After her first session with James Colthurst, Diana knew that she had crossed a personal Rubicon. She had thrown away the map and was striking out on a journey with only a hazy idea of the route, let alone the destination. But she was determined to continue, and as the months passed she became increasingly energized by the process, suggesting topics herself, such as her bulimia, which she wanted to put into its proper context. While I busied myself with the Princess’s friends, James continued with his interviews: ‘Usually we chatted in the morning, then had lunch and sometimes had another session in the afternoon. But by then she had had enough. There were lots of interruptions especially when Paul Burrell [then her under-butler] and other staff were around. She clearly didn’t trust them so then we would move on to general conversation when they entered the room.’
(It is worth pointing out that, after he published his memoir in 2003, Burrell told the American talk-show host, Larry King, that in 1991 he and Diana used to discuss the secret interviews that were taking place for Diana: Her True Story. Straight-faced, he told millions of American viewers: ‘I knew about it. I was there and I knew it was happening. I helped the Princess to have a voice. And that’s the only time that she could ever sort of say how she felt and thought. It [the book] didn’t shock me because I was aware of the whole situation.’ The truth is very different. Far from being an intimate of the Princess, at the time she did not trust him because, as a butler based primarily at Highgrove with Prince Charles, he was in the ‘enemy’ camp. In fact, when Burrell was in Kensington Palace while Diana was being taped for my book, she insisted that loud music should be played in case Burrell was listening at the keyhole.)
At the time what struck Colthurst forcibly was the invasive atmosphere which suffused her home at Kensington Palace. In a world where everyone wanted a piece of her, the Princess had to shield her personal space with the tenacity of a guard dog, hiding anything about her inner life, such as her astrological charts or a book on eating disorders. Her first instinct, demonstrated by the fact that she had a shredder on her desk, was to trust no one – not staff, not courtiers and certainly not the royal family.
While it is easy to scoff, in such an environment, where it seemed that every breath she took, every move she made was watched, monitored and commented upon, it did appear quite possible that Diana’s mail was being tampered with and her phones bugged. There was no doubt that she became noticeably more relaxed after the three of us had bought scrambler telephones to deter potential eavesdroppers.
The Princess was also concerned about Colthurst cycling around London, not just for his safety, particularly when he was carrying around with him the interview tapes or the Spencer family photographs, which she passed to us in November 1991. Her anxiety was justified when one day in the summer of 1991 James was knocked off his bicycle by a car after one of his interview sessions with her at Kensington Palace.
In this atmosphere of distrust and suspicion, the very fact that Diana was prepared to give frank and, at the time, deeply shocking interviews to an old friend for a writer she barely knew graphically demonstrates her desperation.
For Colthurst, the role he had taken on, somewhat reluctantly, of conduit between the Princess and her biographer brought responsibilities and concerns far greater than he had expected. ‘At the time, as far as I was concerned,’ he explained, ‘I was helping a chum at a bloody and difficult part of her life. I was quite uncomfortable with the role and never envisaged that helping her would become virtually my full-time job for the next few years. I saw it as a one-off – that once she had said her piece she would then be free to make her own decisions. It didn’t happen like that.’
In her emotionally fragile state Diana turned repeatedly to her friend and interviewer for guidance and encouragement, and soon James found himself with the added responsibilities of adviser, counsellor and occasional speechwriter, shadowing and pre-empting decisions made by her paid officials, notably her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, who was appointed in November 1991 after working in a similar capacity while he was her equerry.
In the meantime, I was concentrating on the Princess’s biography, which meant that Colthurst and I had different, and at times diverging, agendas. For, naturally enough, in Colthurst’s mind where there was conflict between her needs and the book, Diana always took precedence. ‘Whereas the book was a means of her gaining recognition as an individual,’ he later observed, ‘my overriding concern was what she was going to do with her life and how she was going to run it.’ In many respects his most significant contribution to Diana’s life was not as a mere go-between for a book, but was in the help he gave her through the slow and painstaking process of shaping a new life and channelling away negative thoughts and emotions, and his encouragement to her to focus on a positive and productive future. It was work Diana was to continue with her therapist Susie Orbach, her astrologer Debbie Frank, and a loose-knit group of surrogate ‘father and mother’ figures, who included the film-maker David Puttnam and Lady Annabel Goldsmith.
The Princess trusted Colthurst with many of her most intimate secrets, and used him as a sounding board for her problems and concerns. She telephoned him constantly and the calls – usually around eight a day, more if there was a crisis – gathered momentum and took on a rhythm of their own. Morning conversations were short, dealing with the contents of newspapers and how to counter negative publicity. She would outline her engagements for the day, asking advice on how to handle a range of social situations. On one occasion, for example, she asked him what conversational gambits she could use to engage her lunch partner, the French President, François Mitterrand; on another day, Diana, who was, until late in her life, intimidated by intellectuals, called in a fluster and asked how best to interest the formidable former American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Colthurst’s advice, just to be herself and ask him what really fascinated him, certainly seemed to strike a chord – over the years Kissinger became a great admirer of the Princess, agreeing to present her with a humanitarian award in New York in 1995.
Afternoon telephone calls usually involved an inquest into the Princess’s official duties; then in the early evening she would call to discuss her life and emotional situation. Invariably this involved her husband, her marriage and her future – although, once, while she was staying at Balmoral she asked Colthurst how to resolve a ticklish problem of protocol. It seems that for a time the Queen took to singing hymns unaccompanied after dinner was over. The Princess did not know whether to sing along, start clapping or remain silent. For once Colthurst was at a loss.
He was more helpful when Diana called from Sandringham during Christmas 1991. In the oppressive and accusatory atmosphere of this unhappy family gathering – the last before both the Princess and the Duchess of York separated from their royal husbands – she was desperate to find an excuse to leave, especially after a tart encounter with Princess Anne, who remarked, ‘It’s difficult for Charles with a wife like you.’ When Colthurst suggested to Diana that she visit the homeless in London, she seized on the idea, quickly making arrangements so that she could make her excuses and leave.
The final call, after the day’s torrent of requests for advice and support, was what Colthurst labelled the ‘bored call’, where, before she went to bed, she would chit-chat for up to ninety minutes about nothing in particular. Colthurst, who was then working full-time developing a medical device with British Oxygen and planning his own wedding, found himself juggling his own career with his shadow life as her de facto private secretary. In those days, when mobile phones were the size of house bricks, he regularly received urgent summons on his pager and often had to leave meetings to find a quiet public telephone from which to send his response. In June 1991, for instance, a worried Diana was constantly on the telephone to him seeking reassurance when Prince William suffered a depressed fracture of his skull following a golfing accident at school.
Over time Diana came to rely on James Colthurst for suggestions and soluti
ons to all manner of delicate or thorny problems. When she decided to replace her regular hairdresser, Richard Dalton, but was anxious to do so without hurting his feelings or provoking him to sell his story to the media, she turned to James. He suggested that she write a letter tactfully explaining her decision and give him a present in appreciation of his years of service. His counsel proved effective and while it was little more than sensible man-management, for someone floundering and vulnerable it was a welcome lifeline.
A greater test of his ingenuity came when Diana got herself in a rather sticky situation with Prince Charles’s valet Michael Fawcett. She had come to dislike Fawcett heartily and when he married Debbie Burke, a housemaid who was eventually to work for Prince Philip, in September 1991, the Princess somewhat childishly did not give the couple a wedding present. Fawcett recognized the slight as deliberate and in his anger complained to all and sundry, his gripes so vociferous that at one stage Diana’s detective, Ken Wharfe, told him, in no uncertain terms, to ‘get a grip’. Too late, the Princess realized that most people would conclude that she, Diana, with her reputation as a generous giver of presents, was being mean-spirited. She talked the issue over with Colthurst, who came up with the diplomatic suggestion that she should give Fawcett and his bride an engraved photograph album and make some excuse for the delay – such as that they had misspelled his wife’s name. He then went to a store in Bond Street and bought her an album, which he had appropriately engraved. When she presented it to Charles’s valet – at a very public occasion – he was genuinely taken aback and socially wrong-footed, a reaction which ensured that Diana, for once, was able to enjoy a frisson of satisfaction from a small moral victory.
Much as the Princess depended on him, however, she did not tell Colthurst everything. While she was raging against her husband’s infidelity, she was hiding the fact that she had enjoyed a long if sporadic love affair with Captain James Hewitt from 1986 to 1990; and a dalliance with James Gilbey, who was later to be exposed as the male voice on the notorious ‘Squidgygate’ tapes, telephone conversations illicitly recorded over New Year 1989–1990. Throughout her sessions with Colthurst she dismissed Hewitt as a friend and nothing more, always speaking of him in less than flattering tones. Colthurst was not entirely convinced by her assertions, but she was never open about Hewitt, just as she avoided discussing her friendship with James Gilbey. Until, that is, she needed Colthurst’s help.
The first indications of her relationship with James Hewitt, which was alluded to in a Sunday newspaper in March 1991, came during the 1991 Gulf War when the dashing but indiscreet tank commander borrowed a news reporter’s satellite phone in the Gulf to call the Princess at Kensington Palace. Diana was so alarmed by the prospect of Hewitt being confronted on his return from the war by newsmen who would link her romantically with him that she asked Colthurst to draft a statement for Hewitt to read out to the media. ‘She was worried because she couldn’t trust him to open his mouth and come out with joined-up sentences,’ Colthurst said. ‘Understandably she was never explicit about the true nature of her relationship with him.’
Hewitt flatly turned down our request for an interview for the book, and with Diana passing the relationship off as a friendship there was nowhere left to go with the story. We did not have the faintest inkling either about her infatuation with the art dealer Oliver Hoare, who was the object of her love and devotion by early 1992. It was one of Diana’s enduring, and, for many, intriguing, qualities that no matter how close individuals thought they were to her – family, old friends like Colthurst, fortune tellers – she never revealed absolutely everything.
Rather less dramatic than his function as repository for the Princess’s confidences (some of them), but in the long term more effective, was Colthurst’s capacity as her unofficial speechwriter. She complained that the texts prepared for her by charity officials or the Palace were ‘heavy, formal and dull’ and wanted James to inject a ‘Diana element’ into the address. They would discuss what Diana wanted to say, James would prepare a draft and she would contribute further thoughts and refinements. I too would find myself involved, and quite often even the Princess’s bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, would be found sitting in the royal limousine polishing her speeches minutes before an engagement.
‘The speeches meant a lot to her,’ said Colthurst. ‘It was an area where she gradually realized that she could put across her own message. It gave her a real sense of empowerment and achievement that an audience actually listened to what she had to say rather than just gazed at her clothes, hairstyle and general appearance. She used to ring up very excited if there had been coverage on TV or radio, delighted that she had received praise for her thoughts.’
The procedure, while amateurish, was highly efficient – even though it was usually undertaken in an atmosphere of barely suppressed frenzy and panic. Once, in August 1991, Diana rang in agitation from a Mediterranean cruise on board a yacht owned by the tycoon John Latsis because a speech she was due to give to the Red Cross had not arrived. In fact, Colthurst had faxed it to the boat two days earlier but a crew member had forgotten to give it to her. On another, later, occasion the Princess rang him in a panic as he was eating his breakfast at his farmhouse near Pangbourne in Berkshire. She was due to attend a retirement lunch for her friend Lord King, the former British Airways chairman, and had decided at the last minute to say a few words. In between munching his morning toast, James, pacing around his kitchen in his dressing gown, dictated his hasty thoughts to the Princess who painstakingly wrote them down in long hand.
One lunchtime meeting in September 1991 summed up the frantic mood of her life at that time. James and I were enjoying a liquid lunch in the Stag’s Head public house in London’s West End, editing and rewriting a speech she was due to give to a child-psychiatry symposium. This was the famous ‘hugging speech’ – which won her an award – in which the Princess informed her highly qualified audience of some 800 doctors of the enormous value of a hug, saying that a cuddle was ‘cheap, environmentally friendly and needs minimal instruction’.
As we tinkered with the phrasing, Colthurst’s bleeper went off. We initially thought it was an amateur photographer we had asked, with Diana’s knowledge, to take informal snaps of the Princess and her boys as they entered San Lorenzo’s restaurant where they were having lunch. In fact it was Diana herself. When James found a public telephone and called her, she informed him that his carefully crafted address had quickly to be cut from 2,100 to 1,600 words. The tone also had to be softened, she said, because the reference to hugging might be seen as a criticism of the Queen and the distant way that she had brought up her own family. During the conversation she made a wry comment about a fellow lunchtime diner, the Marchioness of Douro, a one-time friend who had fallen out with Diana when the Princess discovered that she was reportedly allowing her Scottish estate to be used by Prince Charles and Camilla for a romantic tryst. In delighted tones, Diana related how her former friend had been suitably embarrassed during their chance meeting.
This was by no means the first conversation of the day, nor would it be the last. Earlier, Diana had dismissed as ‘nonsense’ a Nigel Dempster story about the Queen ordering Diana to be with Charles – a point she was happy to have publicized if a journalist should call to ask me about it. On the same day, in between rewriting Diana’s speech, I briefed Stuart Higgins, then deputy editor of the Sun, about a secret trip Prince Charles was taking to a friend’s château in southern France. At the time Diana thought that Camilla was going too and we were very anxious to obtain independent confirmation of that, preferably photographic, to support her allegations of Charles’s infidelity. At the last minute, however, Camilla decided against joining the Prince.
Indeed, throughout the summer of 1991, the Camilla question was the most difficult. As the Parker Bowleses had successfully sued an author who had inadvertently linked Camilla to Charles, the prospect of fighting a court case was very real. We needed independent proof of Diana’s assertion
s that her husband was engaged in a long-term affair with Mrs Parker Bowles.
In late August 1991, irked because I seemed to be doubting her word, the Princess, who was staying at Balmoral, rummaged through her husband’s briefcase and came across a cache of letters. In doing this she exposed herself to the cold and conclusive realization – rather than the abstract suspicion – that another woman was in love with her husband, and that that love was clearly returned. The letters – and a couple of saucy postcards – which I was shown in August 1991 were from Camilla Parker Bowles. As Diana read the passionate letters it was quite evident to her that Camilla, who called Charles ‘My most precious darling’, was a woman whose love remained undimmed in spite of the passage of time and the difficulties of pursuing the object of her affection.
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