TV TAPES WILL HURT THE BOYS
Royal fury over Channel 4 plans to show explosive interview
CHANNEL 4’s documentary on Princess Diana was last night blasted as deplorable for raking up painful memories about her divorce.
And one man featured in the show confirmed one of its most upsetting revelations – that Diana was in meltdown because she feared a plot to take her sons away from her.
Dr James Colthurst, 60, said: “That was a fear she had.”
It will be the first time the videos, made while Diana was having voice coaching, will be aired on UK TV.
Extracts, in which Diana opens her heart about her failed marriage to Charles, his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles and her love for her bodyguard Barry Manakee, were broadcast in the US in 2004.
But the claim she feared Palace officials were plotting to undermine her and take her sons away is the most damaging.
Author Penny Junor compared it to “stopping to look at a motorway pile-up to look at the gory details”.
And Ingrid Seward, the biographer who last spoke to Diana just weeks before her death in 1997, said: “It will upset her children, her ex-husband, Camilla, the Queen and Diana would simply not want this.
“The boys now must feel very exploited and very angry once again with the media. It reflects badly on all of us.”
In the documentary, Colthurst, who knew Diana since she was 17, says: “There was a great deal of jealousy from the grey men who sat behind Prince Charles, not wanting him to be living in her shadow.
“Her character was being written down – as she saw it, a campaign to sideline her and remove her from her boys.
“That was her worry, that she was going to lose the boys – overriding, above everything else, that was the concern – and that they were using a character run-down as a means of making that happen, an understandable next step.” The claims back up comments Diana herself makes in the film. She says: “Friends on my husband’s side were indicating that I was unstable, sick, and should be put in a home of some sort in order to get better. “There is no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it.” At his home near Hungerford, Berkshire, Colthurst added last night: “They asked me a few questions and I gave them a few answers and that was it.
“They’ve done two documentaries, and I’ve said my stuff on those and that’s a matter of public record anyway now.”
Junor – who has written studies of the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William and Prince Harry – said of the documentary: “It is just plain exploitation, it is ghoulish, immoral.
“This is just another way of exploiting Diana. It’s not what Charles would want and it’s clearly not what the boys would want. It will
be deeply hurtful to them. I think it will cause enormous upset.”
Seward, author of Diana: The Last Words, added: “This is using Diana to make money and that is what killed her in the end. I don’t see how it will help anyone.”
Seward said that Diana was reportedly warned about being so open with Coronation Street actor-turned-voice coach Peter Settelen as he helped with her public speaking throughout 1992 and 1993.
The documentary, set to air on Sunday, contains sessions thought to have been a practice run for Diana’s infamous 1995 Panorama interview, in which admitted she had been unfaithful to Charles.
Seward, right, added: “I don’t think she would ever have thought they would get out like this.
“But I think one of her friends told her, ‘You need to be a bit careful, one day this guy will make his pension out of this’.”
There was no sign of Settelen at his four-bedroom detached home in south-west London yesterday.
Among the topics discussed, Diana mocked Charles’s courting technique, saying the future king was “like a rash, he was all over me”.
When she confronted Charles over Camilla, Diana claimed she was told: “I refuse to be the Prince of Wales that never had a mistress.”
And when Diana sought counsel from the Queen as the marriage fell apart, she says the response was: “I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.”
Award-winning director Kevin Sim adapted the confessions, filmed inside Kensington Palace, for a planned 2007 BBC documentary.
But it was shelved amid concerns it would upset the royals, with the Beeb saying it did not “add” to Diana’s story after she died 20 years ago in a Paris car crash. Ahead of the broadcast of Diana: In Her Own Words, Channel 4 said: “We carefully considered all the material used in the documentary and the subjects covered are a matter of public record and provide a unique insight into the preparations Diana undertook to gain a public voice and tell her own story.”
INGRID SEWARD