Diana's former lover angers Britain with new boasts

LONDON -- Princess Diana's former lover, despised in Britain for revealing intimate details of their affair, has stirred up more revulsion -- and fascination -- by boasting the princess was good in bed and allowing excerpts from her private letters to be read on a television documentary.

Tabloid newspapers mingled denunciations of James Hewitt with generous excerpts of his boasting.

Hewitt, long nicknamed the "Desert Rat," was followed by a Channel 4 television crew on a trip to the United States this year as he tried to sell the letters Diana wrote to him when he served as a tank commander in the 1991 Gulf War.

He is reportedly seeking $16 million for the missives.

In the documentary, "James Hewitt: Confessions of a Cad," the paunchy, 45-year-old ex-army major listens as his lawyer, Michael Coleman, reads extracts of the letters. Coleman previously said Hewitt would only sell the 64 letters on condition they were not made public.

In one, Diana writes: "Boy, oh boy, does the Earth shake when I get a letter from my desert friend, screams of delight, tears, you name it. Demented female on the loose, that's for sure."

In another, she tells Hewitt: "So, there are 30,000 ladies in the gulf. That should keep you busy, my friend. Variety is the essence, I'm told."

Hewitt also makes crude comments about Diana and his success with other women in the documentary, to be broadcast in Britain on July 24.

He suggests Prince Charles should have been grateful for his five-year affair with Diana, as Charles conducted his own with Camilla Parker Bowles. Hewitt also boasts that his father and grandfather both had an eye for women, "so I reckon it runs in the blood."

"I never wanted to be a cad but I guess I am, so if you're handed a bunch of lemons, make some lemon juice," he adds.

Newspapers endorsed his low self-assessment Thursday.

"Cad. Rat. Slimeball. Disgrace. Snake. ... None of these words comes even close to summing up this disgusting creature," Diana's former butler and confidant, Paul Burrell, wrote in his column in the Daily Mirror newspaper.

A Daily Mail headline denounced Hewitt as "overweight, seedy and reduced to playing the gigolo with older women."

The Sun dressed up a newsman in a rat costume to give Hewitt a "taste of his own medicine" as the former cavalry officer left his London home.

The affair between Hewitt and Diana began when he gave her riding lessons, but it had soured by the time he cooperated in a 1994 book about the liaison, "Princess in Love."

In a now-famous 1995 Panorama interview given two years before her death at age 36 in a Paris car crash, Diana said she had "adored him" but he had let her down.

Hewitt left the Life Guards division of the army 10 years ago and since then has made considerable income from "Princess in Love," speaking engagements and other activities. He is suing Fox News for more than $1 million for allegedly breaking a deal to hire him as a war correspondent in Iraq.

At one point in the Channel 4 documentary, Hewitt talks to his interviewers from a bubble bath and at another appears to be drunk.

Asked how many lovers he has in a year, he boasts -- apparently jokingly -- that there were more than the number of runs the England cricket team scores in a year, which usually is over 1,000.

Another person tired of Hewitt's boasts is former girlfriend Emma Stewardson.

"Everybody wishes that he would just go away -- the royal family, the whole population of the country, me, my family," The Sun quoted her as saying. "For heaven's sake shut up."