Diana tapes reveal her vulnerability

THE release of tapes made by Diana, the late Princess of Wales, makes for some grim reading: bulimia on honeymoon, cutting her wrists within weeks of her wedding and a posse of psychiatrists called in by the Royal Family.

The more I read the more I sympathised with Prince Charles but also the more angry I became with all the grown-ups, including him. This hugely vulnerable girl was just 20 when she married. She was not particularly bright, having failed her exams and left school without any qualifications and she was mentally and emotionally unbalanced as her own words show. That is a very long way from the kind of intelligent, assertive, happily self-assured individual she needed to be.

Well, er, did nobody notice? What about her older sisters? Their contribution appears to have been to tell her, when she wanted to pull out, that she couldn’t because her face was already on the tea-towels. Gee, thanks girls.

Diana’s father can be excused because he was recovering from a massive stroke but what about mum? Didn’t she notice her daughter was having a breakdown? Apparently she was on Valium herself and finding the pressure of the wedding preparations intolerable. Her granny did warn her that she was unsuited to life with the royals but did not act on the conviction.

That leaves Prince Charles who was more than 10 years older and presumably realising that his bride-to-be had major issues. Gossip has it that he wanted out too but was pressurised by the royal concept of duty.

So the necessity to prevent an enormous but short-term scandal over-rode the welfare of a young girl and the so-called grown-ups did sweet nothing about it. That was the real tragedy of her short, unhappy life.