Former ‘It Girl’ Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was pals with Prince Charles…but found a best friend in drugs
SHE had money, fame and friends from the worlds of royalty and celebrity.
But her hopeless weakness for drugs saw her cast adrift from society, alone and miserable.
Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was the ultimate poor little rich girl.
Prince Charles’s goddaughter often partied to the point of self-destruction but her honesty and jolly hockey sticks charm made her impossible to dislike.
She sprung to fame on the ski slopes of Klosters in Switzerland as aristocratic farmer dad Charles, a former Olympic skier, and mum Patty holidayed with pal Prince Charles.
Throughout the 1990s, Tara and her family were said to join the prince on at least three holidays a year.
She caused a stir when she was pictured kissing Charles at Klosters in 1995, with the public clamouring to find out who this mystery woman was.
Following Princess Diana’s death in 1997 she became a source of emotional support for the prince and his children William and Harry.
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The Charles kiss brought Tara instant fame, but her troubles were never very far away.
She said recently: “I’d love to lie and say I have no regrets, but I do.
“I’d like to go back to that young girl and shake her. So much was handed to me on a plate.”
Born in Hampshire in 1971, Tara was raised on the 1,200-acre Dummer Grange estate near Basingstoke, the youngest of three children.
When she wrote first novel Inheritance about a posh girl who falls into drug-taking, she confessed it was based on herself but insisted: “Ironically, while everyone was doing drugs when I was 19 or 20 I was really against them.
“I was against everything.
"I didn’t want to lose my virginity.
"I was mischievous and naughty, but I certainly wasn’t going to do anything like that.”
After school she worked as a stylist’s assistant at Tatler magazine and in the City for Rothschilds bank but by the mid 1990s and aged 24 she had found the hard-partying It Girl role that would define her adult life.
Ghost-writers on her columns in the Sunday Times and Spectator soon became aware her phoned-in ramblings were drug-fuelled.
In one shocking episode she arrived at a party in a bikini and a snorkel, eyes wild and pupils dilated.
By this time her habit was costing her £400 a day and her weight had dropped to just over six stone.
Then there was a slurring appearance on Frank Skinner’s TV chat show in 1999, followed by an overdose that left her almost paralysed on the floor of her flat for three days.
She said: “I wasn’t a pretty sight.
"I’d thrown up and was covered in burns because I couldn’t reach the ashtray, so I put my cigarettes out on my hand.”
As she lay on the floor she began timing her heartbeats, convinced her heart would stop.
When she finally reached the phone her parents were there within an hour — and two days later she was in The Meadows rehab clinic in Arizona.
Tara was so ill, she even got drunk on the flight over.
But the £35,000 process worked and she was widely thought to have kicked drugs.
Sorting out her love life was less simple.
She once said: “I would never go out with a man who, when boarding an aircraft, turned right.”
In the mid-1990s PR man Kris Thykier, married to Claudia Winkleman since 2000, was said to be considering asking Tara to marry him.
But he was scared off by her presence in the gossip columns.
She had a romance with EastEnders’ Sid Owen in 1998 before a year-long relationship with Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes, who helped her through rehab.
Shortly after being treated for cocaine addiction, Tara fell for Greg Martin, playboy son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin, even getting engaged.
But the closest Tara got to true love was with Matalan heir Jamie Hargreaves who she dated in 2004. She was distraught when he dumped her.
Other notable boyfriends included singer James Blunt, who she had a brief fling with in 2006 and Blue star Duncan James.
Asked what one thing she most desired, Tara said: “The ultimate man who absolutely adores me and actually married me for no other reason than love.”
She said many boyfriends treated her like a cash machine, joking: “My initials may be TPT, but they could probably be ATM.”
In 2002 Tara went to the jungle for I’m a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! and finished as runner-up.
More TV work followed, including a celebrity version of Blind Date, Loose Women and children’s weekend show SM:TV Live.
A talented concert pianist, she also won Comic Relief Does Fame Academy.
Although she was no longer using drugs, her nasal septum collapsed in 2006 and she had it rebuilt at a cost of £6,000.
Typically for Tara, she shared the news publicly.
By 2008 there were signs her mental health had also been affected by the drugs.
“I was really tired,” she said, “so I took a strategic move out of the red carpet, out of film premieres, out of magazines.
"I basically wore my pyjamas for two years, sat in my flat and wrote a novel.”
She lectured about the dangers of drugs and from 2013 was the patron of Scottish charity Speur-Ghlan which delivered early intervention for children diagnosed with autism.
By now haunted by loneliness, she confessed: “I’ve only been out three times this year.
"I’ve seen a therapist every single week for the last nine, ten years of my life.”
She was arrested at Heathrow in December 2014 after a meltdown at being turned away from a first class lounge and it was assumed she was back on drugs.
But she insisted it was a panic attack.
A year later, after returning from another skiing trip, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, but kept it secret until reports of her odd behaviour and appearance prompted her to break her silence.
In her last interview in November she said: “I’m not the person I was. I’m much calmer.
“I don’t go to places like Ibiza because the party world scares me.
“It used to really matter what people thought and said about me.
"Now it doesn’t bother me whether people write that I’m off my face, on my face, in my face, whatever.
“It’s all pretty trivial compared to...compared to...”
Unable to finish her sentence, Tara pointed to her head and wept.