Chapter Sixteen ‘The Most Bizarre Life Imaginable after Her Childhood…’ #2
But the trouble really started for me in my gap year between leaving Eton and beginning life as a student at Oxford.
For six weeks I worked as a featured extra in Another Country, a period movie starring the young debutants Colin Firth and Rupert Everett.
One evening, after filming, a few of us got into a squabble in a nightclub, when we were falsely accused of not having paid our drinks bill – something that was impossible, as all customers had to pay when ordering.
I had been mentioned in the papers that morning, and the thuggish bouncer who engineered the spat said he recognized me from that coverage.
He affected outrage at our alleged dishonesty, and threw us out, before announcing on the club’s loudspeakers: ‘Guess who we just kicked out of the club? Only Lady Di’s kid brother! ’
Over the next couple of days, I was berated in the tabloids for behaviour that had no relationship to the truth.
My mother was so furious at the slur against my honesty that she arranged for me to meet libel lawyers.
They advised me to avoid the stress of litigation over a relatively unserious matter.
If I pushed ahead, the lawyers warned, the papers would mark me out for future vengeance.
*
As soon as I arrived as a student at Oxford University, in late 1983, I was bothered by the press and by a persistent stalker. My college, Magdalen, installed a landline in my room for security.
One day Magdalen’s head porter, Mr Strutt, saw a journalist loitering outside my room.
When he asked him to leave, he refused to do so.
Strutt, a former policeman, called for back-up.
This appeared in the substantial form of Tony, a broad-faced fellow porter who spoke with a soft West Country burr.
Tony’s pastime was growing outsized vegetables, something he was so successful at that he would warrant an obituary in The Times.
Tony sized up the situation, spotted the intruder’s camera bag on the ground, and promptly plonked himself as heavily as he could on it.
There was a tinkling sound. This, according to Tony’s Times obituarist, prompted the head porter to say, in mock concern: ‘Oh dear, sir! I do hope there was nothing valuable in your bag?’
On another occasion, early in my Oxford career, I was in London, walking near my mother’s old flat in Belgravia, when I saw a large man apparently being supported by the arms. My first thought was that he must be having a fit and that bystanders had come to assist him.
As I walked over to see if I could help, another man of similar build ran off down the street, with people shouting for him to stop.
Realizing that the fleeing figure must be some sort of criminal, I set off in pursuit. He soon ran out of breath, and stood panting, with his back to a wall, cursing me for my interference. I stood guard, waiting for whoever had been trying to apprehend him to appear.
When they arrived, they explained that the man I had caught and his accomplice had been spotted stealing from loading bays outside Harrods.
The store detectives asked for my name and address, in case I was needed as a witness. I subsequently received a garish tie in the post from Harrods, as a thank-you for getting involved, and I expected that to be that.
But instead, when the man was tried and received a short prison sentence, a journalist from the Daily Mirror accosted me outside my college bedroom.
‘You’re an extremely privileged young man,’ he said, with contempt. ‘How do you feel about sending an unemployed dad with five children to prison?’
I replied, ‘All I can do is respect the court’s decision,’ and walked on, ignoring his further questioning.
But this was not the quote that the reporter wanted, so he invented one of his own that conformed to his prejudices: ‘Dashed good show!’ he pretended I had replied. ‘I’m glad the blighter got what he deserved!’
This fitted with the image that the tabloids were constructing for ‘Di’s brother’, which had me down as a pleasure-addicted wastrel. They began to refer to me as ‘Champagne Charlie’.
I found my portrayal as some mindless upper-class hooligan extremely upsetting. I became a tabloid punchbag, often defamed many times a month, and it was not just the words that were abusive.
Once, a paparazzo burst into a men’s loo in a nightclub, his flashbulb firing off as he captured me standing at a urinal.
These images did not appear at the time, but I heard the photographer being interviewed on the radio a few years ago, boasting about still having them tucked away – ‘Something for me to cash in for my retirement!’ he chortled.
This all sounds annoying, but not too serious.
Yet the cumulative effect of being defamed dozens of times each year was traumatic, and devastating.
I would feel impotent and worthless in the face of constant attack.
After particularly vicious kickings by the press, which would occur year after year, I would contemplate ending my life.
It seemed like the only way to escape such sustained mental torture.
I realize now (but had no idea then) that my form of neurodivergence left me subject to Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD).
This is an intense emotional pain in the face of others’ rejection or criticism.
When beaten up by the tabloids I felt a sadness so extreme that it was akin to grief.
It was no consolation that I knew what they were saying about me was baseless. I was consumed by shame and despair.
I believe that Diana also suffered from RSD. It is easy for outsiders to ask, why would she care what the papers were saying about her, since she had it all – health, beauty, fame and status? But that is now how some with ADHD experience attacks by others.
It is a sad fact that, in her later years, Diana drove herself more than once to Beachy Head, the highest sea cliff in England, while contemplating ending it all. Her love for her sons stopped her from going further.
I became wary about going out in Oxford during my three years at the university, instead retreating to the Falconry, a quirky hunting lodge at the back of Althorp’s park built for a seventeenth-century royal visit, that my father allowed me use of.
Here trusted friends who knew me from before Diana’s marriage would come to stay in private.
I also had use of a bolthole in London. Once, when I was there, two men knocked at the door. They introduced themselves as journalists from, respectively, the Sun and the Daily Mirror, the two largest-circulation tabloids at that time.
They insisted on coming in, saying they had a very important proposal to put to me.
They claimed I had to accept that I was always going to be in the papers, and that their editors had already decided the light in which I would for ever be portrayed.
‘You see, it’s like a fairytale,’ one of them said.
‘Your sister, well, she’s the princess, isn’t she?
The fairytale princess. And you, well, even if you collect stamps and take in abandoned puppies, we aren’t going to make you look good.
You’re always going to be Lady Di’s ne’er-do-well brother. ’
Since that was my lot, they said, how about a deal? Why not work with them? They would run stories I gave them about myself and put a less negative spin on them than would otherwise be the case.
I was only twenty years old, not at all used to the ways of the world, but I wanted to cling to what I had been brought up to see as decent values.
Being a tabloid informant – even against myself!
– was not in the code of conduct that my parents had passed on to me.
I found what was being put to me absurd but also insulting.
I thanked them for their time, declined their offer, and invited them to leave.
As they did so, one of them turned, and eyed me up and down with contempt.
‘You, son,’ he said, darkly, ‘are making the biggest mistake of your fucking life.’
Even back then, when coming to terms with such bizarre moments, I realized I was on the receiving end of but an infinitesimal proportion of the appalling treatment that Diana was having to endure.
She was living centre stage in a world that was captivated by her every look, her every move.
The press might indeed have decided to present Diana to the world as a fairytale princess, but they were not going to let her get away with a fairytale existence.
Skip Notes
* Dr Bloomer’s family told me four decades later that, after he had been afflicted with dementia, the memory that died last for him was that of having looked after Diana when she was young.