Diana: In Pursuit of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 incongruoussurroundings 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.

C HAPTER T WO
     

     
    The Year of Living Dangerously
    I T 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