Diana: In Pursuit of Love

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

Book: Diana: In Pursuit of Love by Andrew Morton Read Free Book Online
Authors: Andrew Morton
sitting in the royal limousine polishing her speeches minutes before an engagement.
    ‘The speeches meant a lot to her,’ said Colthurst. ‘It was an area where she gradually realized that she could put across her own message. It gave her a real sense of empowerment and achievement that an audience actually listened to what she had to say rather than just gazed at her clothes, hairstyle and general appearance. She used to ring up very excited if there had been coverage on TV or radio, delighted that she had received praise for her thoughts.’
    The procedure, while amateurish, was highly efficient – even though it was usually undertaken in an atmosphere of barely suppressed frenzy and panic. Once, in August 1991, Diana rang in agitation from a Mediterranean cruise on board a yacht owned by the tycoon John Latsis because a speech she was due to give to the Red Cross had not arrived. In fact, Colthurst had faxed it to the boat two days earlier but a crew member had forgotten to give it to her. On another, later, occasion the Princess rang him in a panic as he was eating his breakfast at his farmhouse near Pangbourne in Berkshire. She was due to attend a retirement lunch for her friend Lord King, the former British Airways chairman, and had decided at the last minute to say a few words. In between munching his morning toast, James, pacing around his kitchen in his dressing gown, dictated his hasty thoughts to the Princess who painstakingly wrote them down in long hand.
    One lunchtime meeting in September 1991 summed up the frantic mood of her life at that time. James and I were enjoying a liquid lunch in the Stag’s Head public house in London’s West End, editing and rewriting a speech she was due to give to a child-psychiatry symposium. This was the famous ‘hugging speech’ – which won her an award – in which the Princess informed her highly qualified audience of some 800 doctors of the enormous value of a hug, saying that a cuddle was ‘cheap, environmentally friendly and needs minimal instruction’.
    As we tinkered with the phrasing, Colthurst’s bleeper went off. We initially thought it was an amateur photographer we had asked, with Diana’s knowledge, to take informal snaps of the Princess and her boys as they entered San Lorenzo’s restaurant where they were having lunch. In fact it was Diana herself. When James found a public telephone and called her, she informed him that his carefully crafted address had quickly to be cut from 2,100 to 1,600 words. The tone also had to be softened, she said, because the reference to hugging might be seen as a criticism of the Queen and the distant way that she had brought up her own family. During the conversation she made a wry comment about a fellow lunchtime diner, the Marchioness of Douro, a one-time friend who had fallen out with Diana when the Princess discovered that she was reportedly allowing her Scottish estate to be used by Prince Charles and Camilla for a romantic tryst. In delighted tones, Diana related how her former friend had been suitably embarrassed during their chance meeting.
    This was by no means the first conversation of the day, nor would it be the last. Earlier, Diana had dismissed as ‘nonsense’ a Nigel Dempster story about the Queen ordering Diana to be with Charles – a point she was happy to have publicized if a journalist should call to ask me about it. On the same day, in between rewriting Diana’s speech, I briefed Stuart Higgins, then deputy editor of the Sun , about a secret trip Prince Charles was taking to a friend’s château in southern France. At the time Diana thought that Camilla was going too and we were very anxious to obtain independent confirmation of that, preferably photographic, to support her allegations of Charles’s infidelity. At the last minute, however, Camilla decided against joining the Prince.
    Indeed, throughout the summer of 1991, the Camilla question was the most difficult. As the Parker Bowleses had

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