Diana: In Pursuit of Love Read Free Page A

conversation turned to crossing bridges – making momentous decisions where there is no going back. Conspiratorially, she said to him, ‘David, I think I’ve done the thing in my life that is going to change it the most. I’ve been talking to a journalist and there’s a book being published. It has reached a point where there is no way back. And I’m terrified.’
    She then stood up and gave a barnstorming speech about her involvement with and commitment to the fight against AIDS, before coolly answering questions from her audience of media and medical experts including Baroness Jay and Professor Michael Adler.
    Diana was once asked if she gambled. ‘Not with cards but with life,’ was her reply. She was now on the threshold of the first of several throws of the dice.
    The journalist to whom she was referring was me and the book was Diana: Her True Story , first published in June 1992, which, with her enthusiastic collaboration, explored her unhappy life inside the royal family and exploded the myth of her fairy-tale marriage.
    The book had its origins in the incongruous setting of a hospital canteen in October 1986. Here Dr James Colthurst was relaxing after escorting the Princess of Wales on an official visit to open a new CT scanner in the X-ray department at St Thomas’ Hospital in central London where he was at that time working. I was there as the royal correspondent for the Daily Mail newspaper, and over tea and biscuits I asked him about the visit. It quickly became clear that Colthurst was rather more than just a hospital medic acting as a guide to the royal personage, but a friend who had known her for years.
    Over the years Colthurst and I became friendly, enjoying games of squash in the hospital courts followed by large lunches in a nearby Italian restaurant. In the time-honoured fashion I initially tried to cultivate him as a contact but soon discovered that he was the classic royal insider, happy to talk volubly about anything but the royal family. Our early acquaintance gradually mellowed into friendship as we established a tacit understanding that when we met for lunch the subject of Diana was strictly off the menu.
    During the late 1980s Colthurst, the son of a baronet whose family have owned Blarney Castle in Ireland for more than a century, was rekindling his friendship with the Princess, which had been cemented a decade earlier on a skiing holiday in the French Alps in the winter of 1979.
    In the course of that holiday Lady Diana Spencer, who had been introduced to Colthurst and his chalet party by a mutual friend, joined them at an expensive disco in the Tignes resort Val Claret one evening. She enthusiastically participated in a ruse devised by Colthurst so as to enjoy the dancing without paying for the overpriced drinks pressed on the clientele by hovering waiters. Colthurst deliberately bumped into a pillar on the dance floor, bit into a blood capsule for dramatic effect, and in the fracas was‘helped’ out of the club by Diana and another girl. The stunt, albeit rather juvenile, was very much in keeping with the rest of that skiing week, which Diana later described as one of the best holidays of her life.
    While Diana liked innocent and rather silly practical jokes, Colthurst recollected one not-so-innocent prank of which Diana and her friends were the victims, when, during a weekend at a friend’s farm cottage in Oxfordshire, they unknowingly consumed large quantities of hashish that had been mixed into the chilli con carne. Diana got unstoppable giggles and had a severe attack of ‘the munchies’, making night-time raids on the kitchen to devour chocolate bars and sweets. Others, though, were violently ill, and Colthurst, then a medical student, had to keep an all-night vigil by the side of his sky-high friends even though he too was affected.
    Most of the time though their encounters were rather more mundane. Colthurst and others of their set became regular visitors to Diana’s