The Real Diana by Lady Colin Campbell

Author:Lady Colin Campbell [Lady Colin Campbell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909807495
Publisher: Arcadia Books Limited
Published: 2013-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

Thirteen

Stuck in a marriage and a way of life she wanted to be free of, Diana told me she “despaired for the future. I couldn’t see a way out. But there had to be one. Had to be.”

Hope presented itself in an unexpected form. Fund-raising for charity had undergone fundamental changes since the recession had started towards the end of the 1980s. Gone were the halcyon days when the ladies who lunch could get together and effortlessly albeit energetically organize lavish balls which the great and the grand clambered to attend. “Even my rich friends no longer have any money,” Jane Hartley, née Princess Martin Lubomirski and Lady Edmonstone, accurately stated at a committee meeting at the Red Cross headquarters in 1990 when we were organizing a gala for that worthy organization. The result was that many of the established functions on the London social scene withered on the vine, along with the charities which still needed money even though no one had any to spare any longer.

At that time, one of the main purposes of my life was to raise funds for humanitarian charities. Being single, childless and with a reputation as a well-known socialite, I had plenty of scope, and had exercised it sufficiently throughout my adult life to be named third in a list of the top-forty British charity fund-raisers by the Sunday Express magazine. My path often crossed that of the Princess of Wales, for the world of which I had been a part since she was a teenager was one with which she was increasingly occupying herself.

Although Diana and I were not close friends, we did enjoy cordial relations. It must be said, however, that we had little in common, on the face of it, aside from our joint interest in charity work. I was twelve years older than she. My circle of friends was international, while hers was then overwhelmingly British. Of course, she would later change that as she came to appreciate how much more colourful, stimulating and enriching London’s international community is than its British upper-class counterpart. Whenever we met, we had little to say except hello, how much we liked one another’s dresses and jewels, and what excellent work our charities were doing.

Those meetings, however, were the root of the inspiration that struck in 1990, and which altered both her life and mine irrevocably. I was already an established author and social columnist. Why not capitalize upon that by writing an official biography of the Princess of Wales, focusing on her charity work, as a means of raising funds for three of our mutual charities? The book was bound to sell well. If I donated all profits to the charities, each of them would make a fortune, far outstripping anything that charity balls could raise. I decided to approach the charities to ask if they were interested in receiving the donations, conditional upon the Princess’s cooperation. They all unsurprisingly said, “Yes, please.”

In royal circles, the normal way to gain official cooperation

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.