Diana, written out of history
As our poll reveals a majority still don’t want Queen Camilla, a historian says there’s been a cynical Establishment conspiracy — led by the Royals — to ensure Diana is . . .
THIS week ushered in the low-key tenth anniversary of the Prince of Wales’s second marriage to his divorced mistress Camilla Parker Bowles, who elected to call herself Duchess of Cornwall rather than Princess of Wales, the title held by Charles’s hugely popular and late lamented first wife, Diana.
The heir to the throne’s second union, eight years after Diana’s death at the age of 36 in a car accident in Paris, proved deeply controversial at the time.
On the day of the ceremony, feelings were running high, and Camilla had the misfortune to become the first royal bride to be booed in the streets since Henry VIII elevated his mistress, Anne Boleyn, to the Queen Consort’s throne in 1533.
Women especially remembered Diana’s caustic comment in her fateful BBC TV Panorama interview in 1995 — ‘Well there were three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded’ — and found it impossible to forgive Charles’s mistress for the damage they judged her to have caused.
Antipathy to Camilla was still in evidence two years later when Clarence House, in one of the most preposterous misjudgments of Charles’s advisers, announced that Camilla was to attend the memorial service to Diana, held at the Guards Chapel in London on the tenth anniversary of her death.
Outraged public objections instantly erupted to the effect that her presence would be grossly inappropriate. Camilla was forced into a humiliating public climb- down and issued a statement reversing her decision to attend.
We are now eight years further on, and time, and increasing public apathy, has inevitably blunted some of the more extreme emotions that existed in the wake of Diana’s untimely death.
Commentators have suggested that Camilla has now ‘won over’ a sceptical and hostile nation, and there is no doubt that many more of the public have come round to the idea of her as a future Queen than the meagre seven per cent who were prepared to entertain the notion a decade ago.
Yet, if people have gradually grown accustomed to the presence of Camilla in public life, and even to her strange taste for monumental millinery, there are still countless numbers who have reservations — and not all of them are necessarily Diana diehards.
SOME of the online comments following newspaper articles this week on the 10th anniversary of her marriage to Charles were extraordinarily vitriolic. ‘I can’t stand the sight of her,’ fumed one reader, while another lambasted her as ‘the face that cracked 1,000 mirrors’. A third refused to countenance the idea of Queen Camilla: ‘Queen Elizabeth is still very much alive, very active, and for everyone’s sake long may she live.’
Today’s ComRes poll for the Mail shows more than half of us — 55 per cent — are still opposed to Camilla becoming Queen, with just 32 per cent accepting that she should have the title, and the rest undecided. Interestingly, 55 per cent of those polled believe Diana would have made a better Queen, and only 16 per cent opted for Camilla.
These intriguing figures reveal not only that a deeply felt antipathy towards Charles’s second wife still exists, but they also highlight the lasting appeal to the public — if not the Establishment — of Diana.
Of course, all fame is ephemeral and fades with time, and 18 years after her tragic demise in that Paris underpass, the once-global legend of Diana, Princess of Wales has inevitably diminished.
When she was present on this Earth, whether as Queen-to-be and the world’s most beautiful fashion icon, or as an isolated and embattled ex-wife creating havoc for the Royal Family by some spectacular errors of judgment, Diana was an enduring and irresistible source of fascination to millions everywhere.
Then, with shocking suddenness, she was gone, and the fall-out from her passing was seismic, plunging the British monarchy into the greatest crisis it had faced since the abdication of Edward VIII.
For a time, the Diana legend mushroomed through the extraordinary worldwide reaction to her death, to her funeral, and to years of conspiracy theories about the cause of the crash that killed her, and whether it was really an accident or murder. The Diana Princess Of Wales Memorial Fund, which opened after her death with money that poured in from all over the world, raised an astonishing £138 million, all of it used to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged people in the UK and in other countries.
But after years of disastrous mismanagement by Establishment worthies, the Fund closed down as an operational entity at the end of 2012 and, the following March, Diana’s two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, took over its legal ownership.
One of Diana’s friends and a former trustee of the Fund, Vivienne Parry, said: ‘ The view from politicians, the Royal Family and the Spencers was that the quicker Diana was forgotten, the better.’
The Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in London’s Hyde Park, opened by the Queen in July, 2004, quickly deteriorated into a bedraggled and unsightly mess.
In the vivid description of the Mail’s Amanda Platell, it ‘looks like an industrial storm drain’. She recounted how a group of young Japanese tourists stopped her in Hyde Park to ask where the memorial to Diana was located, and were astonished to be told that they had just passed it without recognising it.
They appeared ‘shocked at the lack of respect’, she recalled, ‘ and that our “famous Princess” should be honoured in such a way. Or rather, dishonoured’.
The few surviving memorials
to Diana are now in a bad state of repair.
The Flame Of Liberty at the Pont de L’Alma in Paris, commemorating the scene of the accident in which she died, is now covered in scratches and the wall behind it is frequently daubed with graffiti.
Even her grave, on a tiny wooded island in the Oval Lake at Althorp, the Northamptonshire ancestral home of her Spencer family, was described by a recent visitor as looking ‘ tatty’, with its memorial covered in moss, and the water surrounding it full of algae.
For a long time, the bestknown memorial to Diana was the hideously tasteless display erected inside the London store Harrods by Mohamed Al Fayed in 1998, consisting of photographs of Diana with his son Dodi (who also died in the Paris crash) behind a pyramidshaped structure that held a wine glass smudged with Diana’s lipstick from their last dinner together at the Ritz in Paris, as well as an engagement ring alleged to have been bought by Dodi on the day before they died.
ASECOND memorial erected in Harrods by Al Fayed in 2005, entitled Innocent Victims, showed Diana and Dodi dancing together beneath the wings of an albatross. Both memorials remain in place despite rumours that the new Qatari owners of Harrods would remove them.
Evidence of the lack of respect for Diana’s brief life came in 2013 with the catastrophic failure of the movie, Diana, in which actress Naomi Watts played the Princess in a screenplay that focused on Diana’s affair with the handsome Pakistani heart surgeon, Hasnat Khan.
The film, dismissed as ‘car crash cinema’ by one critic, and by another as like ‘a two-hour Spitting Image sketch scripted by Jeffrey Archer’, bombed in the U.S., taking the derisory sum of £ 40,000 from initial screenings in 38 American cinemas. America’s long love affair with Diana appeared to be over.
And so the People’s Princess, in Tony Blair’s memorable description, became the forgotten Princess.
It seems that she has been deliberately written out of the script. As the PR agent Mark Borkowski observed, the Royal Firm has sidelined Diana as part of a slick rebranding exercise. ‘ The emphasis is on the young Royals,’ he said. ‘Diana has been quietly airbrushed out.’
The Firm wants us to remember not Diana, but other Royals. A £ 2 million, 9ft 6in statue of the Queen Mother — the personal inspiration of Prince charles — now dominates the Mall.
But Diana — the Queen who never was, except, as she once observed, ‘in people’s hearts’ — has no statue, no plaque and no dignified memorial to mark her ground-breaking achievement in transforming the face of the British monarchy by modernising and humanising the House of Windsor through her work with Aids sufferers, with the homeless, the vulnerable and with the victims of landmines.
If she had been alive today, Diana would have been characteristically involved in countless good causes. She would have been immensely proud of the inspirational work of her younger son, Prince Harry, in spearheading the hugely successful Invictus Games, a Paralympic- style event for injured and disabled ex-service personnel.
This showed the often muchcriticised ‘playboy prince’ as a man with vision, compassion, flair and drive, every inch his mother’s son. The one aspect of Diana’s life that has never been derided is her warmth and care as a mother.
In an address he wrote himself for her memorial service on the tenth anniversary of her death, Harry called her ‘ the best mother in the world ... When she was alive we completely took for granted her unrivalled love of life, laughter, fun and folly.
‘ She was our guardian, friend and protector. She never once allowed her unfaltering love for us to go unspoken or undemonstrated.’
Shortly before that service, on what would have been their mother’s 46th birthday, Harry and William organised and hosted the concert For Diana at Wembley Stadium, with many of the world’s most famous entertainers performing, including Elton John, Rod Stewart, Tom Jones, Will Young, Donny Osmond and Jason Donovan. All proceeds went to charity.
When Harry came to set up his Aids charity for sick and vulnerable children in Lesotho, he called it Sentebale — meaning ‘forget me not’ — in memory of his mother.
And William, at the time of his engagement to catherine Middleton, referred significantly to ‘ the mistakes of the past’ from which it was necessary to ‘learn lessons’.
Then he proceeded to touch the hearts of watching millions around the world by explaining that his decision to give Kate his late mother’s sapphire and diamond engagement ring was ‘ my way of making sure that my mother didn’t miss out on today and the excitement and the fact that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives together’.
As the Queen turns 89 on April 21, and in September will break Victoria’s record as the longest-reigning British sovereign, the potential reign of the future charles III becomes ever briefer.
When, at last, he does succeed to his mother’s throne, there is little doubt that his second wife will become Queen, and not Princess consort, the sop originally fed to a gullible public by charles’s advisers as a means of countering opposition to the marriage.
CONSEQUENTLY, a future Archbishop of canterbury will have to walk the ecclesiastical tightrope of crowning and anointing a Queen consort who broke her own marriage vows and helped her present husband to break his.
If the Primate adheres to tradition, and utters the words used for the coronation of the Queen Mother, he will be obliged to say ‘ that by the powerful and mild influence of her piety and virtue, she may adorn the high dignity which she hath obtained’.
Time has a curious way of correcting historical injustice. Diana, robbed of her rightful recognition by a vengeful Establishment, has the most secure of memorials in the hearts of her two loving sons.
And when her eldest comes to the throne as King William V, I have no doubt that his mother’s legacy will at last be restored, and her true contribution to the British monarchy properly honoured.