The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham Page A

crematorium where his ashes are scattered. She even made attempts to contact him through a medium.
    A former senior intelligence officer confirmed that Mannakee’s death could have been arranged, even though only one other vehicle seemed to be involved and a driver had been charged with an offense. “This type of fatal accident is not difficult to set up,” he said. “Clearly other people would have to be involved but witnesses, if there were any, would not necessarily remember seeing them.”
    Diana certainly believed it had been stage-managed, and she blamed herself. “He died because of what he heard from me,” she told Major Hewitt.
    The princess believed that given the morals of today’s royals it was a regular occurrence for the security services to have to clean up after some of their more bizarre romantic attachments. With her privileged vantage point right at the center of the royal family, Diana was in a position to know all of their secrets.
    One of the earliest of the royal sex secrets, which ran in parallel to Prince Charles’s adultery, concerned her outwardly staid sister-in-law the Princess Royal. Diana was fascinated, but hardly surprised, to discover that Anne’s partner in adultery at the time Barry Mannakee was being transferred for “overfamiliarity” was Andrew Parker Bowles. Brother and sister—Charles and Anne—were sharing their beds with wife and husband—Camilla and Andrew.
    Although Anne’s adulterous affair with Andrew Parker Bowles has no direct bearing on Diana’s death, it does help to illustrate the royal family’s absence of moral accountability. The royal prerogative for generations of Windsors has been the right to do anything that pleases them in pursuit of personal satisfaction and sexual fulfillment. Anyone threatening this right automatically becomes expendable.
    Ordinary family values do not apply.

THREE

    Like most women, Princess Anne never forgot the first man in her life, and when her marriage to Mark Phillips became unbearable after fifteen years, she found it easy to turn to her ex-lover Andrew Parker Bowles for emotional support and a shoulder to cry on. Their second-time-around romance coincided, totally coincidentally, with the collapse of Prince Charles’s marriage to Diana following the birth of their second son, Harry. The prince had by then committed himself completely to Andrew’s wife, Camilla, and the cuckolded colonel found himself at something of a loose end.
    “Brother and sister and husband and wife. That’s what you call a special kind of mixed foursome,” said one royal observer at the time. “It was one of the best-kept royal secrets of the decade, and has taken nearly another twenty years to come out.”
    Following her seduction by devoted royal courtier Andrew in 1969, Princess Anne enjoyed several steamy romantic flings before and after her first marriage—mostly at her own instigation. The collapse of her marriage to Mark Phillips had begun even before the birth of their second child, Zara, in 1981. The Queen refused Anne’s plea for a divorce, and rather than face a loveless and indefinite future, the princess and her husband chose to forge relationships outside their marriage.
    Anne is often thought of as the staid one in the royal family, but friends say she was, and still is, a very sensual and tactile woman with a stunning figure which she usually keeps hidden under “sensible” clothes. She is almost paranoid about her privacy, and this has helped create the impression that she is something of a prude and rather straightlaced. “But the real Anne is exactly the opposite,” said a friend.
    Andrew Parker Bowles was Anne’s first lover, and seduced the more-than-willing teenager shortly before her twentieth birthday. When her marriage went wrong in the eighties, it seemed natural to them both that Andrew provide love, affection and reassurance. He was the ideal person to help her through this sticky patch in her life.
    Said a