Free Diana: In Pursuit of Love by Andrew Morton Page B

benefit of boosting her self-confidence.
    In mid-June, a matter of days after the book’s publication, James Colthurst was driving to Solihull in the Midlands for a board meeting at his medical company when he received an urgent page from Diana. He pulled off the M6 motorway and found a phone box in the nearest service station. Diana was waiting frantically for his call. She told him that she and her husband had had a meeting with the Queen and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle to discuss their marriage and the wider impact on the monarchy of any suggestion of a separation. She had expected her husband to stand by the decision they had made and argue for a formal separation, but to her disgust he had remained silent during a tirade from his father.
    While her husband’s failure of nerve in the face of parental disapproval was no more than she had come to expect, what had frightened her was the moment when her father-in-law confronted her about her involvement with the book. When she denied any knowledge of it, he retorted that they had a tape of a telephone discussion in which she was talking to an unidentified person about which newspaper should be given serialization of the book: the Sunday Times or the Daily Mail . Once more she stonewalled, denying his accusation, but when the meeting ended she left Windsor Castle alarmed and confused. Unless this was an elaborate bluff, which seemed extremely unlikely, what she had suspected for years had now been confirmed – that her telephone conversations were routinely tapped by an official government agency, whether it be the police or security services.
    Yet, as she told Colthurst and, later, others in her intimate circle, she could not clearly remember if she had had any such conversation.
    When she returned to Kensington Palace she contacted Sir Robert Fellowes and asked him what the Queen and Prince Philip were playing at. While he was sympathetic and told her that he had never realized how ‘awful’ her life was inside the royal family, he again confirmed that there was an incriminating tape of her conversation. More than that, he told her that the Prime Minister, John Major, had been informed and that she would be given a copy of the tape the following day. The next day Diana was understandably on tenterhooks as she waited for the axe to fall. But the Palace blade remained sheathed and the alleged tape was never made available to her. Instead, she was told later that, as the tape could not be used as evidence of her involvement with the book – the implication being that the recording had been made illicitly or its veracity was in doubt – the episode should be forgotten.
    Shaken and disturbed, Diana now began to see the full extent of the opposition lined against her. If she wanted her freedom, she would have to fight, and fight skilfully. ‘I’m a threat, you see,’ she told her astrologer, Felix Lyle, ‘I’ve got to be very sprightly.’
    She had succeeded in making herself heard. Now she faced a more difficult challenge, the search to find herself.

C HAPTER T HREE
     

     
    The Comfort of Strangers
    W HEN S TEPHEN T WIGG held Diana’s face in his hands for the first time, the feelings and emotions that emanated from his royal client alarmed him. He sensed, according to his notes, ‘a deep and abiding fear, flashes of intense anger, bordering on rage, crippling self-judgement, an extreme sadness, but most of all a profound sense of loneliness and overwhelming despair’.
    Stephen Twigg, therapist, counsellor and masseur, first met the Princess in December 1988, when he went to see her in Kensington Palace. During the hour-long massage he gave her he saw the scars where she had disfigured herself and recognized, from his encounters with clients who were on the brink of taking their own lives, that here was a young woman in utter despair. ‘It was quite frightening as I have had experience in the past working with suicidal people,’ he said. ‘I could feel a