CARLING ADMITS HIS ‘STUPIDITY’ OVER DI
WILL C arl i ng al ways insisted he was just friends with Princess Diana, but the former England rugby captain has now suggested persistent rumours they enjoyed a love affair may indeed be true.
Carling, 55, who was married to TV presenter Julia when he met Diana, has admitted ‘stupidly doing things you shouldn’t do’.
He confessed: ‘It was a bit of a mess.’ Asked to explain, he said: ‘Just making messes of relationships because you’re sort of rudderless and you’ve lost your focus and you don’t behave well, and I didn’t.
‘Never intentionally or vindictively, I just think that was me, I just was in a bit of a mess. You’re sort of like a car that’s lost a steering wheel and you’re careering all over the place.’
Asked on a podcast about the Diana rumours and the media i nterest t hey attracted, he replied: ‘You ended up in situations that you shouldn’t have been in. When I look back.. I rented, not in my name, a flat in Covent Garden with underground parking. It didn’t have a phone in it. My parents didn’t even know where I lived.
‘I lived there for a year and I never opened the curtains or blinds in case anyone looked in.’
Carling met Diana in 1994 while working out at a gym. She went up to him as he was doing sit-ups and joked: ‘You don’t know how to work your abdominals properly.’ It was the start of a friendship that led her critics to accuse her of being a home-wrecker, as Carling was newly married and his wife refused to weep and walk away.
When it was disclosed her husband was visiting the princess at Kensington Palace, Julia publicly fired a warning shot at Diana, declaring she had ‘picked the wrong couple’.
Julia added: ‘It would be easy to say she’s ruined my marriage, but it takes two to tango and I blame Will for getting involved in the first place.’ The following year they were divorced.