For someone as emotionally fragile as Diana, little things could mean a great deal – a haircut could change her outlook on life, for instance. A new hairstylist, Sam McKnight, a friend of her favourite photographer, the Frenchman Patrick Demarchelier, had impressed her because, in her words, he ‘let out something quite different’ when he shaped her hair, giving her greater confidence and sense of self-worth. But minor morale-boosters aside, the bigger question lay unresolved: how to give the public a true insight into her side of the story while untangling the emotional and constitutional knots strangling her life and her marriage. It was a genuine predicament. If she had simply packed her bags and left, as she would have liked to do, the public, which still believed in the myth of the fairy-tale marriage, would have considered her behaviour irrational, hysterical and profoundly immature. More than that, she would have been in danger of losing her children, just as her mother had done a quarter of a century before.
‘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.
CHAPTER TWO
The Year of Living Dangerously
IT 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.
Clearly, we would have to find evidence to substantiate everything the Princess told us. What was more, since we were not able to quote her directly, we needed to find close friends of hers who could back up Diana’s story in their own words.
In the early weeks of this project, it was the Princess who was setting the pace. My notes from the evening of 2 July 1991, the day after her thirtieth birthday (which in the end she had spent alone at Kensington Palace), gives a flavour of her impatient mood. At 5.10 p.m., while Colthurst and I were deep in conversation, his bleeper went off. It was Diana. ‘Sees major urgency for the book,’ I jotted down in my notebook. ‘She thought it could be brought out in weeks. Going to Earl Spencer to pack up a few photo albums and bring them down. If Camilla Parker Bowles leaked the story of the ball to Dempster then the mistress is running the show. Disgusted by the way it has gone.’
If I needed any signal about how tricky this project would be, it came a few days later when I wrote another article for the Sunday Times, headlined ‘Truce’, detailing the behind-the-scenes moves by such unlikely characters as the former DJ Sir Jimmy Savile to bring an end to the warfare between Charles and Diana. Even though the story was accurate, my long-term thinking was to put rival journalists off the scent by giving the impression that all had gone quiet inside the Waleses’ household, as well as underlining my credibility as a writer with an inside track – thus, I hoped, ensuring that when the book was published it would be taken seriously. I was trying to be too clever by half – the strategy crumbled to dust the moment the book was published. In the Sunday Times article I mentioned how, for Diana’s birthday, her sitting room was decorated with helium-filled balloons. It was a point the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, asked Diana about when courtiers carefully scrutinized the article to find clues as to my impeccable source. A few days later, the Sun’s veteran royal photographer, Arthur Edwards, phoned me with a warning. ‘You’ve got them rattled,’ he said. ‘For f—k’s sake be careful. They are looking because you are getting it right. They are turning the place over very quietly.’ His counsel of caution was echoed by the Daily Mail’s royal reporter Richard Kay, who had been told by his newspaper’s crime correspondent that the police had been asked to find my mole. A few months later, my tatty office above an Indian restaurant in central London was broken into, a camera stolen and files rifled through.
With the need for caution paramount and Diana eager to press ahead, it was clear that James w
ould have to take on a much bigger role than he had previously envisaged. He had thought he would be able to bow out after making a couple of tapes – instead he found himself visiting Kensington Palace on a regular basis armed with lists of questions that I had carefully compiled, to ask Diana to fill in the gaps she had left in her early testimony. For the next year he acted as the go-between, as the three of us – Mike O’Mara, James and myself – became her shadow court, not only writing, researching and producing what was to all intents and purposes an ‘unofficial official’ biography, but advising on her day-to-day life. Everything from handling staff problems, to dealing with media issues to drafting speeches came under our umbrella, as she used us to second-guess her small team of courtiers. It was exciting, exhilarating and amusing as this ill-assorted triumvirate helped shape the life and image of the world’s most famous young woman.
At one of our first ‘editorial’ meetings it occurred to us that Diana would feel much more comfortable if her participation in the project was not acknowledged, thus giving her the opportunity to deny her involvement. The Princess was in fact the last of us to realize the importance of ‘deniability’, and it was, according to my notes, not until 4 January 1992, when the book was well under way, that she asked James, almost as an afterthought, to make sure she was kept in the background. ‘She knew from the start that the enterprise was not without risks,’ Colthurst said. ‘But with the proviso that she had deniability she became much more excited.’
This strategy did give us an extra problem in that it became absolutely vital that we verified the Princess’s every claim independently. The emotional torrent that was her first interview raised many sensitive, not to say libellous, issues, particularly about Camilla Parker Bowles. This was my task for the next year – interviewing Diana’s friends, acquaintances and employees in order to acquire corroboration to underpin the original thesis. Some in her circle, like Carolyn Bartholomew and James Gilbey, were aware of her involvement although they did not know the full extent of her cooperation. When, for example, I interviewed Carolyn she told me that Diana had been ‘besotted’ with Prince Charles before they married. Just to make sure she called Diana to check that the word reflected her feelings. ‘I said the right thing, didn’t I?’ she asked. ‘Yes. I was. Totally,’ Diana said with emphasis. While Carolyn was almost in with us, most of the others in Diana’s circle were out of the loop and she had to choose her words with care when they called her to ask if they should speak to me. With many she was noncommittal, with some downright negative – ‘Don’t touch it [a proposed interview] with a bargepole,’ she counselled her masseur Stephen Twigg. (Thankfully, he ignored her advice.) When I eventually interviewed James Gilbey at his Knightsbridge apartment in November 1991, he was explicit about what she wanted to achieve with the book: ‘She wants to make her point loud and clear. She doesn’t want any beating about the bush. She wants people to know the grief she has had to endure and the way she’s been abandoned.’
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