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It’s decades after Princess Diana’s death and still, some people are making her out to be the baddie.

But Patrick Jephson is standing up for the late princess the way the British Royal Family ought to have a long time ago.

As Diana’s private secretary and chief of staff, Jephson worked closely alongside Diana for eight years and says he knew her pretty well, so when people talk rubbish about her mental health, he feels the need to correct them.

Speaking out on The Scandal Mongers podcast with Phil Craig, per Page Six, the 66-year-old alleges that then-Prince Charles’ staff smeared Diana through a “systematic campaign”.

All along, the “establishment” openly knew that he was having an affair with longtime mistress Camilla Parker Bowles:

Jephson said: “This is not just some casual gossip, it was a systematic campaign. Okay, it was a long time ago, but … the man they were supporting is now our king and these things should not be buried, they should not be conveniently pushed to one side.

“They happened, in theory they could happen again, and certainly they shouldn’t pass without censure.”

Jephson has hit back against the now common perception that Diana was “a bit crazy” and “probably impossible”, saying that he gets very frustrated about this official line of thinking:

“If you ask people close to the current royal establishment — if you dare bring up the subject of Princess Diana, which very few people would — then I think that is the answer you would get; that it was a tragic story and that she was essentially troubled mentally, and the implication being that she was not entirely up the job, which essentially then she failed at.”

Referring to the new Queen Consort Camilla, he said: “And the unspoken addition is that everything is alright now because we have her replacement, who is wonderfully down-to-earth and grounded and not at all flakey or paranoid.”

When he hears this and sees that nobody is challenging it, he becomes momentarily flabbergasted as he said “I knew Princess Diana probably better than almost anybody — certainly professionally — and she was one of the most sane people I ever met”:

“Considering the life she lived, considering the pressures she was under, she wasn’t just sane, she had a kind of ability to restore sanity to crazy situations.

“As an eye witness, she could be a bit of a handful sometimes, but she was always extremely aware, sane, grounded, and funny.”

Diana died aged just 36 in a tragic car crash in Paris in August 1997, and Jephson worked with her right up to 1996.

He admitted seeing a visible change in her after the divorce with Charles, noting that going from “a happily married wife and mother to being a discarded ex-wife” is “a heck of a change in anyone’s book”.

He uses an example of the princess being smart enough to turn things to her advantage:

“She said ‘Yes, I do have an eating disorder,’ for example, and she gave a speech about eating disorders. I can’t think of a better definition of sanity than [to] have people accuse you of being nuts, and stand up and make a speech about the condition that you do have,” and explain how it “affects a lot of people, particularly young women. I think that is a sign of extraordinary strength and shows the essential pettiness of her accuser,” Jephson added.

The stories about her mental health were spread “by and large, by men, about a woman in a marriage with the intention to help another man”.

Nobody offered her a single ounce of support and rather left her to figure it all out alone:

“She was left isolated, she was left with no acknowledgment of the situation she was in, the stress she was under, the challenges she faced every day to raise her children in these circumstances, plus she had to prepare them for a life of service. And she thought, ‘How am I going to get my side of this out?’”

Jephson said that is why she turned to Andrew Morton to write her book, Diana: Her True Story, and also “no wonder that she fell for Martin Bashir’s lies,” referring to the now-disgraced BBC reporter who manipulated Diana into that infamous Panorama interview.

Also on his truth-telling mission, Jephson said via Cosmopolitan that he was on “maximum alert” when he screened The Crown season five, watching out for “malicious twisting of words,” “dishonest presentation of historical facts,” and “lies and cruel falsehoods”.

He apparently didn’t find any except for a few key moments that weren’t how the show depicted them.

He wrote a lengthy essay published in The Telegraph about it if you have the time, or just check out another breakdown that we wrote earlier this week.

You can’t always believe what you hear on TV.

[sources:pagesix&cosmopolitan]