DIANA LEFT CHARLES NEEDING THERAPY

Starting a major biography by an eminent royal author – who’s had unique access to the Prince’s closest friends – which may make you see that marriage in a new light

NeARLy 20 years after the death of the Princess of Wales, many still see her as a woman who was scorned and betrayed. The truth, as I discovered when researching my new biography of Prince Charles, is far more complicated.

For the first time, many people who knew the royal couple well agreed to talk to me, both on and off the record, about what really went on in the most high-profile marriage of its era.

Some of their revelations were disturbing. The Prince told his cousin Pamela hicks, for instance, that Diana would resurrect a row with him even when he was saying his prayers.

As he kneeled by his bed, said hicks, the Princess ‘would hit him over the head and keep on with the row while he was praying’.

One of the saddest aspects of Diana’s short and turbulent life was the failure of those around her — friends and family alike — to convince her to obtain treatment for her extreme symptoms of mental instability.

By her own account — in her interviews for Panorama and for a book by journalist Andrew Morton — she suffered from bulimia, selfmutilation, depression and acute anxiety. She attempted suicide four or five times and exhibited clear signs of paranoia.

Aside from all that, Diana was tormented by feelings of emptiness and detachment; she feared abandonment; she had difficulty sustaining relationships; and she kept those closest to her on tenterhooks with her sudden mood swings, explosive rages and prolonged sulks.

In psychiatric parlance, the Princess of Wales was ‘highfunctioning’ — or capable of putting on a great show in public — which made her private upheavals all the more unfathomable to those around her.

Charles was sympathetic, but he lacked the knowledge or the temperament to help a very disturbed young woman who, above all, needed consistent support and the right kind of therapy.

Instead, the Prince and household advisers and staff dealt with Diana’s bewildering and often infuriating behaviour by placating her and trying to distract her.

And, ultimately, out of frustration, they abandoned her.

‘Whatever “in love” means.’ Few have forgotten Charles’s awkward reply to a seemingly simple question during the TV interview that followed his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer on February 24, 1981.

Much later, his insalubrious phrase seemed to suggest a cynical lack of commitment from the start. In fact, in his bumbling way, he was simply being honest.

his friends knew he hadn’t fallen in love.

he had merely followed the advice of his beloved uncle, Dickie Mountbatten, to choose a ‘sweetcharactered girl’ without a romantic past — and there were few enough of those about.

In Charles’s defence, he genuinely thought he could grow to love Diana. At 31, he should have known better.

Certainly he understood little about the rosy-cheeked girl of 19 who kept giving him beguiling sidelong glances.

‘how could I have got it all so wrong?’ he wrote six years later in an anguished letter to a friend.

how indeed? On paper, Diana seemed perfect: aristocratic, virginal, tender with children, sporty and enthusiastic, sensitive,