The True Story Behind Diana’s Bombshell Andrew Morton
Biography
BY ELISE
TAYLOR
9 November
2022
https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/princess-diana-andrew-morton-book
In The
Crown season five, the second episode finds Elizabeth Debicki’s Princess Diana
in a dilemma. (A note for the reader: spoilers are to follow.) She’s miserable
in her marriage to Prince Charles, who is in love with Camilla Parker Bowles.
The press follows her every move – so much so that Diana even fears that her
home at Kensington Palace might be bugged. And most of all, she feels trapped.
Leaving Charles means potentially sacrificing not only her role as an
altruistic public servant but her sons: As heirs to the throne, they’d have to
remain behind in England if Diana were to move anywhere else. “I’d love to have
a book out there so everyone understands how difficult it’s been,” Debicki’s
Diana says to her friend James Colthurst when he tells the princess that a
journalist named Andrew Morton is writing a book. “But I don’t want to be
responsible for starting a war.”
Secretly,
Colthurst agrees to be an intermediary between the two. Morton provides him
with questions, which he, in turn, passes on to the princess. She records her
answers on tape, and Colthurst returns them to Morton. Since Colthurst is a
frequent visitor to Kensington Palace, no one suspects a thing.
The Crown
is known for putting an exaggerated spin on real-life events. In the case of
Diana’s tell-all book – what is fact versus fiction?
It turns
out Peter Morgan and the writers didn’t need to speculate much when it came to
the creation of Diana: Her True Story. Andrew Morton himself wrote a very
detailed account of how, exactly, the book came to be – which he shared after
Princess Diana’s death in 1997.
As the show
suggests, Morton, a veteran royal reporter, was already researching a book
about Princess Diana. Gradually, he befriended Colthurst (indeed, over games of
squash and Italian food, as The Crown shows), thinking he could be a useful
source. Diana, pleased with Morton’s previous work, began giving Colthurst
small pieces of information to relay to Morton – such as the firing of Prince
Charles’s private secretary. Morton then turned that into a piece for The
Sunday Times.
She then
began thinking bigger. “Like a prisoner condemned for a crime she did not
commit, Diana had a crying need to tell the world the truth about her life, the
distress she felt, and the ambitions she nurtured. Her sense of injustice was
profound,” Morton wrote years later. “Quite simply, she wanted the liberty to
speak her mind, the opportunity to tell people the whole story of her life and
to let them judge accordingly.” A book by a well-respected writer was a way she
could do just that.
A major
problem? How to conduct the interviews. Morton was a known and – at six feet
four with glasses – a conspicuous reporter. Kensington Palace and Prince
Charles would no doubt discover, and attempt to squash, the project quickly. So
Colthurst agreed to interview Diana with questions written by Morton, record
her answers via tape, and then deliver them back to the author.
Diana left
no question unanswered. She admitted to multiple suicide attempts. (“She was
suffering dreadfully from morning sickness, she was haunted by Camilla Parker
Bowles, and she was desperately trying to accommodate herself to her new
position and new family,” Morton wrote. “Standing on top of the wooden
staircase, she hurled herself to the ground, landing in a heap at the bottom.”)
She opened up about her eating disorder. (“Diana would make herself sick four,
sometimes five times a day.”) So too did she speak openly about Charles’s
relationship with Parker Bowles. (“Diana had accidentally overheard her husband
talking on a mobile telephone while having a bath. She was deeply upset when
she heard him say, ‘Whatever happens, I will always love you.’”)
As the show
suggests, paranoia gripped them both: Someone broke into Morton’s apartment,
although nothing was stolen besides a camera. Diana thought her apartment might
be bugged and ordered sweeps. (Nothing was ever found.) But even when, by
January 1992, Buckingham Palace figured out that she was, in some way,
cooperating with Morton, she continued. “She knew that there was a cataclysm in
the offing but had no doubts that she would survive it,” Morton recalls.
In June
1992, The Sunday Times ran the first excerpt from the book with the headline:
“Diana driven to five suicide bids by ‘uncaring Charles’.”
The
reaction was explosive. Not only because of the damning claims contained in the
book – at that time, much of the public still believed in the Charles-Di fairy
tale – but because it was clear that Diana herself had sanctioned it.
“Sensational revelations about the royal family are nothing new, but what
distinguishes the latest story, apart from the unusual hype surrounding it that
Princess Diana’s marriage made her so unhappy that she tried to kill herself,
is that it seems to bear her tacit imprimatur,” wrote The Observer at the time.
(One of the tell-tale signs of her involvement? The book’s cover of a
black-and-white portrait by Patrick Demarchelier. Only the princess owned the
copyright of that series – which she had previously only shared with British
Vogue.)
Politicians
from both parties decried the book’s supposed ethical violations. Labour MP
Clare Short called out the “outrageous and gross misbehaviour” of the Sunday
Times’s decision to publish the excerpts, while Conservative MP Patrick Cormack
spoke in barely-coded terms against the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch: “What we
are seeing is the attempted destruction by the lackeys of a sovereign
republican press tycoon of an institution that is the envy of most republics
and the character assassination of two people who have given selfless service
which those who are motivated by greed will never understand.”
Diana
publicly denied any involvement: “The princess did not cooperate with the book
‘in any way whatsoever’, a palace official said,” according to The Guardian,
after the Sunday Times serialisation.
Even if no
one could pinpoint Diana as the primary informant, many understood why she let
the book happen. “It was her only way of countering the routine cruelty with
which Charles had come to treat her,” Anthony Holden wrote in a 1993 issue of
Vanity Fair. “Not merely did he continue to throw Camilla in her face.
Irritated by Diana’s ever-growing popularity, at the expense of his own,
Charles had long demeaned his wife in other ways – by insisting, for instance,
that she submit all her speeches to him before delivery. He would refuse her
permission to venture into areas he regarded as his own, such as education and
the environment. He told their staff that its first loyalty was to him, not
her.”
Six months
after the book’s June 1992 publication, Charles and Diana announced their
separation – although Diana: Her True Story was, metaphorically, just one
chapter in the messy split between the Waleses. In 1994 Charles admitted to
adultery on television, and in 1995, Diana gave an explosive interview to
Martin Bashir for the BBC current affairs program Panorama. (Later, it emerged
Bashir manipulated the princess into doing so with a series of forged bank
statements.)
Yet without
Morton’s book to prime public opinion in her favour, Diana’s decision to do the
Panorama interview could have played out altogether more negatively – the world
now knew of Charles’s transgressions, and judged him for it. (When The
Washington Post reported on the couple’s separation, they noted the likability
gap between the two: “Diana, with her flash and style, is by far the most
popular member of the family. Her public appearances always draw large,
enthusiastic crowds. The dour Charles attracts few.”) Although Diana’s marriage
couldn’t be saved, it turns out her reputation could.
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