Princess Diana called Camilla and told her she’d ‘sent someone to kill her’, controversial book claims

Princess Diana called Camilla in late night phone calls and threatened: ‘I’ve sent someone to kill you’, it has been claimed.

The Princess made the calls because she was angry at Camilla for her relationship with Prince Charles, according to an upcoming royal biography about the Duchess of Cornwall.

The Duchess: The Untold Story, written by royal biographer by Penny Junor, is published later this week and is being serialised in the Daily Mail.

In today’s extract in the newspaper, Ms Junor writes that the then Camilla Parker Bowles received ‘a number of threatening and unnerving calls from the Princess in the middle of the night’.

She wrote: ‘Without saying who was calling, she’d typically say: “I’ve sent someone to kill you. They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?”’

Ms Junor also claims that Diana left ‘disturbing messages on people’s answering machines and pagers’.

She wrote that the princess left one on the machine of her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, with the message: ‘We know where you are, and so does your wife [sic]. I know you’re being disloyal to me.’

Ms Junor wrote of the abuse that Camilla received after her relationship with Charles was revealed to the world.

MORE: Princess Diana ‘tried to cut her wrists’ just weeks after wedding to Charles, secret tapes reveal
MORE: Princess Diana ‘threw herself down the stairs’ while four months pregnant with William

‘The harassment intensified,’ she said. ‘Camilla became the butt of lewd jokes, crude cartoons, lurid headlines; she had disturbing phone calls at all hours of the day and night, received abusive letters, and became a virtual prisoner, alone for a lot of the time, in a big house in the country with no security.

‘Life became horrendous, not just for her but for all her immediate family.

‘How anyone comes back from that sort of public humiliation is hard to imagine. Most people would have been crushed by it, but Camilla internalised the pain and presented a brave face.

‘She has a wonderful instinct for self-preservation, a tendency to put her head in the sand and not think about things that are too difficult.

‘She also has an unerring ability to laugh even in the most terrible of situations, and her family are the same. They closed ranks, rallied round and kept her spirits up.’

Charles admitted the truth about his relationship with Camilla in a television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994, a year before Diana’s own interview with Martin Bashir.

In the interview, Diana said: ‘There were three of us in the marriage, so it was a bit crowded.’

Ms Junor wrote: ‘Camilla stayed largely under the radar. Her face was well-known, and thanks to all the books and tapes and television programmes, she’d become one of the most hated women in Britain.’

The author has been criticised on Twitter and by Daily Mail commenters for carrying out a ‘hit job’ on Diana.