Diana: In Pursuit of Love by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online

Prince Charles’s valet Michael Fawcett. She had come to dislike Fawcett heartily and when he married Debbie Burke, a housemaid who was eventually to work for Prince Philip, in September 1991, the Princess somewhat childishly did not give the couple a wedding present. Fawcett recognized the slight as deliberate and in his anger complained to all and sundry, his gripes so vociferous that at one stage Diana’s detective, Ken Wharfe, told him, in no uncertain terms, to ‘get a grip’. Too late, the Princess realized that most people would conclude that she, Diana, with her reputation as a generous giver of presents, was being mean-spirited. She talked the issue over with Colthurst, who came up with the diplomatic suggestion that she should give Fawcett and his bride an engraved photograph album and make some excuse for the delay – such as that they had misspelled his wife’s name. He then went to a store in Bond Street and bought her an album, which he had appropriately engraved. When she presented it to Charles’s valet – at a very public occasion – he was genuinely taken aback and socially wrong-footed, a reaction which ensured that Diana, for once, was able to enjoy a frisson of satisfaction from a small moral victory.
    Much as the Princess depended on him, however, she did not tell Colthurst everything. While she was raging against her husband’s infidelity, she was hiding the fact that she had enjoyed a long ifsporadic love affair with Captain James Hewitt from 1986 to 1990; and a dalliance with James Gilbey, who was later to be exposed as the male voice on the notorious ‘Squidgygate’ tapes, telephone conversations illicitly recorded over New Year 1989–1990. Throughout her sessions with Colthurst she dismissed Hewitt as a friend and nothing more, always speaking of him in less than flattering tones. Colthurst was not entirely convinced by her assertions, but she was never open about Hewitt, just as she avoided discussing her friendship with James Gilbey. Until, that is, she needed Colthurst’s help.
    The first indications of her relationship with James Hewitt, which was alluded to in a Sunday newspaper in March 1991, came during the 1991 Gulf War when the dashing but indiscreet tank commander borrowed a news reporter’s satellite phone in the Gulf to call the Princess at Kensington Palace. Diana was so alarmed by the prospect of Hewitt being confronted on his return from the war by newsmen who would link her romantically with him that she asked Colthurst to draft a statement for Hewitt to read out to the media. ‘She was worried because she couldn’t trust him to open his mouth and come out with joined-up sentences,’ Colthurst said. ‘Understandably she was never explicit about the true nature of her relationship with him.’
    Hewitt flatly turned down our request for an interview for the book, and with Diana passing the relationship off as a friendship there was nowhere left to go with the story. We did not have the faintest inkling either about her infatuation with the art dealer Oliver Hoare, who was the object of her love and devotion by early 1992. It was one of Diana’s enduring, and, for many, intriguing, qualities that no matter how close individuals thought they were to her – family, old friends like Colthurst, fortune tellers – she never revealed absolutely everything.
    Rather less dramatic than his function as repository for the Princess’s confidences (some of them), but in the long term more effective, was Colthurst’s capacity as her unofficial speechwriter. She complained that the texts prepared for her by charity officials or the Palace were ‘heavy, formal and dull’ and wanted James toinject a ‘Diana element’ into the address. They would discuss what Diana wanted to say, James would prepare a draft and she would contribute further thoughts and refinements. I too would find myself involved, and quite often even the Princess’s bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, would be found