The abbreviated life of Princess Diana left behind the haunting question of
what she might have become. Would she have fulfilled her potential as a
global humanitarian, as suggested by her last, brilliantly achieved landmine
campaign? Or would she have descended into the deluxe vagrancy of a detached
celebrity princess, as suggested by her final romance with the playboy Dodi
Fayed?
The lurid nature of her death 10 years ago overshadows the fact that in her
final months Diana felt more alive to the potential of her public role than
ever before. I met her for lunch in New York in June 1997, two months before
the Paris car crash that killed her and Fayed. She was hugely excited about
Tony Blair’s election win in May. She believed he had a role in mind for her
as a bona fide humanitarian ambassador for Britain.
Later I learnt from Shirley Conran, a friend of hers, that in between
frivolous vacations with Fayed, Diana, just 36 when she died, was plotting
something she had never had before: a career. “She wanted professional
fulfilment,” Conran told me. “She wanted to do something herself that would
show she wasn’t an idiot.”
Diana’s privately nurtured last project, which she hoped would be in
partnership with a British TV company, was to produce documentaries, on the
model of the much acclaimed BBC film of her trip to Angola that highlighted
her landmine campaign. She had asked friends to seek out a media coach to
help improve her broadcasting skills so she could front the documentaries
herself. She had already chosen the subject for her next campaign: adult
illiteracy.
Would she have pulled off her evolution to an independent woman of real
influence on the world’s stage? My guess is she would have. Celebrity
culture, as we have seen, was moving in her direction. The political power
of the monarchy had been wasting away for nearly 400 years and by Diana’s
day it was in effect gone.
But the people’s princess had stumbled onto a new kind of royal power. When
she hugged a seven-year-old with Aids in February 1989, grasped with bare
hands the gnarled fingers of lepers later that same year, and walked across
an only partially cleared Angolan minefield, she showed the latent power of
the old concept of royal bounty – that the drama of humanitarian concern
could be connected with the electronic nervous system of global media.
Today the tragedy of Darfur, so shamefully dependent on Hollywood’s megaphone
to get air time, calls out for the Diana Effect. There is little doubt that
she would have responded, beaming her travelling spotlight onto those scenes
of ravaged despair in Sudan with an intensity guaranteed to mesmerise the
global media. The Live 8 concert in July 2005 in Hyde Park, London, with
Bono, Paul McCartney and Madonna – which succeeded in getting western
governments to promise an extra $50 billion a year in Third World aid by
2010 – was an event that lacked only Diana’s presence.
To be sure, there was always an element of risk with Diana. That’s what makes
her perennially fascinating. So much of what she might have become depended
on that other volatile war zone: her private life. “Stand by for a mood
swing, boys,” she used to say jokingly to Patrick Jephson, her private
secretary, and his team.
The primal wound of her childhood abandonments and the collapse of her
princess dream along with the failure of her marriage caused her, at times,
to do crazy things. Her emotional neediness was forever dragging her down.
Shortly before she went away with Fayed on their ill-fated jaunt, Hasnat Khan,
the Pakistani heart surgeon she adored, had ended their secret two-year
affair. And the Prince of Wales had dealt her a crushing hurt by hosting a
50th birthday party for Camilla Parker Bowles at Highgrove.
Even after so many years, Diana still could not accept that her gauzy girlhood
fantasy had been shattered by the tenacity of her husband’s ageing mistress.
In July 1997, after watching a TV programme that positioned Parker Bowles
firmly as Charles’s future consort, Diana called Debbie Frank, her
astrologer, in distress. “All the grief in my past is resurfacing,” she
wailed. “I feel terrible . . . so frightened and needy.” She sounded, Frank
once told an interviewer, “breathy, childlike again”.
The sad truth is that in Diana’s second act she needed a man – a man who
probably didn’t exist. She needed a rich, competent protector with a
Gulfstream plane and a solid agenda of global concerns. A man secure enough
in his own ego not to feel threatened, with inexhaustible patience for a
high-strung superstar and the ability to stay discreetly in the shadows and
remain unfazed by a life of constant press aggravation. A man, in short, who
was the opposite of Fayed.
Jackie Onassis found such a man herself in her third act: her final beau, the
businessman Maurice Tempelsman. But Onassis was always a pragmatist. Diana’s
flaw – and her appeal – was that she was an incurable romantic. She always
fell in love with the wrong guy.
I like to think, however, that Diana at the end of her life had come to
understand what she had been put on earth for. Remember what royal walkabout
photographs were like before Diana? A stiff, outstretched gloved hand, a
faint smile of distant concern.
Diana gave us the princess who knelt down to talk to children at their own
level, who whispered in the ears of the sick and the maimed, who greeted her
own boys after trips abroad by running towards them with outstretched arms.
She revived the monarchy’s understanding of something that the Queen Mother
had exemplified so well during the blitz: the power of gesture.
When Diana took her famous walk in that Angolan minefield in 1997, some
members of the press half-jokingly wailed that they hadn’t quite got their
picture. She responded by bringing to bear all the reckless bravery she’d
once used to defy the royal family – but in a much better cause.
She walked through the minefield again. This second walk was Diana’s purest
synthesis of bravery, calculation and brilliantly directed media power.
It was very much a postDiana palace which ensured that after the 7/7 bombings
the Queen flew the next day by helicopter from Windsor Castle to tour the
wards of the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel and made a speech offering
sympathy in the informal setting of the hospital’s canteen.
It was suggested recently that if Diana had lived, she would now be
“competitive” with Kate Middleton, Prince William’s girlfriend. I doubt it.
Middleton would not be remotely possible as a future queen without the
template of Diana. Nobody wishes on William some mealy-mouthed mouse.
Thanks to Diana we now expect our princesses to be glamorous, accessible and
camera-ready. Diana would have loved sponsoring the girl her son loves
through the shark-infested waters of the palace naysayers. Diana was the
first yummy mummy and would no doubt have eventually become the first
glamour granny, upstaging all the other ageing society women at the sports
days of William’s and Harry’s kids.
That’s why I remain sanguine about the future Diana never had. The role that,
in the end, would have triumphed over all Diana’s difficulties was the one
she treasured most: the role of mother. Few unsuitable boyfriends would have
survived the disfavour of William and Harry. William had already made clear
to Diana that he considered Fayed an embarrassment. Ultimately, she would
have felt more protective of her eldest son’s path to the throne than she
had been desirous of the queenly role for herself.
And there is no doubt that her handsome, grounded and engaging boys would have
secured her restoration to her rightful place in the royal hierarchy.
“Don’t worry, Mummy,” the 14-year-old William assured her
when she was told she must forfeit her title of HRH. “I will give it back to
you one day when I am king.”
Diana would have wanted to make those boys proud and the greatest sadness of
her loss is that she did not live to see how well her maternal instincts
have served the House of Windsor.
- Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is the
author of The Diana Chronicles
