Tapes reveal Diana’s unflattering first impression of Charles

Twenty years after the tragic death of the Princess of Wales, transcripts of the tapes upon which Diana recorded some of her innermost thoughts and secrets have been released. 

Seven News reported that the tapes reveal what she thought of Prince Charles when she met him and their life together after they married, what she thought of Buckingham Palace, and her struggles with an eating disorder.

The tapes are believed to have been recorded years before her death in a car accident in Paris in 1997, and were the foundation of Andrew Morton’s controversial book ‘Diana: Her True Story‘. 

Diana had recorded the tapes for Morton on the condition that they stay private, so the release of the book was controversial, although Morton always asserted that he had the transcript to back up the claims he made in the book.

Read more: The fashion secret Princess Diana held close to her chest

They are now to be released in an updated version of the book, and have also been released to the Daily Mail. 

They reveal that upon meeting Prince Charles when she was just 16, Diana’s first impression of him was “God, what a sad man”. She added that he had brought his labrador with him to her family home of Althorp when he was dating her older sister, Sarah. 

“I kept out of the way. I remember being a fat, podgy, no make-up, un-smart lady but I made a lot of noise, and he liked that. And he came up to me after dinner and we had a big dance, and he said: ‘Will you show me the gallery?”

Describing their early courtship, Diana said that Charles was “all over” her. 

“The next minute, he leapt on me practically, and I thought this was very strange, too, and I wasn’t quite sure how to cope with all this. Frigid wasn’t the word. Big F, when it comes to that,” she said. 

When she was 19, Charles asked Diana to marry him, and they were married in July of the same year. 

She goes on to describe Buckingham Palace as a place of “dead energy”, and the people there “cold”. 

She says that her well-known struggle with bulimia began soon after her engagement to Charles, when an insensitive comment from her future husband tipped her over the edge. 

“My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?” she reportedly said.

What are your your thoughts on the transcripts being released?