A public relations nightmare awaits Prince Charles as he winds up his successful nine-day trip to India and heads for home after a stopover in Australia.
His arrival in New Delhi last Tuesday was overshadowed by the publication of a controversial book by former royal butler Paul Burrell, who has written about Charles' tantrums and his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, as well as the men in the life of his ex-wife princess Diana.
Charles's biggest headache has been an audiotape that allegedly contains the details of a homosexual encounter between a male member of the royal family and a member of the Buckingham Palace staff. Burrell has always denied he knows the whereabouts of this tape, which police were looking for when they raided his house over a year ago.
Many royal watchers believe that rising public interest in the allegations contained in the tape could sufficiently undermine the monarchy to destroy Charles' chances of claiming his royal inheritance.
In a separate development, authorities in France have indicated that they want Diana's body exhumed from her grave in England so that they can prove that their emergency ambulance service and hospital staff did their best to save her life after the car crash that left her grievously injured.
The French are known to be sensitive to allegations that an ambulance carrying Diana took one hour and 10 minutes to travel three miles to the hospital where she died and that they did not do enough to save her.
However, exhuming her body would refocus attention on allegations in the UK of a conspiracy to kill her.
At the Paris morgue, chief pathologist Professor Dominique Lecomte has revealed that she was ordered to embalm Diana's body, a move that would have obscured any test to show whether the divorced princess was pregnant at the time of the car crash.
French officials have refused to say whether Diana's organs were removed during the autopsy in Paris, although it is now understood they were embalmed inside her body.
Meanwhile a French magistrate is due to decide this week if there is to be a DNA test on Henry Paul's blood sample to prove if he was drunk or, as some have claimed, his sample was switched. Paul was driving the car carrying Diana at the time of the crash.
Since his death, an investigation has revealed unexpected amounts of cash in his bank accounts. Although paid only £20,000 a year as deputy head of security at the Paris Ritz hotel, it turns out he had accumulated £102,000 in 13 separate bank accounts. More than £2,000 was found in his pocket and it turns out that he had banked £4,000 on five separate occasions in the previous eight months.
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