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

OK.’ ‘Even though I had known her since she was a teenager I was most surprised by the way that she discussed her suicide bids so freely,’ Colthurst commented. ‘She was very open too in the way she talked about Camilla, her family and the royal family, and one could feel her anger around these issues.’
    At the second meeting with Michael O’Mara, James brought along his battered tape recorder. As soon as he played the tape O’Mara’s worries about its authenticity evaporated – to be replaced by another worry. ‘How the hell are we going to prove this stuff?’ he asked.
    Clearly, we would have to find evidence to substantiate everything the Princess told us. What was more, since we were not able to quote her directly, we needed to find close friends of hers who could back up Diana’s story in their own words.
    In the early weeks of this project, it was the Princess who was setting the pace. My notes from the evening of 2 July 1991, the day after her thirtieth birthday (which in the end she had spent aloneat Kensington Palace), gives a flavour of her impatient mood. At 5.10 p.m., while Colthurst and I were deep in conversation, his bleeper went off. It was Diana. ‘Sees major urgency for the book,’ I jotted down in my notebook. ‘She thought it could be brought out in weeks. Going to Earl Spencer to pack up a few photo albums and bring them down. If Camilla Parker Bowles leaked the story of the ball to Dempster then the mistress is running the show. Disgusted by the way it has gone.’
    If I needed any signal about how tricky this project would be, it came a few days later when I wrote another article for the Sunday Times , headlined ‘Truce’, detailing the behind-the-scenes moves by such unlikely characters as the former DJ Sir Jimmy Savile to bring an end to the warfare between Charles and Diana. Even though the story was accurate, my long-term thinking was to put rival journalists off the scent by giving the impression that all had gone quiet inside the Waleses’ household, as well as underlining my credibility as a writer with an inside track – thus, I hoped, ensuring that when the book was published it would be taken seriously. I was trying to be too clever by half – the strategy crumbled to dust the moment the book was published. In the Sunday Times article I mentioned how, for Diana’s birthday, her sitting room was decorated with helium-filled balloons. It was a point the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, asked Diana about when courtiers carefully scrutinized the article to find clues as to my impeccable source. A few days later, the Sun ’s veteran royal photographer, Arthur Edwards, phoned me with a warning. ‘You’ve got them rattled,’ he said. ‘For f—k’s sake be careful. They are looking because you are getting it right. They are turning the place over very quietly.’ His counsel of caution was echoed by the Daily Mail ’s royal reporter Richard Kay, who had been told by his newspaper’s crime correspondent that the police had been asked to find my mole. A few months later, my tatty office above an Indian restaurant in central London was broken into, a camera stolen and files rifled through.
    With the need for caution paramount and Diana eager to press ahead, it was clear that James would have to take on a much bigger role than he had previously envisaged. He had thought he wouldbe able to bow out after making a couple of tapes – instead he found himself visiting Kensington Palace on a regular basis armed with lists of questions that I had carefully compiled, to ask Diana to fill in the gaps she had left in her early testimony. For the next year he acted as the go-between, as the three of us – Mike O’Mara, James and myself – became her shadow court, not only writing, researching and producing what was to all intents and purposes an ‘unofficial official’ biography, but advising on her day-to-day life. Everything from handling staff problems, to