PRINCESS Diana is said to have opened up about Ch@rles’ @ffair years before her bombshell Panorama interview, leaving Jennie Bond “gobsmacked.”

The former BBC Royal Correspondent revealed that she was invited to the palace to meet the late Princess of Wales, who candidly revealed intimate details about her marriage.

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Princess Diana shared revealing details about Ch@rles’ @ffair to Jennie Bond, months before her bombshell Panorama interviewCredit: Getty

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Former BBC Royal Correspondent Jennie says she was ‘gobsmacked’ at what Diana told her, but she kept her secretsCredit: Getty
Speaking on The Sun’s Royal Exclusive show, Jennie told how she had written to Princess Diana asking if she could have a “cup of coffee” with her.

She shared: “To my amazement, I was invited to the palace about three weeks later, and 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 marriage, it was a bit crowded.

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“She told me she thought Camilla had been loyal and discreet.

“She told me that she knew now at that stage that the love that Ch@rles 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.”

The palace meeting with Jennie occurred in 1995, three years after Ch@rles and Diana – parents to Prince William and Prince Harry – had separated in 1992.

She added: “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.

Princess Diana ‘boldly’ confronted Camilla over Prince Ch@rles @ffair and said she ‘didn’t want to be treated like an idiot’

“And she was so open, so incredibly open, and also so incredibly charming.”

Jennie shared how she had kept Diana’s secrets, upon request of the royal mum-of-two.

However, she had later watched as the Princess of Wales revealed numerous details on Panorama, which was her first solo interview since her marriage to Ch@rles had ended.

Diana’s chat with Martin Bashir has gone down as one of the most controversial interviews seen on TV.

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Jennie said Diana told her ‘the love that Ch@rles had for Camilla was stronger than any marriage he might ever have made’Credit: PA

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Diana ended up sharing her secrets in her famous Panorama interview with Martin BashirCredit: BBC

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Diana famously said ‘there were three of us in this marriage’ during the chatCredit: ITV

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Jennie spoke to The Sun’s Royal Editor Matt Wilkinson on the latest episode of our Royal Exclusive showCredit: THE SUN
Her scandalous tell-all broadcast was kept a total secret from Buckingham Palace – and within a month of it airing the Queen wrote to both Diana and Ch@rles personally advising them to divorce.

During his chat, Bashir asked Diana: “Do you think Mrs Parker-Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage?”

Diana, whose head had been pointing towards the ground, famously looked up and replied: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

Speaking of her keeping Diana’s secrets, Jennie told The Sun’s Royal Correspondent Matt Wilkinson: “I thought ‘am I the most stupid correspondent in the world?’

She told me that she knew now at that stage that the love that Ch@rles had for Camilla was stronger than any marriage he might ever have made

Jennie BondFormer BBC Royal Correspondent

“The reason I didn’t is because at the end of each conversation, as I was leaving standing on the landing, she’d say ‘oh, Jenny, it’s been lovely to see you, you do realise this is just between you and me and these four walls.

“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.”

Diana’s marriage to Ch@rles was dissolved in August 1996, and her tragic car accident occurred a year later on August 31, 1997 when she was 36 years old.

Inside Princess Diana and Prince Ch@rles’ marriage

Before she was a member of the royal family, Princess Diana was known as Lady Diana Spencer.
The King first met his future bride when she was just 16, in November 1977.
He had been dating her older sister Lady Sarah, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1980, when Diana watched him play polo during a country weekend, that he took a serious interest in her as a bride.
Ch@rles and Diana are known to have had a very tumultuous relationship.
The future king proposed to Diana on February 6, 1981, but the news was kept secret for a few weeks.
The couple officially announced their engagement on February 24, 1981.
The wedding took place on Wednesday July 29, 1981 at St Paul’s Cathedral.
It was estimated to have been watched by a global TV audience of 750 million, and the UK had a national holiday on the day too.
Yet the couple barely knew each other. Diana later admitted: “We met only 13 times before our wedding day.”
On the very first day of their honeymoon onboard the yacht Britannia things began to unravel.
Diana noticed Ch@rles was wearing a pair of cufflinks with two entwined letter Cs.
She would later recall: “So I said, ‘Camilla gave you those, didn’t she?’.
He said, ‘Yes, so what’s wrong? They’re a present from a friend’. And boy, did we have a row. Jealousy, total jealousy.”
Weeks before their marriage, Diana had come across a bracelet inscribed with the letters GF among their wedding gifts.
They stood for Gladys and Fred, their pet names for each other.
The widening rift was put aside and on November 5, 1981, when the Princess’s first pregnancy was officially announced.
In 1984, pregnant with Prince Harry, Diana suspected that her husband was seeing Camilla at other times, too.
But as the birth approached, Diana recalled: “Ch@rles and I were very, very close to each other the six weeks before Harry was born — the closest we’ve ever, ever been and ever will be.
“Then, suddenly, as Harry was born, it just went bang, our marriage. The whole thing went down the drain.”
The couple famously split in 1992 and finalised their divorce in 1996.
Ch@rles is alleged to have told his friends “how awful incompatibility is”, and by mid-1986, he is said to have rekindled his @ffair with Camilla.
In June 1994, Ch@rles confessed to Jonathan Dimbleby in a TV interview that he had been unfaithful to Diana, saying he rekindled his relationship with Camilla in 1986 only after his marriage had “irretrievably broken down”.
Then in November 1995, Diana chose BBC’s Panorama to give her side of the sorry story, telling presenter Martin Bashir: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”