Princess Diana was the patron saint of today’s dangerous age of populism

The Princess of Wales was no saint. Twenty years after her tragic death in a car crash, it’s important to resist the lure of sentimentality, and acknowledge her faults and failings as well as her virtues, writes Eilis O’Hanlon

ASHORT while before Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris, I’d begun writing a new weekly column for the Northern Irish edition of the now defunct News Of The World.

I decided to tackle rumours that Diana was thinking of quitting Britain for a new life with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in Europe. The gist of my argument was that Britain would be well shot of her.

It appeared in some early editions of the newspaper the following Sunday, August 31 1997, by which point Diana was dead after her chauffeur-driven car collided with a pillar at 12.23am while being pursued by paparazzi.

Many readers were outraged, thinking that the column had been written as a direct response to Diana’s death. The headline didn’t help. “Bye bye, Diana, and good riddance,” it read.

I laugh about it now, but at the time the backlash was vicious. Britain was locked down into weeks of mourning for the woman Prime Minister Tony Blair, ever a man for the populist gesture, dubbed “the people’s princess”. Crowds thronged the streets. Anti-royalist revolution was in the air.

It’s a tribute to the royal family’s versatility that they weathered the storm and came back stronger than ever. As for me, I was made to write a grovelling apology the following week. (A first draft was rejected as being insufficiently repentant). The storm passed. Storms do.

That world seems very alien now. Royal biographer Penny Junor did face hostility from surviving acolytes of the Cult of Diana when she dared criticise the socalled “Queen of people’s hearts” in a recent book; but most readers would no longer bat a proverbial eyelid at criticism of Diana. She’s remembered fondly, but not fanatically any more. That’s been reflected as this week’s 20th anniversary of her tragic death approaches.

There have been plenty of newspaper articles, and programmes on TV, in which Princes William and Harry talked movingly of their late mother and the impact that her death had on them as young children. But it’s history now, rather than hysteria. Looking back, most people who got caught up in the delirium are probably even a bit embarrassed about it at all.

That’s not to downplay the tragedy. Diana was an attractive, charismatic young mother of two boys who were only 15 and 12 at the time, and rightly attracted huge sympathy for the ordeal she endured at the hands of the House of Windsor when she blundered naively into marriage with Prince Charles, oblivious to what awaited her. What a cold and dysfunctional family they were. An innocent like Diana didn’t stand a chance.

The virgin had been carefully selected as a “brood mare”. Her role was to give the heir to the throne some heirs of his own, not to be happy. Naturally she went off the rails. It’s no slight on Diana that she couldn’t cope. That she escaped at all was miraculous. That she did so taking so much public goodwill with her was a testament to her better qualities. She was a compassionate woman, who visited Aids victims and young homeless people and refuges for battered women. She liked normal people.

She energised an institution still paralysed by Edwardian stuffiness. Even ardent anti-royalists couldn’t find a bad word to say about her.

The ability to connect directly to people is a gift which her sons have clearly inherited. That’s Diana’s legacy. Her death shook the foundations of the House of Windsor, but her sons have strengthened it immeasurably, reconciling the two inherited conflicts and making something new from them.

Britain is in no danger of becoming a Republic any time soon. Beyond that, though, Diana’s is just a sad story about a troubled woman who died far too young.

As time passes, the complexity of the situation has also been better appreciated. The royals may have treated her monstrously, as if her feelings did not matter, but they were no cartoon monsters.

They were prisoners of the abnormal expectations placed on them as well. Prince Charles was the villain of the piece for a time, and didn’t always behave well, but the palpable warmth and respect between the Prince of Wales and his sons speaks for itself.

His relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, who was viscerally hated for her role in the saga, has also come to be appreciated as a solid and meaningful partnership. Camilla is now regarded with affection. This is all as it should be.

Even the Queen, who was demonised as a heartless dragon after Diana’s death, has been rehabilitated. She didn’t like Diana, but ultimately gained by her.

Diana wasn’t perfect either. Her mind was often silly, trivial. She could be childish and impulsive. She’s remembered as a victim of a voracious media, but she was a skilled manipulator of the paparazzi, too. She had to be, but there was a streak of ruthlessness there that was far from admirable. In appearing on Panorama to give a one-sided view of her marriage, she massed the forces of public opinion against her former husband, who could not defend himself.

The royal family had to put up with a lot from Diana’s narcissistic outbursts. Penny Junor goes as far as to say that the princess’s mental fragility damaged her children. Diana dismissed William’s beloved nanny when he was only four because she felt threatened by his fondness for her. That was cruel. She also relentlessly used her children as pawns in a PR war with Charles when she should’ve been shielding them. Even her embrace of charitable causes could be seen as an attempt to stay in the public eye and get one up on Charles.

The Royals learned from their mistakes. It’s questionable whether Diana would ever have had the self-awareness to do the same.

Diana was simply a blank slate on which everyone scribbled their own fantasies. To some she was a feminist icon, who walked out on a powerful husband and a oppressive patriarchal institution.

That’s partly true, though she was hardly the first to do so. Caroline of Brunswick had done the same two centuries earlier when her own Prince of Wales, later George IV, tried to dump her as surplus to requirements. She used the power of public affection against the royals to similar effect.

To others, Diana was tantamount to a saint, and, once she was dead, that myth quickly became unassailable. Post religious societies still need deities. Tony Blair dubbed her the “people’s princess”, and she was drafted in to take her place in the new pagan pantheon.

It might be a stretch to draw a direct line between, on the one hand, Diana as the outsider who was hailed as superior to the natural born royals, and, on the other, Donald Trump as the outsider who is better than all those mere politicians who play by the rules. But both are creations of the populist impulse; children of a world that now prizes emotion above reason.

Diana would have exploited Twitter’s potential for revenge every bit as rashly as the President.

Diana presaged the collapse of a ‘stiff upper lip’ culture of duty and forbearance, but the sentimentality which underpinned that change can be as dangerous as it is seductive. There’s more emotional openness now. That’s good. But there’s also more emotional incontinence and psychological fragility. Not so good. Diana represented both sides of that coin. Twenty years after her death, it would be irresponsible to remember one without some honest warnings about the other.

‘The royal family had to put up with a lot from her narcissistic outbursts’