Despair of 'recluse' Tara Palmer-Tomkinson's final months: How a rare auto-immune disease was 'eating' the 'It Girl' from the inside as friends feared she was still facing battle against addiction 

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Tara Palmer-Tomkinson had, in what now seems the cruellest twist of fate, spent much of the past year thinking about death.

In January last year, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, a growth in her pituitary gland which — though it turned out to be benign — had her fearing for her own life.

‘I got terribly frightened,’ she admitted, in a deeply emotional last interview with the Mail’s Rebecca Hardy in November.

‘I started thinking: “I’m going to die. I’ve only got a couple of weeks to live.” I have been, touch wood, very lucky.’

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Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, left in 2012 and right in 2008, was 'terribly frightened' of the brain tumour growth in her pituitary gland which she revealed to the Daily Mail last November

The former model and media personality was removed from her home and taken to a private ambulance this evening

Palmer-Tomkinson was a family friend of Prince Charles (pictured together, left, in 2003) and attended numerous royal weddings and occasions. She was last pictured (right) two weeks ago outside her flat, where she was found dead today

Tragically, Tara’s luck ran out. Yesterday afternoon, she was found dead at her flat in Kensington, West London, aged just 45.

Tributes flooded in for the feisty, eccentric socialite, whose high-jinks and love of a good time lit up the gossip columns of the Nineties and won her a special place in the hearts of many.

Tara's fame 'almost happened by accident' but she 'loved being in the spotlight'

The term ‘It Girl’, coined by Tatler magazine in 1996, was invented for Tara. Among her blonde, leggy contemporaries — Lady Victoria Hervey, Tamara Beckwith, to name but two — it was Tara who reigned supreme.

In an era dominated by ‘celebrities’ famous for simply being famous, Tara was the first. Her fame wasn’t hard-won or cynically engineered; she happened upon it almost by accident.

But what drove those around her — money, TV appearances, praise — seemed irrelevant to Tara. She simply loved being in the spotlight — and the spotlight loved her back.

Last night, devastated friends and relatives, united in their shock and grief, were seeking answers about what could have led to her untimely death.

Doctors had cleared her of brain cancer, but she was also known to be suffering from a rare and debilitating auto-immune condition, which, left untreated, would eat away at her lungs and kidneys, viciously devouring her body from within.

Police, who were called to her home just before 2pm, said her death was not suspicious, but they were treating it as ‘unexplained’.

Behind closed doors, there were, inevitably, whispers.

For Tara’s long battle against addiction — at the height of her fame in the Nineties she boasted of a £400-a-day cocaine habit — was certainly no secret.

During her 20s, her struggles with drugs, which culminated in the septum in her nose collapsing, scarring her face even after surgery to repair it, were as well-documented as her blue-blooded upbringing and her friendship with the Royal Family.

In recent years, she put her frail and often dishevelled appearance down to her auto-immune condition, which she had been suffering from for 18 months before it was diagnosed.

But friends fear Tara’s drug problems were far from in the past. They fear addiction had the perpetual party girl so tightly in its clutches that she couldn’t escape — and those dearest to her think it may be what ultimately cost Tara her life.

‘She had been dependent on drugs for so long that she didn’t know any other way to live,’ says a close friend.

‘Tara did have times where she was clean, but I don’t think she had been able to stay off them for the past five or six years.

‘She was a very sweet, good-natured person who got caught up in a terrible addiction.

‘In many ways, she was still a child. She was much loved by her family and they did everything they could to protect her. But ultimately no one could protect her from herself.’

Indeed, friends say Tara’s illness, whose symptoms included extreme exhaustion, headaches and agonising joint pain, had driven her to despair in recent months. 

A despair from which, many believe, she knew only one way to escape.

In recent weeks, they say her behaviour was alarmingly out of character, more akin to the wild party girl she claims to have left behind 20 years ago.

A private ambulance outside the Bramham Gardens apartment this evening. Local residents spoke of their shock today

Police outside her Earl's Court flat today after she was found dead shortly before 2pm. Neighbours said she was 'very sweet'

She was said to be distraught after a public argument with her mother at a restaurant, and in constant discomfort because of a hole that had developed in the roof of her mouth, disturbingly reminiscent of the injury caused to her nose in 2006.

Whatever the truth, there can be no doubt her death is a tragedy, a sad, pitiless end for a woman who was born to privilege and thought she had been given a second chance at life.

Second chances were, in many ways, at the heart of Tara’s fame. Time and time again she bounced back from crippling disappointments, in her career, friendships and turbulent love life.

‘I’ve always felt positive, whatever has happened in my life,’ she told the Mail last year.

‘In a way, I’m like Alice in Wonderland. I fall down the rabbit hole and there are teddy bears’ picnics and Mad Hatters and tea parties going on all around me, but somehow I manage to climb back up.

‘Then, just as I poke my head out the top, I go falling back down again. But I will get out. I will.’

It was, perhaps, her upbringing that imbued Tara with her trademark can-do cheerfulness.

She was unapologetically upper-class, born into a family of wealthy landowners and growing up on a 1,200-acre estate in Hampshire where her parents, Charles, a former Olympic skier, and Patti, entertained members of the Royal Family.

Her family holidayed with Prince Charles, who was Tara’s godfather, as well as that of her sister, the novelist Santa Sebag Montefiore, and she spent childhood holidays on the slopes with a young William and Harry.

After leaving school, Tara moved to the capital where she tried — unsuccessfully — to be a model, and soon settled into the glitzy lifestyle expected of a young, rich Londoner.

She got to know the royals on the ski slopes of the Alps and was pictured receiving a kiss from Charles in 1995

She was known for her glamorous looks whether at parties or even book launches, as she is pictured left and right here in London in 2016, left, and 2010, right 

She was first photographed with Prince Charles in 1996, in the ski resort of Klosters, and on her return to England found herself very much in the public eye. There was even a rumour, quickly quashed, that the pair were having a relationship.

It was later that year that Tatler anointed Tara part of its It Girl revolution — and suddenly she was on the VIP list of every party, premiere and polo event around.

Unlike her peers, she never looked down on her newfound fans. She had a unique knack for making people — ordinary people from whom her gilded existence couldn’t be more different –—warm to her.

With Tara there was always a smile, an uncouth remark, a self-deprecating raise of the eyebrow that cut straight through the nonsense of fame.

When, in 1998, she turned up to her birthday party wearing, in a James Bond film parody, a bizarre get-up comprising a bikini, a snorkel and a fur coat, Tara’s transformation was complete.

‘I was queen of the It Girls,’ she said, looking back on the height of her fame. ‘I was in a puff of fame, glamour and powder.’

Inevitably, with that came drugs — and lots of them.

Tara, by then ‘writing’ a weekly column for the Sunday Times (ghost-written by author Wendy Holden, to whom she would ‘phone in descriptions of her activities during the week’), had succumbed to the vice so synonymous with the party scene.

Over the years, immersed in a bubble of parties, freebies and rich men, Tara admitted taking so much cocaine her body almost packed up.

A humiliating appearance on the BBC’s Frank Skinner show in 1999 led to a stint in a rehabilitation clinic in Arizona, after which Tara declared she was clean. But the damage had been done.

She became a figure of fun, the subject of lurid tabloid stories and paparazzi ambushes outside her flat.

She was shunned by people she had counted as friends who wanted nothing to do with her now her bright star was tainted.

Her confidence in tatters, Tara’s love life took a turn for the worse. She had short-lived relationships with Duran Duran star Nick Rhodes and dated EastEnders actor Sid Owen before turning her affections to the multi-millionaire property developer Anton Bilton in 2000.

She was a frequent sight at parties throughout the noughties, pictured left in 2003 and right in 2005

But none of them would last. Other boyfriends over the years included pop singer Duncan James, Matalan heir Jamie Hargreaves and Fiat boss Eduardo Teodorani-Fabbri.

Tara claimed to have a sex addiction and during a 2002 appearance on the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity (on which she was the runner-up) reportedly passed X-rated notes to fellow castaway Darren Day.

Friends say it was a source of much sadness that Tara never managed to settle down. ‘All she wanted was to find a man who loved her, who would take care of her and love her for who she was,’ one says.

‘Men used to take terrible advantage of her because she had this reputation. It wasn’t her, deep down. She longed to get married and have a family.’

As she struggled to rebuild her professional life, doing ad hoc work on daytime TV and presenting light entertainment shows, Tara relied on the support of her family, who were there for her during her darkest hours.

‘She was her mother’s favourite, there was no secret about that,’ says a friend. ‘They are terribly conventional, solid people — and Tara needed that; a rock when everything around her was unsteady.’

She was close, too, to her nieces and nephews, the children of her older siblings James and Santa. 

Tragic: Tara Palmer-Tompkinson was found dead at her home on Wednesday, three years after she revealed how she had almost passed away from an overdose in a heartbreaking TV interview

Her signature looks meant she soared to the top of the London social scene through her connections with modelling and the Royal Family

Not having any children of her own, she strove for their love and admiration, and wanted above all to retain their untainted image of Auntie Tara.

In a recent, unpublished interview conducted just weeks before her death, she was asked what drives her in life. ‘To make my family proud of me again,’ she said. ‘I’ve put them through a lot.’

Friends, acquaintances, even journalists who interviewed her and strangers who were fortunate enough to spend time in her company were struck by her incredible warmth and generosity.

She had time for everyone, it seemed, except in the end herself.

For underneath all the trappings of fame and drugs and money, Tara had one thing so many of her contemporaries lacked: a kind heart. 

Where other celebrities were seedy, she was silly; where they bitched and backstabbed, Tara knew only how to make fun of herself.

And it was this grounded, human side that kept her in the public’s affections over the years. 

When she won Celebrity Fame Academy, the BBC’s reality singing show for Comic Relief, in 2007, her friends couldn’t have been more delighted to see her back on her feet.

Her brilliantly idiosyncratic rendition of the Nancy Sinatra classic These Boots Are Made For Walking, belted out on stage in a black ballgown and knee-high leather boots, not only delighted those who had been willing her on, but won her a whole new generation of fans.

Miraculously, despite several indiscretions along the way — most famously when, during that infamous chat show appearance in 1999, she asked: ‘What do you want to know about Prince Charles? How big?’ — she maintained her close friendship with the Royal Family.

She was invited to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding in 2011, waving confidently to the crowds in a kingfisher blue off-the-shoulder dress. 

She looked, to all outward appearances, as if she had finally shed the demons that had plagued her all her life.

More recently, Tara seemed to build success upon success. She published her first novel, Inheritance, and last year set up her own fashion company and brought out a women’s clothing range.

The socialite's party-loving ways became well-known around London in the 1990s. Pictured, left, at her birthday party in 1998 and, right, at hairdresser John Barrett's party in the early 1990s

She even fulfilled her ultimate childhood dream: playing a 9ft Steinway piano at the Royal Albert Hall, in a stunning performance that left her critics dumbfounded.

In recent years, she refused to discuss those hedonistic, drug-fuelled years that catapulted her to fame two decades ago.

‘I’m not going into detail,’ she declared when asked about that era last year. ‘That’s in the past. I’ve been clean for years.’

She professed to have given up smoking and said alcohol was banned from her house. Temptation, it seemed, remained her biggest vice of all.

Somewhat prophetically, Tara was asked in that final, unpublished interview how she would like to be remembered after she had gone.

‘Like a Bernese mountain dog,’ she said. ‘Cheerful, beautiful and loved by all.’

That, in the end, is all Tara ever wanted: to be loved. And whatever the circumstances of her tragic and premature death, in that, at least, she succeeded beyond doubt.

MY FRIEND LAUGHED IN THE FACE OF DEATH 

By Rebecca Hardy for the Daily Mail 

Kicking her heels on the tarmac at Heathrow airport shortly after Christmas, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson sent the text: ‘I’m on plane to Koh Samui for R n R!!! I put on a stone so although I had to have pre-Xmas checks I’m actually feeling v tired but not bad at all!!!’

The rest of the text was the sort of private chat girlfriends share.

For, since Tara revealed the devastating news of her illness to me three months ago, we’d shared many conversations. 

The Hampshire-born socialite mixed with royalty and was friends with the Duchess of Cambridge (pictured, left, 2007) and her sister Pippa (pictured, right, at a book launch in London in  2008)

Sometimes she despaired, other times she laughed fit to burst, but mostly, she was phenomenally brave.

For Tara knew she was desperately ill. While the pituitary tumour, as she was at odds to make clear in our interview, ‘seemed to have gone away’, a rare auto-immune condition ravaged her body.

She had far too much dignity to speak publicly about how cruelly it affected her. 

She was also deeply concerned about how the terrible detail of her illness might upset the nephews and nieces upon whom she doted. 

It would be wrong to break her confidence now. Suffice to say, the condition related to her anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies that commonly attacks the upper respiratory tract (sinuses, nose, ears and trachea), the lungs and the kidney caused her untold pain.

So much so, she struggled to eat, to sleep and, some days, to summon the energy to get out of bed. 

She knew her condition was progressive and, yes, the thought of death terrified her. But she tried so very hard to remain positive.

Take the time she’d been particularly tearful during one of our conversations a few weeks before those pre-Christmas tests. 

Within minutes of our chat, she sent a recording of a song she’d written.

And Tara sang and played the piano beautifully. The lyrics are particularly poignant today. 

Tara on a ski lift in 1994 with her sister Santa (left), Prince Charles (second right) and a young Prince Harry (right)

‘It was New Year’s Eve last night but today my face looks like Halloween, the scars are my history, love lines where all my love has been. 

'Every one around me they’re trying to push a different way. I’ve lost and found me but who says, who says the party’s over.

‘Who says the party’s over. Cos I know I’m not ready to change my ways. No not ready. Who says the party’s over. No it’s not over.’

Tara, you see, was one of those rare people who, whatever life threw at her, was determined to squeeze as much fun from it as she could. 

Yes, she acknowledged she lost her way at times and deeply regretted those excesses, particularly any distress she may have caused the family she loved dearly.

But, in living her far-too-short life in the way she did, she brightened the lives of so many who knew her.

The last time we spoke she told me, once new medication had stabilised her condition, she was looking forward to going to her apartment in Klosters. It is where she was always at her happiest.

‘When on the mountains with the blue sky above and the cloud beneath me I feel as if I’m in paradise,’ she said. It is where I like to think of her today.