'My life is so lonely'

Goodness gracious, it's hard to pin Tara Palmer-Tomkinson down. First of all we were to meet on a Thursday, then Friday, then Sunday. There are endless telephone calls from a variety of people and Tara herself until, finally, we all agree on Saturday afternoon. "I'll be in the country," Tara tells me in her throaty, raspy accent. "Meet me there!" I then go through hoops to organise people to look after my children and tell my friends who are coming for the weekend not to and then, five minutes before I am about to leave, I get a call to say she's feeling apprehensive about meeting me.

So I am in a murderous mood when I get to Dummer, in Hampshire. I have no idea where the Palmer-Tomkinson family home is and the battery on my phone has run out. I drive around the pretty village like a loony, spitting and cursing, until a nice gentleman directs me down a long, treacherous track. At the end is Tara, looking small in tracksuit bottoms and cashmere jumper, standing in front of a huge country house. She gives me a little wave and a smile and within five minutes I cease wanting to hit her and, instead, want to hug her, for she seems lonely and lost and a little sad.

Her mother, Patty, on one crutch after a skiing accident in Klosters, sets about getting us tea and biscuits and then wanders off accompanied by an assortment of dogs. It's all very English. Tara's father, Charles, is a former Olympic skier turned farmer, and he and Patty are friends of the royals and immensely well-bred. Outside there are flat, green lawns and well-maintained gardens and trimmed privet hedges. Inside there are dressers stacked full of crockery and photographs everywhere: Santa, Tara's older sister who is married to the writer Simon Sebag Montefiore, in her wedding dress; Santa and Simon with their children. There are also many of Tara always looking amazing, but always on her own.

Does it bother her, being on her own? "Oh, sometimes I wish I could turn back the clock," she says, supine in front of a roaring fire. "I'd be married and have children like my sister. But that hasn't happened." Does she really want that? She always comes across as if she's having such a good time. The other night, Jamie Cullum and some friends went back to her Chelsea flat and they jammed for hours. Cat Deeley pops round. Darius comes over for a sing-song.

Tara is an accomplished pianist. On Wednesday she will accompany opera singer Colin Salmon in a Leonard Bernstein tribute night for the ENO. They are doing Maria from West Side Story. It is, apparently, going to be a starry event.

Wouldn't marriage and children at the age of 33 scupper all that? "Oh, I know," she says, "but my life is so lonely. I don't want to whinge because I know many people have much more difficult lives than mine. When my job, being the bubbly TPT, is going well and I'm feeling positive then it's the best job in the world but sometimes I don't feel like being TPT. Sometimes I come home from work and I'm close to tears. I find it hard to trust people because I've been let down in the past. I had a flatmate for two years, my best friend in the whole world, who stole my credit cards and ran up thousands of pounds on them. Now my best friend is my Polish cleaner." How does she feel today? She gives a short laugh. "I'm feeling a bit low. A bit bruised." And she ruffles her long, glossy hair and gazes into the fire.

No wonder she's feeling bruised. So many things have happened to her, and all of them so public. There was her descent into drugs, then her rehabilitation six years ago. She then went on to have a disastrous engagement to Beatles producer George Martin's son, Greg; she called the marriage off. She followed that with a relationship with property developer Anton Bilton who ended up going off with Lisa B, Tara's friend. Anton and Lisa are now married and about to have their first child. Tara licked her wounds by going off to the jungle to film I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, which did more to endear her to the public than anything else she'd done. But still, she tells me, there are endless sniping reports in the press saying she is back on drugs.

"That's the problem," she says. "I rarely go out. I haven't been to a nightclub in six years. I can't. On my last day in rehab [at Meadows, in Arizona] I burnt my address book. I couldn't have got clean and lived the life I used to as I'd have gone back onto the cocaine.

"Lots of my friends were angry with me. I told them I was saving my life! I then took on work and made sure I did appointments in the morning so I'd get up. It sounds awful but for two years, before rehab, I can barely remember a thing. I must have been a nightmare."

Why did she get into drugs in the first place? "I think I was pretty troubled,"
she says. "I felt like a loser. I had all this fame but for the wrong reasons. My family have been friends with the royals for ages and they are part of our lives and, I suppose, it got me attention when I was younger.