'Master Manipulator': Piers Morgan Reveals That Princess Diana Had an 'Unpleasant Streak'

Piers Morgan has opened up about his friendship with the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who "didn't quite play fair" when it came to an agreement he claims the two had with one another.

"Although I loved her for many reasons — she was dazzlingly beautiful and fabulously charismatic, as actress Elizabeth Debicki captures so well with her brilliant depiction of her — Diana also had a very unpleasant and duplicitous streak that is never shown in The Crown," Morgan wrote.

"She talked about her lovers — promoting William to say he kept a photo of Will Carling's then wife Julia on a dartboard and had 'never laughed so hysterically' as when, after James Hewitt spilled the beans about their affair in a tawdry book, I hired a white horse, which a Mirror reporter, in full armor, rode to Hewitt’s home to charge him with treason for sleeping with the wife of a future king," Morgan added when describing a lunch he attended at Kensington Palace in 1996 with Diana and her 13-year-old son, Prince William.

Morgan first met the one-time future queen in the mid-1990s, as her divorce from Prince Charles was being written out and finalized. The host of Piers Morgan Uncensored was, at that time the editor-in-chief of The Daily Mirror, which, like other British newspapers, regularly reported on the Princess of Wales's life. His afternoon spent with the princess and William led him to strike an agreement with Diana that he would notify her beforehand of sensitive stories his paper planned to write about her.

Diana's part of the deal was apparently to clue him in on when she was set to attend events or make speeches, which he said she did not hold up. Three months before she died, Diana attended an engagement at the Priory Clinic in London, where she gave a speech to assembled women suffering from eating disorders — she did not alert Morgan beforehand.

The broadcaster wrote: "She gave me an hour-long off-the-record interview on the phone about exactly what she'd said and all her own experiences with bulimia and anorexia".

When The Daily Mirror broke the story the following day, Diana backtracked on her partnership with Morgan to condemn the "sensationalized stories" about her conversations held at the clinic.

Although the late Princess of Wales had an acrimonious relationship with the world's media and pursuing paparazzi were later implicated in her cause of death, numerous analysts have come forward to share how she also benefitted from the press.

Diana would go on to lose her life alongside her romantic partner, Dodi Al-Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, in a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997. Diana and Dodi's bodyguard, Trever Rees-Jones, was the sole survivor of the crash.

Daily Express reported on Morgan's article.