‘I was desperate’: Secret tapes reveal Princess Diana’s tragic battle for Charles’ love
Secret tapes recorded by the late Princess Diana reveal her battles with bulimia and turbulent relationship with Prince Charles, who told her she was “a bit chubby”.
The never-before-heard tapes feature in the revised 25th anniversary edition of Diana: Her True Story – In Her Own Words, according to an extract obtained by the Daily Mail.
The book’s author, Andrew Morton, said in the midst of Prince Charles’ relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana recorded her thoughts in 1991 to contribute to the book on the condition that her involvement was kept a secret.
Transcripts of those tapes have now been published and include an admission from Diana that she began suffering bulimia the week after she got engaged to Charles, prompting a decade-long battle to overcome the ailment.
“My husband [Prince Charles] put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me,” she says.
“And the Camilla thing. I was desperate, desperate! I remember the first time I made myself sick. I was so thrilled because I thought this was the release of tension.”
The late princess, who described herself as “podgy”, also revealed the first time she was measured for her wedding dress she had a 29-inch waist, but was 23-and-half inches by the time she married the Prince of Wales.
“I had shrunk into nothing from February to July. I had shrunk to nothing,” Princess Diana reveals in the transcript.
The excerpts also give insight into the shotgun engagement between Charles and Diana on February 3, 1981. Prince Charles, then 32, proposed to Diana, 19, in the nursery at Windsor Castle.
They married on July 29 of that same year in St Paul’s Cathedral.
“Anyway, so he said: ‘Will you marry me?’ and I laughed. I remember thinking: ‘This is a joke,’” Diana recounts.
“He was deadly serious. He said: ‘You do realise that one day you will be Queen?’
“And a voice said to me inside: ‘You won’t be Queen, but you’ll have a tough role.’
“I thought: ‘OK, so I said: ‘Yes’. I said: I love you so much, I love you so much.’
In a BBC interview, when asked if they were in love, Charles responded: “Whatever in love means.”
Princess Diana, the first British commoner to marry an heir to the British throne in 200 years and was killed in a car crash in August 1997.
Prince Charles eventually married Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, in 2005.
