'The palace said a head needs to roll': The Princess Diana story that got Anne Robinson fired
Fortunately for Anne, she transitioned to a rather successful career in television
Famous for her withering putdowns and unbreakable stare presiding over The Weakest Link for 11 years, Anne Robinson had a long and celebrated career in television.
As well as presenting the BBC quiz show, she hosted the likes of Watchdog and Countdown, and, in a strange turn of events, this storied showbiz career might have indirectly been a result of Princess Diana and Buckingham Palace.
Before she was on TV, Anne worked as a journalist and an editor. It was a fateful decision to use a provocative front page in the late 1980s implying that Princess Diana had an eating disorder that led to her being dismissed, and as she recalls it, the orders came from “the palace [saying] a head needs to roll”.
Speaking with Lorraine Kelly for the Experience is Everything podcast, Anne recalled how it all came to pass. "I was editing on a Sunday. Diana had gone late to the Albert Hall the night before, after the Queen, unheard of.
"I looked at the pictures, and she was painfully thin. And I called in our wonderful royal correspondent, James Whittaker. And I said, ‘James, this doesn't look right’.
"He said, ‘Give me an hour or two’. And I trusted him completely. And he went away, and he said, ‘She's got an eating disorder'.
Anne’s decision to act on this would lead to serious repercussions. She continued, “So I splashed on it. The Sun [a British tabloid] followed in their second edition. The next week, I looked, and I wasn't on the editing rota
“And I remember going up to the editor. I said, I'm not on the editing rota. He said, ‘You go off and do television, blossom. That's what you're good at.’
"I went home furious. I had a good cry, because you never cried in the office. It took two years for me to find out that the palace said a head needs to roll, and I was the head. I'll never forget it."
Princess Diana, years later, would reclaim the narrative and discuss her eating disorder history on her own terms.
In 1992, Andrew Morton published the book, Diana: Her True Story. The book was sensational for the time as Andrew’s source was Diana herself, who shared with him a series of confessional tapes.
On one, she opened up about her battle with bulimia for the first time. In the book, Andrew wrote that Diana recorded herself saying, "The bulimia started the week after we got engaged and would take nearly a decade to overcome.
"My husband put his hand on my waistline and said: ‘Oh, a bit chubby here, aren’t we?’ and that triggered off something in me - and the Camilla thing."
A few years after the book was published, Diana would once again speak out on the topic, this time allowing viewers to hear it from her own lips. Speaking with Martin Bashir for the famous 1995 Panorama interview, Diana shared, "I had bulimia for a number of years. And that's like a secret disease.
"You inflict it upon yourself because your self-esteem is at a low ebb, and you don't think you're worthy or valuable… You have to know that when you have bulimia you're very ashamed of yourself and you hate yourself - and people think you're wasting food - so you don't discuss it with people".
