DIANA ON DIANA
Diana Wichtel: the power of the People’s Princess
It was one of those moments when you have to make a conscious decision to return your lower jaw to its accustomed position. I’d flicked on the car radio. There had been an accident in a tunnel in Paris. At home I turned on the television. “But she’s a princess,” said my small daughter. “She can’t die.” Two decades later, Princess Diana in prime time is still a global event. “She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem,” she told Martin Bashir in that infamous 1995 interview. “I’ll fight,” she said, “till the end.”
There is no end. Now, to mark the 20th anniversary of her death, there’s Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, shown here on Three. In some ways it’s royal doco as usual, as notable for what is left out – Camilla, bulimia, Bashir, “Oh, Squidgy” and Charles’s wish to be reincarnated as a tampon – as for what makes the cut.
The narration sometimes can’t help itself. “Diana’s marriage was a joyous event which everyone could relate to,” insists Amanda Redman in her Special Royal Voice. Cue scenes of preposterous pomp and a giant crumpled catastrophe of a dress it would take a feudal disposition and a certain amount of inbreeding to truly relate to.
But this one is different. It’s made by HBO and is more Game of Thrones than Diana: Queen of Hearts. Princes William and Harry are involved. Utu is in the air. No one gets served up in a pie, but as shape-shifting avenger Arya Stark says before dispatching a roomful of Frey males via goblets of poisoned wine, “Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe.” Diana left two. Let the counterspin begin.
Princess Di was a bit of a shape shifter too: shy 19-year-old virgin appraised like so much royal breeding stock; tantrumthrowing hot mess; media victim and media manipulator … Diana,
Our Mother naturally focuses on her maternal warmth and good works. There she is hugging her boys. There she is holding the hand of a man with Aids at a time when such a natural gesture made front-page news.
But there’s also a lot to read between the lines. An angry speech she made about the plight of young homeless people – “I am appalled!” – is counterpointed by a clip of some old numpty outside Parliament deploring this anti-government subversion in a masterful display of simultaneous sexism and forelocktugging: “The Princess really is a rather headstrong and wilful young lady here, as charming and delightful as she is in other ways …”
It would take a pretty stiff upper lip not to be moved by the segments devoted to William and Harry talking about the sudden, violent death of a parent when they were 15 and 12. William shared the sort of comforting narrative that helps overcome loss: “I’m grateful that that love still feels there … My mother lives with me every day.”
Harry has been open in the media of late about his struggles. He doesn’t mention here being required to walk under the scrutiny of vast crowds and the media behind his mother’s casket, but the pictures – a small, devastated boy with balled fists trudging along – tell the story. “There’s a lot of grief that still needs to be let out,” he says.
There is that spectral attendant at any major bereavement, guilt. William and Harry spoke of rushed last phone conversations with their mother. “If I’d known, obviously, what was going to happen … That phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily,” says William. Does he remember, he’s asked, what she said? “I do,” he says, “I do.”
It’s all careful and controlled, though William allows himself a moment of barely restrained rage about the paparazzi: “Being chased by 30 guys on motorbikes who block your path, who spit at you, who shout at you … make a woman cry in public to get photographs … I don’t believe that’s appropriate.” He wasn’t blind to the unhealthy symbiosis between Princess and press.
“One lesson I’ve learnt is you never let them in too far … You’ve got to maintain a barrier and boundary, because if you cross it – both sides cross it – a lot of pain and problems can come from it.” The footage shown is a startling reminder that we haven’t seen scenes quite that feral since Diana’s death – though the co-operation of Diana’s sons in this documentary is being cited as justification for screening, finally,
Her death was like “an earthquake has just run through the house, your life”.
some tapes she made with a voice coach that are alleged to be of a “confessional” nature. Riding the media tiger remains a dangerous game.
In an improbable plot twist worthy of some reality show called The Real Housewives of Windsor, a book about Camilla by royal biographer Penny Junor has landed this year as well. Friends of the Duchess of Cornwall are quoted. What was anyone thinking?
The Duchess: The Untold Story has already earned a Digested Read parody in the Guardian: “After leaving Queen’s Gate school with a single O-level in kennel hygiene …” Edited extracts printed in the Daily Mail reveal a story possibly better left untold: “… the opinion Charles trusted most when it came to choosing his bride was that of Camilla, his best friend and lover”. Of Diana: “She lived in a romantic fantasy world of women’s magazines and Barbara Cartland novels, which could not have been more divorced from reality.” As opposed to those regular folk, the Windsors.
Diana cops the blame for being charming – “She’d set her sights on [Charles], flirting and flattering and bending over backwards to be everything that he wanted her to be” – and then for not being charming. “She was no longer the bouncy girl Camilla had first met; she suddenly became moody, wilful and unpredictable.” For “bouncy” read “compliant”. For “wilful” read, “disappointingly prone to independent thought”.
The whole thing was mad – Harry describes his mother as “naughty” and “a kid” and Charles is Charles – but then look what she was up against. Her death, William says, was like “an earthquake has just run through the house, your life”.
He imagines what might have been. “She’d be a nightmare grandmother,” he says fondly. “She’d come in, probably at bath time, causing an amazing amount of scene, bubbles everywhere, bath water all over the place and then leave.”
That’s not a bad summation of the situation. She arrived, with her bubbles and her trouble, made an amazing amount of scene and then was gone. The royal family would never be the same. In Diana, Our Mother, in its restrained Windsor way, her sons give steely notice that her game of thrones goes on.
Princess Diana was a bit of a shape shifter too.