To a seasoned royal-watcher like Ingrid Seward, the core incompatibilities were already clear to see
On 23 June 1991, less than a year before Andrew Morton blew the Wales’s marriage open in print, the Observer offered a gossipy deep-dive into their distinct friendship groups, the ‘erudite eggheads’ versus ‘pedigree chums… dedicated to having fun’.
Authored by royal-watcher Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty, it’s a between-the-lines portrait of fatal incompatibility, best crystallised in an anecdote about Diana’s friends playing Twister: ‘Charles left the room, complaining of their childish behaviour.’ His idea of a good time, Seward explained, was discussing ‘Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious’ with writer Laurens van der Post, pottering around Highgrove, occasionally ‘enjoying the stimulus of fine art in the company of Marchesa Bona Frescobaldi’, or ‘joining Lord Tryon and his Australian wife, Kanga, on salmon-fishing expeditions over in Iceland’.
