Diana: the best and worst books on the ‘people’s princess’
‘The only books Diana ever read were mine,” her stepgrandmother Barbara Cartland once observed, “and they weren’t terribly good for her.” There is a poignant contrast between the reading matter favoured by Diana, Princess of Wales – Dame Barbara’s tales of upper-crust romances with fairytale happy endings – and the many books of which Diana is the subject, with their sad accounts of her doomed ambition to turn those fantasies into reality.
Still, there is clearly no shortage of readers with more robust tastes than Diana’s. The shelf-full of Diana books published during her lifetime became a bookcase-full in the years following her death a quarter of a century ago, and threatens eventually to become a library-full – and still the appetite for unpanned nuggets of Diana gossip shows little sign of abating.
It is a sign of her continuing profitability as a literary subject that the American thriller writer James Patterson – a man sufficiently canny to have made himself the world’s bestselling author – has now co-written a biography of her. There is also a new volume, Diana: Remembering the Princess, from her former bodyguard Ken Wharfe, who presumably has good reason to think that readers won’t have been sated by his previous works, Diana: Closely Guarded Secret and Guarding Diana.
The range of books about Diana is wide. There are Diana colouring books (although one would think that to anyone of the right age to be using a colouring book, she must seem a figure barely less remote than Queen Anne). There are books that tell you at painstaking length which member of her ex-husband’s family organised her assassination. And then there are books that are actually billed as fiction, of which the best is Monica Ali’s novel Untold Story – although even this alternative-reality tale of the Princess surviving the fatal crash and beginning a new life in the US doesn’t really manage to penetrate to the heart of her.
The vast majority of Diana books are either memoirs by acolytes and satellites, or formal biographies. James Patterson’s Diana, William and Harry (co-written with Chris Mooney) is one of the latter – although it might be better described as an informal biography, turning the lives of Diana and her children into the sort of pacy, frictionless read that’s perfect for taking on the beach on one of those days when you feel like leaving your brain in the hotel safe.
It’s told racily in the present tense, in the rhythms of an airport thriller: when we’re informed that, in reaction to his mother’s Panorama interview, “William is horrified. Absolutely mortified. And angry”, each sentence gets a paragraph to itself. It’s a rollicking read all right, but it won’t tell you anything new.
The authors make no claims to insider knowledge, which one might think is a bit of a handicap in the crowded field of Dianaology. But at least they aren’t making themselves hostages to fortune in the same way as biographers who cultivate the impression of having spies in every nook and cranny of Kensington Palace do.
Anthony Holden was billed as “the leading expert on the Prince and Princess of Wales” on the dust jacket of A Princely Marriage: Charles and Diana, The First Ten Years (1991), in which he declared that Diana “will continue to breathe into the monarchy the fresh air which has so revived it in the public esteem over her first ten years”. You can judge how closely the leading expert had his ear to the ground by the fact that within a year the couple had separated.
The key to bestsellerdom for Diana biographers is to provide scoops – or if they don’t have that many scoops, to assert that they do.
Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles (2007) was touted as being the book in which the Queen Mother’s page William “Backstairs Billy” Tallon had “broken his lifelong rule never to talk about the Royals”; one of the trailed revelations, contradicting Diana’s own assertion that she was miserable on the eve of her wedding, was Tallon’s claim that she borrowed his bicycle that day and rode giddily backwards and forwards singing “I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow”. But in fact Tallon had already told this story to Sarah Bradford, who had included it in her measured and carefully researched biography of Diana the year before.
It was Tina Brown, too, who beat off stiff competition to pen the most tasteless line in any Diana biography, with her description of the Princess’s death: “For an hour they tried direct massage, adrenaline, direct stimulation, and several microvolted defibrillations.
Still the appetite for unpanned nuggets of Diana gossip shows little sign of abating
But this time Diana’s broken heart would never mend.”
The most famous Diana biography of all is Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, first published in 1992, when the author’s claims to intimate knowledge of the goings-on behind closed portcullises were greeted with some scepticism: only after Diana’s death did Morton reveal that she had been his close collaborator. But although Morton was the vessel into which Diana leaked secrets about her husband’s extramarital love life, she was not forthcoming about her own love affairs, with the result that Morton later wrote a second book, Diana: In Pursuit of Love (2004), to fill in the gaps.
In that book Morton railed against the “distortion” of Diana’s character in the many books by “those who knew or worked for the Princess… often exaggerating their own importance in her life, airing their disappointment with her, or continuing their own vendettas in the pages of [these] memoirs”. The book that started the trend for the hanger-on memoir was Shadows of a Princess (2000) by Diana’s former private secretary Patrick Jephson.
Jephson defended his decision to spill the beans by saying he would write sympathetically about Diana. In the event, however, passages such as his verdict on her Panorama interview – “It was as if a small child had stamped her foot and demanded that the adults pay attention… Yet… she could only venture the evidence of her own unfinished and frequently banal thoughts” – proved oddly typical of the acidulous tone of many of the books supposedly written to express the author’s admiration for the Princess – see also A Royal Duty by Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell.
I suspect that many people who plough through the books by the Princess’s intimates – the anodyne memoirs of Ken Wharfe; the somewhat ironically named Diana in Private by Lady Colin Campbell; The Diana I Knew by Mary Robertson (who had employed her as a nanny); The Bodyguard’s Story by Trevor ReesJones, sole survivor of the Paris crash – end up with a more nebulous sense of who Diana was than they had before they started.
No author has really conveyed the charisma that captivated almost everyone who met her, or made sense of her contradictions. What we need, perhaps, is a novelist with an abiding interest in royalty and an almost supernatural ability to bring the long-dead to life. What’s Hilary Mantel up to these days?