property belonging to Diana, Prince Charles, and Prince William after her death.
On November 1, 2002, prosecuting counsel William Boyce QC rose to his feet in Court Number One and announced that all charges against Burrell were being withdrawn.
The reason: Queen Elizabeth II had suddenly remembered that Burrell had told her, in a private meeting shortly after Diana’s death, that he was removing some of Diana’s papers and possessions for safekeeping.
The Queen’s recollection placed a reigning monarch at the center of a major criminal trial for the first time in British legal history.
What would have been aired in open court if the trial had continued – the valet’s rape allegation, the Philip letters, the divorce papers, every item in Diana’s locked archive – was never heard.
—
By November 1995, the formal separation had been in place for three years.
But no divorce had been finalized.
Diana remained in a position of institutional limbo: separated but not free, famous but stripped of her formal advisory role, still living in the Kensington apartments but increasingly cut off from the machinery of the royal household.
Charles had fired the opening salvo in the media war in June 1994 when he sat down with Jonathan Dimbleby for a three-hour televised documentary.
He not only admitted his affair with Camilla but deployed the extraordinary justification that the relationship had only resumed after the marriage had irretrievably broken down.
Diana’s first response was the revenge dress.
The black off-the-shoulder silk chiffon gown by Greek-born designer Christina Stambolian had been sitting in Diana’s wardrobe at Kensington for three years before she wore it.
Commissioned in September 1991 during a shopping trip to Stambolian’s boutique in Beauchamp Place, she had previously considered it too daring to wear in her capacity as a working royal.
But on the evening of June 29, 1994, knowing that Charles’s Dimbleby confession was dominating every television channel and news program in Britain, she chose it deliberately.
She leaked to the press that she would be wearing Valentino to the Serpentine Gallery party.
Then she appeared instead in the Stambolian gown.
Photographs of Diana – luminous, confident, devastatingly beautiful, apparently liberated rather than diminished – ran on every front page alongside headlines about her husband’s admission.
The dress, however magnificent, was still a gesture rather than a statement.
What Diana needed next was a platform she fully controlled, from which she could speak in complete sentences directly to the public.
And she could do so in the same room where she had already spoken the most dangerous truths of her life.
—
On November 5, 1995, a three-person BBC crew arrived at Kensington Palace under conditions of extraordinary secrecy.
Diana had dismissed her staff for the day.
She had deliberately arranged for no makeup artist, no stylist, no courtier, no companion.
She sat alone and did her own makeup.
The famous smoky eyes and pale lips became the visual signature of the interview.
The BBC equipment was brought into the palace on the pretext of installing a new hi-fi system, concealed in boxes that would not attract the attention of the police or security officers on the gates.
In Diana’s private sitting room – the exact room where she had pressed record on a Sony cassette recorder four years earlier and began answering James Colthurst’s questions – journalist Martin Bashir took a seat and began.
The fifty-four-minute interview was broadcast on BBC1’s *Panorama* on November 20, 1995.
An estimated twenty-three million Britons watched the broadcast that evening – roughly 40 percent of the entire population – with two hundred million people in over one hundred countries tuning in globally.
She confirmed the essence of the Morton book.
The marital breakdown.
Charles’s affair with Camilla.
Her own bulimia.
Her self-harm.
Her suicidal despair.
She admitted to her own affair with James Hewitt.
“Yes, I was in love with him, but I was very let down.”
She articulated her anxiety about the machinery of the crown with a directness no royal had ever publicly deployed.
“I would like to be a queen of people’s hearts.”
She deployed what became the most quoted line in modern royal history.
“There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
The most constitutionally explosive moment came in response to Bashir’s question about the succession.
Diana said she did not think Charles could adapt to the role of king, that the constraints it imposed were incompatible with his temperament, and suggested Prince William might be better suited.
In the context of British royal protocol, this was beyond controversial.
It was without precedent.
A member of the royal family speaking on national television had publicly expressed doubt about the heir to the throne’s fitness to reign.
Within weeks, Queen Elizabeth II had written personal letters to both Charles and Diana urging them to proceed to divorce without further delay.
The divorce was finalized on August 28, 1996.
Diana had won her war.
And the journalist who had helped her wage the final battle had used forged documents to get into the room.
—
What the public did not know in 1995 – and would not know for over twenty years – was the full extent of the deception used to obtain the *Panorama* interview.
In 2021, a 127-page independent inquiry by retired Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson concluded that Martin Bashir had committed “serious and deliberate acts of deceit” to gain access to Diana.
Bashir had commissioned a graphic designer named Matt Wiessler to fabricate a set of bank statements purporting to show payments made by the security services to Diana’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, and another royal household employee.
Fake evidence that Diana’s inner circle was being paid to spy on her.
Bashir showed these forged documents to Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, in early September 1995, playing on Spencer’s knowledge of his sister’s deep paranoia about institutional surveillance.
Spencer, convinced by the fabrications, introduced Bashir to Diana as a trustworthy journalist.
Bashir then showed the same or similar forged documents to Diana herself.
The inquiry found that the BBC had subsequently covered up what it learned about Bashir’s behavior in 1996, when an internal investigation produced evidence of the fabrication but declined to act on it publicly.
Lord Dyson’s conclusion was blunt.
“Bashir deceived Earl Spencer into thinking he was a trustworthy journalist and obtained access to Princess Diana through that deception.”
The BBC issued an unconditional apology.
Director General Tim Davie announced the interview would never be broadcast again.
Prince William said the interview had been “a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse” and had manipulated his mother into thinking she needed to trust Martin Bashir.
Prince Harry described it as “the product of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices that ultimately took her life.”
The line that investigative journalist Andy Webb – whose years of persistent research triggered the Dyson inquiry – draws is more specific still.
Bashir’s forged documents told Diana that people around her were being paid by the security services to monitor her.
This intensified existing paranoia about surveillance into something acute.
The paranoia in turn contributed to her decision after the divorce to shed the royal protection officers she regarded as potential instruments of that surveillance.
Without protection officers on the night of August 31, 1997, she was in the back seat of a car in a Paris tunnel with no one whose job it was to keep her safe.
—
On October 30, 1995 – five days before the secret *Panorama* recording session at Kensington Palace – Diana met with her solicitor, Victor Mishcon, and her personal secretary, Patrick Jephson, at Mishcon’s offices.
She made a disclosure so extraordinary that Mishcon immediately reduced it to a contemporaneous written note.
Diana told him that she had been warned by reliable sources that “efforts would be made to get rid of her” by the following April, most likely through a staged car accident involving brake failure and serious head injuries.
The prediction was specific enough.
Brake failure.
Head injury.
Car.
When Mishcon handed the note to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon on September 18, 1997 – just weeks after Diana died in exactly a car crash – it caused what Lord Stevens later described as “a significant pause.”
Condon kept it locked in a safe for six years rather than disclosing it to the French investigation or to the internal British review that followed Diana’s death.
It was only in 2003, when Stevens himself became commissioner and the coroner announced the inquest, that the Mishcon note was finally transferred to the inquiry.
In October 1996, two months after her divorce from Charles was finalized, Diana composed a handwritten letter to Burrell.
He would publish it in his 2003 memoir, *A Royal Duty*.
It read in part: “This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning an accident in my car. Brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy.”
Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of *Majesty* magazine and one of the best-sourced royal journalists of her generation, has confirmed that Diana expressed virtually identical fears to multiple close friends throughout 1996 and 1997.
She genuinely believed in the final year of her life that she was a target.
—
When news of Diana’s death reached London in the earliest hours of August 31, 1997, the first mourners arrived at the gates of Kensington Palace before 4:00 a.m.
Over the following days and nights, the trickle became an extraordinary flood.
An estimated sixty million individual blooms were left at impromptu memorials across London, with Kensington Palace as the center and the most heavily visited site.
The palace’s ornate golden gates disappeared entirely behind walls of flowers reaching twelve to fifteen feet deep and thirty feet wide.
The royal family retreated to Balmoral in Scotland.
They initially declined to return to London.
They declined to lower the flag at Buckingham Palace.
They issued no public statement for several days.
The response was interpreted as cold and institutional.
The monarchy’s traditional preference for private grief was weaponized in the public’s perception into indifference toward a woman the public had loved.
The Queen eventually returned to London.
She addressed the nation on television in a speech that broke with royal convention in its directness.
She bowed her head as Diana’s coffin passed Buckingham Palace on its way to Westminster Abbey.
The apartments themselves stood largely empty for several years.
An eerie silence at the center of the palace.
They were briefly used as studio space for Prince Charles’s royal drawing school, with life drawing sessions involving nude models taking place in the windows of Diana’s old rooms – visible to Prince William and Kate Middleton in the neighboring Nottingham Cottage, where William was then living.
Later, in a more fitting transformation, Apartments Eight and Nine were renovated into office and meeting space for the Royal Foundation, the charitable vehicle through which William and Harry initially pursued their joint public work.
In 2017, Princes William and Harry commissioned sculptor Ian Rank-Broadley, best known for the portrait of the Queen that appears on British coins, to create a bronze statue of their mother for the Sunken Garden.
The statue was unveiled on July 1, 2021.
What would have been Diana’s sixtieth birthday.
It depicts Diana in the simple working clothes of her later years.
No tiara.
No ball gown.
No royal regalia.
Surrounded by three children representing the universality of her charitable work with the sick, the landmine-affected, the homeless, and those living with AIDS.
—
Among the many unresolved threads in the Diana story, the five missing Settelen tapes remain the most tantalizing immediate mystery.
Seven of the twelve known recordings were recovered from Burrell’s home in 2001 and eventually returned to Settelen.
Six were subsequently broadcast.
The remaining five have never been located.
“There are more,” Settelen told journalists. “Who knows what is on them?”
Kensington Palace is often described as Diana’s home, and it was more than that.
It was the operational base from which she conducted the most successful single-handed assault on royal mythology in the history of the British monarchy.
In a building that had once imprisoned Queen Victoria under the Kensington System, Diana experienced her own version of gilded captivity and chose – with extraordinary clarity of purpose – to fight back from within it.
The tapes were smuggled out by bicycle, carried in briefcases, transcribed in South London restaurants, and eventually read by hundreds of millions of people.
The interview she gave in that same sitting room four years later was watched by two hundred million people in a single night.
The mahogany box she kept locked in that apartment, its key hidden in a tennis racket cover, contained material so sensitive it brought down an Old Bailey criminal trial and consumed a royal inquest.
Even in death, her presence in that palace shaped everything that came after.
The sixty million flowers at the gates.
The statue in the Sunken Garden.
The apartments turned into offices for the sons she raised on the floor above.
Kensington Palace was where Diana lost her fairy tale.
And it was also where she built her legend instead.
—
She had taken the telephone off the hook.
The body microphone was clipped to the lining of her blouse.
In the room with the dusky pink armchairs and the floral wallpaper and the soft white carpet, a young woman sat alone and began to speak.
She was thirty years old, famous beyond reasonable measure, and for eleven years had performed the role of the Princess of Wales in front of an audience that at her wedding had numbered 750 million people.
In this particular room, she was performing for nobody.
And the words she spoke would outlast every coronation, every jubilee, every carefully managed royal press release.
The palace that was her prison became her weapon.
The tapes she made became her testimony.
The box she kept locked became her insurance.
And the story she told – from that second-floor sitting room at Kensington Palace – became the thing that finally broke the fairy tale wide open.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She said so herself.
“It’s such a relief not to be on my own anymore,” she wrote to Colthurst, the volcano preparing to erupt.
“And that it’s okay to be me.”
