The Showgirl and the Prince – by Tom Sykes

Ruthie Henshall’s account in this weekend’s Daily Mail of her five-year relationship with Prince Edward is indiscreet in all the ways I had hoped, studded with the kind of detail no biographer would dare invent.

The story starts backstage at Cats in 1988. Henshall, then 20, and making her West End debut as Jemima at the New London Theatre, heard a rumour flying round the company that a new production assistant called Edward Windsor was joining.

She innocently asked who he was. The answer: the Queen’s youngest son, 23, who had just walked out of the Royal Marines (to the horror of Prince Philip) to work for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatre Company.

The gay rumours started immediately, she notes, for no better reason than that he worked in theatre. His mother, meanwhile, is said to have voiced a different worry: that he might come home with a chorus girl.

Enter Henshall, who greeted him at the stage door with a Cats in-joke about “joining the litter.”

She describes making a beeline for him whenever he was in the building, mainly, she says, because she enjoyed watching his reaction to her filthy backstage humour.

When he mentioned a weekend at Windsor, she told him that if he ever wanted company, she was available. There was also, she confesses, the strategic deployment of a very short ra-ra skirt.

In May 1988 he finally asked whether she fancied coming to his to watch a Judy Garland film (no help with the gay rumours to be fair) and have a bite to eat. She drove her battered Vauxhall Nova down the Mall in a leotard and dungarees, gave her name to the policeman at the gates of Buckingham Palace, and was waved through to an apartment with a bathroom the size of her entire flat, and name tags reading “HRH Edward” sewn into every piece of his underwear.

Edward moves slowly, very slowly, and it’s all rather adorable: Freesias sent to her flat because he knew they were her favourite, loving notes left by the bed when he slipped out early and letters on Buckingham Palace letterhead, signed with three kisses rather than his name for security, delivered under a stamp bearing his own mother’s head.

The Royal family embraced her, and she spent time at Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral.

There is a great set-piece scene in Balmoral. Three martinis in, with the Queen and Princess Margaret singing hymns, Diana tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to rescue everyone with a proper song.

Margaret requests I Dreamed A Dream. Henshall belts it out to royal applause. Edward later relayed his mother’s verdict: “Now, that’s a pair of lungs!”

William and Harry, then ten and eight, tell her ghost stories and then lie in wait outside the loo to jump-scare her. Charles is described as chasing his squealing sons through the Balmoral corridors at breakfast. Diana is not as warm as Fergie, who at one point offers Henshall advice: leave while you still can.

Darker currents emerge too. Henshall writes about pulling out her eyelashes, a compulsion rooted in childhood sexual abuse, and how when she confided this in Edward, he breezily assured her it would pass.

She wonders whether the confession made him retreat a little, knowing the scrutiny she would face if the relationship ever became official.

The ending, when it comes, is very grown-up. By 1993, Crazy For You had made her a genuine star. Front-page reviews and comparisons to Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers ensue, and the whole royal family came trooping in to watch, the Queen and Queen Mother included.

That summer Edward began seeing Sophie Rhys-Jones, a young PR at Capital Radio; Henshall took up with the actor John Gordon Sinclair. Edward suggested the four of them meet, so he and Sophie came to see her in She Loves Me and they all went on to dinner at the Savoy. All four, she writes, understood the significance of the evening without anyone saying it: the right thing had happened. She felt no jealousy, being besotted herself, only the poignancy of knowing that she and Edward would never again come first for each other.

Thirty years on, she says, she still sometimes dreams about Edward – and texts him whenever it happens.