Squidgygate

Squidgygate or Dianagate refers to the controversy over pre-1990 telephone conversations between Diana, Princess of Wales, and her lover, James Gilbey, which were published by The Sun newspaper.
In 1992, The Sun publicly revealed the recording's existence in an article titled "Squidgygate". During the calls, Gilbey affectionately called Diana by the names "Squidgy" and "Squidge". In the conversation, the Princess of Wales likens her situation to that of a character in the popular British soap opera EastEnders, and expresses concern that she might be pregnant and there is discussion of abortion. The publication of the tapes faced media attention which surrounded Diana's separation, and eventual divorce.

Recording and publication

The tape was published after it was allegedly accidentally recorded by a retired bank manager who was a radio enthusiast.

First eavesdropper: Cyril Reenan

In January 1990, two reporters from The Sun newspaper met Cyril Reenan in the parking bay of Didcot railway station, six miles from his home in Abingdon. Reenan, a 70-year-old retired manager for the Trustee Savings Bank, regularly listened in on non-commercial radio frequencies for amusement with his wife. Reenan played them excerpts from a tape without having previously told them what he had recorded.
Two days later the journalists were shown round Mr Reenan's home-made eavesdropping studio, in which "Above the scanners was a 1960s-style tape recorder with a microphone dangling down above the scanning equipment so that the couple could tape 'interesting' conversations".
Reenan was quoted as saying he was "so nervous I just want you to take the tape away." He added, "I didn't know what to do with it once I'd got it. I was stuck with it, and I was frightened of it," he was quoted as saying, claiming that if the paper had told him that "the tape was 'dangerous', I would have burned it or scrubbed it out."
Reenan claimed that he had been so worried by the evident security breach that he had first thought of attempting to gain an audience with Diana: "I could have used a code-word, perhaps the nickname Squidgy... I was trying to save her face in a way." However, having thought on it "for a day, at least", Reenan decided that he "would not get to see Diana." So he "rang the Sun instead."

Publication

Published in The Sun on 23 August 1992, "Squidgygate" was the front-page revelation of the existence of a tape-recording of Diana, Princess of Wales talking to a close friend, who later turned out to be Gilbey, heir to the eponymous gin fortune. Gilbey, who initially denied The Sun's charges, was a 33-year-old Lotus car-dealer who had been a friend of Diana's since childhood. Their conversation, which took place on New Year's Eve 1989, was wide-ranging. A special phone line allowed about 60,000 callers to hear the contents of the 30-minute tape for themselves, at 36 pence per minute.
The tape begins in mid-conversation, with the man asking: "And so, darling, what other lows today?" To which the woman replies: "I was very bad at lunch, and I nearly started blubbing. I just felt so sad and empty and thought 'bloody hell, after all I've done for this fucking family...' It's just so desperate. Always being innuendo, the fact that I'm going to do something dramatic because I can't stand the confines of this marriage He makes my life real torture, I've decided."
The conversation covered topics as diverse as the BBC soap opera EastEnders, and the strange looks that Diana received from the Queen Mother: "It's not hatred, it's sort of pity and interest mixed in one every time I look up, she's looking at me, and then looks away and smiles." Additionally, in view of a fascination with spiritualism that was later to become well-known, Diana was also heard explaining how she had startled the Bishop of Norwich by claiming to be "aware that people I have loved and have died are now in the spirit world, looking after me."
Diana expressed worries about whether a recent meeting with Gilbey would be discovered. She also discussed a fear of becoming pregnant, and Gilbey referred to her as "Darling" 53 times, and as "Squidgy" 14 times.

Second eavesdropper: Jane Norgrove

On 5 September 1992, The Sun announced that the same call had also been recorded by an Oxfordshire eavesdropper, 25-year-old Jane Norgrove, who claimed she had recorded the call on New Year's Eve 1989, but "didn't even listen to it. I just put the tape in a drawer. I didn't play it until weeks later, and then I suddenly realised who was speaking on the tape."
In January 1991, after sitting on the tape for a year, Norgrove approached The Sun. The paper made a copy of her recording, and offered her £200 for her time: Norgrove refused the money, claiming that she "got scared and didn't want to know about it any more." Norgrove claimed: "I wanted to speak out now to clear up all this nonsense about a conspiracy I'm not part of a Palace plot to smear the Princess of Wales." The Sun had initially published the opinions of "a senior courtier claims the tape is part of a plot to blacken Diana's name" and the verdicts of other anonymous Palace staffers, who said that the tape was "a sophisticated attempt to get even by friends loyal to Prince Charles after Diana's co-operation with the book Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton."
Such speculation had not been confined to tabloid newspapers: William Parsons, of anti-surveillance consultants Systems Elite, remarked that the technical and atmospheric requirements for such a recording to be possible, were so improbable as to arouse suspicion: "My money would not be on somebody accidentally picking it up There is more to this than meets the eye."
Jane Norgrove was adamant: "It was just me, recording a telephone conversation in my bedroom. Nothing more and nothing less than that."

Context and reaction

According to Tina Brown, Diana and Gilbey had first met each other before her marriage to Charles and reconnected in the late 1980s. At the time of publication, the Prince and Princess of Wales, engaged in acrimonious pre-divorce proceedings, were involved in a protracted battle for public sympathy which became known as the "War of the Waleses". The Duke and Duchess of York had separated months before, and now all eyes were on Charles and Diana, the next king and queen, whose marriage had been the subject of rumour for years.
Speculation in the media—and in court circles—reached fever pitch. In his memoirs, Diana's private secretary Patrick Jephson recounts a fraught game of media one-upmanship by the feuding couple: secret briefings to friendly journalists, open collaboration with TV documentaries, and separate appearances at different public events on the same day were just some of the many strategies with which Charles and Diana attempted to force each other out of the limelight. Jephson recalls that the atmosphere at Kensington Palace at the time was "like a slowly-spreading pool of blood leaking from under a locked door."
Throughout 1991 and into 1992, Diana had been secretly collaborating with a previously little-known court correspondent, Andrew Morton, on the book Diana: Her True Story, which revealed in graphic detail the previously hidden disaster that the Waleses' marriage had become. Diana's bulimia, suicide attempts and self-harm were spelt out unambiguously, as were Charles's relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, and the intrigues of Palace officials in attempting to contain the disintegrating royal marriage.

Analysis of the tape

In 1993, The Sunday Times published the findings of an analysis of the "Squidgygate" tape, commissioned from Corby-based surveillance specialists Audiotel International.
Audiotel concluded that the presence of data bursts on the tape was suspicious. Data bursts would normally be filtered out at the exchange before Cellnet transmission. That these "pips" were present at all was therefore anomalous, but they were also too fast, too loud, and exhibited a "low-frequency 'shadow'," implying "some kind of doctoring of the tape," said Audiotel's managing director, Andrew Martin, in his firm's report. "The balance of probability suggests something irregular about the recording which may indicate a rebroadcasting of the conversation some time after the conversation took place."
Within a week of the Sunday Timess announcement, a further independent analysis was carried out for the same newspaper by John Nelson of Crew Green Consulting, with assistance from Martin Colloms, audio analyst for Sony International. Their analysis demonstrated convincingly that the conversation could not have been recorded by a scanning receiver in the manner claimed by Reenan. Amongst several relevant factors, there was a 50 hertz hum in the background of the "Squidgygate" conversation together with components in the recorded speech with frequencies in excess of 4 kHz. Neither could have passed through the filters of Reenan's Icom receiver or indeed have been transmitted by the cellular telephone system. The 50 Hz hum was consistent with the effect of attempting to record a telephone conversation via a direct tap on a landline.
Since Gilbey was known to have been speaking from a mobile phone, inside a parked car, this left Diana's telephone line at Sandringham as the source of the recording. Nelson's analysis, written after a visit to Reenan and an examination of his unsophisticated receiving system, showed that the recording was most likely to have been made as a result of a local tapping of the telephone line somewhere between Diana's telephone itself, and the local exchange. Furthermore, narrow-band spectrum analysis showed this 50 Hz "hum" to consist of two separate but superimposed components, possibly indicating a remixing of the tape after the initial recording. The spectral frequency content of the tape was demonstrably inconsistent with its supposed origin as an off-air recording of an analogue cellular telephone channel but quite feasible if the recording had been made via a local-end direct tap.
As well as the strong technical case he made against the recording, Nelson established two other salient points. The first was that Gilbey's mobile telephone was registered to the Cellnet network. Secondly, the Cellnet base-station transmitter site in Abingdon Town, the data channel of which was the only one receivable on Reenan's receiving system at the time of his visit, was not in service at the date of the alleged telephone conversation; it was first commissioned on 3 March 1990. It was therefore not possible that the purported recording could have been made off-air by Reenan or Norgrove in December 1989 or January 1990.
With regard to the data-bursts that had aroused the suspicion of Audiotel International, Colloms and Nelson stated: "We are forced to conclude that these data-bursts are not genuine, but were added later to the tape. They originated with a locally-made recording, and show that an attempt has been made to disguise a local tap by making it appear that it was recorded over cellular radio."
Telecommunications company Cellnet admitted that it had automatically conducted its own internal investigation after publication of the "Squidgygate" transcript, because Gilbey had been speaking on a Cellnet phone. "It is a very sensitive issue if a cellular network has been bugged," said Cellnet spokesman William Ostrom: "We wished to satisfy ourselves exactly what happened." Cellnet's inquiry, claimed Ostrom, had "replicated" the findings of Colloms and Nelson: Cellnet announced that it was "completely satisfied that we can dismiss this as an example of our network being eavesdropped."