Princes’ nod to outpouring of public grief is too much
We’ve seen enough of the human side of the royals, it’s time they restored the stiff upper lip, writes Sarah Caden
‘IT was a very long and lonely walk,” says Prince William in the BBC One documentary, Diana, 7 Days. The 20th anniversary documentary being broadcast tonight takes in his mother’s death on August 31, and also the week that followed — leading to the funeral procession from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, when her two boys, then 15 and 12, walked behind.
William, recalling that walk, talks tonight about hiding behind his then floppy fringe. It was a security blanket against a scene he just could not comprehend and it wasn’t just the difficulty in believing that his mother was dead, it was also what was going on around him.
He recalls the thousands of mostly silent people thronging the streets, staring at them, but then there were those who were wailing with grief. How could they grieve so, he remembers thinking, when they didn’t even know her? Why did they “cry as loud as they did?” he asks.
Recalling that sunny morning, walking behind their mother and alongside their grandfather, Prince Philip, their uncle, Charles Spencer, and their father, Prince Charles, what the Princes describe is an almost out-of-body experience.
But then, they seem to have wondered at the time, how could complete strangers seem so engaged?
There is in this, of course, a degree of Prince William saying that he wished they would all shut up and go away. There is no way he could have felt anything else. It was his mother and here were all these people trying to claim her as their loss. Also, he was a teenager, naturally self-conscious and awkward, being put on show in his hour of grief.
In retrospect, we should know that it was probably wrong to do it to those boys. And yet it is their need to let us know that sits uncomfortably. Or is it just that, at this stage, months into the royal openness and honesty about Diana’s death, maybe enough is enough? Maybe it’s time for them to resume the stiff upper lip again, keep counsel and restore a little mystery. If they become too relatable, they may well shatter the whole illusion that they are other and, well, deserving of their position as highly paid figureheads.
Of course, William and Harry aren’t complaining in tonight’s documentary. No, since Harry’s interview with Newsweek earlier this year, when he said of the procession behind the hearse that “no child should have to do that under any circumstance”, there has been a great deal of repair work done.
Tonight, Harry says: “Generally, I don’t have an opinion on whether that was right or wrong. I’m glad I was part of it. Looking back on it now, I’m very glad I was part of it.”
Duty looms large in their recollections tonight and that’s no harm, but once these commemorations are over, it might be time to stop the sharing. It’s wonderful for William, personally, that he keeps his mother close by, telling his children bedtime stories about her. It’s helpful to other people that Harry has talked about his anxiety issues born out of that early, shocking grief, but enough is enough.
It’s a discomfiting thing, at this point, the sharing of Diana’s death. At this point, in fact, the royals seem to have tipped into oversharing, the curse of the modern age.
In a strange way, the royals, criticised for being too aloof in the aftermath of Diana’s death 20 years ago, have now swung the other way. In fact, you could say that they are now overresponsive to public demand for shows of emotion.
The 21st-century attitude is that nothing should be kept quiet, everything should be shared, and that’s how the Royals have handled this anniversary. They are buying into the attitude that if there are “no pics, it never happened”, to the point that last month we saw footage of William and Harry leafing through family albums together. There was laughter about a photo of William and Diana and Harry “in the tummy”. There was teasing about William’s hair loss.
It was heartwarming and nice to see them remember their mother with love, but this was a private moment. In real life, with people to whom we are actually close, do we share their grief to such an extent, sit around almost literally peering over their shoulders as they gaze upon images of their dead loved ones? Oh, yes, these days we do. These days, we’re all in on everyone else’s experiences of birth, life, death and everything in between. We set up WhatsApp groups to announce the arrival of our babies, basically leaning on everyone whom we’ve forced into the group to share our elation. Communions, engagements, weddings, nothing is sacred, nothing is safe from needing to be “liked”. And the sending of ‘RIPs’ is the social-media commiserating equivalent when someone dies, in the same way that the visiting of scenes of tragedy is another way for us to really, truly feel a loss. Even of a person or people we never knew. We can’t just know, instinctively, that something sad has happened and empathise at arm’s length. We need proof, we need visible emotion, we need in on it.
We are hooked on outpourings of grief. And outpourings of grief, you may recall, were born with the death of Diana. There had never been anything like it and it shaped how we manage our emotions today.
One wonders if, in their ongoing efforts to win popularity — and Charles’s has reportedly plummeted in the lead up to Diana’s anniversary, as we are reminded of his coldness to her — they are pandering to popular opinion. The public wanted them to be more emotional 20 years ago, and hated them for resisting that demand, so now they are sharing to excess.
In tonight’s documentary, Princes William and Harry talk about how their father woke them in the middle of the night in Balmoral to tell them Diana had died.
Half-asleep, only little boys really, already affected by their parents’ acrimonious marriage and break-up, it must have been layer upon layer of devastation. We can only imagine — though we don’t need to. They will tell us.
Charles, the princes emphasise tonight, was terrific. He was supportive, gentle — and contrary to the public perception of the royal broken marriage, he was himself grieving for Diana.
It’s a sympathetic image of a moment — of two boys left suddenly with only one parent. But it’s private. Or it should be so, surely.
An unlikely hero emerges from all of this though — in the form of Prince Philip.
In the week between Diana’s death and her funeral, he grew increasingly frustrated with Tony Blair and his team’s efforts to make the Queen show more emotion, fly the flag at half mast, behave as a grandmother as well as a monarch. The royals, who hated Blair’s “people’s princess” tag, did not want it repeated at her funeral.
Last week, a former aide to Blair alleged that when it was suggested in a conference call between Downing Street and Balmoral that the princes should walk behind the hearse, Prince Philip told them all to “f **k off ”.
In the end, of course, he was overruled, but maybe that bluntness, that brusque resolve is something the royals need more of right now. Two short words can say so much about the real grief of the royals, while their current oversharing devalues it day by day.
‘Maybe that bluntness is something the royals need more of now...’