Passport: Lady Colin Campbell - 'A lot of what I had said turned out to be true'
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Your support makes all the difference.Lady Colin Campbell's original passport had described her as male because she was born with a cosmetic malformation and mistakenly registered as a boy at birth. She was brought up as George William, but at 21 she had corrective surgery and was issued with a new birth certificate. Now officially Georgia Arianna, she was able to apply for a new passport which gave her gender as female. She became a model and went on to marry Lord Colin Campbell, but the marriage ended in divorce. She began to write and published a book about the Princess of Wales called Diana in Private.
She wrote the book using information gathered from friends of the royals, and her passport shows that she travelled to America and Japan in 1992 to publicise the book. She says: "My book was before Andrew Morton's. When the Morton book came out, people saw that a lot of what I had said, which had been discounted at the time, turned out to be true - things like that the marriage was on the rocks and that she had bulimia. I also said at the time that she wanted a separation, which people found slightly unbelieveable - well, of course, later they found out that indeed it was absolutely true." The Russian stamps in her passport trace the lengthy process she had to go through to secure the adoption of her two young sons, Misha and Dima. She says: "I went over in '91, '92 and '93. The laws were very complex and the Russians are very punctilious about respecting the law, and they kept bringing in new regulations, so it was quite an involved process, but certainly worthwhile. I tried to adopt in Britain, but I actually found the system quite counter-productive. I was left with the impression that the system is geared towards keeping social workers in jobs and babies in foster care."
In the end she adopted Russian children because she has some Russian blood. "My father's grandmother was Russian and I feel an affinity for the Russians."
8 'A Life Worth Living: the Autobiography of Lady Colin Campbell' is published by Little Brown. Price pounds 18.99.
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