Tara's highs and lows

I've known Tara Palmer-Tomkinson for 15 years. When I met her she was a bouncing teenage Sloane with a witty turn of phrase. Soon she had posed in her bra and knickers for the

A few years later she asked me to a birthday party she was having at L'Equipe Anglaise, the West End venue for die-hard party-players. She was wearing a minuscule pink sequined dress and was as high as a kite. We sat at a back table in the club because she was too glassy to mingle.

Tara wasn't fun when she was high. She was wide-eyed and silent, slightly clingy and increasingly paranoid, emaciated and unreliable. During the two years that followed there were few parties; just a lot of sitting at home waiting for the dealer and wondering if she was going to die. Then rehab, then the jungle.

Recently, rumours have been circulating again that Tara is back on cocaine. The rumours tend to be weighted with intimate details and authenticated by times and places, citing disorientation in Le Caprice, for example, or frequent visits to the loo at a book launch at The Ritz. In fact, these whispers had reached such a frenzy of apparent viability that I didn't know what manner of creature would walk through the door for today's photo shoot - or indeed if Tara would appear at all.

But she does appear - on time, tanned, relaxed and desperate for lunch. I've never seen her so not on drugs. 'The idiots who spread these rumours,' she begins once we're settled by the pool with cigarettes. 'What they don't realise - and how ironic is this - is that for the last two years of my addiction there were no parties. It started with sitting in the corner of a party and went on until I just lived in the corner of my bathroom.

'The psychosis had set in, it was vomiting and weight loss and six locks on my bathroom door because of the paranoia. I knew my days were numbered. I was... I was bad.' She's stuttering to find words for the state she was actually in. 'So it seems ridiculous for people to think that if I took coke now I could actually make it to a party. Any therapist will tell you that if you start using again you go back to the place you were in before you came off.

'It's stupid to think that if I relapsed I'd just get out there and go mad. Now, I kiss people hello and if they're on coke I can smell it and I immediately want to hurl. It was the lover, the boyfriend, the everything for six years - I know that demon.'

The sight of Tara drinking seemed to serve as evidence that she was doing everything else as well. 'I do drink,' she says directly. 'Is that a crime? I went clean off drink and drugs for two years and then I came off the programme. It didn't suit me. Lots of people need the guidance and confidence that comes from going to a meeting every day but the reasons that I'd done drugs were very clear to me. It started with boredom and self-loathing and then I was seduced into a full-blown habit.'

Perhaps the main problem is that she's so high-octane and 'look at me' nutty when she's sober that it seems impossible that such funloving dizziness could come from merely a natural high. 'Oh, I've always been like that. My mother [Patty - Prince Charles's great friend] was the same. The only correct thing in these recent reports is that I talk gibberish, but I've been doing that for 32 years. And the best thing to come out of the rumours is that my family and close friends completely ignored them. I never realised that so many people had such faith in me.'

More pressure comes from the fact that both Tara and her ex-habit are disproportionately famous. Her face, her husky voice, her taut build, her romantic history - we are familiar with it all so there are eyes everywhere.

'I know that when I'm in a restaurant and I come out of the loo there will always be a diner looking at me and wondering what I did in there,' she says ruefully, 'but that's the weakness in them, not in me. I always wonder how my face is supposed to be when I come out of the loo. Do you smile? Do you laugh? Do you cry? Anything can get people talking. I mean anyone could have a bit of pastry from a canapé stuck to their lip but on me it's automatically a big rock of crack!'

But she's angry that people talk, angry that they quote 'an onlooker' or 'a concerned friend' rather than her mother who testifies that she's never been better. And Tara feels that the aspersions affect the anti-drugs talks she gives to children. 'That's my great sadness really,' she says. 'Try talking to a whole load of people and telling them not to take drugs when they've just read a double-page spread called "Tara Palmer-Troublesome" which tells them that you might be. It's really shitty to plant that seed of doubt. I'm not trying to be Mother Teresa but I've done my best to use my experience of drugs to help other people. It's such a shame when you've really struggled. I think people have the wrong idea about rehab; they think it's a quick wash and the clothes come out clean but it's not. It's just the first five weeks of the rest of your life. It's the easy bit because there are nurses and therapists and people to cheer you up when you're sad. The difficult part is carrying on by yourself.

'These rumours come about once in a blue moon. They make me furious but the best revenge is to go on being healthy.'

We are sitting, by the way, amid crates of Walkers crisps that the hopeful PR has sent over, rather thinking that the photographer might shoot her on a lilo surrounded by floating packets of crisps. As it happens, we remain crisp-free but Tara would have happily chewed away for the camera. She's thrilled with her Walkers contract, thrilled with the money and thrilled that they've hired her for a second year.

'I love doing the adverts because they're funny,' she says, 'and the people are great, they always keep me in the loop.' Perhaps the unknown is a little scarier than it once was. 'Oh, but I'm tougher,' she protests. 'I can see the Greg Martins coming a mile off.' Martin was the man Tara got engaged to a month after coming out of rehab. The media gleefully began to report his philandering ways which put paid to the relationship but, in this case, the zeal of the newspapers may have saved her from an appalling mistake.

Next came a two-year relationship with divorced property developer Anton Bilton. 'When I was with Anton I was trying to be happy but never quite getting there,' she remembers. Actually, I remember having lunch with her towards the end of their relationship and she was a twitchy, bored mess. 'I was,' she agrees. 'I was thinking that this was the right man, the right house, the right way to live. But none of it was right - I was totally unstimulated and bored.'

Bilton eventually left Tara for her friend Lisa B. Their engagement has been announced and a wedding is planned for September. Does that sting? 'I feel total indifference, doesn't bother me at all,' she says. 'Actually, I wish them well. I very much believe in destiny and she's much better suited to that life. It got to the stage when I was having headaches and a lot of that was to do with the fact that I wasn't working. I didn't have any pride in myself.'

The jungle changed all that. Low-brow television, the adverts, the sweet eagerness all come together to paint a picture of someone who wants attention for appreciation and approval rather than for international celebrity. 'I got well when I came out of the jungle. I got confident because I was popular,' she says unashamedly. 'The day I came out was like a wedding day; the most incredible day ever. My family, my friends, everyone had told me not to do it; that I'd be the first one out. But I was damned if people were going to continue to have this image of me which wasn't me. The jungle changed everything.'

After I'm a Celebrity, Tara didn't have a day off for a year and a half. She continues to present for ITV, has a magazine column and does her commercials but really her ambition is limited: a house in the country with dogs and kids when the time is right.

'I'm grateful for everything I get rather than madly hunting for jobs,' she says. 'And in this business people are thinking on your behalf - I'm like a clockwork mouse; just wind me up at the beginning of the day and off I go, looking for my pieces of cheese.'

During the cheese hunt she's managed to unearth a new boyfriend, Jamie Hargreaves, 32, heir to the Matalan empire. Nicky Haslam introduced them in Majorca. Super-budget shopping is newly chic and Tara is certainly endorsing it, even though she's still carrying a Dior handbag. She's fresh from a weekend on his boat in Portofino. 'I'm madly in love,' she says, 'and I've never been happier. We're getting to the three-month mark but we've fitted in so much and it's been just perfect - it feels 100 per cent perfect. I don't really have any angst in my life now and the only drugs I'm on are these herbal pills that are supposed to give you bigger boobs. You're meant to take three a day, so of course I take six.' Some people just don't do anything by halves.