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For an interview in Le Figaro Magazine, journalist Charles Jaigu traveled to the former monarch’s residence in Abu Dhabi to discuss the memoir, which was written in collaboration with French writer Laurence Debray. He also denied ever having a relationship with Diana, whom he got to know when she spent summers at Marivent Palace with King Charles III, her then husband, and their two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry. The late princess’s marriage to Charles had already begun to founder by the time they first visited Marivent, and Diana might have found an ally in King Juan Carlos. This might explain why Diana decided to stay in Marivent after Charles returned to England, and she ultimately returned for another three years. “The king was very attentive to her, perhaps too much so,” Roberto Devorik, Diana’s former adviser and confidant, later told Vanity Fair España. “One summer he told her that she looked very much like the British journalist Selina Scott. After one of those vacations, Diana confessed to me that Queen Sofia had not liked her very much,” he said, adding, “[Diana] flirted with Juan Carlos, but innocently, as any woman would do.” Rumors of an affair began to spread in 1992 following the publication of Lady Colin Campbell’s Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, which claimed that Princess Diana had an affair with Juan Carlos during those summers in Marivent. Now, for the first time, Juan Carlos had denied he ever had a relationship with Princess Diana. Though Diana did acknowledge other extramarital relationships before her death, she never mentioned one with Juan Carlos. Andrew Morton, Diana’s friend and biographer, once said that the princess had told him that she could not stand Juan Carlos and considered him a playboy. Her bodyguard Ken Wharfe said in 2016 that Princess Diana had found her host at Marivent to be “too friendly,” to the point that she even commented on the “problem” to her husband. Juan Carlos was on better terms with his distant cousin “Lilibet,” Queen Elizabeth II. In the Le Figaro interview, the former king said he consulted her about his plan to abdicate the throne of Spain to his son, Felipe VI. In his memoir, Juan Carlos recounts that Queen Elizabeth II did not agree with his decision. “It is not done!” she said, according to Juan Carlos. “A king dies with his boots on.” Originally published in Vanity Fair España.
