Penny Junor: Prince William

As one of them said, ‘She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.’

‘Is it all right if I call you Michael, like His Royal Highness does?’ Diana asked Michael Colborne, a friendly father figure who was the Prince’s right-hand man and with whom she shared an office.

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Will you call me Diana?’

‘No,’ said Colborne. ‘Certainly not. I appreciate what you’ve just said, but if it all works out you’re going to be the Princess of Wales and I’ll have to call you Ma’am then, so we might as well start now.’

He wasn’t being unkind, he was simply being truthful. She was joining a traditional, formal and hiearchical institution and, however close they came to members of the Family, courtiers never allowed themselves to believe that they were anything other than servants. The adjustment was hard for a young girl who had spent hours sharing confidences with the kitchen staff at Althorp.

Who knows how she imagined life would be with Charles? She had never watched a couple play happy families. Her role models were probably taken from magazines and the idealised plots of the Barbara Cartland romantic novels she had grown up with. She certainly hadn’t expected that marriage would leave her feeling so lonely.

But she was marrying a man who was already heavily engaged in royal duties. Almost every day took him to a different part of the country. Immediately after her arrival at Buckingham Palace Charles had left for a five-week foreign tour, organised long before their engagement. His diary was set six months in advance and there was no room for manoeuvre; any cancellation, he knew, meant letting people down and he was too conscientious to even contemplate it. Whatever he might have wanted privately, duty and discipline were second nature to him; he had been brought up to respect both, whereas Diana had never had occasion for either. She was charm personified and had excellent manners – she would have written and sealed a thank-you letter to a dinner party host that same evening before their heads had touched the pillow – but she had never stuck with something that she found hard going.

Charles was thirty-two years old and he longed for a happy and companionable family life with children that so many of his friends had; but his lifestyle was well established. He worked hard and he played hard – hunting and shooting in the winter, polo and fishing in the summer; he had a close, if curious, family who traditionally spent high days and holidays together; and when he wasn’t working or with family, he had a wide circle of friends whose company he enjoyed.

He imagined that Diana would fit into his world without his having to change. He assumed that she would like his friends as much as he did, enjoy his country pursuits, share his passion for gardening, opera and old churches and be happy to settle down companionably with a good book and some classical music. He imagined that because she was so young she would easily adapt and fit into everything that royal life demanded.

But she didn’t. Despite having been brought up in the country, she was only nineteen years old and, not surprisingly, was far happier in the city. She hated horses and had no interest in taking part in field sports. Like most teenage girls she read trashy novels and magazines rather than literature and philosophy; she listened to pop rather than classical music (although she came to appreciate it and always loved ballet) and would much rather have spent a day gossiping over lunch with a friend, shopping or watching a good film than digging and weeding or sitting on a hillside with a sketch pad.

Charles had little experience of putting himself in other people’s shoes and was surprisingly naive. He didn’t see that Diana might have a problem with his former girlfriend remaining in his circle of friends. As he saw it, he had chosen Diana as the one he wanted to marry and his romantic involvement with Camilla was over. It never crossed his mind that Diana might be suspicious that they were still involved or that he loved Camilla more than her. Finding a gold bracelet he had bought for her on Michael Colborne’s desk was, in Diana’s mind, all the proof she needed. It had a blue enamel disc with the initials GF, which stood for Girl Friday, his nickname for Camilla. Diana was convinced the entwined letters stood for Gladys and Fred, the names she thought they called each other and felt nothing but ‘Rage, rage, rage!’ It was, however, one of several pieces of jewellery he had bought for special friends as a means of saying thank you for having looked after him in his bachelor years.

Diana told Andrew Morton she had felt like ‘a lamb to the slaughter’ as she walked up the aisle at St Paul’s Cathedral on their wedding day in 1981. Her sisters, Sarah and Jane, have told friends they will always feel guilty for not helping her when she said she wanted to back out at the eleventh hour. Either way, there is no doubt that when the world thought they were witnessing a fairytale and celebrated with abandon, both Charles and Diana knew that something was amiss.

The honeymoon was hardly an intimate getaway à deux . After three nights at Broadlands, Lord Mountbatten’s former home, where Charles had entertained previous girlfriends, they cruised the Mediterranean on the royal yacht Britannia , along with a crew of 256, a valet, a Private Secretary and an equerry. During the day Charles would sit blissfully immersed in a Laurens van der Post book, while Diana, according to him, dashed about chatting up the crew and the cooks in the galley. They would have seen a happy-go-lucky girl who made them all laugh. But Diana confided to friends that physically the honeymoon was a disaster, and beneath the cheerful exterior the old feelings of rejection were bubbling away. There were fearsome rows and rages and tears, and during the final stage of the honeymoon, spent at Balmoral stalking and fishing with family and friends (not many people’s idea of a honeymoon), Diana had lost so much weight that Charles arranged for her to see a psychiatrist in London. Even her fingers were noticeably thinner; her wedding ring no longer fitted and had to be made smaller.

The medical profession’s understanding of eating disorders is imprecise even today. Thirty years ago, when Diana first displayed symptoms, most people had never heard of anorexia or bulimia.

As Diana said herself, ‘All the analysts and psychiatrists you could ever dream of came plodding in trying to sort me out. Put me on high doses of Valium and everything else. But the Diana that was still very much there had decided it was just time; patience and adapting were all that were needed. It was me telling them what I needed. They were telling me “pills”! That was going to keep them happy – they could go to bed at night and sleep, knowing the Princess of Wales wasn’t going to stab anyone.’

Prince Charles was dumbfounded. He hadn’t the faintest idea what was the matter with the beautiful wife who was wasting away before his very eyes and who was so troubled. At one time she was so thin he thought she was going to die and he thought he must be responsible, that marriage to him was just too awful or that he had destroyed her by bringing her into his bizarre way of life. He spoke to no one about the difficulties they were experiencing, but gradually became increasingly depressed and despondent.

The condition often affects fertility but clearly not in Diana’s case, and she discovered she was pregnant on the second day of their tour of Wales, in October.

On the rain-sodden streets she was a star, a complete natural, her smile and her warmth brightening up the dull day, and the people who had waited hours for a glimpse loved her; but back in the car or the train she collapsed in tears saying she couldn’t face another crowd.