How Diana fixed spy camera case with $1 million

IT HAD been labelled ‘World exclusive’ and the Sunday Mirror certainly caused a furore when in 1993 it published a story headlined Di Spy Sensation – The Most Amazing Pictures You’ll Ever See.

The photographs, spread over seven pages, were of Princess Diana exercising in a gym, taken by a camera hidden in the ceiling by the gym owner, a man called Bryce Taylor.

The Princess, out to prove herself after her separation from Charles, was advised to take legal action. The High Court judge who first heard her claim asked me to represent Bryce Taylor, which would mean crossexamining the ‘People’s Princess’.

I would need to explore under cross-examination Diana’s twofaced attitude to privacy – she had told the tawdry secrets of her marriage to journalist Andrew Morton for a book which blackened Charles’s name.

However, on the evening before ‘the trial of the century’, there was a deal, and Diana’s lawyers withdrew her claim, reportedly after depositing $1 million in Bryce’s Swiss bank account.

This was all swathed in secrecy, of course, so the Princess could claim to have ‘won’.

I was somewhat deflated, as always when a big case settles at the door of the court.

It’s a condition my witty wife Kathy Lette called ‘courtus interruptus’.