Diana would have just wanted her boys to be happy

I DELIBERATELY started writing the words I share with you this week several hours before I saw, unveiled, the statue of a young woman who died more than two decades ago, before I saw two young men who, for years, had planned this tribute to their mother together again.

And more importantly before the body language experts were called upon to tell us how they are feeling about each other now. As if they really know.

My column this week is not about a spat between siblings. That is not our business.

It is about a woman given the title Diana, Princess of Wales but only ever relished one title. Mummy.

Thursday was never about William and Harry, and certainly not about their well documented feud which has spawned a million column inches from people who can only ever speculate how deeply it runs.

Instead it is as they would wish it to be, as she would wish it to be, about a woman who would have celebrated her 60th birthday on that day surrounded only by her close family, a woman who died far too young, probably an unhappy woman, save for her love for the two most important people in her life, her sons.

The statue unveiled on Thursday can never truly summon up the woman Diana became after bursting onto the front pages as a rather gauche and certainly naive 19-year-old nursery nurse in a see-through skirt with children in her arms and by her side.

It will never truly reflect her dazzling smile, those brilliant blue eyes and heavy blonde fringe from under which she gazed at the world, a world she tried to change and did so in many ways. She changed the way we viewed the homeless, those living and dying with Aids, and those injured by the millions of land mines still scattered over the globe today.

In her way she changed the Royal Family by speaking up for herself and for others, even when she was condemned for doing so.

But her tragedy is that she ended up alone, save for her young boys. Boys that had to cope with life without her. Boys that needed her there to step in before petty squabbles became chasms and boys who break our hearts when they tell the world how much they still miss her and always will.

Though they may now be men with families of their own, the two Princes will always be Diana’s boys, boys that ultimately will always be bound together because of her.

My heart goes out to them again this week. But also to a woman whom, I am sure, would have found contentment simply being called Granny.

And that is why her statue in bronze sculpted by Ian Rank-Bradley was in my view the perfect representation of all she stood for.

Children were always at the centre of Diana’s life, especially her own. So how fitting that three children stand alongside her again, set amidst flowers carefully planned and lovingly planted in the sunken gardens of Kensington Palace.

How wonderful that her two boys together chose her favourite flower, forget me nots, to plant alongside the sweet smelling roses for this most celebrated English rose, as Sir Elton John sang of her at her funeral.

And how moving and thought provoking are the words inscribed upon it?

“These are the units to measure the worth of this woman as a woman regardless of birth. Not what was her station. But had she a heart? How did she play her God-given part?”

Diana did play a part in all our lives. But her most important role was being mummy to two young boys, who will never get over their loss though they may react to it in very different ways.

Of course there are others who have lost a beloved parent at a young and tender age. Of course there are those who have learned to live without a guiding hand to hold as they grow into young adults. But that doesn’t take away the pain and the damage her death caused William and Harry.

And I could weep, as she would, that they are no longer as close as they once were. But they will get there, for her sake, I am sure.

Because ultimately they know that nothing would have grieved their mother more to know her two sons are still hurting all those decades later and though they may show it or even speak of it in very different ways, hurting they are.

The joint statement from William and Harry this week spoke volumes.

The words that “every day we wish she were still with us”, was as heartbreaking as the day we witnessed them as young boys walking behind her coffin.

But the word ‘we’ was not lost on me. Together they will get through this. Together they will come to realise that they are her most important legacy.

A legacy that they continue to strive to achieve, albeit on different paths. And nothing would have meant more to their beloved mother than to know they were will always come together in her name as they did this week.

That would truly give her the peace she sought all her life.

Diana, Princess of Wales was a woman with so much more to do and so much more to give, not just to her country or indeed the world, but to her children.

This week should remind us that though they have gone their separate ways, though they may live very different lives, when it comes to their mother they are united and always will be. As she would have wanted. Just as all mothers wish only one thing for their children – that they are happy.

Diana was a woman with so much more to do and so much more to give.