Charles’s grief for the It-girl no one could save

Beautiful, wealthy, friend of the royals, the original It-girl had the world at her feet. So why couldn’t Tara escape her downward spiral?

FOrMer ‘It Girl’ Tara Palmer-Tomkinson died yesterday aged 45, three months after revealing she was suffering from a brain tumour.

The ex-model and reality television star was pronounced dead at her £4million London penthouse.

She had been receiving treatment for a rare auto-immune condition and a growth in her pituitary gland. However, she had recently said the tumour was gone, and neighbours said she was ‘happy and smiling’ when they saw her last week. Police said they were treating her death as unexplained but not suspicious.

Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall led the tributes to Miss Palmer-Tomkinson last night. The couple are close friends of her landowner father Charles, 77, a former British Olympic skier who instructed the Prince of Wales.

The Prince and Duchess said in a statement: ‘We are deeply saddened and our thoughts are so much with the family.’

a regular on the London party scene in the 1990s and 2000s, Miss Palmer-Tomkinson frequently hit the headlines with her extravagant lifestyle and revealing outfits. She had a well- documented battle with cocaine, spending up to £400 a day at the height of her addiction.

Newsagent rekha Gandeche said she was ‘happy and smiling’ when she came into her shop to buy her favourite Marlboro Gold cigarettes and a chicken tikka masala last Thursday, but emergency services were called to Miss PalmerTomkinson’s apartment in South Kensington, West London at 1.40pm yesterday.

Sarah, Duchess of York, said her family was ‘so shocked by this tragic news of the magnificent, beautifully energetic soul of Tara’. She added: ‘ My mother was her very proud godmother, and she adored her. We are all deeply shocked and saddened.’

Miss Palmer-Tomkinson had appeared on numerous reality TV shows, coming second to Tony Blackburn on I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! in 2002, but in recent years she became a virtual recluse as result of her drug addiction and a nervous breakdown. She never married, but had relationships with a number of high-profile businessmen and pop stars, including Duran Duran keyboardist Nick rhodes. Singer Duncan James, another former boyfriend, said he had lost ‘one of my oldest and dearest friends’, adding: ‘I’m going to miss your laughter the most.’

Tara Pa lm e r - Tomkinson had, in what now seems the cruellest twist of fate, spent much of the past year thinking about death. In January last year, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, a growth in her pituitary gland which — though it turned out to be benign — had her fearing for her own life.

‘I got terribly frightened,’ she admitted, in a deeply emotional last interview with the Mail’s rebecca Hardy in November.

‘I started thinking: “I’m going to die. I’ve only got a couple of weeks to live.” I have been, touch wood, very lucky.’

Tragically, Tara’s luck ran out. Yesterday afternoon, she was found dead at her flat in Kensington, West London, aged just 45.

Tributes flooded in for the feisty, eccentric socialite, whose high-jinks and love of a good time lit up the gossip columns of the Nineties and won her a special place in the hearts of many.

The term ‘It Girl’, coined by Tatler magazine in 1996, was invented for Tara. among her blonde, leggy contemporaries — Lady Victoria Hervey, Tamara Beckwith, to name but two — it was Tara who reigned supreme.

In an era dominated by ‘celebrities’ famous for simply being famous, Tara was the first. Her fame wasn’t hard-won or cynically engineered; she happened upon it almost by accident.

But what drove those around her — money, TV appearances, praise — seemed irrelevant to Tara. She simply loved being in the spotlight — and the spotlight loved her back.

Last night, devastated friends and relatives, united in their shock and grief, were seeking answers about what could have led to her untimely death.

Doctors had cleared her of brain cancer, but she was also known to be suffering from a rare and debilitating auto- immune condition, which, left untreated, would eat away at her lungs and kidneys, viciously devouring her body from within.

Police, who were called to her home just before 2pm, said her death was not suspicious, but they were treating it as ‘unexplained’.

Behind closed doors, there were, inevitably, whispers.

For Tara’s long battle against addiction — at the height of her fame in the Nineties she boasted of a £400-a-day cocaine habit — was certainly no secret.

During her 20s, her struggles with drugs, which culminated in the septum in her nose collapsing, scarring her face even after surgery to repair it, were as welldocumented as her blue-blooded upbringing and her friendship with the royal Family.

In recent years, she put her frail and often dishevelled appearance down to her auto-immune condition, which she had been suffering from for 18 months before it was diagnosed.

But friends fear Tara’s drug problems were far from in the past. They fear addiction had the perpetual party girl so tightly in its clutches that she couldn’t escape — and those dearest to her think it may be what ultimately cost Tara her life.

‘She had been dependent on drugs for so long that she didn’t know any other way to live,’ says a close friend.

‘Tara did have times where she was clean, but I don’t think she had been able to stay off them for the past five or six years.

‘She was a very sweet, goodnatured person who got caught up in a terrible addiction.

‘In many ways, she was still a child. She was much loved by her family and they did everything they could to protect her. But ultimately no one could protect her from herself.’

Indeed, friends say Tara’s illness, whose symptoms included extreme exhaustion, headaches and agonising joint pain, had driven her to despair in recent months. a despair from which, many believe, she knew only one way to escape.

In recent weeks, they say her behaviour was alarmingly out of character, more akin to the wild party girl she claims to have left behind 20 years ago.

She was said to be distraught after a public argument with her mother at a restaurant, and in constant discomfort because of a hole that had developed in the roof of her mouth, disturbingly reminiscent of the injury caused to her nose in 2006.

Whatever the truth, there can be no doubt her death is a tragedy, a sad, pitiless end for a woman who was born to privilege and thought she had been given a second chance at life.

Second chances were, in many ways, at the heart of Tara’s fame. Time and time again she bounced back from crippling disappointments, in her career, friendships and turbulent love life.

‘I’ve always felt positive, whatever has happened in my life,’ she told the Mail last year.

‘ In a way, I’m like alice in Wonderland. I fall down the rabbit hole and there are teddy bears’ picnics and Mad Hatters and tea parties going on all around me, but somehow I manage to climb back up.

‘Then, just as I poke my head out the top, I go falling back down again. But I will get out. I will.’

It was, perhaps, her upbringing that imbued Tara with her trademark can-do cheerfulness.

SHe was unapologetically upper- class, born into a family of wealthy landowners and growing up on a 1,200-acre estate in Hampshire where her parents, Charles, a former Olympic skier, and Patti, entertained members of the royal Family.

Her family holidayed with Prince Charles, who was Tara’s godfather, as well as that of her sister, the novelist Santa Sebag Montefiore, and she spent childhood holidays on the slopes with a young William and Harry.

after leaving school, Tara moved to the capital where she tried — unsuccessfully — to be a model, and soon settled into the glitzy lifestyle expected of a young, rich Londoner.

She was first photographed with Prince Charles in 1996, in the ski resort of Klosters, and on her return to england found herself very much in the public eye. There was even a rumour, quickly quashed, that the pair were having a relationship.

It was later that year that Tatler anointed Tara part of its It Girl revolution — and suddenly she was on the VIP list of every party, premiere and polo event around.

Unlike her peers, she never looked down on her newfound fans. She had a unique knack for making people — ordinary people from whom her gilded existence couldn’t be more different –— warm to her.

With Tara there was always a smile, an uncouth remark, a selfdeprecating raise of the eyebrow that cut straight through the nonsense of fame.

When, in 1998, she turned up to her birthday party wearing, in a James Bond film parody, a bizarre get-up comprising a bikini, a snorkel and a fur coat, Tara’s transformation was complete.

‘I was queen of the It Girls,’ she said, looking back on the height of her fame. ‘I was in a puff of fame, glamour and powder.’

Inevitably, with that came drugs — and lots of them.

Tara, by then ‘writing’ a weekly column for the Sunday Times (ghost-written by author Wendy Holden, to whom she would ‘phone in descriptions of her activities during the week’), had succumbed to the vice so synonymous with the party scene.

Over the years, immersed in a bubble of parties, freebies and rich men, Tara admitted taking so much cocaine her body almost packed up.

a humiliating appearance on the BBC’s Frank Skinner show in 1999 led to a stint in a rehabilitation clinic in arizona, after which Tara declared she was clean. But the damage had been done.

She became a figure of fun, the subject of lurid tabloid stories and paparazzi ambushes outside her flat.

She was shunned by people she had counted as friends who wanted nothing to do with her now her bright star was tainted.

Her confidence in tatters, Tara’s love life took a turn for the worse. She had short-lived relationships with Duran Duran star Nick rhodes and dated eastenders actor Sid Owen before turning her affections to the multimillionaire property developer anton Bilton in 2000.

But none of them would last. Other boyfriends over