James Middleton opens up on the incredible moment dog Ella saved him from suicide | UK | News

The winter’s night in November 2017 when James Middleton climbed the ladder to the roof of his west London flat remains a Sliding Doors moment. Months of anxiety and depression had left him unable to sleep and struggling to eat without retching; losing weight, isolated and mentally and physically exhausted.

It was, he recalls, a “black and white world empty of emotion and feeling”. He had pushed away his family, locking the door and hiding when his sister Pippa dropped by to check on him, while ignoring increasingly urgent calls and texts. “I didn’t necessarily want to end my life, but I didn’t want to continue living how I was,” he admits starkly today. “I felt like I was in this conundrum – I didn’t see a way forward.”

That night, agitated, in need of air and wanting to escape the feeling of being “boxed in by four walls”, yet afraid of meeting any late night homecomers outside, he pulled down the telescopic ladder and climbed up, his heart racing.

For hours, the Princess of Wales’ younger brother paced the exposed flat roof space like a caged animal. It was his “darkest night”.

“I didn’t have a purpose. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just trying to stop my mind from thinking,” he continues. “I didn’t believe there was a way to overcome this and I started to think the only solution was ending my life.”

Today, with tears in his eyes and a slight catch in his voice, the 37-year-old entrepreneur explains the reason why he believes he didn’t take that final, fatal step to oblivion – his black cocker spaniel, Ella, gazing lovingly up at him through the skylight.

“Perhaps on a normal night, and I’d been up on the roof on plenty of happier occasions, she would have gone to her bed and fallen asleep knowing I’d return,” he tells me. “But she sensed there was something not right and sat looking up the ladder and willing me to return. Every time I went past, she was staring back at me.”

He pauses: “She looked at me as if saying, ‘You are enough as you are. You don’t need to be any more’. Dogs look into your soul. They know you better than you probably know yourself. I remember, vividly, the jolt in my mind that stopped me thinking about myself and thinking about her instead.”

James now accepts he had been trying to work out if he could make his death look like an accident, to save his parents some of their inevitable heartbreak.

Thankfully, Ella’s unflinching devotion broke that brutal chain of thought.

“The one real conundrum was, ‘Who would find Ella, who would give her breakfast and let her out in the morning…?’ She needed me as much as I needed her,” he continues. “She clearly didn’t want to let me out of her sight. That scared me, I realised there was something really wrong.”

A few days later, he plucked up the courage to call the family doctor, which set him on the path to the happier space he inhabits today. “If I hadn’t acknowledged I needed help, things could have gone a very different way,” he admits.

Seven years later, the crisis forms the emotional epicentre of his remarkable memoir, Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life, a no-holds-barred account of the toughest moments of his life and subsequent diagnosis with attention deficit disorder.

Given the circumstances it documents, it’s a genuinely joyful read and a love-letter to the pleasure and responsibilities of canine companionship.

Today James is happily married to French financier Alizée Thevenet – thanks largely to Ella, of which more shortly – and the couple have a one-year-old son, Inigo.

As is common for many of us, his life has had its ups and downs but the one constant until her death aged 15 in January last year, was Ella. The late Queen, famously a dog lover herself, even let her stay in James’ room during stays at Sandringham.

We’re talking today at Bucklebury Farm Park, a petting-zoo-cum farm shop in Berkshire owned by his brother-in-law James Matthews and sister Pippa, 41, and close to his parents Carole and Michael. James, who also lives nearby, has brought three of his six dogs along for company: Isla, a two-year-old golden retriever with adorable eyes; and Inka and Luna, both ten and daughters of Ella.

As we talk, they nuzzle around our feet, occasionally jumping up for a cuddle (his other dogs, Mabel, Zula and Nala, are at home with his wife). He is frank, warm and likeable. His life, he admits, has been highly privileged, born into a wealthy, aspirational family, yet depression has no regard for title nor income nor background.

His oldest sister, Catherine, 42, began dating Prince William at university in 2001, when James was just 14 – thrusting the Middleton family unforgivingly into the public eye. Having married the heir to the Throne in 2011, she is now Princess of Wales. It would be all too easy to blame that scrutiny, which he doesn’t.

“I was 13 or 14 when I first met William so he’s been in our lives for longer than he hasn’t,” James says. “So it’s been a gentle journey.” That said, he admits his life pressures were often played out in the public eye, “not out of my own choice but by circumstances because I just happened to be ‘the brother of…’”

However, the roots of his own depression go back much further. Growing up dyslexic and slightly introverted in the shadow of two driven older sisters, the expectations placed on him were high. Like Catherine and Pippa, he attended the elite boarding school Marlborough College but failed to shine as they had and spent his gap year retaking his chemistry A-Level four times.

James insists he doesn’t blame school or parents, but there’s a sense of a round peg being forced into a square hole. By his own admission, he was not cut out for academic life and dropped out of the University of Edinburgh after a year. There, however, was a major positive: meeting Ella, then a tiny newborn pup.

“I needed a sense of responsibility that gave me the confidence to go off on my own,” he explains. “That’s when Ella came into my life. I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to take care of this dog’. And little did I know that, actually, she’d be the one taking care of me – during anything from my troubled times through to my relationships.”

And nowhere was that more evident than during the summer of 2018, when thanks to Ella, James met his now wife in a west London members’ bar. “Ella was sitting with this girl who had her back to me. As I walked past, menu in hand to go to the bar, I sort of said, ‘I hope that Ella isn’t bothering you’,” he beams. “And Alizée turned around, and this beautiful face looked at me and smiled.”

Thinking James was a waiter, she gave him her order.

“So I went to the bar, ordered their drinks, and then wrote a note from Ella to Alizée, paid and left my number: ‘I might be barking up the wrong tree but if there’s the opportunity to take you for a drink we would love that’, and I signed it, ‘Ella and James’.”

They went on a date soon afterwards and, subsequently, married in France in 2021.

Ella died a week before they discovered Alizée was pregnant.

“I was devastated at the time, obviously, but as Alizée pointed out, Ella was the first to know she was pregnant,” says James. “Dogs can smell cancer, they can sniff cash or drugs at airports and they certainly recognise the hormonal changes when someone’s pregnant. In hindsight we thought it was because she was dying, but now it’s like she was subtly trying to tell us, ‘There’s good news on the way’.”

His recovery was helped, in part, by the work done by William and Catherine in normalising our discussions of mental health.

He doesn’t think his own situation influenced them, but concedes: “It was happening on their doorstep and it can happen to anybody. But, equally, I was fortunate that some of the work they’d done was out there because it was an aid for me and brought it to the forefront of family life.

Today he devotes a lot of his life to making sure we give back to dogs. That comes via an ambassadorship for charities Dog’s Trust and Pets As Therapy, plus his thriving new business, James & Ella, making premium freeze-dried dog food in the UK, already on the shelves of Waitrose and Sainsbury’s.

His recovery continues apace, but it’s a work in progress.

“I haven’t cured my mental health, I’ve learned to look after it by keeping it in the forefront,” he says. “I talk about it, I exercise it, I have good days, I have bad days. It’s like the physical side, if you overdo it you get fatigued, and I think it’s the same with mental health.”

Ella’s DNA flows through the wider Middleton family’s dogs, not only in Inka, Luna, Zula and Nala, but in Pippa’s dog, Rafa, who is Ella’s nephew, and Ella’s granddaughter, Orla, the cocker spaniel owned by the Wales’ and their young family. One can only hope she’s given them as much support during the tough year of Catherine’s illness as Ella gave James.

“I know how much of a role my dogs and Ella played in my life and I know Orla is playing her role in supporting that family through the good and bad,” says James. “They’re lucky to have her in their life but it’s not for me to say how she’s doing.”

A year after her passing, how much does he think about Ella, I wonder?

“Pretty much every day – there’s something in me that doesn’t want to forget her,” he adds. “That was one thing I was scared of at the start. I didn’t want her to become a distant memory that got foggier and foggier as I got older, which is part of the reason I wanted to write a book to tell Inigo all about this amazing dog.

“So I keep her very much in the forefront of my mind and pretty much everything I do. And that’s my way of processing grief. I’m not embarrassed by that. Also, I think it actually makes it easier because she’s still with me.”

Meet Ella: The Dog Who Saved My Life, by James Middleton (Octopus, £22) is out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25. For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit samaritans.org