A Review by Brian Appleyard (Sunday Times)

Copyright of News International

`...And so now we have the policeman's story. Ken Wharfe, one of the Yard's finest, has decided to blow the gaffe on his years spent looking after Diana. It is, say some, outrageous, a disgraceful betrayal of trust. Oh come on. There is no private realm left in the Diana story, no trust left to betray. Apart from anything else, in life she played the media game so ruthlessly - "not altogether unhypocritical in this", is how Wharfe puts it
- that she can hardly expect, in death, to command the discreet silence of those who knew her.

"But the children," whine the moralists. That doesn't work either. She wheeled them out on the beaches for the benefit of the Long Toms of photographers Kent Gavin and pals, and consistently used the press in subversion of the advice of her friends and protectors. If William and Harry turn out weird, then Diana's deranged media manipulations are more likely to be at fault than the famously cold strictures of the House of Windsor.

Wharfe's book is, you will gather, a hatchet job.Repeatedly he says it isn't and repeatedly he proves himself wrong. Anybody reading this book - except, perhaps, Camilla Parker Bowles - will find they dislike Diana more at the end than they did at the beginning.

Wharfe was her protection officer for seven years from 1987. So she enters his story fully formed. This is important because his impression of her is not the usual one of innocent young filly warped by contact with the royals and the media, but rather that of bitter wife and mother trapped in a bad marriage with an unfaithful husband. This is a book, therefore, about effects rather than causes.

The effects were, as we know, spectacular, and are made more so by Wharfe's account. As her protector, inevitably he was drawn into her own campaign of infidelity. The list of men she either hypnotised or was hypnotised by - Hewitt, Gilbey, Hoare and the rest - is long and damaging. Wharfe himself is on this list. They weren't lovers but she certainly drew him into the sticky web of her confidence. "Nobody understands me, Ken," she says. It was, he observes, "one of her trademark expressions".

In fact, being a royal protection officer appears to be a quite impossible job. Keeping them safe seems easy enough, keeping oneself safe, mentally and physically, is out of the question. Your job is perpetually on the line
- Wharfe's superiors constantly question the liaisons with the press on which Diana insists - your sanity is threatened by the adulterous pantomimes over which you are obliged to stand guard, and your body is threatened by the likes of Prince Harry, who primarily appears in this story in order to kick Wharfe in the crotch. Leave out the death and what we have here is a farce.

But, that aside, this version of the story is, above all, a revenger's tragedy. Diana loved Charles, he did not love her and he had Camilla. After the birth of the crotch-kicker, she concluded it was hopeless. Her vengance involved taking lovers and, with increasing sophistication, using publicity to discredit her husband and his family - "those Germans", she called them.
Her charity work, however well meant, was part of the same programme. In descending into the depths of disease and poverty as well as in her campaign against landmines, she was signalling that she cared more than the Windsors. Perhaps, for a while, she did.

But, in the end, she didn't. Wharfe's insistence on her life-affirming goodness becomes increasingly unconvincing as she slips into petulance and into her dance of death with the media. He finally ditches her after a row over whether she can park on a double yellow line to run into Tower Records to buy some CDs. And then - in the book's coda - he watches her death from a distance, coldly criticising the security arrangements provided by Mohamed al-Fayed.

It is a good read. Wharfe's ghost, Robert Jobson, has done a fine job of maintaining tone, pace and lucidity. He has also smoothed over the ambiguity of Wharfe's attitudes to the woman. He seems to love her, or at least the idea of her, as much as he loathes her. And the now celebrated anecdotes flow smoothly enough. The moral of the tale - that Diana's vengeance was obviously disproportionate to the wrong done her - is clear but unstated.

``Ken,'' she said, climbing out of the British ambassador's swimming pool in Cairo, ``if anything happens to me you'll let people know what I was really like, won't you.'' Sadly for her, that is just what he did....'