Nearly three decades after her death, he’s still defending her.
In an interview with Good Morning Britain on February 25, Princess Diana’s lover James Hewitt condemned the BBC, saying late journalist Martin Bashir “inveigled” and “lied” to land a controversial 1995 Panorama interview with the royal. “I think it’s appalling.”
But Diana accused James himself of some pretty awful behavior.
“I was absolutely devastated,” she confessed in that same interview, of how he shared intimate details of their five-year romance with author Anna Pasternak for the 1994 book Princess in Love. “It was very distressing for me that a friend of mine, who I had trusted, made money out of me … I was in love with him. But I was very let down.”
Ever since, the former British Army cavalry officer has been alternately avoiding the spotlight and courting the press.
“And now he’s speaking out again, leading many to believe he may be planning another tell-all,” a source says of the former British Army cavalry officer, who’s already written one memoir, Love and War, in 1999. “He could clear up a lot of myths and tell the truth about Diana.”
James knows secrets Diana took to the grave, according to her long-time butler, Paul Burrell.
“He knew the princess intimately for years. She wrote to him almost every day during their passionate affair. He has information and a personal insight which is unrivaled,” Burrell tells In Touch. “Certainly enough to write another book.”
Inside Princess Diana and James Hewitt’s Relationship
Diana first met James at a cocktail party in 1986. The princess, then 25, asked the dashing 28-year-old — who had played polo with her husband, King Charles III, and had even been in charge of her royal wedding procession in 1981 — to give her riding lessons. Their pair finally gave in to their growing mutual attraction, described in bodice-ripper-style prose in Princess in Love, after a private dinner at Kensington Palace.
“That night, our affair began,” James wrote in his memoir. “It was Diana who initiated it.”
Burrell was in charge of arranging their clandestine rendezvous.
“When I joined the household in 1987, I was entrusted with this secret,” he tells In Touch, revealing that he often helped smuggle the “very charismatic” young man in to see Diana. “Diana was in love with James and trusted him with everything in her world.”
She poured her heart out to him.
According to Pasternak’s book, Diana revealed explicit details about her lack of physical intimacy with Charles and shared her jealousies over his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. She also confessed to her struggles with bulimia and self-esteem.
“What it seemed she most craved from him was his approval,” Pasternak writes. “It was not only that she hungered for personal acceptance, that she needed to be constantly reassured that she was a beautiful, sexual woman…. She also needed someone to voice some appreciation for her public life and duties.”
James gave her all that and more.
“He was a great friend of mine at a very difficult … time, and he was always there to support me,” she told Bashir. She saw him as her “knight in shining armor,” Burrell tells In Touch, and even introduced him to her sons, Prince Harry and Prince William. Burrell believes that “they know that he loved their mother and that she loved him.”
James spent a lot of time with the two princes.
“I never claimed to be a father figure,” James told The Telegraph in 1999. “I played with them, swam with them, taught them to ride.”
He was not, as has often been rumored, Harry’s real father.
Princess Diana Remained Friendly With James Hewitt After Split
By 1991, the romance was over.
“It could never have worked … not then,” says Burrell.
Instead, the pair remained friends. (“It was clear … she adored the man, even after the affair had cooled,” her former bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, told The Daily Mail.) Diana wrote James letters while he was stationed in Iraq, signing them “Julia.”
In 1993, he says, she called him to come to her rescue.
“I was asked to talk to the press by Diana,” he told The Telegraph, in order to engender sympathy at a time when her marriage to Charles was crumbling.
