Talking about Diana makes Meghan’s life much harder

GEORGE Clooney must have thought he was doing the Duchess of Sussex a favour when he weighed in last week, comparing her treatment to the hounding of her mother-in-law, the late Princess of Wales. But I doubt that he was. By making that comparison, he was undermining the deliberate effort spent by both Princes William and Harry to keep the women in their lives free from the dominant sphere of her memory.

Diana died when they were still young. In her absence they have had to construct lives that have allowed their love for her to flourish, yet enable them to move on. In many ways they are the same as anyone who loses a parent early in life. Some try to replicate what they are missing in their choice of partner and deliberately go for somebody who reminds them of what they lost and even court comparison.

But in the case of the Princes, they will have known that it is not fair nor wise for their wives to have to exist, more than absolutely necessary, shackled to an endless process of being measured against their mother. By the time she died, Diana had become a victim of her own myth.

When the Duchess of Cambridge finally agreed to a magazine cover shoot to help celebrate the centenary of British Vogue, it was with the clear proviso that she didn’t want to put herself in the position of replicating the studied glamour of Diana.

So she dressed down in jeans, a trenchcoat, check shirts and T-shirts, and was photographed in the natural light of the countryside.

The pictures were of a relatable life – at one point she suggested building a bonfire, but some kind of