Diana: In Pursuit of Love (8 page)

While
Diana: Her True Story
was dismissed as a confection by the media and the political establishment, in the days after the first extract was published it became clear that we had to show that the book was not disapproved of by the Princess, or at least had the support of her friends; somehow we had to try to halt the accelerating juggernaut of disbelief and censure. After twenty-four hours in the hot seat, even a seasoned campaigner like Andrew Neil was rattled, concerned that the book’s most contentious story, that of Diana’s suicide bids, was going too far. On Monday 8 June, after a bruising encounter with Max Hastings on the
Today
show, Neil called me to say that before he appeared on the ITV lunchtime news, this time in battle with Tory peer and royal confidant, Lord St John of Fawsley, he needed more ammunition to back these claims. Diana’s friend James Gilbey, who proved a steady and stalwart friend in these difficult days, agreed to issue a statement confirming that the Princess had told him and other friends about her suicide attempts. We cobbled together a form of words on the phone, which I then read to Neil, who took them down in longhand just minutes before his TV appearance. He then proceeded to read Gilbey’s statement out on air: ‘I can confirm that I was interviewed by Andrew Morton when he was researching his book
Diana: Her True Story
. My interviews are represented fairly and
accurately in the book. I did not receive nor ask for any payment. I can confirm that the Princess discussed with me, on numerous occasions, her attempted suicides, as she has done with other close friends. Her friends have given interviews freely in the knowledge that the information would be treated in a responsible manner. I have no further comment to make.’

While St John lamely tried to dismiss Gilbey’s statement with the cliché, ‘With friends like that you don’t need enemies’, at least the dam was holding against the torrent of foaming ire. Of most concern to all of us was the Princess of Wales. She had had a very wobbly weekend when the book was first serialized. Hours before the
Sunday Times
was made available to the public she called the Buckingham Palace duty press officer Dickie Arbiter – who, like everyone else, knew of the book’s existence but not its contents – and asked plaintively: ‘What shall I do, what shall I do?’ His advice was simple – ‘Pour yourself a stiff whisky.’

Events were moving quickly. On Monday 8 June, the same day that St John, Moore and Hastings were on TV and radio shows denigrating the serialization, the Prince and Princess of Wales met at Kensington Palace and for the first time seriously discussed their broken marriage. The first person she contacted after that momentous meeting with her husband was Colthurst: ‘The phone rang and she said, “He’s agreed, he’s agreed [to a separation].” I’ve never heard her so ebullient, she was out of control with excitement. So when she subsequently said on television that she didn’t want a divorce, what she was really saying was that she didn’t want to be
blamed
for the divorce. That was always very important to her.’

In the years since the publication of
Diana: Her True Story
, I have often wondered whether this issue of blame was not one of the chief reasons that Diana pursued the publication of ‘her true story’. As I have mentioned, both James Colthurst and I were unaware of the exact nature of her relationships with James Hewitt and James Gilbey; we did not even know of the existence of Oliver Hoare. Could it be that Diana, knowing that her husband had been unfaithful to her for many years, was worried that one of her dalliances might be made public and that she would be blamed for the failure of her marriage? How bitter this would have been for a
wife who believed that her husband had loved another throughout their marriage.

Neither did the Princess want to be blamed for the book, for that matter. Irrespective of her conversation with her husband, the pressure on her from senior courtiers to renounce and denounce the book was intense. She, however, refused to yield to their demands that she make a statement of criticism. At the same time she was acutely aware that her friends, themselves under attack from their family and friends for their perceived betrayal of the Princess, were desperate for her to give them some public indication of support. There were numerous tearful phone conversations with friends worried that she was going to let them hang out to dry. ‘When Andrew goes on the road it will be fine,’ Diana argued, when referring to my publicity tour for the book, and being rather over-optimistic in her efforts to wriggle out of the entreaties of her friends. She faced a tricky dilemma: how could she tread the narrow path between endorsing their statements and distancing herself from complicity?

We came to the conclusion that, although it was a risk, the only way would be for Diana to be seen publicly with one of the friends who was known to have cooperated with the book. The choice was obvious, for she was in any case due to visit William and Carolyn Bartholomew at their Fulham home that week. Diana viewed this with dread, but Colthurst and Carolyn Bartholomew between them convinced her that it was imperative that she kept that appointment. A picture of Carolyn and Diana together would do more than any argument advanced either by myself or Andrew Neil that the book was authentic. She agreed to take the chance. So on the morning of Wednesday 10 June I called Stuart Higgins, then deputy editor of the
Sun
, who was due to serialize the book after the
Sunday Times
, and told him to send a couple of discreet photographers to Carolyn’s home where they might see something of interest. None of us, not even Diana herself, knew exactly when she would arrive so I didn’t want to take any chances. At seven in the evening, while the Princess was on her way, I got a frantic phone call from William Bartholomew. He had walked up and down his road and could not see any photographers. With Higgins
unavailable, I took a chance and called my former colleague, Ken Lennox, the photographer who had been my partner in the days when we had worked together as the royal duo on the
Daily Star
and who was now employed by the
Sun
’s rival, the
Daily Mirror
. It was a high-risk phone call. While Ken is totally trustworthy and would never reveal his source, I thought it would not take anyone long to link us and come to the conclusion that Diana was part of a surreptitious photo opportunity and therefore behind the book. It was a gamble we had to take. As Ken lived nearby, in Chelsea, he was quickly outside Carolyn’s house, though not in time to capture Diana’s arrival. An hour or so later she emerged from the Bartholomew’s home, and while Ken clicked away she embraced Carolyn and William on the doorstep before leaving. The
Daily Mirror
’s headline accompanying the photographs said it all: ‘Seal of approval.’ True to form, Lennox resisted pressure from his editor Richard Stott to tell him who had given him the tip-off. The following day when Stott was discussing the implications of the story with his royal correspondent James Whitaker, the veteran reporter stated that he had no clue as to the identity of Lennox’s informer. ‘He hasn’t got any royal contacts,’ said James confidently. ‘Well, he seems to have one more than you,’ his editor replied acidly.

For years, everyone has believed the story that it was a ‘well-spoken woman’, possibly Diana herself, who had called the news desks of several national newspapers and tipped them off about her private visit to a friend. Like so much concerning this aspect of her life, the
Daily Mirror
piece was unplanned, an improvised but remarkably effective operation, which staunched the flow of unrestrained criticism. Certainly Richard Stott, the
Daily Mirror
editor, who, in a typical knee-jerk fashion, had tried to rubbish the book because his rivals the
Sun
were serializing it, was given cause to look with fresh eyes at the evidence before him.

Privately Diana paid a high price for supporting a friend. The following day she was hauled over the coals by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, for having visited Carolyn Bartholomew, someone so closely associated with the book. Just minutes after her confrontation with Fellowes, she called James Colthurst and told him that she felt like having a good weep. ‘If
you want to cry, just do it, don’t hold back,’ he said. But public duties denied her the luxury of throwing herself down on her bed – she was about to leave for a scheduled visit to Liverpool. There, a woman in the crowd stroked her face and, as if on cue, the tears coursed down her cheeks. While her obvious distress gained her immediate public sympathy, it sent out mixed messages about her feelings towards her biography. Andrew Neil, who heard the news on his car radio, recalled saying to his driver, ‘Oh, no, I’m going to go down in history as the editor who made the Princess cry.’ As ever, Diana had been much cleverer than anyone truly suspected, her tears to some degree premeditated. While she had given her friends support, through her show of tears in Liverpool she had also distanced herself from the book while winning over public sympathy.

In fact, all Diana’s theatricals would have counted for nothing if one of her other friends had had his way. On 8 June, the day after the first extract was serialized, Michael O’Mara received a phone call that made his blood run cold. It was from a man acting for the photographer Terence Donovan, who was a friend of the Princess. He pointed out that a picture of Diana used by the
Sunday Times
and attributed to Patrick Demarchelier had in fact been taken by his client, Mr Donovan. The picture had been used without Donovan’s permission and he wanted £70,000 in payment. O’Mara’s explanation, that we had used the photograph under the innocent impression that it had been taken by Demarchelier, cut no ice with either Donovan or his negotiator. They informed us that they knew exactly how we had obtained the picture, since Donovan had given it only to Diana, and that if we did not pay this inflated price – the usual fee at the time for a picture used in a book was £500 – they would reveal to the world who had supplied the picture. It meant that Diana’s complicity with the book would be exposed in spite of all our attempts to camouflage her involvement. Both sides dug their heels in; at one point my publisher had a group of employees on standby, ready to cut the offending picture out of the book with razor blades. In the end O’Mara paid Donovan a five-figure sum for the use of his picture, a price which also guaranteed his silence.

Had that story come out at the time it could well have tipped Diana over the edge. For, as Colthurst, Carolyn Bartholomew, James Gilbey, and others, witnessed, the first few days after the book’s appearance in the
Sunday Times
tested the Princess’s resolve to the limit. But very soon she began to receive the kind of support that always meant so much to her, from her public. ‘The flak was intense and for a time she did get cold feet,’ said Colthurst. ‘Then the letters of support came pouring in. There were thousands of them, many from women who had suffered from eating disorders and accepted their lot in silence. Many told her that they were inspired by her example. She knew that somehow she had touched the heart of humanity and had been able to make a difference. That meant so much to her.’ Just as encouraging was a report from the Eating Disorders Association, shortly after the book was published on 16 June, saying that they had had an enormous increase in first-time callers asking for help. The response was entirely due to the Princess’s courage in making public her private difficulties.

Even as these supportive letters were landing on her desk, an article appeared in the
Sunday Express
headlined ‘My Regrets by Diana’, which implied that the Princess wished she had never become involved. She was quick to telephone James to repudiate the article and to apologize for any implication that she was in any way responsible for it. Over the years there have been endless suggestions that she regretted her part in the book, that her involvement was an example of aberrant behaviour which she entered into at a low point in her life. The truth of the matter is that she had put what she called ‘the dark ages’ of her royal life behind her and was keen to move on to a more fulfilling future. Certainly she was nervous but she was also resolved to break out of the prison her life had become. David Puttnam was certain she never regretted her involvement in the book, saying, ‘She owned what she had done. She knew what she was doing and took a calculated risk even though she was scared shitless. But I never heard one word of regret, I promise you. With all her faults she was a good woman.’

The original idea behind the book was for the Princess to tell her side of the story, and to dispel the myths that had been woven around her marriage, but it soon became clear that collaborating with the book had psychological benefits for Diana. For those intense twelve months, she went through a process of purging the past, a kind of confessional-through-reminiscence in which she was able to give voice to her anger and her regrets, as well as her dreams and ambitions. The book was a biography – but given the extent of its subject’s participation, it was also the nearest the Princess could come to an autobiography and self-expression – and so had the additional benefit of boosting her self-confidence.

In mid-June, a matter of days after the book’s publication, James Colthurst was driving to Solihull in the Midlands for a board meeting at his medical company when he received an urgent page from Diana. He pulled off the M6 motorway and found a phone box in the nearest service station. Diana was waiting frantically for his call. She told him that she and her husband had had a meeting with the Queen and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle to discuss their marriage and the wider impact on the monarchy of any suggestion of a separation. She had expected her husband to stand by the decision they had made and argue for a formal separation, but to her disgust he had remained silent during a tirade from his father.

While her husband’s failure of nerve in the face of parental disapproval was no more than she had come to expect, what had frightened her was the moment when her father-in-law confronted her about her involvement with the book. When she denied any knowledge of it, he retorted that they had a tape of a telephone discussion in which she was talking to an unidentified person about which newspaper should be given serialization of the book: the
Sunday Times
or the
Daily Mail
. Once more she stonewalled, denying his accusation, but when the meeting ended she left Windsor Castle alarmed and confused. Unless this was an elaborate bluff, which seemed extremely unlikely, what she had suspected for years had now been confirmed – that her telephone conversations were routinely tapped by an official government agency, whether it be the police or security services.