by Tim Clayton
Dimbleby consulted the medical textbooks. He told us:
I stumbled across the term BPD in a variety of psychiatric journals while researching the symptoms of the Princess’s self-acknowledged condition, bulimia. I discovered that the two disorders are often associated with each other.
We understand that Dimbleby also took his interview notes and shared them with at least two professional psychiatrists. Dimbleby did not reveal to the psychiatrists the identity of the person whose symptoms he was describing, but given that he was known to be working on a biography of Prince Charles they must have guessed fairly quickly.
Conversations with these experts, and close study of the academic journals they recommended, led the author to feel confident enough in the diagnosis to draft an entire chapter about Diana and BDP. But it never reached the printers. Dimbleby told us that he ‘came to the conclusion that any conceivable link between bulimia and BPD was too speculative’. We understand that when Prince Charles read the draft chapter he also asked for it to be dropped. Dimbleby concludes that
The Prince of Wales was concerned throughout to avoid causing distress to the Princess . . . I exercised self-restraint for a range of reasons, among which was a concern to avoid causing unnecessary pain to the family – as I indicated in the foreword to The Prince of Wales.
Dimbleby dropped most of his BPD chapter, and excised any direct reference to the disorder from his pages. But the results of his psychiatric research did not entirely disappear. One section about Diana’s behaviour that made it on to the page reads
. . . there appeared to be a terrible conflict inside her that would suddenly erupt in anger or grief. As her public prestige soared, she grew correspondingly anguished in private. She . . . scoured the newspapers for photographs of herself with an eagerness unalloyed by familiarity. Not for the first time, it seemed to their friends that she was searching for her own identity in the image of a princess that smiled back at her from every front page.
Whatever clinical or psychiatric label was appropriate to the Princess’s distress, its effect on her marriage to the Prince could hardly be in doubt.
Dimbleby had stumbled upon a huge story, perhaps the key to understanding the evidence gathered for the abandoned chapter. It is easy to understand why he would share his insight, although he was clearly not Penny Junor’s only source. Columnist Nigel Dempster wrote about BPD in 1995 and since Diana’s death several other writers have alleged that she suffered from it. The result of all this is a now widely reported ‘Mad Diana’ story.
One of Diana’s closest friends in the late 1990s was Lana Marks. Her English-born husband Neville, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and former professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami, met Diana several times.
Borderline personality disorder is a very serious personality problem. The person with this problem has difficulty in all areas of their life and thinks and behaves in ways that are not normal for their culture. In my thirty-two years experience as a consultant psychiatrist, I have treated many people with this condition. Classically it comes on as a young adolescent and then it’s pervasive and it lasts their whole lifetime.
I met Princess Diana and I spoke to her, and someone with her responsibilities would not have been able to cope with the pressures of her job, travelling around the world, meeting world leaders, the brightest intellects in the world. She coped with these very stressful, important roles. What she couldn’t cope with was a more personal emotional role – being rejected by her husband and not knowing how to deal with that.
If she had had a borderline personality disorder she would not have been able to cope with any area of her life. She would have had difficulties that would have been apparent to the world from the day the world first knew about her, right through her life. This is the characteristic of a borderline personality disorder, it’s a lifelong condition, it’s a serious difficulty with emotions, with thoughts and with controlling one’s impulsive behaviour.
Dr Marks is the husband of one of Diana’s allies and he would be the first to stress that his opinion was not formed under clinical conditions. But he does, of course, combine professional experience of BPD with a personal acquaintance with the Princess of Wales.
It is interesting to note that back in the early 1980s, long before anyone had heard of a royal case of Borderline Personality Disorder, Buckingham Palace issued a statement about newspaper attempts to psychoanalyse Diana:
‘Rubbish’, a spokesman said. ‘This is pretty bloody stupid. No one would give a medical opinion on someone he has never met and is never likely to.’
* * *
If Diana was suffering from mood swings in the autumn of 1982, so was the press. James Whitaker, now writing for the Mirror, reported in October that Diana and Charles returned from Balmoral after two weeks of sulking followed by a blazing row. Andrew Morton followed suit in the Daily Star. Richard Stott of the Mirror remembers:
a picture of her and Charles which was taken by Kent Gavin, the Mirror photographer, and she looked haunted. So much so that the Mirror didn’t run it because there were worries being expressed that her health was being affected.
This charitable mood did not last. On 13 November 1982 Diana had a semi-public argument with Charles when, at the last minute, she decided she was not going to the British Legion Remembrance Service at the Albert Hall. Charles left without her and then Diana had a change of heart. Ignoring her staff, who told her it was too late, she followed, arriving ten minutes after the Queen and after Charles had already apologised for her absence. Richard Stott recalls:
suddenly she arrived, in a rush, through the back door. Something clearly odd had happened. And I think that was the first example of something tangible being shown, that there might be something wrong.
‘No one, but no one, is EVER late for the Queen,’ proclaimed James Whitaker the next day, noting the thin and strained appearance of the Princess. On 15 November the Mirror asked, ‘Is it all getting too much for Diana?’ Harry Arnold, in the Sun, reported that Charles was ‘seriously concerned’ and had ‘taken top medical advice’. The tabloids were not clear what the problem was but they were speculating that Diana, like her sister Sarah, had fallen prey to anorexia.
These stories were immediately denied in other newspapers with Palace spokesmen proclaiming Diana fit and well. Nigel Dempster criticised the Sun and the Mirror for exaggerating the ‘inevitable stresses’ of a public marriage and then listed several signs of Diana’s stress himself. He quoted a member of the ‘inner circle’ to the effect that ‘quite simply she has freaked out’. At the beginning of December, Private Eye’s Grovel reported:
So badly is the Princess of Wales treating husband Brian – Kensington Palace and Highgrove reverberate daily to her tantrums and staff are complaining that her language when dressing down the Heir to the Throne is full of expletive deleteds – that former ‘mentor’ Camilla Parker Bowles may soon find HRH calling again at her Gloucestershire mansion.
Regular readers will remember that Camilla, along with Aussie harpie Lady (Dale) Tryon, used to attend to Brian’s therapeutic needs until they were banished from the inner circle following the marriage to Diana . . .
Dempster topped this in December 1982 when he announced on ABC’s Good Morning America that Diana was a ‘fiend’ and a ‘monster’ and that ‘Charles is desperately unhappy . . . because Fleet Street forced him into this marriage’. He claimed to have obtained this information from one of Prince Charles’s staff. Dempster was denounced by his rivals. Judy Wade of the Sun remembers:
I was asked to write a story counterbalancing that saying, ‘No, no, no, these wild accusations in America, they’re totally untrue. Diana is a wonderful wife and mother, and she’s helped her husband all the time, and they’re planning their garden at Highgrove together.’ And I wrote all this tosh because editors believed that the public wanted the fairytale, and that you have to give a young couple a chance. You can’t say, ‘Oh dear, the marria
ge is in trouble’ so soon. I mean, everybody goes through rough patches.
But the denials were not convincing. Private Eye commented quizzically: ‘If the Daily Mail’s Reptile in Residence is to be believed, the beautiful, demure Diana is a tortured fiend who has to be tied to her bedposts every night.’ In early 1983 the News of the World was reporting that Diana was ‘near to tears much of the time . . . and her quick temper never far from the surface’. She could not handle being left alone and ‘might well be heading for some kind of breakdown’.
For Diana, who read the papers and took what they said seriously, the accuracy of the reports must have been unsettling. It was ever more clear that there were leaks, and it appeared that some of them were coming not from chambermaids but from senior staff. Were they ganging up on her? Who could she trust? And what about the Eye’s speculations about Camilla?
Meanwhile, evidence of friction within the marriage was piling up. Judy Wade recalls an occasion when
A photographer was called to Kensington Palace to do some pictures, which would be issued when Charles and Diana went on their first tour abroad to Australia and New Zealand. And when he arrived at the Palace a fairly highly placed official said to him, ‘Now look, if they start to fight and row in front of you, please try to ignore it.’ He was talking about it as if it was a regular occurrence – as if you can expect them to fight in front of you.
* * *
The tour that began in March 1983 came as a blessed escape from domestic tension. No one was left at home this time – William travelled with them. Royal officials had not been slow to recognise the value to the monarchy and to the country of the enormously popular couple. The Charles and Diana show was a gilt-edged opportunity to reinforce the popularity of the British Crown in the far-flung states of the Commonwealth. An affable Canadian, Victor Chapman, was appointed as press officer to beef up the razzmatazz of royal tours and get the most out of the new asset. He did not have to try hard. The public reaction to Diana was extraordinary. Robert Spencer remembers:
She suddenly became a sort of star, complete star, and I remember going to Australia in January 1983 and being pestered by everybody saying, ‘You are related to Diana, this perfect being.’ I mean, she was almost a goddess at that stage.
During the seventies the media had lost interest in such tours, but suddenly they were big news again. Instead of five or six reporters tagging along, there were nearer eighty. When the new star turned up in Australia, the scenes were unlike anything seen before.
Arthur Edwards recalls:
There were just thousands, hundreds of thousands of people just come to see this lady. And I mean it was no secret that she loved it, she absolutely loved it. At the Sydney Opera House she was the star in this open-top car, she was arriving like she was already the Queen, you know. The crowd was screaming for her: ‘Diana! Diana!’
The Prince was a veteran of fifty royal tours and had made sure that he would get his moments of privacy. Six visits to a hideaway in Woomargama, New South Wales, were written into the schedule. Charles wrote home about how music and reading ‘help to preserve my sanity and my faith when all is chaos, crowds, cameras, politicians, cynicism, sarcasm, and intense scrutiny outside’.
Diana stopped traffic. In Brisbane the city came to a grinding halt. Half a million people turned out on the street in one section of the town just to catch a glimpse of her. And she was so overwhelmed by the crowd that they had to take her into the town hall and give her a drink of water and sit her down.
The royal scrutineers noted that Charles did his best to help and support Diana. Arthur Edwards saw that:
He was always touching her hand or holding her arm. And they seemed to be very much together. And I remember when they looked at each other they looked like they wanted to rip the clothes off each other, they looked so much in love. . . . And there was all these big gaps in the programme where they would go off for two or three days. Because it was a long tour. And it was obvious that they were looking forward to those wonderful weekends and so they really did seem to be very much in love. I am convinced of it to this day.
Diana was elated, and entered one of her forgive-and-forget moods. She wrote a letter to a friend from Australia that said that she was ashamed of her behaviour in London, proud of the Prince and grateful for his support and guidance on the tour. To crown it all, William crawled for the first time in Government House.
* * *
Before his marriage Charles had expressed some decidedly old-fashioned views about the role of a royal wife, telling Alistair Cooke in 1976:
whoever I choose is going to have a jolly hard job, always in my shadow, having to walk a few steps behind me, all that sort of thing.
But now the spotlight was being continuously beamed away from the heir to the throne and on to his dazzling wife. Once again the crowds cheered if they were on her side of the road and groaned if they were on his, once again he laughed it off, saying he needed two wives to cover both sides of the street. When the couple did things separately all the press went with Diana. For Judy Wade she was the story:
Their press officer, Vic Chapman, would come to us and say, ‘For God’s sake, can’t some of you walk with the Prince?’ We were all surrounding Diana. We were only interested in Diana because she was so pretty; she had such a great way with the crowds and she was so naïve she’d open her mouth and say amazing things that made good copy.
Even within her own family, traditionalists like Robert Spencer looked at Diana’s sudden fame with mixed feelings.
There was this girl trying to establish herself as the wife of the Prince of Wales, or that’s what she should be doing. Instead of which she was inundated with praise and she was on the front of every magazine. She was just unable to get on really with settling down as the wife and mother that she should have been and I think that’s where the problem started.
Earlier that year Time magazine had posed the question: ‘What is a Princess? What is one for?’ The answer, it concluded, was simple: to be photographed. But this was not how Prince Charles, with his restless desire to make a real contribution to public life, would have answered the question.
* * *
It was wet in New Zealand, but Diana’s new informal style was an equally huge success. ‘Princess thrills 35,000 children,’ proclaimed the Auckland Star over a picture of Diana rubbing noses with a Maori girl. ‘Red Tape Cut As Royal Couple Warm to Crowd,’ thrilled the New Zealand Herald on 18 April. Charles seemed to enjoy being paddled by eighty painted Maoris on the historic Nga Toki Matawhaorua canoe at Waitangi, but this was one of the few occasions when the Kiwi press took any notice of him. ‘Diana’s spontaneous manner in making sure as many as possible of the throngs of school children, the elderly, the handicapped, and the crowds at large were able to meet her first hand ensured her of a lasting place in the memories of the Northland people,’ reported the Northern Advocate. The unprecedented intensity of the enthusiasm, especially in the British press, alarmed Prince Charles in a way that could not simply be attributed to envy of his wife. Experience had left him with a weary understanding of the ways of journalists:
The terrifying part, as always in this kind of thing, is that they construct the pedestal; they put you on top of it, they expect you to balance on the beastly thing without ever losing your footing, and because they have engineered the pedestal along come the demolition experts amongst them who are of the breed that enjoy breaking things down. And it is all done for a sort of vicarious entertainment . . . Maybe the wedding, because it was so well done and because it made such a wonderful, almost Hollywood-style, film, has distorted people’s view of things? Whatever the case it frightens me.
7
Radiant
* * *
He didn’t change his bachelor ways. She wanted him to stay at home with her and the children. There were tantrums and hysterics. She challenged him – it was the first time he had been challenged. It was the first time he had met his equal – he w
as surrounded by yes-men. Diana accused Charles’s friends of being sycophants, but she was her own worst enemy too.
Senior Buckingham Palace official
In the autumn of 1983 local journalists alleged that Charles was again seen riding to hounds with Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana later told Anthony Holden that she pressed the ‘redial’ button on the phone in Charles’s Highgrove study. A servant at Camilla’s country home answered. She said that she implored Charles not to go hunting that weekend, but he did.
One of Diana’s greatest qualities was her ability to sense and connect with the mood of strangers. It was how she had first caught Charles’s attention on the hay bale. This empathy, later deployed at a thousand hospital bedsides, was also deployed at her own. She just knew that Charles wasn’t happy with her, just knew that he pined for Camilla. Given the state of his marriage, he probably did have these feelings, but that did not mean he was being unfaithful.
Diana began to deal with the continuing leaks and the rival claims on her husband’s time. She pressed Charles to see less of old and faithful supporters such as the van Cutsems, Romseys, Palmer-Tomkinsons and Nicholas Soames. Diana was convinced that they were facilitating secret meetings between him and Camilla. His friends all insist that there were no one-on-one meetings between Charles and Camilla until 1985, and no affair until 1986.
Apart from her intuition, Diana’s only evidence that the affair resumed years before this date were Charles’s frequent absences from her bed. We know that Diana did spend many nights alone at this time, because she would call up her friends and tell them so. After a busy and exciting day, she wanted someone with whom to share her news. Janet Filderman received dozens of such late-night phone calls.
She would phone up in the evenings, probably nine o’clock or something like that, or later, saying ‘Hi, I am sitting in bed with Wills and we are watching telly.’ If it was later she was always on her own, but she would just have a little chit-chat. I suppose it was the mother/daughtery thing.