Diana confronted Charles over affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles
It was the controversial love triangle that plagued the royal family for decades. But years before Prince Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker Bowles became public knowledge, Princess Diana took it upon herself to find out the truth.
“I remember saying to my husband, you know, ‘Why, why is this lady around?’ And he said, ‘Well, I refuse to be the only Prince of Wales who never had a mistress’,” Diana revealed in private recordings made with her vocal coach in 1992.
In the tapes, aired in Australia exclusively by Sunday Night, Diana said that Prince Philip and the Queen were aware of Charles’ infidelities and turned a blind eye.
“My father-in-law said to my husband, ‘If your marriage doesn’t work out you can always go back to her [Camilla] after five years’, which is exactly, I mean for real, I know that it happened after five.
“I knew something was happening before then, but the fifth year I had confirmation. So I went to the top lady – sobbing – and I said, ‘What do I do? I’m coming to you, what do I do?’
“And she said, ‘I don’t know what you should do, Charles is hopeless’. And that was it. That was help.”
Diana, who was 31 at the time the tapes were made, also detailed an awkward encounter with Prince at the beginning of their relationship.
“I sat there and this man walked in and I thought ‘well, I am quite impressed this time round’. I was different and everything else. He chatted me up - like a bad rash, he was all over me.”
In their conversation, Diana consoled the Prince over the recent death of his great uncle, Lord Mountbatten, and mentioned it was ‘ghastly’ that he didn’t have someone beside him at the funeral.
“Whereupon he leapt upon me and started kissing me and everything and I thought ‘argh’! This is not what people do!” she said.
“And he was all over me for the rest of the evening, he followed me around like a puppy.”
Diana admitted she had only met Charles 13 times before they were married on July 29, 1981.
“I was brought up in the sense that, you know, if you got engaged to someone, you loved them,” she said.
“In the space of a year, my whole life had changed, turned upside down. It was isolating. You had to either sink or swim and you had to learn that very fast.”
