Nor did Earl Spencer spare the Windsors their record on child rearing. ‘On behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men, so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.’
Having effortlessly skewered the Windsors as a dysfunctional family, he went on to bludgeon the mass media. ‘My own and only explanation [for her treatment by the media] is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’
While it was these sentiments which provoked spontaneous applause from the congregation, he spoke with insight about the character of his sister, whom he called, ‘the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds’. He praised her compassion, her style, her gifts of intuition and sensitivity, while admitting that her underlying feelings of insecurity and unworthiness had provoked her eating disorders.
Her brother, like the royal family and her friends and advisers, was astonished by the outpouring of overwhelming grief at her death, and he cautioned against canonizing her memory. ‘You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint,’ he said.
It proved a vain hope. As a memorial fund in her memory attracted hundreds of millions of pounds, as Elton John’s Diana tribute became the fastest- and biggest-selling record of all time, as the books, videos, magazines and other memorabilia emerged, Diana joined the pantheon of the immortals. Like Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley, her final resting place at Althorp has become a place of pilgrimage and homage. She has been garlanded with numerous posthumous awards – the Nobel Peace Prize would have been particularly appropriate – her name has been lent to hospitals, hospices and other charitable causes around the world, while her work and memory continue to inspire many among this generation to live worthier and more fulfilled lives.
It is clear that there are two Dianas, the individual known to her friends and family, and now the venerated icon, the projection of millions of fantasies, hopes and dreams. Many of those who knew her as a young girl, a troubled princess and a divorcee searching for happiness still remain baffled by the global outpourings of grief. For her death did not provoke the kind of mass hysteria which is often seen at pop concerts but something much deeper. Many doctors started talking of ‘the Diana Syndrome’ as they dealt with troubled members of the public who had come to them for help because the Princess’s death had awakened painful memories buried deep inside themselves.
How then do we explain Diana the individual and Diana the phenomenon? In her life Diana was a complex web of contradictions; fearless yet frail, unloved but adored, needy but generous, self-obsessed yet selfless, inspirational yet despairing, demanding of advice but disliking criticism, honest yet disingenuous, intuitive yet unworldly, supremely sophisticated yet constantly uncertain, and manipulative but naïve. She could be wilful, exasperating, a flawed perfectionist who would disarm with a self-deprecating witticism; her penetrating, cornflower-blue eyes seduced with a glance. Her language knew no boundaries; her lexicon was that of the smile, the caress, the hug and the kiss, not the statement or the speech. She was endlessly fascinating and will remain eternally enigmatic.
All through her life she was guided, not by argument or debate, but by instinct and intuition. It was a river which took her on a journey into the worlds of astrologers, psychics, soothsayers and therapists. Here lies the key that unlocks the doors between her personality and her universal appeal. This is why if Diana had lived for ever, the media would never have understood or appreciated her. When she looked at a rose she savoured its beauty, they counted the petals.
In her work Diana embraced those who were on the margins of society – lepers, Aids victims and others. Hers was an appeal to our emotional rather than intellectual intelligence, our intuitive and nurturing nature, as well as to the way she had been used and exploited by men in her life, be they princes or photographers, reflecting how many women saw their own lives. At heart she was a woman who championed feminine values rather than simply craving acceptance in a male-dominated world. Her importance now lies not just in what she did during her lifetime but in the meaning of her life, the inspiration she gave to others, particularly women, to search for their own truth.
Afterword
‘We think of her every day’
It was quiet now. Peaceful. Her apartment at Kensington Palace which had once rung to the sound of laughter and conversation now stood empty and silent. It was as though Diana had never existed. Her bedroom, sitting room, nursery and elsewhere had all been stripped bare, right down to the wallpaper. Her furniture was taken to St James’s Palace for William and Harry or to the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Her clothes, letters and other papers were burned, shredded or packed up and sent to Althorp, the Spencer family home. Fifteen years of her correspondence – letters to charities and government departments – disappeared without a trace, leaving her former private secretary Patrick Jephson utterly bemused. Even the ink blotter on her desk was cut into tiny pieces.
The fear of souvenir hunters taking Diana’s belongings and selling them meant that everything – the carpets, the silk wallpaper, the plants and even the light bulbs – was removed, leaving apartments eight and nine empty and anonymous. Her butler Paul Burrell was given formal notice; the sackfuls of mail sent to her home were all opened, answered and filed away Then, to tie everything up, around the first anniversary of her death, the sign outside her former home indicating the Waleses’ residence was painted over.
Certainly there were those inside and outside the royal palaces who wished that her memory could be expunged so easily, enabling the spotlight once more to focus on the Queen and her family. Her brother Charles caught the mood: ‘I think there is a feeling among those who were never Diana supporters of “Let’s try and marginalize her and tell people she never mattered.”’ It was easier said than done. Her death had induced the birth of a remarkable charity, the Diana Memorial Fund, which arose from the extraordinary outpouring of grief, expectation and hope in the days following her death. In a spontaneous gesture by her public, thousands of pounds were sent to Kensington Palace, temporarily turning the royal garages into a makeshift sorting office. The tears of grief grew into a tsunami of giving as every day 6,000 letters arrived containing cheques, cash, pocket money and postal orders.
In the months following her death, the Fund became far more than a simple charity, the offices operating as a conduit for much hurt and unresolved anguish. The foundling charity was flooded with poems, poignant letters and tearful phone calls. One touching note read: ‘I hope you are OK in heaven and dad’ll look after you.’ It was accompanied by a note from the sender’s teacher explaining that the little boy’s father had died on the same day as Diana.
From the moment of its conception there were those who sneered and sniped at its work, eager to smother the infant charity. ‘Certainly St James’s Palace [Prince Charles’s London base] wanted the Diana Memorial Fund wrapped up as quickly as possible,’ recalled Vivienne Parry, one of the charity’s first trustees.
Besides the negative remarks of its naysayers, the nascent charity was also beset by problems almost before it had taken its first steps. A decision to sue Franklin Mint, an American company that was producing Diana dolls without the Fund’s approval with regard to Diana’s image rights, was manna from heaven for the critics. Not only did the Fund lose the case but the bitter legal wrangle cost millions of pounds in fees. The court case, together with the decision to license the use of Diana’s name on tubs of margarine, even had Diana’s brother on the warpath, describing the d
eal as ‘tasteless’. Prince Charles’s supporters gleefully released Earl Spencer’s confidential letter to the Fund asking for it to be closed down at the earliest opportunity. ‘Their motive is clear,’ noted Vivienne Parry, ‘the fund had filled a media vacuum left by Diana’s death and the quicker we were shut down the quicker she will go away.’
The royal family’s focus, however, was not on the dead but on the living, particularly Camilla Parker Bowles, the third wheel in the royal marriage. Prince Charles, who considered her presence in his future as ‘non negotiable’, instructed his advisers to introduce his partner to the public in a way that was unobtrusive and discreet. While Camilla kept a low profile, the Prince’s new press spokesman, Mark Bolland, known by William and Harry as Blackadder, after the scheming nobleman in the eponymous TV comedy, devised ways to achieve his master’s bidding. He used a meeting at St James’s Palace between Prince William, seen as the living legacy of the late Princess, and Camilla to signal her acceptance by Diana’s children. Royal correspondents were briefed on the meeting, Bolland helpfully adding that Camilla needed a cigarette and a stiff gin and tonic after the fateful encounter. When William eventually realized that he had been played like a fish in order to enhance Camilla’s standing, he was understandably furious that a very private and intimate family moment had been used in such a manner. Little wonder that Prince Charles’s biographer Catherine Meyer described the atmosphere in the office of Prince Charles as akin to Wolf Hall, the treacherous and opportunistic world of Henry VIII brilliantly evoked by the novelist Hilary Mantel.
None the less the strategy worked: the Prince of Wales and his partner were able to fly to Greece for their first ever family holiday together without attracting negative headlines. The fact that William had been instrumental in inviting Camilla to join the party – as was conveniently leaked at the time – was interpreted as forgiveness for past transgressions, a latter-day version of the laying-on of hands. The subtext for the public to absorb was obvious: if William could forgive, so could the rest of the world.
Their holiday was followed by a carefully choreographed photocall at the Ritz hotel in January 1999 where banks of photographers flashed away as the couple entered the building. Later that year, Bolland was on hand to guide Camilla through her launch into New York society, a brief trip that was to all intents and purposes a royal visit with people calling her ‘ma’am’. When she was invited to join the Queen for the Golden Jubilee service in Westminster Abbey in June 2002, her acceptance inside royal circles appeared to be complete.
Their marriage in April 2005 was the culmination of a considered process, one that had been severely delayed, initially because of the unforeseen death of the Princess, and then by a cascade of curious and scurrilous headline-making incidents surrounding the French and then the unexpected British investigations into Diana’s tragic accident.
Add to that the trial at the Old Bailey of Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell on charges of stealing her property, of which he was acquitted. Then there were false allegations of male rape involving a member of the Prince’s staff, which culminated in a formal investigation by the Prince’s then private secretary Michael Peat. Topping off the lurid stories was a letter, purportedly written by Diana in October 1996 or 1995, where she wrote about her suspicions that there was a plot, organized by her ex-husband, to have her killed by engineering a car accident. Inevitably, the Prince became the subject of headlines such as: ‘Charles: How much more can I take’.
The extraordinary decision to have a second, British investigation into Diana’s death, even after the French, who employed 30 detectives and interviewed 300 witnesses, had concluded that the crash was an accident, pleased no one – not the insulted French authorities, nor the Prince of Wales, nor Earl Spencer and his family. The only man delighted by the decision of the official coroner Michael Burgess to instruct Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan Palace Commissioner, to open his own inquiry rather than rubber-stamp the findings of the exhaustive two-year French effort was Mohamed al-Fayed. He had already spent five million pounds and hundreds of thousands of man-hours attempting to prove that his son and Diana were murdered. ‘Absolute black and white, horrendous murder,’ he stated. It was a view that resonated in the Arab world where it was widely believed that the couple were killed because the shadowy Establishment did not want a Muslim to marry a princess. Who Killed Diana? Order from the Palace was a best-seller in Egypt while the then Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi broadcast his view that French and English secret service agents had arranged the assassination.
As Fayed piled conjecture upon allegation upon accusation, many went along with his conspiracy theories. Secret services, the royal family, Prince Philip – all were viewed as potential murderers. Most popular among the 36,000 conspiracy theory websites were those stories concerning the involvement of Britain’s spooks. Extra weight was added by the testimony of former British intelligence agents Richard Tomlinson and David Shayler when they cited an earlier unrelated plan to kill the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in a faked car accident when he was due to visit Geneva in Switzerland. Not all were convinced, however. An agent from the KGB, Russia’s spy service, even told espionage writer Philip Knightley: ‘It takes a genius to make murder by car look like an accident.’
There were other runners and riders in the great conspiracy theory race, including that she was killed by international arms dealers due to her support for a landmine ban, that Osama bin Laden had her murdered as she was a poor role model for Muslim women, and that she was killed by the deeply strange Babylonian Brotherhood (believers in this group claim that members are in fact reptile humanoids who control humanity) as she was named after the moon goddess and the Pont de l’Alma, where the accident occurred, means passage of the moon goddess.
As was regularly pointed out, if Diana had genuinely believed that she could be killed in a premeditated car accident, as she had supposedly written, why was she not wearing a seat belt that fateful night? The conclusion of the British criminal investigation, published in December 2006, was virtually the same as the French report, stating that every conspiracy theory was without foundation and that all the evidence pointed to the deaths being the result of a tragic accident. A few months later, in April 2007, a jury at the coroner’s inquest gave the verdict that Diana and Dodi were unlawfully killed as a result of the gross negligence of Mercedes driver Henri Paul and the paparazzi. ‘When it is all over,’ commented the former royal coroner Dr John Burton, ‘95 per cent of the people will still disregard the facts and want to go back to their conspiracies.’
The truth is that at heart the public find it difficult to believe that a modern-day goddess could meet her maker in the banality of a car accident with a drunk driver who was driving too fast. We need conspiracy theories to somehow rationalize, make ordered and bearable that which is chaotic and inexplicable. As Dr Patrick Leman of Royal Holloway College, University of London, who has conducted research into conspiracy theories, observed: ‘When a big event happens we prefer to have a big cause. It upsets our worldview if there isn’t a significant powerful explanation.’ As a result, major world events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of Elvis Presley and the attack on the World Trade Center, are all surrounded by competing conspiracy theories.
These lurid allegations, endless conspiracy theories and nasty speculations did little to enhance the reputation of either the Prince or Princess of Wales. Diana’s letter of foreboding, which was both pathetic and comic, made her seem, as The Times noted, like ‘a drama queen or a tragic princess’. The witty, self-deprecating, courageous, caring and humane woman remembered by Diana’s friends, and to whom the world responded when she died, was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror. In life she feared that she would be dismissed as mentally unstable, in death she was increasingly being described as at best flawed and sometimes even mad, a woman who had preserved her reputation by dying young.
With the passing years there wa
s a wholesale reassessment of her personality as her critics felt more able to speak out. ‘I think she was out of control and it would have got worse,’ the Queen’s biographer Robert Lacey told talk-show host Larry King, while respected royal writer Hugo Vickers believed that she was ‘spiralling into chaos’. ‘It might have been a very sad middle age for her,’ he opined. Prince Charles’s biographer Penny Junor, who was helped in her profile of Diana by royal courtiers, stated that the Princess had threatened to have Camilla killed and was the first in the marriage to stray. Even friends of the Queen got in on the act, Lady Penn, a lady-in-waiting, telling the Queen Mother’s official biographer, William Shawcross: ‘The Queen found Diana’s ill health or mental instability very hard to understand because she’s a very matter-of-fact person.’
The fact that there were only ever a handful of bouquets outside Kensington Palace in the years following her death was seized upon as a sign of Diana’s wilting reputation and the public’s fading memory. It was more ammunition for those who felt that the outpouring of grief at her death was a hysterical overreaction, a temporary aberration before society once more embraced good sense and reason. Diana worship was simply a craze, like Pokémon.
Grandiose plans to honour her death had petered out. In the immediate aftermath of her death senior politicians suggested renaming Heathrow Airport and the August bank holiday in her name. These plans were quietly shelved and even those schemes that went ahead were bogged down in controversy. A £3 million water feature in Kensington Gardens to commemorate her life was awash with indecision and argument. The Diana Memorial Committee, chaired by the strong-minded Rosa Monckton, couldn’t decide between a design offered by American landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson and one from the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor. In the end the then Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, was called in to make the final decision, plumping for the American entry. Since it was opened by the Queen in 2004 it has been dogged by complaints as to the high running costs, estimated at more than £1 million since it was completed, frequent closures for maintenance, and health and safety issues.
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