Twenty five years ago, the royal family was plunged into chaos when a book, Diana: Her True Story, by journalist Andrew Morton became a sizzling, international bestseller.
The book contained a series of devastating revelations — among them, how Diana, Princess of Wales, developed bulimia and the extent to which her marriage and quality of life had been affected by her husband’s ongoing affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
The royal family scrambled to find the source of the leak, only to discover years later that it was Diana herself who had given the interviews. She had, in fact, recorded a series of raw and unflinchingly honest audio tapes that were passed onto Morton via an intermediary.
In the tapes — transcripts of which have recently been published in an anniversary edition of the book and featured on The Daily Mail — the ‘People’s Princess’ claims her bulimia developed after Prince Charles made a comment about her being “a bit chubby.”
“My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me,” she said. “And the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate. I remember the first time I made myself sick. I was so thrilled because I thought this was the release of tension…. The first time I was measured for my wedding dress, I was 29 inches around the waist. The day I got married, I was 23½ inches. I had shrunk into nothing from February to July. I had shrunk to nothing.”
Princess Diana claimed her bulimia developed after a careless comment from Prince Charles.
The explosive tapes also reveal the much-loved royal tried to self-harm just two weeks after her wedding.
The royal, who tragically died at the age of 36, said she tried to self-harm just weeks after her wedding.
“We stayed up there [at Balmoral] from August to October. I got terribly, terribly thin. People started commenting: ‘Your bones are showing.’ By October, I was in a very bad way. I was so depressed, and I was trying to cut my wrists with razor blades. It rained and rained and rained. I came down early [to London] to seek treatment, not because I hated Balmoral, but because I was in such a bad way,” she said.
Charles and Diana sit for a set of photographs in the months leading up to their wedding.
In the tapes, Diana also detailed the moment she realised her soon-to-be husband was in love with another woman.
“The first thing that hit me was my [future] husband sending Camilla Parker Bowles flowers when she had meningitis: ‘To Gladys from Fred’….I once heard him on the telephone in his bath on his hand-held set, saying: ‘Whatever happens, I will always love you.’ I told him afterwards that I had listened at the door, and we had a filthy row.”
Charles and Camilla had, of course, nicknamed each other Fred and Gladys during their long affair.
She went on to describe him as having been “hot and cold,” and subject to intense changes in mood.
“He’d found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb, and in a way he was obsessed with me. But it was hot and cold, hot and cold. You never knew what mood it was going to be—up and down, up and down,” she said.
Charles and Camilla are pictured following the church blessing of their civil wedding ceremony, 09 April 2005.
In another first, Prince William and Prince Harry will soon talk in detail about the days and weeks that followed the death of their mother in a new BBC documentary.
William was just 15 and Harry only 12, when their beloved mother was tragically killed in a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997.
She was just 36.
Since her tragic death in 1997, William and Harry have made it their life’s work to continue their late mother’s incredible legacy.
The boys were just 15 and 12 respectively when their mother died in a car crash.
In a teaser for the feature-length documentary, provisionally called Diana, the Duke of Cambridge, 34, explains he and his younger brother felt compelled to comment or “stand up” and protect their mother — something they weren’t able to do at the time of her tragic passing.
“Part of the reason why Harry and I want to do this is because we feel we owe it to her,” William said. “I think an element of it is feeling like we let her down when we were younger. We couldn’t protect her. We feel we at least owe her 20 years on to stand up for her name and remind everybody of the character and person that she was. Do our duties as sons in protecting her.”
The 90-minute feature, one of two authorised documentaries about the much-loved royal that will be released this year to mark the 20th anniversary of her death, will also include interviews with close friends, political figures and journalists.
Air dates for the documentary are yet to be announced.
