USA TODAY International Edition
DI TAUGHT THE ROYALS HOW TO BE REAL
She mystified and irked them, but made them more involved
Exhibit A has to be the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Queen Elizabeth II, then 86 and celebrating 60 years on her throne, participated in an extraordinary video skit to open the Games, featuring James Bond actor Daniel Craig and “the queen” as a Bond girl skydiving from a helicopter into the Stadium. Mouths dropped, especially those of her grandchildren, as tens of thousands of Brits in the crowd cheered and roared.
“Would she have done that cameo had it not been for Diana, all those years earlier, who emboldened them to do things in a fresh way and be more relatable?” asks American biographer Sally Bedell Smith, who has written best-sellers about both the queen and Diana.
Diana’s feelings about the Windsors were as mercurial as she was, toggling between awe and admiration and rage and despair in the years she was the desperately unhappy wife of Prince Charles and the daughter-in-law of the queen and Prince Philip.
The queen herself said after Diana’s death, “There are lessons to be drawn from her life,” and those lessons are apparent, says PR consultant and royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams.
“Diana’s more approachable, endearing and emotional style, her conviction that the royal family had no heart, the way she appealed to the public in (interviews), all this was unique but had real impact,” Fitzwilliams says. “It is a tribute to the resilience of the Windsors that they have made certain changes yet kept the monarchy’s mystique.”
Despite her troubles with her in-laws, Diana always said she wanted to bolster the ties between the monarchy and the people. She was, after all, the mother of a future king.
British reporter Katie Nicholl, author of several royal biographies, says Diana broke the mold: She did and said things considered “very un-royal” that had a positive effect, especially in the way her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, were raised to be aware of life beyond palace walls.
“As they have said in recent interviews, they are the princes and the men they are today largely because of the way Diana raised them and the things that she exposed them to from an early age,” Nicholl says.
“There is a rawness in these interviews, an openness that Diana would have approved,” Fitzwilliams says. “The princes are following directly in her footsteps.”
Diana pressed “politically sensitive” causes not previously connected to the royals, including AIDS treatment, help for the homeless, the eradication of land mines. These were issues that touched real people and people who had no voice, Nicholl says.
“Ultimately, this was all very positive for the royal family even though the queen and others were concerned at points that some of the issues Diana was campaigning for weren’t synonymous with what royals should be doing,” Nicholl says. “She was a princess, but one who wasn’t afraid to roll up her sleeves and get stuck in, and that did the royal family a huge amount of good.”
No doubt the 1,000-year-old British monarchy already knew a thing or two about keeping in touch with the people. (To do otherwise risked execution and exile in centuries past.) But it was Diana — equal parts beguiling and bewildering — whose shocking death helped remind them of this fundamental survival skill.
Her death was followed by an almost-as-shocking tsunami of grief that washed over the world, and nearly swamped the royals.
Tucked away at their usual summer bastion at Balmoral, their vast estate in Scotland, they were unprepared for the reaction back in London: the hysteria, the headlines, the 24/7 media coverage, and the persistent importuning, from Prime Minister Tony Blair and many others, that the queen return to the capital, respond to the public grief, and put on a semi-royal funeral for Diana.
After first balking, the queen met all the demands and more. She rose to the occasion with a stirring live speech to the nation (the queen never does this) before the funeral, in which she paid tribute to Diana.
In deed and metaphor, the queen bowed her head to Diana’s coffin, and it was sincere. Diana was no longer a member of the royal family, and she had behaved in obstreperous ways in the years before her 1996 divorce, but she was still the mother of the queen’s young grandsons; this was a gesture no loving grandmother would withhold.
Immediately, public opinion about the queen and her family swung back to its previous high levels. In the years since Diana’s death, the royals have been more popular than ever, culminating in extravagant displays of affection for the queen during her Diamond Jubilee in 2012 and for her 90th birthday in 2016.
Victoria Arbiter, daughter of the queen’s former press secretary and a commentator for CNN, says “little glimpses of Diana” are apparent everywhere. But she also gives credit to the queen.
“You can’t take anything away from the queen and her ability to adapt and evolve and meet the needs of the people at any one time,” Arbiter says. “Diana should be credited with many changes, one of which is the royal family is very much more hands-on.”
Society’s expectations have changed, Arbiter says. The deference and formality associated with the royals are disappearing. You might not see the queen in a Starbucks, but she’s no longer quite as remote as she once was.
“It’s been slow, gradual change,” Arbiter says, “and Diana was definitely the trigger.”