Tara Palmer-Tomkinson dead: How Prince Charles' god-daughter became a socialite and TV celebrity

The reality TV star, who once declared she had kissed the Prince of Wales every day since the age of four, frequently found the contents of her life subject to the harsh glare of the limelight

The former socialite, who once published a book titled The Naughty Girl's Guide to Life, gained massive publicity in 2006 for her cocaine addiction (Getty)

To the shock of many, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson has died at the age of 45.

The god-daughter of the Prince of Wales was found dead at her London flat on Tuesday. She had been suffering from a brain tumour discovered by doctors last January.

Palmer-Tomkinson, better known by her moniker of T-P-T, was a socialite and frequently found her name splashed across the tabloids throughout the late nineties and noughties. Appearing on manifold reality TV shows, Tomkinson’s life often found itself subject to the unremitting glare of the limelight.

Appearing on everything from I'm a Celebrity... Get Me out of Here! to A Place in the Sun, Blind Date, and Top Gear in her time, Palmer-Tomkinson was something of a veteran reality TV star.

But asides from that, what is it which made the press so relentlessly drawn to the Hampshire-raised television presenter who once declared she had kissed the Prince of Wales every day since the age of four?

She has close-knit royal connections

After Palmer-Tomkinson left school, she briefly embarked on a career in the city, working for Rothschilds bank. But that didn’t last long and she quickly found her exploits ghostwritten by author Wendy Holden in a weekly Sunday Times column in the 1990s. The socialite would call Holden to describe the events of the last week and they would then appear in the piece under her name.

Palmer-Tomkinson is from the landowning and Olympian class. While her paternal great-great-grandfather, James Tomkinson, was a landowner and Liberal politician, her father, Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, represented the UK at Olympic level as a skier and is said to have taught Prince William to ski.

It goes without saying that she had tight-knit royal connections, with her parents being close friends of the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall. She attended Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding.

She struggled with addiction and mental health problems

The former socialite, who once published a book titled The Naughty Girl's Guide to Life, gained massive publicity for her cocaine addiction in 2006. Appearing on the Jeremy Kyle Show in 2014, she said her battle with anxiety had made her a “recluse”.

While she said she had put an end to her well-documented drug addiction, she admitted she was still dealing with mental health issues. She also revealed that she once nearly died after taking a cocaine overdose.

“I get terribly anxious going out, I’ve only been out three times this year,” she said. “I don’t go out to public events. For the last two years, I haven’t worked. I've seen a therapist every single week for the last nine, 10 years of my life.“

It was after her family sent her to rehabilitation in Arizona that she decided to “change her life”.

She revealed she had a brain tumour last year

Palmer-Tomkinson revealed she was diagnosed with a brain tumour in an interview in November 2016. However, in the Daily Mail interview, Palmer-Tomkinson said she had been told the non-malignant growth in her pituitary gland had cleared after treatment.

“I went to the doctors to talk about my latest blood test results when I got back from skiing in January. I said: 'What does this mean? Can you translate it?' And the doctor said: 'As I suspected, you have a brain tumour',” she told the paper.

“I got terribly frightened. I started thinking, 'I'm going to die, I'm going to die. I've only got a couple of weeks to live.' Stuff like that.”