The palace of malice
The royal family committed a terrible wrong against the naive young Diana.
The badge I bought for the royal wedding of 1981 said ‘‘Don’t Do It, Di.’’ Why marry that 32-year-old stiff? But Diana wore pie-crust collars and alice bands, the whole junior dowager range: we were punks. And she was a little older. So it never struck me back then she was so very young. The documentary Diana: In Her
Own Words has been condemned for showing private footage she never intended to air. In truth, it’s puny stuff: 10 minutes chatting with her speech coach, Peter Settelen, spread Marmite-thin across an hour. The sole new Diana data, which one might have guessed, is that she and Charles rarely had sex.
Yet in another sense it is a revelation. Here is Diana not poised or posing, not St Diana of the bedside nor divorced Diana calibrating her every Panorama word. But unguarded, silly, face-pulling, charming, needy, lonely Diana: the person she was most of the time. She is about 31 in this film, yet such a child.
In the 20 years since she died the royal soap has run many new storylines. Boys grown into decent men; a wedding and babies; Charles and Camilla rebranded as a doting older couple. But under all these cheerful accretions is the undeniable truth that, in Diana, the royal family committed a terrible wrong.
As the film pulls the lens of history back, you see her in long view against the backdrop of her time. Why in 1981 did they need to find Charles a virgin bride? You’d have struggled to locate one in my sixth form. Yet as her uncle, Lord Fermoy, said: ‘‘Purity seems to be at a premium when it comes to discussing a possible bride.’’
The Firm homed in on Diana when she was barely 16. As Diana describes in the documentary, rolling her eyes, Charles was ‘‘all over me’’. She was 19: it looks like ‘‘grooming’’ now. But they had to harvest Diana before she was spoiled. Like a medieval lord claiming droit du seigneur, the heir to the throne had to tread fresh, white snow. Diana’s sister, 22, was cast aside: a suspicion of lovers. Camilla Parker Bowles, with her Jilly Cooper earthiness, was fit only to be mistress.
Who signed off on this feudal deed, which sent not just Diana but Charles into a cold and loveless hell? ‘‘We met only 13 times before our wedding day,’’ Diana says in the film with an amused, what-ya-gonna-do-about-it shrug. An arranged marriage: that ruthless separation of love and duty, sexual pleasure and breeding heirs, which keeps dynasties rolling on.
You could forgive this virgin sacrifice if the royal family had then taken care of the Mills & Boon ingenue they’d suckered in. Now I have a son of 19 I know girls this fragile age. And I want to say to these long-ago courtiers, why did you leave her so alone? Charles had the loyal circle of any thirty-something man but Diana was cut loose of her old flatmates, her gang. She was expected, this girl with George Michael on her Walkman, to lunch with her husband’s mistress, who appraised her then reported back.
What a lonely woman we see through Peter Settelen’s video camera. Secure people, moored to the earth by loving friends, don’t tell their voice coach details of their sex life, don’t confess all to their dancing teacher, makeup artist, detective, secretary. They don’t fall for 40-yearold royal protection officer Barry Mannakee, just because ‘‘he believed in me’’. Like a sad child raised only by nannies, Diana latched on to staff.
Do the royal elders ever think of the deception they spun? They knew Charles loved another and had never entirely broken free. Prince Philip, Diana reports, told his son he could go back to Camilla in five years if the marriage didn’t work out. And he did. Yet all the while Diana, left rattling around her royal apartments, was told she was neurotic, paranoid, imagining things. Why couldn’t she just stay quiet, get into dogs, go riding, accept her privileged lot? When Diana told Camilla she knew about the reignited affair, she replied: ‘‘You have two wonderful sons.’’ Diana thought it an odd non sequitur but what Camilla meant is ‘‘that should be enough’’.
Lately Princes William and Harry have been accused of oversharing their mental health traumas, told to buck up like their grandparents and carry on. But they cannot and probably don’t wish to criticise the royal firm. So this is the only way they have of acknowledging their mother’s pain, her depression and bulimia, caused not by, as the palace painted it, some innate weakness or hysteria, but cruelty and emotional neglect. ‘‘There’s no better way to dismantle a personality,’’ Diana says, ‘‘than to isolate it.’’
That she didn’t stay silent, instead weaponised her glamour to take on the palace machine, is why she endures in the public imagination.
I used to think it hardly took courage to wear a great dress and steal the limelight from Charles. Now I know how institutions work, how they use secrecy and smears to crush those who threaten them. She reminds me of the Khaleesi in
Game of Thrones, sold in marriage to a hostile dynasty, but whose suffering only fuels her power.
When Diana died at 36 my second response after shock was: ‘‘Yes, of course this is how it ends.’’ Not that I believe in conspiracy theories, just that lost, lonely rich girls are drawn into the world of shallow celebrity, extravagant men with fast cars. When all she ever needed was a loving voice, someone watching out for her, saying: ‘‘Don’t do it, Di.’’
❚ Diana: In Her Own Words will be shown on UK television today. Prime has yet to release a New Zealand screening date for the documentary.