Diana: In Pursuit of Love Read Online Free PDF

had published over the years.
    As the meeting proceeded O’Mara warmed to Colthurst. ‘He was clearly no con man because he didn’t ask for money,’ he reasoned. But a test was set – a tape recording of Diana’s ‘memoirs’ was to be made before the amateur conspirators met for a second time.
    While I was keen to interview the Princess myself, it was out of the question. At six-foot-four and as a writer known to Palace staff, I would hardly be inconspicuous. And as soon as it became knownthat I was talking to the Princess, the balloon would go up and courtiers would step in to prevent her from speaking her mind. James, as an old friend, was, on the other hand, perfectly placed to undertake this delicate and, as it proved, historic mission.
    Armed with a list of questions I had prepared and an old tape recorder, Colthurst set off on his bicycle and pedalled up the drive to Kensington Palace. It was May 1991 and he was about to conduct the first of a series of interviews that continued through the summer and autumn and would ultimately change for ever the way the world saw the British royal family.
    ‘I remember it vividly,’ Dr Colthurst recollected. ‘We sat in her sitting room at Kensington Palace. Diana was dressed quite casually in jeans and blue shirt. Before we began she took the phone off the hook, as she did each time I asked her questions, and closed the door. Whenever we were interrupted by someone knocking she removed the body microphone and hid it in cushions on her sofa.
    ‘For the first twenty minutes of that first interview she was very happy and laughing, especially when talking about incidents during her schooldays,’ Colthurst went on. ‘When she got to the heavy issues, the suicide attempts, Camilla and her bulimia, there was an unmistakable sense of release, of unburdening. Yet I felt that she had said these things before to other people as there was an air that her answers, while genuine, were well practised. It was obvious that she had often vented her concerns.’
    As Diana spoke, the sense of injustice she felt at the way she had been treated by Camilla, Prince Charles and the royal family grew all the more keen – articulating the sacrifices she had made seemed to define her feelings of grievance and anger. In spite of her raw emotional state, what the Princess had to say was highly believable and many pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of her life began to fall into place. Deep-seated and intense feelings of abandonment and rejection had dogged her for most of her life – ever since, when she was just six years old, her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, had walked out on her father.
    It was a bleak emotional landscape that Diana described in recalling an unhappy childhood – her sense of guilt at not beingborn a boy to continue the family line, her mother’s tears, her father’s lonely silences and her younger brother Charles sobbing in the night. There were other distressing revelations in store as Colthurst went through the list of questions I had prepared. As it was, many questions were made redundant simply because once she started talking she only needed a brief prompt for her to discuss some aspect of her life, such as her schooldays.
    ‘When I left after that first long interview I realized that I had a large job on my hands,’ said Colthurst. ‘I felt that she needed to be protected from herself, so in the early months there were several issues, such as the suicide attempts, which I rather soft-pedalled on. At the same time it was obvious that the situation had to be resolved, otherwise it would have meant the end of her. She was certainly not mentally unstable but the circumstances were so crushing that it had the potential to create instability. The potential for her taking her own life was always there.’
    Early in their first conversation, Colthurst said to her, ‘Give me a shout if there is something you don’t want me to touch on.’ Her reply was telling: ‘No, no, it’s