Weekend Read: When Princess Diana Dropped the Mask

My take on Dianaworld, a new biography about Diana that I couldn’t resist reviewing for one of my favorite brainy Brit mags, The New Statesman

Edward White has pulled off an unusual experiment in his biography of Diana, Princess of Wales – the life of one of the most famous women in history captured entirely in long shot. There are times when his resourceful use of contemporary Everyman diaries and interviews with insightful nobodies provides valuable historical insights, and others when it’s a bit like reading a profile of Lawrence of Arabia from the point of view of the sand. Only occasionally does the real Diana, the practised superstar I lunched with in New York six weeks before she died, break out of the suffocation of mass perceptions and cultural analysis.

One such moment is a killingly self-revealing story I didn’t know (and as a Diana biographer myself it always quickens my pulse to find a nugget that escaped me). According to Alastair Campbell, in 1995 Diana advised an as-yet unelected Tony Blair “to touch people in pictures” and be sure to be photographed with “down and outs”. “Children with no hair,” she told Blair coolly, “were especially effective in curating a reputation for compassion.” A mask-off moment hard to forget. The future PM was, White tells us, “rapt by her shrewdness and savvy”. But not enough to want to give her the formal ambassadorial role she craved when he got into Downing Street. By then, tabloid coverage of her multiple affairs and her association with the son of the tawdry Mohamed Al-Fayed, who had been caught up in an MP bribery scandal, were too much of a political risk. However, when I met with her in New York in June 1997, the princess clearly was still hankering to be the British government’s freelance Queen of Hearts. Her huge, limpid blue eyes filled with artful sincerity when she told me across the lunch that she felt she could be “an enormous help” to bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

Was she delusional? It’s not surprising that by the end of her life, Diana had become high on her own supply. But in her presence, it was impossible not to be seduced. No photographs do justice to the combination of that blonde radiance and conferred charisma. In her stockinged feet Diana was five foot 11 inches, and when she crossed the Four Seasons restaurant to our table wearing three-inch Manolo heels and a peppermint green Saint Laurent suit, with a short skirt that gave full rein to her limitless legs, she electrified a dining room used to the appearance of high-wattage celebrities.

White’s book dives deeply into how Diana was mythologised by the media and the British people and, as her marital unhappiness seeped out and exploded, became a proxy for random sublimated pain that in turn confirmed her own sense of magical power. A sex worker at the time, whose observations White comes across in an oral history of prostitution project, considered Diana’s life filled with parallels to her own. “She had the same sort of shite [as me] when she was a kid. You know, didn’t do particularly well at school… She said ‘up yours’ to so much hierarchy”. So muses the sex worker about a woman who was born into one of Britain’s oldest aristocratic families and set her cap at an early age to marrying the future king.

Royal Flush

It’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of Diana’s story – especially during the Megxit coverage – that Diana, like Harry and Meghan, longed to escape from the cage of monarchy. But Diana’s problem was not with being royal. She knew she was brilliant at that. (In her divorce demands, continuing to live at Kensington Palace was a non-negotiable.) It was being married to a man who was in love with someone else and was hopelessly jealous of his wife’s popularity. Even after the royal divorce was final and she was supposedly thrilled to be free, Diana told me how much she regretted losing Charles, and wistfully spoke of how they could have been “such a great team”. I tend to agree – had she married him at 30, rather than at 20.

Dianaworld needs more helpings of such emotional content, but White’s surround-sound approach amplifies how Diana was both shaped by the aristocratic culture of the Britain she was born into and how much she had changed that culture by the time she died. I was fascinated, for instance, by his parsing of Diana’s early childhood trauma due to her parents’ divorce. An underlying theme of his book is the abiding question of how external contemporary events unwittingly affect the behaviour of, or are absorbed by, the people who live through them. In the case of Diana’s mother, Frances, her decision to leave Earl Spencer for the wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd occurred in 1967, when Diana was six, around the same time as British divorce numbers were surging. There was an explosive BBC documentary titled Whicker’s World: The Stresses of Divorce: one episode features the celebrity model Sandra Paul, who bolted on her aristocratic husband, Robin Douglas-Home, a cousin of Diana’s father. (It’s incredible television even today, well worth the bad-quality YouTube rendering.) Alan Whicker’s interviews with the couple are more intimate and fascinatingly invasive than anything in modern confessional talk shows or reality TV, mostly because it’s rare to see candour like this expressed in such cut-glass accents. The distressed, ethereal beauty Sandra explains how she could no longer tolerate Robin’s selfishness and Robin, with his quivering cigarette and clipped Noël Coward delivery, tells us he how he just cannot, cannot live with this humiliation and the “leering little clerks in solicitors’ offices” who arranged his divorce. “I had to be ruthless in order to be free,” Sandra tells Whicker. “It’s the kind of statement,” says White, that, “could have come from Diana’s lips 30 years later.”

Myth-Busting

In a book in which it’s mostly hard to discern what the author really thinks of his subject, it’s clear that White is unimpressed by many of the hyperbolic myths around Diana. He deflates the now-accepted view that she transformed attitudes to Aids and ushered in a new era of British emotionalism. There is no doubt that the princess’s famous visit to patients in the Aids ward of the Middlesex Hospital in 1987 was the hand shake (without gloves) that went round the globe. But he considers Harry’s declaration – and that of many others – that his mother “changed the world” with her embrace of Aids patients is predictably overwrought. He suggests it’s more likely that a long-running Aids storyline about the character Mark Fowler on the massively popular TV soap EastEnders was far more influential in changing cultural attitudes.

Diana’s warmth toward an AIDS patient at London’s Middlesex Hospital. He did not feel safe in showing his face. (1987)

Similarly, Diana’s public admission to suffering from eating disorders was not as pioneering in White’s telling as it seems in sainted myth. Revelation of her bulimia in Andrew Morton’s 1992 bombshell book came over a decade after Susie Orbach’s bestselling Fat Is a Feminist Issue, which explored the often-concealed dysfunctional relationship women have with food and body image, and led to a wave of obsessive women’s magazine coverage of the topic. Where we must credit Diana is her impeccable flair for capturing the zeitgeist, an ability to identify all the right things to care about and talk about at just the right moment which burned her into the nation’s psyche. White may be correct that EastEnders played a more significant role in easing British attitudes to Aids, but Diana’s global fame and royal mystique elevated its acceptance, and even made it into a fashionable fundraising cause.

White doesn’t have a fully baked new theory about the explosive grief of Diana Week, those seven days of histrionic mourning that rocked the streets of London in the wake of the princess’s death. Some of the Mass Observation diary entries and interviews he turned up likened the Dianaists of 1997 to “spellbound Nazis in 1930s Berlin”. Both mourners and “those who felt differently”, White observes, “frequently framed their criticism of the other lot as the appearance of something not truly British. For decades, the Queen’s aloofness, inscrutability and restraint had been hailed as the epitome of a distinctively British attitude to life. Now those same qualities were reviled as horribly out of touch with modern Britain.” At a minimum, Diana Week was the moment when a national dam broke and repudiated the harsh-faced politics of the Thatcher era and the Major government still attempting to hang on to them. The collective emotion was in perfect sync – as, even in death, Diana always was – with the coming of New Labour and Tony Blair who used the word “compassion” seven times at the Labour Party conference a month after the funeral.

The Dam Breaks

White suggests the notion that the outpouring presaged the inklings of a rise in populism that “had usually existed only on the fringe”. Like Boris Johnson, who at the time mocked the Diana frenzy as “a Latin American carnival of grief”, and Donald Trump, whose motto was always “I alone can fix [the country]”, Diana “cast herself as a people’s tribune who refused to be silenced by a bullying elitist establishment, just as those two men do”.Diana as a harbinger of Brexit? The irony of that thought is that the chaos of the post-referendum years has only strengthened a monarchy beloved more for its sangfroid than its sentiment. If Prince Harry is Diana’s emotional heir, his efforts to reproduce her confessional connection to the British people have been rejected in favour of the stoic elder brother and his wife, who give the least away. One of Diana’s greatest gifts, White suggests, was “creating an atmosphere of intimacy where none existed”. And yet her personification of a kinder, more caring world blazes still.

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