A TRIAL HAS collapsed. An inquiry has been announced. Five years after her death, Diana, Princess of Wales, is again causing shock waves. And while her official memorial is still at the planning stage, it is beginning to look as though her most lasting legacy may be the tidal wave of sleaze that currently threatens to overwhelm the monarchy. Celebrity is slugging it out with royalty, and the winner has yet to be declared.
That is why there is more to the furore of the last couple of weeks than scabrous gossip and the settling of old scores. It is as much about history as a failed marriage: not so much the Princess’s true story as an epic battle between an inflexible institution and a 20th-century phenomenon. For that is what the late Princess — glamorous, fragile, credulous and manipulative — is gradually revealing herself to be.
None of this was obvious when Lady Diana Spencer, in a frumpy blue suit, became engaged to the Prince of Wales in 1981. He was a mature man with a past and she was a girl with a glittering future, not just a princess-in-the-making but our next queen. Few observers remarked at the time that the union of age and inexperience is generally an unstable one, or that the Princess, unlike her bridegroom, had a lot of growing up to do.
But then no one, at the time of the royal wedding, could have predicted the startling form that her transformation would eventually take. Who would have guessed that “shy Di” would become an international superstar, abandon stuffy royal circles for the company of other deracinated celebrities, and reach out in her distress to all the panaceas popular culture had to offer? Nor, at a moment when so little inside information was available about the Royal Family, did anyone suspect that the Windsors would turn out to have quite so much to hide.
The royals now stand accused of petty acts of greed, including a claim that the Prince employed an aide to sell unwanted gifts, and of a patrician reluctance to help the police with their inquiries, even in a case of alleged homosexual rape. Reports of a covert gay mafia in various palaces are uncomfortably homophobic, but they do little to dispel the sense that the royal households are an anachronism in a society where openly gay men are able to occupy some of the highest political offices in the land.
It is the Princess’s former servants and partisans who have brought these scandals to light. It is not yet clear why she taped a claim by George Smith, who is obviously a troubled individual, that he was raped by a male member of the Prince’s staff; she may have suspected a cover-up but it is also apparent that, unlike the family she married into, she was repeatedly drawn to people in distress. On some occasions — when she publicly embraced people with HIV, dispelling some of the myths about the condition — this was a positive aspect of her modernity.
But when it involved offering unsolicited help to total strangers, such as the wildly unstable TV presenter Michael Barrymore, it looks like further evidence of her own emotional turbulence. The Princess was quicker than most to recognise the existence of a new breed of aristocracy, based not on class but on celebrity and consisting of pop stars, dress designers and playboys. She preferred their company, towards the end of her life, to that of her own or her ex-husband’s family. But it is also clear that some of them were drawn to fame by the same problems — eating disorders, emotional abuse in childhood, low self-esteem — that led her to embrace another popular 20th-century occupation, psychotherapy.
Whatever disasters were going on in her private life, she seems to have grasped that her marriage offered a passport to a species of global recognition available only in an age of mass media. With the proliferation of TV stations and magazines in the Eighties, she was offered an opportunity to become not just world-famous but the most celebrated woman who had ever lived. It was a role she embraced with alacrity, skilfully manipulating royal correspondents and leaving her husband and in-laws standing in the contest for popular sympathy.
If every marriage breakdown involves a custody battle of one sort or another, the Waleses’ divorce was the first in history to involve a struggle for the affection of around 60 million people. It was a contest she won effortlessly, as was to become apparent in the extraordinary scenes of mourning after her death. This was not because she was the first royal wife to feel crushed by the coldness of her husband’s family or to air her grievances publicly; the disaster Diana Spencer brought upon the Royal Family — or which they brought on themselves by under-estimating her — has its roots in the way popular culture developed in the post-war period.
Taking advantage of what must be the most confessional age in history, the Princess’s particular talent lay in portraying herself to be in tune with contemporary mores and characterising the Windsors as emotional dinosaurs. When her marriage collapsed, she began publicly to associate herself with campaigns that would have been deemed too controversial by other members of the Royal Family — for a ban on landmines, for instance — and belief systems that were simultaneously popular, unorthodox and irrational.
The Queen is supreme governor of the Church of England but her former daughter-in-law employed, alongside the butlers and footmen usually to be found in a royal household, a faith healer. In a period when millions of people have turned to every kind of alternative therapy imaginable — the Prince himself is keen on homeopathy — this did nothing to damage her credibility. Even her more sceptical admirers were able to rationalise it as further evidence of her fragility and the lengths to which she had been driven to by the unfeeling Windsors.
It is thanks to her faith healer, to whom the Princess apparently showed letters from the Duke of Edinburgh, that we now know that he accused his former daughter-in-law of being a “harlot” and a “trollop”. There could scarcely be a more telling example of how the Windsors misread her, for she had embraced a kind of feminism — debased or populist, depending on your point of view — which could only be enraged by such sexist abuse. The exposure of the Duke’s misogyny and double standards has added to the sense that the royals are hopelessly out of touch.
At the same time, it has always been clear that the Princess was very much a man’s woman, seducing them with that famous upward glance through her eyelashes. One of her many strokes of genius was to conceal this fact from millions of female fans; once again her acute sense of the Zeitgeist came to her rescue, allowing her to exploit something she genuinely had in common with millions of ordinary women.
Living at a time when more than a third of marriages end in divorce, the Princess succeeded in presenting her own sexual and emotional history as a kind of parable for women in the final decades of the 20th century. She invited ordinary women to identify with her and for the most part they responded, overlooking dissimilarities such as her wealth and aristocratic background. The Princess may have been a single mother but she did not have to work or claim State benefits, a point her admirers willingly overlooked.
Her Panorama interview was a perfect example of what has come to be known as victim-feminism, brilliantly turning a tricky admission of her own infidelity with James Hewitt into further evidence of the fickle nature of men. At the same time, as we have learnt in the past couple of weeks, she managed to conceal other affairs from the public gaze through the use of car boots and cloak-and-dagger tactics. But if lurid tales about her running round London dressed only in a fur coat have tarnished her image, it is only because this whole sorry saga continues to be viewed in excessively personal terms: touchy-feely Diana versus out-of-touch Charles and his chilly relatives.
Posterity will almost certainly offer a different verdict. A more detached reading of events would identify the conflict as one between the monarchy and a naive individual who believed too wholeheartedly in its tinsel fantasies. When she became disillusioned after her marriage, she retaliated by exposing its contradictions and hypocrisies, threatening to bring the entire edifice down.
There is a supreme irony here, in that the source of the worst damage ever inflicted on the British Royal Family was herself an ardent monarchist, who aspired to be the mother of a future king. But with her rampant individualism, her continual evasion of responsibility and her grasp of the power of celebrity — above all, her instinctive ability to manipulate a culture addicted to personal confession — the Princess also embodied some of the most destructive tendencies of her age.
Whether her former husband’s family can survive the damage she is still inflicting on them remains to be seen.
DEBATE
Can the Royal Family survive?
E-mail your opinions to debate@thetimes.co.uk
