Tragic Tara was £200k in debt and predicted she would die
Former It Girl Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was trying to reinvent herself. Right, Lady Victoria Hervey SOCIALITE Tara PalmerTomkinson was £200,000 in debt and predicted her death in the days before she died, it was revealed yesterday.
The former It Girl, found dead in her London flat last week, was trying to reinvent herself as a businesswoman.
But her high-end company Desiderata had lost money with huge overheads building up.
The fashion line, specialising in women’s button-down shirts, was inspired by Tara, 45, customising and wearing her father’s shirts.
Tara was the daughter of Charles Anthony Palmer-Tomkinson, 77, a landowner and philanthropist, former Olympic skier and a close friend of Prince Charles.
The party girl, who once battled a £400-a-day cocaine habit, had relapsed into “a dark place” in the weeks before her death.
She had difficulty eating because of holes in her mouth brought on by drug abuse and had recently looked frail when visiting a friend in hospital.
A friend said yesterday: “There was only one moment when she was talking about her life and she said ‘death comes to all of us, I’ve accepted that. It’s all about the journey you choose to take. That’s the only thing you can control’.”
In January last year she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and revealed that she was suffering with an auto-immune disease.
Meanwhile Lady Victoria Hervey, a former rival of Tara’s on the London party scene, said she was someone with “real talent and intelligence” whose problems with drugs had masked “the very real pain she was in”. But she added: “Underneath it all, she was insecure.” The 40-year-old model said she had stepped away from the London party scene “to save my sanity”.
She said: “Tara, though, stayed close to the old crowd, and that wasn’t the healthiest thing for her. I wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t remained there.
“She pretended not to care what people thought about her but all she ever wanted was to be loved.
“She had an emotional fragility that would ultimately be her undoing.”