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who then involved the police. The police discovered the calls originated from Kensington Palace and, more specifically, Diana herself, at which point a senior unnamed politician stepped in to persuade them to drop the case to avoid further embarrassment.
    It was no sooner published than several interested parties swung into motion. First, inevitably, there were concerns that it was Prince Charles’ camp deliberately planting stories to make his wife look bad, a view that would appear to have been supported by Diana herself. A huge story appeared in the next day’s Daily Mail – under the headline WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS ? – in which friends of the Princess claimed there were people out there who were trying to make her appear unstable. ‘I feel I am being destroyed,’ she told journalist Richard Kay. ‘There is absolutely no truth in it.’
    However, on the same day, the Sun (the News Of The World’ s stable-mate) carried the headline QUEEN’S FURY AT PLOTTING DIANA , with a picture showing the Princess getting into a car with Richard Kay. His by-line had been on many stories involving Diana, always with a sympathetic angle and almost invariably quoting ‘Friends of the Princess’. Finally, this picture proved what many had long suspected, namely the so-called ‘friends’ were none other than the Princess herself. In this particular instance, she had been briefing Kay about the angle to take to rebut the claims, on top of which Kay himself had rung Piers on the Saturday before the story was due to break to make the Princess’s case. Diana subsequently went on to claim that she had made her own investigations and discovered a little boy (unnamed) who lived in Kensington Palace was the real culprit, but it was pretty obvious to everyone else what had really gone on.
    Scarcely a day went by without a new ‘Diana’ story atthis point, but this particular piece really stood out, as it involved a politician stepping in. It was hinted to be either Nicholas Soames (unlikely, since he is a close friend of Prince Charles) or William Waldegrave (who had links to the royals), but the identity of the man in question was never made clear. Then there was the minor matter of how such an extremely detailed story made its way into the public domain with widespread suspicion that it had been leaked by the police, although Piers would not be drawn. ‘Suffice it to say, this is a story which has been fairly common knowledge in the police for some time,’ was all he would admit. The affair itself had also been widely suspected by Fleet Street, but this was the first time there was some real proof.
    It crowned Piers as the king of scandal – life and blood to a newspaper like the News Of The World – and was the culmination of a stunning successful six months in the editor’s chair. This was the biggest story he’d run to date, but it was by no means the only one: since taking on the editor’s mantle, he’d revealed Tory MP Hartley Booth’s relationship with former researcher Emily Barr, leading to Booth’s resignation from a junior government post. He then published a similar piece about Labour MP Dennis Skinner ( THE BEAST OF LEGOVER ), and also revealed the affair between Lady Bienvenida Buck, then married to another Tory MP, Anthony Buck, and the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Peter Harding – who was also forced to resign – but topped that with a story about the Tory MP Alan Clark’s affairs with a mother, Valerie Harkess,and her two daughters, Josephine and Alison, whom he’d nicknamed ‘The Coven’. The injured husband and father, James, posed with a horsewhip and admitted he would like to use it on the great man himself.
    This was an impressive tally by any standards but it was the royal stories where Piers really came into his own: his first ‘Diana’ story was that her psychiatric records had