The same year Princess Anne was dealing with the outing of an alleged affair, her sister-in-law Princess Diana also stepped into the danger zone when police officer Barry Mannakee was assigned to be the vulnerable and desperately lonely young woman’s bodyguard. Mannakee, a married, handsome “cocky East Ender with kind eyes,” according to Brown, seemed to be everything Prince Charles was not—funny, handy, and brave. The two shared a naughty sense of humor and fun. “Diana loved to tease Mannakee when she was glammed up for a premiere or a public appearance,” Tina Brown writes. “‘Barry, how do I look?’ she would ask him coquettishly. ‘Sensational, as you know you do. I could quite fancy you myself.’ ‘But you do already, don’t you? Escort me to my car if you please.’”
According to several sources, the two soon launched into a passionate affair. “I was always wandering around trying to see him,” Diana recalled in a recorded video. “I was only happy when he was around…. I was like a little girl in front of him the whole time, desperate for praise, desperate.”
Mannakee, while smitten with Diana, was also worried about both her neediness and his job. Diana relied heavily on his reassurance before public events, Brown writes. “She kept on saying she couldn’t go ahead with it, and just collapsed in my arms,” Mannakee told one coworker. “I hugged her and stopped her crying. What else would you have done?”
Soon members of the palace staff began noticing that something was going on between the People’s Princess and her handsome bodyguard. According to Brown, Diana increasingly requested to travel overnight on the royal train when Mannakee was on duty, and he’d sleep outside her door. For his part, Mannakee gave Diana stuffed animals, and the two took tea in her private apartments, according to Diana’s subsequent bodyguard, Ken Wharfe. Feeling trapped in her unhappy marriage, Diana admitted that she dreamed of “giving all this up just to go off and live with him.”
Over time, Mannakee’s coworkers started to see a change in him as well. “He really had the hots for her,” a former Highgrove staffer told Brown. “He acquired all these cashmere sweaters. It went to his head.” Wharfe agreed. “He broke the golden rule and stepped over the divide between the grey carpet to the red,” he noted. “He was a typical victim of red-carpet fever.”
Diana knew the romance was doomed. “I should never have played with fire, and I did,” she said. According to Brown, things came to a head on the evening before the wedding of Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew. That night, the two were reportedly caught in a “compromising position.” Almost immediately, Mannakee was dealt with and reassigned to the Diplomatic Protection Squad. The story turned tragic in May 1987, when Mannakee was killed in a motorcycle accident. According to Diana, Prince Charles told her of her former lover’s death right before they were due to make a high-profile appearance at the Cannes Film Festival. “That was the biggest blow of my life,” she said. “Charles thought he knew, but he never had any proof. And he just jumped on me like that.” Diana then appeared in front of thousands of flashing bulbs at the Cannes Film Festival, smiling and chatting through her pain. “I wasn’t able to do anything,” she recalled. “Had to smile for everyone. I wasn’t supposed to mind as much as I did, if you know what I mean.”
