Diana: In Pursuit of Love (4 page)

‘We hacked around a number of options,’ Dr Colthurst reminisced. ‘It was obvious that it was an issue she had discussed with others and that it preyed constantly on her mind. The first and simplest solution was for Diana to confront her husband. But she had tried that. By then Prince Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles had become quite blatant and even when she had shouted at him, ranted and raved, she had been ignored. She felt totally disempowered. She had seen the Queen, who sympathized, knew what was going on but had nothing to offer.

‘The second scenario was to continue her silence and seek psychiatric help. She had already tried that. The problem was that she knew that she wasn’t ill – it was the circumstances affecting her, not her mind. No amount of psychiatric counselling would change the circle of deceit. A constant refrain from her was: “I’ve had enough, I’ve really had enough.”’

The third scenario was to go public and reveal to the world what her life was truly like. But how could she smuggle her story out? She considered a range of alternatives, from producing a series of newspaper articles, to cooperating with a book about herself, to giving a TV interview. ‘She was concerned to express her point of view in a controlled way, which people would understand and in a way which gave her due recognition as a human being rather than an adjunct to the royal system,’ explained James Colthurst. ‘The difficulty was finding the medium to deliver the message.’

Over the past ten years Diana had seen the way newspapers misrepresented and sensationalized her life, and thought that, while a series of articles would create a huge impact, the effect would be short-lived and out of her control. She was wary too of any involvement with TV or radio because of the close, almost incestuous, relationship most media outlets enjoyed with Buckingham Palace. She was especially anxious to have nothing to do with the BBC, given that the wife of the then Chairman of the Governors, Marmaduke Hussey, was Lady Susan Hussey, senior lady-in-waiting to the Queen. The fear of censorship and exposure was always uppermost in her mind. Diana was not overly enamoured
with the world of publishing, either, as that year’s crop of royal books, by authors such as Penny Junor and Anne Morrow, painted what she considered to be an entirely misleading picture of her life.

On the other hand, she knew that I was at the time writing a full-scale biography of her, and was reasonably pleased with my earlier book,
Diana’s Diary: An Intimate Portrait of the Princess of Wales
(1990) – mainly because it had irritated Prince Charles with its detailed description of the interior of Highgrove, causing his private secretary, then Richard Aylard, to initiate an inquiry to uncover my source. She was also amused, as she told Colthurst, about the day I had annoyed the Queen in a Sandringham farmyard. During the winter of 1986 I was showing a new royal photographer around the Sovereign’s 20,000-acre Norfolk estate. A member of the Queen’s staff suggested, rather mischievously, that I should drive down a country track marked ‘Private’ where we might ‘see something that would interest’ us. No sooner had we arrived in the farmyard than, like a scene from a Western, the Queen, Prince Edward and the Duchess of York appeared on their horses over the horizon and galloped purposefully towards us. Clearly furious that we had intruded on their morning ride on her property, the Queen leant over her mount and said, ‘I hope you are proud of yourself, Mr Morton.’ We eventually hightailed it out of town, suitably chastised after our confrontation with the Head of State. It seems the Queen voiced her disapproval at a subsequent family gathering, for the Princess had come to hear about the encounter and had been much amused. She considered me something of a rebel and an outsider, a fact that, though I was unaware of it at the time, counted heavily in my favour when she was considering telling her story.

While I had met Diana at numerous cocktail parties where the royal couple chatted to the media at the start of overseas tours, exchanges had normally been bright, light and trite, usually about my loud ties. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to suggest a hint of the future working relationship we would later enjoy. However, in March 1991, Diana gave Colthurst advance warning of the sacking of Prince Charles’s private secretary Sir Christopher Airy in the knowledge that James would pass the intelligence on to
me. She was, I learnt, quietly thrilled that the resulting article, which appeared in the
Sunday Times
under my by-line, accurately reflected the situation inside the royal household as conveyed by the Princess. I now believe she was testing me out. As I was later to realize, it gave her a heady sense of control in a life that was closely monitored. She had been so used to Prince Charles and his team calling the shots that, in the undeclared war of the Waleses, it was satisfying to launch a sally of her own.

It was not a feeling that lasted long. In May 1991 an article by the gossip writer Nigel Dempster was published, portraying Diana as petulant and ungrateful for having turned down her husband’s offer of a party at Highgrove to mark her thirtieth birthday. She had her reasons – apart from the fact that she disliked Highgrove, which to her was the province of Charles’s mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, and Charles’s set of fawning friends, she felt that a party in her honour would be nothing more than a sham, a cover for the Prince and his mistress to meet and mingle in public – but the public was given a very different impression. When I wrote a feature for the
Sunday Times
on the ‘War of the Waleses’ a few days after the Dempster piece, again with a briefing from Diana via James Colthurst, it seemed to cement in her mind the notion that she could control her image. ‘She had been toying with the idea of going public for some time and the birthday party issue finally made up her mind,’ Colthurst later observed. ‘She realized that somehow she had to get her message across.’

Diana knew now that unless the full story of her life was told, the public would never understand or appreciate the reasons behind any action she decided upon. It was at that time that she asked James Colthurst if he would sound me out about the possibility of conducting an interview for a book. Before approaching me, Colthurst asked her if she really wanted to try again with Prince Charles. ‘She was very clear and said “Yes”,’ Colthurst remembered. ‘That response conditioned my approach to the book.’ That is to say, as far as he was concerned, Diana’s wellbeing and future took priority over the book.

In keeping with the undercover nature of the whole operation, James and I met to discuss her thoughts in the incongruous
surroundings of a working men’s café in Ruislip, north-west London, close to the place where he was, at the time, attending a course. What I heard changed my life for ever. Amidst the sizzle of frying eggs and bacon, he unveiled an extraordinary story about Diana’s desperation, her unhappiness, her eating disorder – bulimia nervosa – and her husband’s relationship with a woman few had ever heard of, Camilla Parker Bowles. He also tentatively alluded to her half-hearted suicide attempts. It was bewildering, alarming and disconcerting. Day after day for the last ten years I and other members of the so-called royal rat pack had followed the couple around the world and never sniffed the story taking place under our noses. For a couple of years or so now there had been signs that all was not well with the Waleses’ marriage, but I had not for a moment imagined that it could possibly be this bad. I left the café reeling. I had been given the key that had unlocked the door to a parallel universe, a world where nothing was as it seemed and everything was in disguise.

Deeply affected by the day’s revelations, when I got on the Underground for my journey home I felt compelled to cast a furtive glance behind me, to check whether I was being watched or followed, such was the mistrust and unease with which I now felt burdened.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

The Year of Living Dangerously

I
T WAS NOT LONG
before I was brought down to earth. My American-born publisher, Michael O’Mara, was deeply sceptical when I told him about my discussion with James Colthurst. With a TV drama about the forged Hitler Diaries then in the news, he unsurprisingly suspected that I was being set up by a con man, but he agreed that he, James and I should meet in his office in south London. The meeting was tense; James did not really trust me completely, and he did not know Mike and felt that he was getting in over his head. Instinctively he wanted to protect his royal friend, while O’Mara wanted to test his integrity. ‘If she is so unhappy why is she always smiling in the photographs?’ he wanted to know, indicating the small library of royal picture books he had published over the years.

As the meeting proceeded O’Mara warmed to Colthurst. ‘He was clearly no con man because he didn’t ask for money,’ he reasoned. But a test was set – a tape recording of Diana’s ‘memoirs’ was to be made before the amateur conspirators met for a second time.

While I was keen to interview the Princess myself, it was out of the question. At six-foot-four and as a writer known to Palace staff, I would hardly be inconspicuous. And as soon as it became known
that I was talking to the Princess, the balloon would go up and courtiers would step in to prevent her from speaking her mind. James, as an old friend, was, on the other hand, perfectly placed to undertake this delicate and, as it proved, historic mission.

Armed with a list of questions I had prepared and an old tape recorder, Colthurst set off on his bicycle and pedalled up the drive to Kensington Palace. It was May 1991 and he was about to conduct the first of a series of interviews that continued through the summer and autumn and would ultimately change for ever the way the world saw the British royal family.

‘I remember it vividly,’ Dr Colthurst recollected. ‘We sat in her sitting room at Kensington Palace. Diana was dressed quite casually in jeans and blue shirt. Before we began she took the phone off the hook, as she did each time I asked her questions, and closed the door. Whenever we were interrupted by someone knocking she removed the body microphone and hid it in cushions on her sofa.

‘For the first twenty minutes of that first interview she was very happy and laughing, especially when talking about incidents during her schooldays,’ Colthurst went on. ‘When she got to the heavy issues, the suicide attempts, Camilla and her bulimia, there was an unmistakable sense of release, of unburdening. Yet I felt that she had said these things before to other people as there was an air that her answers, while genuine, were well practised. It was obvious that she had often vented her concerns.’

As Diana spoke, the sense of injustice she felt at the way she had been treated by Camilla, Prince Charles and the royal family grew all the more keen – articulating the sacrifices she had made seemed to define her feelings of grievance and anger. In spite of her raw emotional state, what the Princess had to say was highly believable and many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of her life began to fall into place. Deep-seated and intense feelings of abandonment and rejection had dogged her for most of her life – ever since, when she was just six years old, her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had walked out on her father.

It was a bleak emotional landscape that Diana described in recalling an unhappy childhood – her sense of guilt at not being
born a boy to continue the family line, her mother’s tears, her father’s lonely silences and her younger brother Charles sobbing in the night. There were other distressing revelations in store as Colthurst went through the list of questions I had prepared. As it was, many questions were made redundant simply because once she started talking she only needed a brief prompt for her to discuss some aspect of her life, such as her schooldays.

‘When I left after that first long interview I realized that I had a large job on my hands,’ said Colthurst. ‘I felt that she needed to be protected from herself, so in the early months there were several issues, such as the suicide attempts, which I rather soft-pedalled on. At the same time it was obvious that the situation had to be resolved, otherwise it would have meant the end of her. She was certainly not mentally unstable but the circumstances were so crushing that it had the potential to create instability. The potential for her taking her own life was always there.’

Early in their first conversation, Colthurst said to her, ‘Give me a shout if there is something you don’t want me to touch on.’ Her reply was telling: ‘No, no, it’s OK.’ ‘Even though I had known her since she was a teenager I was most surprised by the way that she discussed her suicide bids so freely,’ Colthurst commented. ‘She was very open too in the way she talked about Camilla, her family and the royal family, and one could feel her anger around these issues.’

At the second meeting with Michael O’Mara, James brought along his battered tape recorder. As soon as he played the tape O’Mara’s worries about its authenticity evaporated – to be replaced by another worry. ‘How the hell are we going to prove this stuff?’ he asked.