Many of us should have spotted the early-warning signals when we read Andrew
Morton’s Diana: Her True Story and, having thrown up, started to gobble it
all over again. By the time we were binge-reading Lady Colin Campbell’s The
Real Diana, or the unforgettably nasty The Housekeeper’s Diary, almost
retching as we turned the pages but unable to stop cramming in every last
sordid detail, we were on a hopeless spiral. Even ready-spewed vomit such as
James Hewitt’s caddish Love and War, or Paul Burrell’s The Way We Were,
could still lure us. Surely, you would think, there is enough stuff out
there already? Last year, Sarah Bradford provided a magisterially sensible
book that seemed unimprovable.
But I am sorry to tell you that every previous Dianologist must now take a
back seat. Addicts are about to be offered a feast such as they never had
before, and some of it will actually stay down. Back from New York, on
chariots of pure brass, comes the Queen of Gloss. Tina Brown’s The Diana
Chronicles is not a book on Diana. It is the book. Not only does it
put the story of Diana in its proper historical context of British politics,
journalism and the changing mores of the past quarter century, but it is
also a perfect example of the nosy-parker’s art. It conveys, better than
anything I have ever read, the basic intelligence of its subject. Di knew
she was dicing with disaster when she chose the tabloid press as the means
by which she would rise beyond megastardom to sex goddess, saint and martyr.
Yet the instinct was right. There’s often more truth in the lower ends of
journalism than there is in its stuffier upper echelons. Again and again,
this book exposes the lies told by Buckingham Palace and the collusion of
public-schoolboy editors in those lies. Glossy she may be, but Brown – the
former editor of The New Yorker – has all the skills and instincts of the
gutter newshound.
So, what’s new in this book? Let’s start with the Blonde on the Train. In
November 1980, before the ill-fated pair were married, the royal train was
spotted in a siding in Wiltshire. A blonde arrived in a car and spent the
night with the Prince of Wales. There were the usual palace denials. The
tabloid press assumed it was Di. Woodrow Wyatt, wrong on almost everything,
put about the rumour that the woman on the train, which had stopped 20 miles
from Bolehyde Manor, the Parker-Bowles residence, was Camilla.
It became the orthodoxy among Dianologists that the shameless Camilla had
slept with Charles just when he should have been initiating his virgin bride
into the arts of love. But, says Brown, Diana was the blonde. If it had been
Camilla, would not Di have used this fact against Charles in her post-Morton
propaganda? Better still, Brown has the car’s registration, as given to the
palace security. It was Frances Shand Kydd’s Renault, often used by her
daughter Diana.
New is the detail from Mary Robertson, the American who employed Diana Spencer
as her son’s nanny, that the lissom aristocrat once casually wolfed all the
meat from a stew left on the stove for her boss’s dinner – an early warning
perhaps of bingeing to come. New, too, is much of the detail of Diana’s
phones being bugged. Brown is good on the differences between Squidgygate
and Camillagate: the latter came out because of the bad luck that dogs all
that Prince Charles does, but the former was deliberately leaked by the
intelligence services.
The indiscretions of formerly loyal servants are glorious. Who will not cheer
on reading the “off-the-record interview” with a courtier who claims to
believe that Diana’s most frequently quoted words to her butler Paul Burrell
– “You are my rock” – were actually “You’re wearing my frock.” And what
about the Queen Mother’s reaction to Di rushing to the deathbed of her
friend Adrian Ward-Jackson: “Why can’t she take on less gloomy things?”
New, too, are details of Diana’s weight loss after her first holiday as a
royal bride at Balmoral: she went from 10st to 8st 12lb, provoking a row
which ended when Charles flung her gold wedding ring at an aide with the
barked command, “Get it made smaller.” New are the details of Charles’s
tantrums, with material supplied anonymously about the Prince of Wales
hurling antique clocks around and, on a visit to Althorp, breaking a window
with a chair leg. And new is confirmation that Diana’s first extramarital
affair was with her personal protection officer Barry Mannakee. Nine months
after he left her service, he was dead in a motorcycle accident (“bumped
off” in Diana’s view). New is the fact that Princess Anne nearly wrote to
her brother in 1986 to tell him to “stop humiliating his wife” – the Camilla
affair now being something in which all the horsey set colluded.
New, and most poignant, are the details after Diana’s death. We hear Prince
Philip’s anxious voice from Balmoral – “Our worry at the moment is William.
He’s run away up the hill and we can’t find him. That’s the only thing we’re
concerned with at the moment.” Another touching detail is when the Queen
Mother sends her page, William Tallon, to put flowers on the coffin. When he
gets there, the catafalque has been lowered and he asks why. The chaplain
says, “Oh, that’s for the boys. They’re waiting next door in the vestry
until you’ve gone. They are going to view her then.” Tallon wept.
These details, all new, are among masses that Brown has collected from
interviews with hundreds of witnesses. We hear Mary Clarke, Diana’s nanny,
opine that the royal family turned “a practical, warm little girl into a
basket case and then rewrote early history to justify it”. But we also see
Di, on the eve of her wedding, larking about on a bike in the servants’
quarters of Clarence House singing, “I’m going to marry the Prince of Wales
tomorrow!” And there are joyously irrelevant details never unearthed before,
such as the Queen Mother on a naval vessel, heading for the castle of Mey
where she was to give her daughter a picnic, sending a flag signal to the
royal yacht Britannia – “Dearest Lilibet, Bring lemons, have run out.”
The truly impressive thing about the book, however, is its wisdom. It is full
of good mots, such as “Diana’s inferiority complex became her greatest
asset.” Brown sees that the great surge in the popularity of the
touchy-feely princess coincided almost exactly with the Iron Lady’s attack
on the weak. “In the wards of hospitals, in the run-down homeless shelters
where the people left behind by Thatcher’s revolution cried out for help,
Diana rediscovered her own big heart.” This may nauseate you, but it is
true. The book chronicles a deeply damaged, charismatic person transforming
herself from an HRH into a mega-celebrity. (I liked the detail, supplied by
a “close adviser of the Princess”, that when the Duke of Edinburgh said to
her, “If you don’t behave, my girl, we’ll take your title away”, Di hit back
with, “My title is a lot older than yours, Philip.” Yes, there’s a strong
whiff of esprit d’escalier, but still, hurrah for the toffs.)
This book is evenhanded but it gives more weaponry to the Princess’s Party
than to the old fogeys who still support the funny little prince and his
boot-faced wife who, as Brown rightly says, resembles his old nanny. (Brown
is “virry, virry” funny at transcribing, Kingsley Amis-style, Camilla’s
voice.) It leaves you in no doubt, however, that Camilla refused to leave
Charles alone, and that without her the marriage could probably have been
repaired. The adulterous code of the Parker-Bowles’s “set” is evoked with
chilling accuracy, as is the horrible way the Old Buffer tendency in
journalism tried to debunk Morton’s book. (Smug Tory bovver boys, Brown
calls them.) “Charles Moore [of the Telegraph] revised the definition of
journalism on Newsnight by decreeing that when writing about the royal
family ‘journalists should use hypocrisy and concealment’.”
There might be a lot of brass about this book, and the author’s boasting about
the grand people she has met will raise some smiles. The volume’s only
picture, incidentally, is of that charismatic blonde goddess, the author.
There are howlers – Private Eye isn’t a weekly, and she muddles Westminster
Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. But it is a masterpiece.
Sometimes I blush for our profession – not when it is vulgar or intrusive, but
when it sucks up to politicians or colludes with the Establishment. Then a
book such as this appears, which will ruffle feathers everywhere. Heartless,
ruthless, relentlessly inquisitive, it made me cheer to the rafters the
great traditions of the gutter press.
The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown
Century £18.99 pp481
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.99 (inc p&p)
on 0870 165 8585
