Diana: In Pursuit of Love (3 page)

Hard Road to Freedom

T
HE
P
RINCESS OF
W
ALES
was deep in dinner-table conversation with the film producer David Puttnam. They had known each other for years and Diana regarded Puttnam as one of the uncle figures in her life, a shoulder to lean on and a sympathetic ear always there to listen during times of trouble.

At that time, in March 1992, Puttnam, who was part of a growing group of insiders who had some inkling about her troubled life, sensed that Diana was under greater stress than usual. As they chatted at an AIDS symposium at Claridge’s Hotel in central London, the conversation turned to crossing bridges – making momentous decisions where there is no going back. Conspiratorially, she said to him, ‘David, I think I’ve done the thing in my life that is going to change it the most. I’ve been talking to a journalist and there’s a book being published. It has reached a point where there is no way back. And I’m terrified.’

She then stood up and gave a barnstorming speech about her involvement with and commitment to the fight against AIDS, before coolly answering questions from her audience of media and medical experts including Baroness Jay and Professor Michael Adler.

Diana was once asked if she gambled. ‘Not with cards but with life,’ was her reply. She was now on the threshold of the first of several throws of the dice.

The journalist to whom she was referring was me and the book was
Diana: Her True Story
, first published in June 1992, which, with her enthusiastic collaboration, explored her unhappy life inside the royal family and exploded the myth of her fairy-tale marriage.

The book had its origins in the incongruous setting of a hospital canteen in October 1986. Here Dr James Colthurst was relaxing after escorting the Princess of Wales on an official visit to open a new CT scanner in the X-ray department at St Thomas’ Hospital in central London where he was at that time working. I was there as the royal correspondent for the
Daily Mail
newspaper, and over tea and biscuits I asked him about the visit. It quickly became clear that Colthurst was rather more than just a hospital medic acting as a guide to the royal personage, but a friend who had known her for years.

Over the years Colthurst and I became friendly, enjoying games of squash in the hospital courts followed by large lunches in a nearby Italian restaurant. In the time-honoured fashion I initially tried to cultivate him as a contact but soon discovered that he was the classic royal insider, happy to talk volubly about anything but the royal family. Our early acquaintance gradually mellowed into friendship as we established a tacit understanding that when we met for lunch the subject of Diana was strictly off the menu.

During the late 1980s Colthurst, the son of a baronet whose family have owned Blarney Castle in Ireland for more than a century, was rekindling his friendship with the Princess, which had been cemented a decade earlier on a skiing holiday in the French Alps in the winter of 1979.

In the course of that holiday Lady Diana Spencer, who had been introduced to Colthurst and his chalet party by a mutual friend, joined them at an expensive disco in the Tignes resort Val Claret one evening. She enthusiastically participated in a ruse devised by Colthurst so as to enjoy the dancing without paying for the overpriced drinks pressed on the clientele by hovering waiters. Colthurst deliberately bumped into a pillar on the dance floor, bit into a blood capsule for dramatic effect, and in the fracas was
‘helped’ out of the club by Diana and another girl. The stunt, albeit rather juvenile, was very much in keeping with the rest of that skiing week, which Diana later described as one of the best holidays of her life.

While Diana liked innocent and rather silly practical jokes, Colthurst recollected one not-so-innocent prank of which Diana and her friends were the victims, when, during a weekend at a friend’s farm cottage in Oxfordshire, they unknowingly consumed large quantities of hashish that had been mixed into the chilli con carne. Diana got unstoppable giggles and had a severe attack of ‘the munchies’, making night-time raids on the kitchen to devour chocolate bars and sweets. Others, though, were violently ill, and Colthurst, then a medical student, had to keep an all-night vigil by the side of his sky-high friends even though he too was affected.

Most of the time though their encounters were rather more mundane. Colthurst and others of their set became regular visitors to Diana’s apartment in Coleherne Court during her short but jolly time as a bachelor girl. From time to time she cooked him dinner, they danced together at the Hurlingham Ball and on occasion she visited his flat in Pimlico, usually accompanied by her friend Philippa Coker. ‘She was good fun and good company, it was as simple as that,’ Colthurst later recalled. ‘There was never any suggestion of a romance; she isn’t my type, nor I hers.’ Indeed, during her courtship with Prince Charles in the autumn of 1980, James Colthurst got an idea of the way the wind was blowing when he arrived at her apartment one evening for dinner. Diana, who was busy getting ready for her royal date, had forgotten all about her dinner guest. She rushed out to the corner store, bought some food and ordered her flatmates to rustle up a meal for him. When she returned from Buckingham Palace at about midnight she was dewy-eyed and her main topic of conversation was Prince Charles’s wellbeing. ‘It’s appalling the way they push him around,’ she said, referring to his commitments and his demanding staff.

With her elevation to the role of Princess of Wales in 1981, the easy familiarity that had characterized Diana’s bachelor life was lost, and for several years there was an inevitable distance between herself and her ‘Coleherne Court’. She did, however, attend the
occasional get-together with James Colthurst, now working in various hospitals in the Home Counties, and a handful of other old friends, including Colthurst’s fellow old Etonian Adam Russell and her schoolfriend Carolyn Bartholomew, who became godmother to Prince William. Even so, it was not until after Diana’s formal visit to St Thomas’ Hospital in 1986 that she and Colthurst began again to see each other more frequently.

They enjoyed a number of jolly lunches at Italian or Chinese restaurants in their old Fulham stamping grounds and it was at these meetings that Colthurst noticed how she would bolt down her food and then go to the ladies – a classic feature of the binge-and-purge symptom that characterizes the so-called slimmers’ disease, bulimia nervosa. At first he didn’t think too much of her behaviour as she had always had a hearty appetite as a teenager. But some time later Carolyn Bartholomew expressed to him her concern about Diana’s eating habits and they discussed the illness and its dire long-term effects. It was after this conversation that Carolyn Bartholomew decided to make her famous threat – that if Diana did not get help she would go to the media and tell them about the Princess’s eating disorder.

By degrees Colthurst began to catch glimpses into the true nature of the life Diana was trying to come to terms with. Her marriage had failed, and her husband was having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, the wife of his army officer friend Andrew, but she was expected to keep up the appearances required by the royal family, and live a life of pretence. At Kensington Palace she felt she was controlled by courtiers who preferred her to be seen – looking quiescently attractive – and not heard. It was a claustrophobic life, made worse in that everyone, from the Queen downwards, was in some way, knowingly or unknowingly, colluding in the duplicity. In Dianaland conspiracies were not theories but a daily reality.

Everyone felt the strain of this deception. When Dickie Arbiter first began working for the Waleses as a press officer in July 1988 he found himself in an ‘impossible’ position, maintaining to the world the illusion of happy royal families while turning a blind eye to the private distance between them. At the end of an engagement
in London, for example, the Prince and Princess would leave together – but they would only travel together as far as Friary Court at St James’s Palace before one of them would get into a second car. ‘She would return to Kensington Palace and he would go off and make, ahem, late-night visits to museums and art galleries,’ Arbiter recollected. ‘It was best not to ask where he really went.’ When Prince Charles broke his arm in a polo accident in June 1990 and was taken to Cirencester Hospital, his staff listened intently to the police radios reporting on the progress of the Princess of Wales on her journey to the hospital, so that they could usher out his first visitor – Camilla – before Diana arrived.

Other royal staff were pulled, often against their will, into the deception: the bodyguard who accompanied the Prince on his nocturnal visits to Middlewick House, Camilla’s home, eleven miles from Highgrove, the Waleses’ country house; the butler and the chef ordered to prepare and serve a supper they knew the Prince would not be eating as he had gone to see his lover; the valet who had to take a pen and circle programmes in the TV listings guide,
Radio Times
, to give the impression that Charles had spent a quiet evening alone at home in front of the television. ‘We’ve all kept his secrets and the strain made me very ill,’ Ken Stronach, a former valet to the Prince, admitted to the
Daily Mail
in January 1995. ‘Everything he told us to do was a lie.’

Diana was effectively the focus of a conspiracy, a conspiracy to deceive and hoodwink both herself and the public that would have continued indefinitely, and which involved those she trusted, admired and loved. When she questioned Prince Charles’s friends about Camilla, they told her that her suspicions were misplaced, that Mrs Parker Bowles was merely an old friend. As Diana’s concerns multiplied they told each other that she was paranoid, fanciful or obsessively jealous. The Queen Mother dismissed her misgivings as the imaginings of a ‘silly girl’ – a view echoed by other senior royals – while Lord Romsey and his wife Penny, who had spent a wasted hour trying to persuade the Prince not to propose to Lady Diana Spencer when he asked for their counsel during a visit to their home of Broadlands, dubbed her ‘that
madwoman’. She was all too often so called by the members of Prince Charles’s set, who continued to say she was paranoid to the end of her days and beyond.

Making her situation untenable was Diana’s belief that by labelling her mad it was only one step away from admitting her to a psychiatric ward. ‘It’s almost as if they want to put me away,’ she told Colthurst. After all, during the desperate days of depression and bulimia she suffered at Balmoral soon after becoming a member of the royal family, the first response had been to summon psychiatrists. The Princess also knew that, under British law, the Queen had legal guardianship of the immediate heirs to the throne, rather than the boys’ mother. If she was ‘put away’ or if she fled, Diana would lose her children.

Far from being the ravings of a madwoman, Diana’s suspicions were to prove regrettably correct, and the painful awareness of the way she had been so grievously deceived, not just by Prince Charles but by so many inside the royal system, instilled in her an absolute distrust of the Establishment and all its works that would shape her behaviour for the rest of her life.

In the late 1980s the Princess was coming to realize that unless she took some drastic action she faced a life sentence of unhappiness and dishonesty. Her first thought was simply to pack her bags and flee to Australia with her two young sons. There were echoes here of the behaviour of her own mother, who, following her acrimonious divorce from the late Earl Spencer, and a subsequent remarriage and divorce, now lives as a virtual recluse on a remote cottage on the bleak island of Seil in north-west Scotland, a world away from her earlier life at the heart of Norfolk aristocracy.

While more and more insiders were becoming aware of the circle of deceit, only a handful of her friends were aware of Diana’s increasing desperation. Sometime in 1990 James Colthurst was made graphically aware of the gravity of her plight when she spoke seriously of standing in the middle of Kensington High Street and shouting out her tale of woe to an astonished world. ‘As your enemies think you are mad,’ Colthurst reminded her drily, ‘that course of action will hardly strengthen your position.’

While his comment snapped her out of her reckless mood, Colthurst and others now began to appreciate how very critical her situation had become. ‘At that stage she wanted to shout her outrage from the rooftops. She wanted to bring the whole house down,’ he recalled. ‘The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.’ He continued, ‘Her anger about the duplicity practised by her husband and the organization had reached a pitch where at times she was out of control, sometimes in tears, others quite depressed. Indeed, the reason why she went for long car drives on her own or had colonic irrigation was to come to terms with the anger she felt.’

Matters were not helped by the instability in the marriage of the Princess’s friend, the Duchess of York, who was in the midst of an affair with a Texan playboy, Steve Wyatt. At the same time, though, Diana was downplaying her own relationship with an army officer, James Hewitt, whom she passed off as a friend who was teaching her boys to ride. Even when she was eventually confronted with her own infidelity she rationalized her behaviour as a reaction to her husband’s long-term relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.

Watching his friend’s emotional pendulum swing back and forth, Colthurst considered her plight. He realized that she would gain some moral strength if she could control at least a small fragment of her life inside the royal system – then she would have a fighting chance of making reasoned decisions about her future.

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.