90 damning minutes that will haunt Charles and Camilla
JAN MOIR ON LAST NIGHT’S DIANA DOCUMENTARY
Just when you think there could be no more fresh nuggets to be panned amid the tragic detritus on the royal riverbed, here comes Diana: In Her Own Words (C4).
this new documentary, featuring recordings she made with her voice coach, revealed that Princess Diana saw herself as ‘a fat sloane Ranger’, while Charles was someone who ‘followed me around like a puppy’.
that was in the beginning, of course, when she couldn’t have known that the end was bearing down upon her with unspeakable haste. We also learn that Charles and Diana met just 13 times before getting married and afterwards had sex ‘ once every three weeks before it fizzled out’.
troubled and isolated, she once went to the Queen for advice – but comfort came there none. ‘Charles is hopeless,’ Her Majesty told her, and that was that.
she even approached Camilla, and begged her to ‘leave my husband alone’. Only to be told, in so many words, that she had two sons, and she should be grateful for and content with her lot.
No wonder there has been so much antipathy towards this programme being aired. Not because of what Diana does or does not say. More that in this dark Windsor whirlpool, what comes swirling to the surface once more is an awareness of just how badly the royals treated the vulnerable Diana all those years ago. A woman who, after all, only wanted to be loved.
Yet the bigger conflict at the heart of In Her Own Words is the issue of the tapes being made public in the first place.
some, including her brother Earl spencer and many commentators close to Prince Charles, have contended that this is a private film, as sacrosanct as a diary with a key turned fast in the clasp.
the unguarded footage was recorded with Diana’s voice coach Peter settelen and was something she never expected anyone to see, let alone millions of crisp- crunching C4 viewers on a summer sunday evening. Prince William and Prince Harry have remained silent, but elsewhere the mood emanating from the House of Windsor is that of pearl-clutching horror, sanctimoniously disguised as concern for the late princess and her memory. It is not what she would have wanted, they moan, reaching for the smelling salts as they pull up the drawbridges – but haven’t we been here before? Here is history repeating itself as those who wish to silence Diana once more do so to protect themselves, not her.
Actually, I think that Diana would love these videotaped sessions from 1992 being broadcast. Adore it!
For the recordings show her in a golden light; rueful, amused, heartbreakingly vivacious and beautiful, noble in her obvious loneliness.
Here she is, scalded but brave, brushing up her oratorical skills as she prepares to embark on a new and independent life following her split from Prince Charles. The fabulous nerve of the woman! The fact that she confessed these random intimacies to former Coronation Street actor Settelen – a largely unseen but slightly creepy presence – only serves to highlight her isolation. Where was her brother when she needed someone to talk to? Where were her experienced in- laws and her friends? The only people around her she could trust were her staff, so she talked to them instead. The legal battle launched by her brother to block the tapes being broadcast seems a hysterical response, given that the excerpts only account for a scant ten minutes of this odd, 90-minute documentary. And in truth, very little of what Diana says is new, shocking or can be unknown to her sons – although it is fascinating and yes, a little intrusive, to hear it from her own lips.
PERHAPS no son or daughter really wants to know about mummy and daddy’s sex life or the fact that she wanted to run away with a former bodyguard (Barry Mannakee), who was ‘the best fellow I ever had’. However, if the princes have managed to cope with the bald fact of their father’s mistress (now wife) for all these years, then surely they can cope with this. Giggling on her candystriped sofa, Diana is around 30 years old but seems much younger. With the eye-rolling goofiness of a teen relating her schoolgirl crushes to a rapt audience in the Mallory Towers dorm, she burbles on with enthusiasm. She is very funny about the night she and Charles started dating; all it took to get him interested was for her to empathise over the recent death of Lord Mountbatten.
‘He chatted me up! Like a bad rash, he was all over me. He leapt on me and started kissing me,’ she says, making a ‘yuk’ face and mimicking pushing him away. She also confessed all to her ballet teacher Anne Allan, to her private secretary, Patrick Jephson and to her bodyguard Ken Wharfe.
Ultimately it is their words, not hers, that do the most damage. each of them paint sober, measured but corrosive accounts of Diana’s life behind the palace walls. ‘ She loved Charles but Charles loved another woman. It made her very sad, devastated. She felt that she wasn’t enough,’ said Allan, who has never spoken out before. Jephson noted Diana’s aloneness and could never respect the Firm again, after the way they treated her. ‘I saw more royal virtues embedded in her than in him,’ he said. Wharfe bristled at the way attempts were made to portray Diana as mad and bad, nothing more than a pesky obstacle to Charles’ smooth ascension to the throne and personal happness. If she had been alive to see Charles and Camilla marry, he mused, she would have said to him; ‘You see Ken, I wasn’t wrong, was I?’
Much of this might seem like tired old ground, but the approaching anniversary of Diana’s death and the haunting candour of her former aides bring a fresh intensity to her story. And there is something heart-breaking all over again in seeing those familiar images; especially that footage of a beautiful girl in a golden carriage, riding off to her doom.
That is not to say this is a faultless documentary. Far from it! The actor Iain Glen narrates a cheesy voiceover in full Old Testament mode (‘It is the mid-1980s,’ he booms, ‘and a kind of darkness falls on the green and pleasant land.’) The tone is often ridiculous and melodramatic, with sinister music accompanying Diana’s bridal progress down the aisle at St Paul’s, plus historical footage of animals being burned during the BSe crisis in an attempt to draw a crazy parallel with Diana as some kind of mad cow? Sacrificial burnt offering? It is never made clear.
However, this documentary does succeed in reminding everyone what a superstar she was, and how she loved Charles but he did not love her back because he loved someone else. That was the black pip in the Windsor bad apple, the simple harbinger of all the disaster that followed.
How the Windsors must be dreading this 20th anniversary of her death and the poor light it casts upon them. especially Charles and Camilla, who have done everything possible to rinse away their rackety past and reconstitute themselves in the public’s affections. Yet even they cannot escape this past that will not die. Attempts to stop this documentary show how the powers that be tried and failed – yet again – to control the Diana narrative. Once more her voice is heard above the royal hubbub. And don’t say she wouldn’t love that.