HOW I GOT THE TAPES THAT MADE HISTORY

TurNINg on a battered tape recorder, I listened with mounting astonishment to the unmistakable voice of Princess Diana. She was pouring out a tale of woe in a rapid stream of consciousness.

The year was 1991. Diana was approaching 30 and the very idea that her ten-year marriage was in dire trouble seemed unthinkable at the time.

I felt I’d been transported into a parallel universe. The Princess was talking about her unhappiness, her sense of betrayal, her suicide attempts — and two things I’d never previously heard of: an eating disorder called bulimia nervosa and a woman called Camilla.

As a journalist who chronicled the work of the royal Family, I’d met the Prince and Princess on many occasions. But our conversations had seldom ventured beyond comments about my loud ties. So why did she trust me with the true story of her marriage?

The key, it turned out, was Dr James Colthurst, whom I met in 1986 when the Princess opened a new CT scanner in his X-ray department at St Thomas’ hospital in Central London, where he worked as a junior doctor.

Afterwards, over tea and biscuits, I questioned him about Diana’s visit. An Old Etonian and the son of a baronet, I discovered he had known Diana since she was 17. gradually, James and I became friendly, enjoying games of squash. As her friend, of course, James was well aware that her marriage had failed and that her husband was having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.

Diana had spoken with Charles about his mistress and been dismissed. Then she’d talked to the Queen, but it was like facing a blank wall.

In short, she was coming to realise that unless she took drastic action, she faced a life sentence of unhappiness and dishonesty.

Her first thought was to pack her bags and flee to Australia with her young sons. There were two problems with this: she wouldn’t have been allowed to keep them there, and the public would have considered her behaviour irrational and hysterical.

Meanwhile, she had a nagging fear that, at any moment, her enemies in the Palace would have her classified as mentally ill and locked away.

Where to turn? It had finally dawned on Diana that unless the full story of her life was told, the public would never understand the reasons behind anything she decided to do.

At the time, she knew that I was researching a book about her.

So she gradually started testing me out by allowing Colthurst to give me snippets of information, which I turned into news stories. Some time later, she asked him: ‘Does Andrew want an interview?’

Naturally, I was keen to talk to the Princess directly, but this was simply out of the question. At 6ft 4in tall and as a writer known to Palace staff, I’d hardly be inconspicuous.

So I interviewed her by proxy — giving my questions to Colthurst, who then conducted six taped interviews with her in her sitting room at Kensington Palace.

Colthurst vividly remembers that first session: ‘Diana was dressed quite casually in jeans and a blue shirt. Before we began, she took the phone off the hook and closed the door. Whenever we were interrupted by someone knocking, she removed the body microphone and hid it in cushions on her sofa.’

Anxious to be believed, she passed James Colthurst several letters and postcards from Camilla to Prince Charles to show me. These billets- doux — passionate, loving and full of suppressed longing — left absolutely no doubt that Diana’s suspicions were correct.

‘I hate not being able to tell you how much I love you,’ wrote Camilla, adding that she longed to be with Charles and was his for ever. I particularly remember one vivid passage that read: ‘My heart and body both ache for you.’

However, due to Britain’s libel laws, I wasn’t at the time able to write that Prince Charles and Camilla were lovers, because it couldn’t be proved. Instead, I had to allude to a ‘secret friendship’.

DurINg the year that Diana was being secretly interviewed, my office was burgled and files rifled through — but nothing of consequence, apart from a camera, was stolen.

After that, the Princess had her sitting room ‘swept’ for listening devices — none was found — and shredded every piece of paper. She trusted no one inside the royal system. Even with Colthurst, she was never entirely frank.

While she raged about her husband’s infidelity, she hid the fact that she’d enjoyed a long love affair with Major James Hewitt from 1986 until 1991, as well as a brief dalliance in 1989 with her old friend James gilbey (later exposed as the male voice on the notorious Squidgygate tapes).

Nor did Colthurst and I have the faintest notion that the married art dealer Oliver Hoare had recently become the object of her love and devotion.

Looking back, Diana’s audacity was breathtaking. One is left wondering if she wanted to get her side of the story published first, so that she’d escape blame for the failure of the marriage.

She read my book in chunks as I wrote it and on one occasion was so moved by the poignancy of her own story that she confessed to weeping tears of sorrow.

And, shortly before her father Earl Spencer died, she sent him a note asking for photos for the book from the family’s albums.

‘I would like to ask you a special favour. In particular, I would like you to keep that as a secret between us. Please will you do that,’ she wrote.

‘An author who has done me a particular favour is now writing a book on me as Diana, rather than POW (Princess of Wales) . . . It is a chance for my own self to surface a little rather than be lost in the system. I rather see it as a lifebelt against being drowned and it is terribly important to me.’

A few days later, several large, red, gold-embossed family albums arrived. The Princess herself helped to identify many of the people in the photographs, a process she thoroughly enjoyed, as it brought back happy memories — particularly of her teenage years.

On June 7, 1992, the first extract from my book appeared in a newspaper — under the banner headline: ‘Diana driven to five suicide bids by “uncaring” Charles.’ I’d used a few quotes from the secret tapes, but the vast majority of what she’d said was disguised.

It’s hard now to convey the shock, disgust and astonishment that greeted the first instalment.

The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it, one MP suggested I be imprisoned in the Tower of London, and the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, Lord Mcgregor, accused the media of ‘dabbling their fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls’.

In the ensuing furore, the book was banned by numerous major bookstores and supermarkets. Ironically, a biography written and produced with Diana’s enthusiastic co- operation was being piously boycotted on the suspicion that it was a pack of lies.

BuT it soon became apparent that the book really was, as it claimed, Diana’s own true story. And the Princess quickly began to receive the kind of support that always meant so much to her. Letters came flooding in — many from people who’d suffered from eating disorders themselves.

She never regretted the taping sessions. As her friend film-maker Lord Puttnam recalled: ‘ She owned what she had done. She knew what she was doing and took a calculated risk, even though she was scared s***less. But I never heard one word of regret, I promise you.’

In the last five years of her life, the world witnessed the flowering of Diana’s humanitarian spirit — qualities that might have remained buried if she hadn’t had the courage to disclose the reality of her life. The public’s verdict can be gauged by the outpouring of grief that convulsed the country when she died in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.

Thankfully, Diana left her own searing testimony of what life was really like for her as Princess of Wales.