Diana’s most dangero infatuation

Passionate. Destabilising. And ending in humiliation when she besieged him and his wife with hundreds of nuisance calls. Now, after the death of society art dealer (and Charles’s friend) Oliver Hoare, the full story can finally be told about...

OF ALL the men drawn into the vortex of Princess Diana’s life, he was one of the few to emerge with any credit. He was also the unlikeliest of suitors — a close friend of Prince Charles.

Too well-bred to ever allow his emotions to go on public display, Oliver Hoare weathered the endless speculation about his affair with the Princess of Wales with a wearied insouciance, keeping both his dignity and his silence.

Diana never publicly acknowledged her love for Hoare as she did for Cavalry officer James Hewitt, or allowed her friends to talk of him as they did subsequently of other men friends such as Hasnat Khan or Dodi Fayed.

But then her relationship with the married art dealer was by some distance the most dangerous, the most destabilising and the most humiliating of her life. It was also the most passionate.

Almost 25 years have passed since revelations about the couple exploded into the public consciousness after Diana was accused of bombarding the Hoare family home with more than 300 nuisance telephone calls.

Yet, throughout that near quarter of a century, Hoare said nothing. Now with his death at 73, after confronting illness with both bravery and dark humour, the Old Etonian has ensured what he always vowed — that he would take the secrets of the affair to his grave — has come to pass.

Diana’s infatuation with the dashing fatherof-three was so intense, so all-consuming that for a brief moment she considered leaving Charles for him.

Indeed, he was the only man she truly ever thought of giving up everything for. At the height of her unhappiness with Charles, the address where Hoare lived in Chelsea, Tregunter Road, was the code word she and her sister-inlaw the Duchess of York devised to describe their clandestine plans to abandon their husbands and their royal lives.

‘Tregunter Road was our code for escape,’ she once told me, ‘it meant our leap for freedom.’ By then, however, her love for Hoare had subsided, but her wish for a life outside the Royal Family had not.

It has always been said that Diana lost her nerve for that double break-out with Fergie from behind palace walls. And that when Fergie’s split from Prince Andrew was announced, the princess — whose marital unhappiness was the greater of the two women — quietly changed her mind.

That, though, was only half the story. Many believed that if push had come to shove, Hoare himself would anyway not have walked out on his own family. He once ruefully quipped that however rich he could possibly become, he would ‘never be rich enough to look after a princess’.

It was also significant that while Diana’s domestic life was joyless, his was happy, if chaotic. His French-born wife Diane had displayed great reserves of emotional resilience to steer her family through the crisis wrought by the princess’s unquenchable ardour for her husband.

Hoare’s continuing devotion to Diane and for his daughter and two sons were also key factors.

And unlike others over whom Diana cast a shadow, Oliver handled it so much better — and infinitely more stylishly.

Remarkably, he remained a friend of the Prince of Wales, who for many years spent part of each summer at the Hoares’ French retreat in rural Provence, sometimes with Camilla. He had also been one of the few insiders who had known about the prince’s relationship with the former Mrs Parker Bowles.

In part, their friendship survived thanks to his closeness to the family of the prince’s in-laws. Businessman Simon Elliot, who is married to the Duchess of Cornwall’s sister Annabel, was one of his closest confidants.

But it also involved their shared fascination for all things Islam, a curiosity for antiquity and a deeper regard for the mysticism of life and the spiritual.

‘Oliver admired the prince hugely,’ says an old friend of Hoare. ‘He never stopped liking him even though his involvement with Diana at the time meant they would no longer see one another. He always saw Charles as a force for good in the country, often misunderstood but a man with decent values.’

So it was perhaps inevitable that after Diana’s death in 1997 the two men should rekindle their friendship and take up where they had left off many years before.

While it served to illustrate a uniquely upper-class view of marital infidelity, it also demonstrated the prince’s remarkable capacity for forgiveness.

When he had first learned of the affair Charles had been incredulous that someone seemingly as erudite and well-read as Oliver could have anything in common with Diana, whom he did not consider his intellectual equal.

But for Diana, he would be remembered as one of the most influential figures in the art world. His expertise made him quite possibly Britain’s foremost authority on Islamic art in which he made and lost a fortune.

Although his success in the saleroom brought him plenty of attention in London art salons, it was through his wife that Hoare started socialising with the royals.

Oil heiress Diane, whose aristocratic mother Baroness Louise de Waldner was a friend of the Queen Mother, was close enough for the couple to be guests at a Windsor Castle house party during Royal Ascot in 1985.

Princess Diana, then just 24, was immediately attracted to the darkly handsome Hoare. Pictures at the time showed them smiling. She later admitted she had felt a little shy when they were introduced and had blushed when they shook hands.

It was another four years before their affair began.

Hoare was 16 years her senior and good looking, and some of her friends suggest his sophisticated manner satisfied her need for a father figure rather than a lover.

Others believe that for her there was an extra frisson of satisfaction in the relationship because he was a close friend of Charles.

And because he was also a friend of Camilla it meant he could keep the princess up to date about her rival. With the Waleses’ marriage moving into a state of open warfare, Hoare and his wife began to act as intermediaries.

Diana questioned Oliver constantly, trying to understand what her husband saw in the woman she called ‘the Rottweiler’. Soon he was more than a mere intermediary. Years later it was claimed that Diana smuggled him into Kensington Palace in the boot of her car and that security staff once found him half naked smoking a cigar behind a potted bay tree when a fire alarm went off in the middle of the night.

For his part Oliver said the stories were amusing, but untrue.

Undoubtedly, Diana was infatuated with him, and told her confidante and surrogate mother figure Lady Bowker, a diplomat’s widow, that she ‘daydreamed of living in Italy with the handsome Hoare’.

But this was to turn into the princess’s most dangerous liaison in which even the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, then Paul Condon, became involved.

For when Hoare tried to end the relationship, a number of silent ‘nuisance’ phone calls were made to the Hoares’ Chelsea home. These particularly upset his wife, who called in the police.

Enquiries were initiated and some of the calls were traced to the princess’s private line in Kensington Palace, some to mobile phones she used, and others to telephone boxes in the Kensington

‘I told her it would be fun, but end in a lot of pain for both of us’ ‘She daydreamed about living in Italy with Oliver’