Free Diana: In Pursuit of Love by Andrew Morton

interest. None of us, not even Diana herself, knew exactly when she would arrive so I didn’t want to take any chances. At seven in the evening, while the Princess was on her way, I got a frantic phone call from William Bartholomew. He had walked up and down his road and could not see any photographers. With Higginsunavailable, I took a chance and called my former colleague, Ken Lennox, the photographer who had been my partner in the days when we had worked together as the royal duo on the Daily Star and who was now employed by the Sun ’s rival, the Daily Mirror . It was a high-risk phone call. While Ken is totally trustworthy and would never reveal his source, I thought it would not take anyone long to link us and come to the conclusion that Diana was part of a surreptitious photo opportunity and therefore behind the book. It was a gamble we had to take. As Ken lived nearby, in Chelsea, he was quickly outside Carolyn’s house, though not in time to capture Diana’s arrival. An hour or so later she emerged from the Bartholomew’s home, and while Ken clicked away she embraced Carolyn and William on the doorstep before leaving. The Daily Mirror ’s headline accompanying the photographs said it all: ‘Seal of approval.’ True to form, Lennox resisted pressure from his editor Richard Stott to tell him who had given him the tip-off. The following day when Stott was discussing the implications of the story with his royal correspondent James Whitaker, the veteran reporter stated that he had no clue as to the identity of Lennox’s informer. ‘He hasn’t got any royal contacts,’ said James confidently. ‘Well, he seems to have one more than you,’ his editor replied acidly.
    For years, everyone has believed the story that it was a ‘well-spoken woman’, possibly Diana herself, who had called the news desks of several national newspapers and tipped them off about her private visit to a friend. Like so much concerning this aspect of her life, the Daily Mirror piece was unplanned, an improvised but remarkably effective operation, which staunched the flow of unrestrained criticism. Certainly Richard Stott, the Daily Mirror editor, who, in a typical knee-jerk fashion, had tried to rubbish the book because his rivals the Sun were serializing it, was given cause to look with fresh eyes at the evidence before him.
    Privately Diana paid a high price for supporting a friend. The following day she was hauled over the coals by the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes, for having visited Carolyn Bartholomew, someone so closely associated with the book. Just minutes after her confrontation with Fellowes, she called James Colthurst and told him that she felt like having a good weep. ‘Ifyou want to cry, just do it, don’t hold back,’ he said. But public duties denied her the luxury of throwing herself down on her bed – she was about to leave for a scheduled visit to Liverpool. There, a woman in the crowd stroked her face and, as if on cue, the tears coursed down her cheeks. While her obvious distress gained her immediate public sympathy, it sent out mixed messages about her feelings towards her biography. Andrew Neil, who heard the news on his car radio, recalled saying to his driver, ‘Oh, no, I’m going to go down in history as the editor who made the Princess cry.’ As ever, Diana had been much cleverer than anyone truly suspected, her tears to some degree premeditated. While she had given her friends support, through her show of tears in Liverpool she had also distanced herself from the book while winning over public sympathy.
    In fact, all Diana’s theatricals would have counted for nothing if one of her other friends had had his way. On 8 June, the day after the first extract was serialized, Michael O’Mara received a phone call that made his blood run cold. It was from a man acting for the photographer Terence Donovan, who was a friend of the Princess. He pointed out that a picture of Diana used by the