Royal Insider Was ‘Gobsmacked’ After Princess Diana Revealed Every Secret Detail About Charles and Camilla’s Affair
Royal fans probably know way more about now-King Charles and Queen Camilla’s affair than they care to admit because of numerous documentaries, several books, what was rehashed in The Crown, and what Princess Diana revealed herself in that infamous Panorama interview.
But before the public knew any of the dirty details, Diana spilled everything her husband did with his former flame to someone who admitted what she heard left her “gobsmacked.” Here’s more on that and the reason that person never uttered a word about it before.
Who Princess Diana shared all the inmate details of Charles’ affair with
Princess Diana and then-Prince Charles tied the knot on July 29, 1981. The televised wedding resembled something out of a storybook but as we found out later, their marriage never mirrored a fairy tale.
Diana knew Charles was seeing Camilla while they were married and even confronted them about it. But her husband continued to see his mistress, and years later Diana decided to confide in former BBC correspondent Jennie Bond about everything.
Nearly three decades later, Bond spoke on The Sun’s Royal Exclusive show about the time Diana invited her to have a cup of coffee, and soon after that the princess told her things she could have never imagined.
“To my amazement, I was invited to the palace about three weeks later,” Bond recalled. “It was the first of two or three conversations — long, long conversations we had just the two of us — in which I asked everything I felt like asking her. All the stuff pretty much that she shared in Panorama five months later, she told me at the time. There were three of us in the marriage, it was a bit crowded.”
The former correspondent also explained that Diana had come to accept the fact that Charles was in love with Camilla.
“She told me she thought Camilla had been loyal and discreet,” Bond remembered. “She told me that she knew now at that stage that the love that Charles had for Camilla was stronger than any marriage he might ever have made. And she was very resigned and relaxed really about the situation, this was after the separation.
“We were pretty well aware of what the situation was but had not heard her true feelings about it. I was gobsmacked by nearly everything she told me. And she was so open, so incredibly open.”
Why she didn’t tell anyone else what Diana told her
When asked about her decision to keep Princess Diana’s secrets and not disclose them to anyone else after all these years, Bond explained: “I thought, ‘Am I the most stupid correspondent in the world?’ The reason I didn’t is that at the end of each conversation, as I was leaving standing on the landing, she’d say, ‘Oh, Jennie, it’s been lovely to see you. You do realize this is just between you and me and these four walls.'”
Bond added: “You’ll know as a journalist if you go against that, you’re never going to get another story again. So I didn’t but I used those conversations as a broad framework for understanding the woman, and I hope it made my reports more informed.”
Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, one year before the princess’s tragic death. In 2005, Charles married Camilla.
