Chapter Nineteen ‘She Remained Intact – True to Herself’ #2
As I look back on this distressing side of Diana’s life, I feel embarrassment and guilt that I was of so little help to her as she battled such demons.
I tried to stick to the vow I had taken, after witnessing those old family friends fawning over Diana in that restaurant soon after her elevation to superstardom.
I remained conscious that I had the duty always to be true to my sister, but maybe I should have been less rigid in my approach.
I suppose I was comforted a little, after some of my private correspondence with Diana was posthumously released to the media – maliciously, for profit, and without context – to receive a letter from Zelda West-Meads, one of Britain’s most eminent relationship counsellors.
She had helped Diana with her issues, and had been professionally supportive of me:
I know how much you loved Diana [Zelda wrote to me] and I also know how much anguish is caused within families when one of their very loved members suffers from anorexia and bulimia.
It is, as you know all too well, extremely difficult to try and get that person to recognize their illness and to get them to get help.
You feel quite desperate at times because you see the person you love on such a self-destructive course.
Try as you might they just refuse to get help, leaving the people who love them feeling impotent and despairing. As you very rightly say part of that illness is that the person can become manipulating and deceitful.
I am really sorry that what you wrote to your sister has been misinterpreted and not seen as a loving brother having the courage to confront her in the hope that this might just get her to seek the help which was so needed.
I hope you can draw comfort from your friends and people who know you, because they will know how much you loved Diana, and how unfair and cruel the recent press coverage has been.
I still wish I had done more. My telling Diana how beautiful she looked on her wedding day, when the reality was that she had lost an unhealthy amount of weight through starving herself, was far from helpful.
I had no idea that her food issues partly stemmed from a feeling that she was unloved by the man she adored.
This ghastly possibility had first arisen three months before her engagement.
The Sunday Mirror ran a dramatic front-page exposé in November 1980.
In what became known as the ‘Royal Train Scandal’ the paper claimed it had been tipped off by an impeccable source (a police officer, it transpired) that the Royal Train had pulled into sidings in Wiltshire for a secret assignation.
Prince Charles was the only member of his family on the train when a blonde woman had been spotted getting on board.
She was known to have stayed with him on the train for several hours.
The thrust of the exclusive was that Charles had, disgracefully, used the publicly funded vehicle for a tryst with Diana.
The Royal Train’s purpose was to transport senior members of the Royal Family round Britain to facilitate their official duties, not to provide a place for nighttime assignations.
But Diana knew that the blonde was not her.
Indeed, although she was in love with the prince, there was no physical relationship at this stage (she told me when and where that side of things started, and it was weeks later).
Also, she had been fifty miles from Wiltshire on the night of the alleged rendezvous.
As Diana protested at the time, ‘I was so shocked. I simply couldn’t believe it. I’ve never been anywhere near the train, let alone in the middle of the night.’ Buckingham Palace forcefully confirmed that the allegation against Diana was ‘a total fabrication’.
As it was not Diana, then who was the blonde? After her marriage took the direction it did, Diana became convinced that she must have been Camilla Parker-Bowles – particularlyas the railway siding was just nineteen miles from Camilla’s home.
The Royal Train Scandal, although picked up around the world, had slipped into the background by the time Diana was presented by the press, globally, as the prince’s blushing fiancée in February 1981.
In the television interview that accompanied the engagement, the couple were asked if they were in love.
Diana replied, ‘Of course!’ while Prince Charles famously countered, ‘Whatever “in love” means…’
Nineteen years old, deliriously happy, and caught up in the huge excitement of the engagement, Diana must have pushed any nagging questions about the Royal Train story to one side.
But that incident marked the beginning of seventeen years of fear and resentment of the supposed ex-girlfriend who seemingly would not go away.
A month after her engagement, Diana was photographed in tears saying goodbye to Prince Charles as he was about to board a plane on official business.
Newspapers cooed with delight at what they thought to be the pain of a lovestruck young innocent being parted from her fiancé.
The truth was very different. Diana was completely at sea having found a bracelet that Prince Charles had bought for Camilla.
Last year a very old man, who was once one of King Charles’s palace aides, took me aside at an event in London.
‘I love the monarchy,’ he said, by way of preamble, ‘and I will always serve the Crown with total loyalty. I am also a great admirer of the King, in many ways. But I will never forgive him for what he did to your dear sister when marrying her. It was double-dealing, pure and simple.’
All those years on, this stalwart royalist still bristled with anger and dismay on Diana’s behalf.