DIANA’S UNSEEN PHOTO ALBUM
Her brother demands C4 axe bombshell videos to spare her boys agony
EARL SPENCER has made an impassioned plea to Channel 4 to try to stop Princess Diana’s explosive ‘video diaries’ being broadcast next week.
In the recordings, Diana discloses intimate details of her failed marriage to Prince Charles and criticises the Royal Family.
She also admits that she considered running away with her bodyguard. Friends of the Earl said he believes the 90-minute programme, Diana: In Her Own Words, due to be screened next Sunday – three weeks before the 20th anniversary of her death – is a betrayal of his sister’s memory and privacy.
It captures Diana at her most vulnerable and angst-ridden. Her marriage had just foundered and she appears haunted by episodes from her past. Nothing is off-limits and she speaks with unflinching candour, knowing that only she and her voice coach would see the highly confidential recordings – or so she thought.
It is understand that the Earl, acting for the Spencer family, contacted Channel 4 warning that broadcasting the tapes for the first time on British television would cause profound distress, particularly to her sons Princes William and Harry.
But Channel 4 refused to back down. It sent the Earl ‘a comprehensive reply... explaining the importance of the film’ and why it was pressing ahead with the broadcast.
The prospect of millions watching Diana candidly discussing the most personal aspects of her life has long appalled St James’s Palace and the Spencer family, who fought an unsuccessful legal battle to seize control of the tapes.
They were recorded by her voice coach Peter Settelen at Kensington Palace when her marriage had already broken down and she was trying to shape a life away from Charles.
Her infamous Panorama interview in which she admitted adultery – significantly less revelatory in comparison – was screened a few years later.
Last night Rosa Monckton, one of Diana’s closest friends and confidantes, said: ‘I think it’s completely inappropriate that they are being shown publicly. And I would like to challenge – I don’t know who the chairman is of Channel 4 or who the directors are – but I would like to ask them just one question. Imagine if this were your wife, your daughter, having therapy at a very difficult time, and suddenly to broadcast this to the nation. What would they feel?
‘I mean, how intrusive is this? It doesn’t matter that it was 20-odd years ago. It makes no difference at all. Think of the hurt they are causing to her family, to her sons. I think it is unfeeling and unthinking towards them.
‘The tapes should have been sent to the boys. They should definitely have been sent to her sons. I just think it is absolutely disgusting.’
In all there were 12 video tapes – dubbed the ‘dynamite diaries’ – and Channel 4 has based its documentary on seven of them. Five are said to be missing.
In 2007 the BBC abandoned plans to broadcast the tapes for fear of upsetting the Royal Family.
They have been broadcast only once, on American television network NBC in 2004. Its decision to purchase them was universally condemned. Critics called the programme a ‘ghoulish striptease’ and said that those involved were no better than ‘grave robbers’.
Channel 4 executive Ralph Lee is believed to have written to Earl Spencer, and insists the documentary will be an ‘important contribu- tion to the historical record’.
It is understood that seven of the tapes that Mr Settelen recorded were seized by Scotland Yard in 2001 during a raid on the home of former royal butler Paul Burrell.
Their content was regarded as so sensitive that the prosecution agreed not to use them in a 2002 trial that saw Mr Burrell accused of stealing items belonging to Diana. The case collapsed.
In the clips being shown by Channel 4, Diana talks about every facet of her life. While discussing Camilla Parker Bowles, she says: ‘I said to my husband, you know, why is this lady around? And he said, “I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress.”’
And she claims that the Duke of Edinburgh told Charles that if his marriage didn’t work out he could ‘always go back to her [Camilla] after five years’.
On being dated by Charles, Diana says: ‘He chatted me up, you know, he was like a bad rash, he was all over me, and I thought, you know, urgh, you know?’
Other admissions include how she was deeply in love with a royal protection officer, presumed to be Barry Mannakee.
Last night Earl Spencer declined to comment on his dramatic intervention over the tapes.
The controversy comes after the Earl was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week and claimed he was deliberately misled about whether Prince William and Prince Harry wanted to walk behind their mother’s coffin at her funeral, after she died in Paris in 1997.
The Earl told the programme it was a ‘very bizarre and cruel thing’ for the children, who were 15 and 12 at the time. Their participation is believed to have been influenced by the Duke of Edinburgh.
The Earl said that his sister would not have wanted it for her children, but when he protested to officials he was told that it was her sons’ wish. He said: ‘Eventually I was lied to and told they wanted to do it,
‘The tapes should have been sent to the boys’ ‘Charles was like a bad rash, he was all over me’