90 damning minutes that will haunt Charles and Camilla
JAN MOIR ON LAST NIGHT’S DIANA DOCUMENTARY
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.