For three decades, Nigel Dempster, London's top gossip columnist, has chronicled Britain's royal family and been the confidant of several of its members. While others have speculated about the royals' loves and liaisons, their marriages, divorces, and remarriages, Dempster has heard the truth from some of the most highly placed sources in Britain. In Behind Palace Doors, he and investigative journalist Peter Evans present a through-the-keyhole story of the marital woes of the Windsors and their most celebrated members, Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
Behind Palace Doors is an astonishing anatomy of what went wrong and where it will end. The union of Charles and Diana, the authors reveal, was doomed from the start. Soon after the engagement, Charles told his parents he had made a "bloody awful" mistake, and begged to be released, but to no avail. As the marriage faltered, he returned to an old love, Camilla Parker Bowles, whose own husband was philandering. Caught in this sorrowful triangle, Diana changed from naive young girl to angry, vengeful wife. But the major reason the marriage fell apart, we learn, was not Camilla, or even Diana's own relationships with other men, but Diana's destructive tantrums and deep hereditary depressions. In less than two years' time, Dempster has learned, she will liberate herself from the Prince of Wales and his family.
As for Charles's brother Andrew, his marriage to Sarah Ferguson fared no better. Five months pregnant with their second child, she began a close friendship with Texan Steve Wyatt, and later she kept steady company with her "financial advisor" John Bryan. The authors provide the reasons for Sarah's reckless behavior and explain why Andrew remained tolerant for so long.
In this intimate, anecdotal book, Dempster and Evans take the reader inside the private family meeting called to handle the crisis surrounding the "Camillagate" tapes. The authors present the reactions - including actual comments - of the Queen and Prince Philip, the manipulations of the Queen Mother, and the acid recriminations of Princess Anne. They also divulge the wrenching trauma of the Parker Bowles family and describe an extraordinary scene in which Camilla's father dresses down the Prince of Wales.
Revealing, at times even shocking, Behind Palace Doors is nonetheless surprisingly sympathetic. The authors portray the British royals as spoiled, selfish, frequently wanton, yet in the end, supremely human.

Book details

• Format Hardcover
• Pages271 pages
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN100399138609
• ISBN139780399138607