The Diana myth

The people’s princess has been dead 10 years. Her sons have staged her memorial concert at Wembley, Tina Brown has written a memoir that is alternately gushing and malicious, and Prince Charles has married his mistress. Her sons are both army officers. By the end of the year William will be bald. William, every inch a Windsor, has turned into a dead ringer for Princess Anne, Harry for Diana’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale.

If Lady Diana Spencer had had a history O-level she might have learnt that marrying a Prince of Wales was a one-way ticket to misery. Indeed it could be argued that for a Princess of Wales she got off lightly. She and her husband had a language in common. She was not kept on short rations or kicked out of the palace, or barred from the court or public life; her children were not taken away from her, and her husband had only one mistress and a discreet one at that.

The present Queen’s great-grandmother, Princess Alexandra, had to share her Prince of Wales with a promiscuous horde of loose aristocrats and gabby performers, even as she was bearing him six children. She was never suspected of allowing herself similar liberty, whereas Diana sampled an extraordinary collection of men. Her only punishment was to be called a trollop by the Duke of Edinburgh. Sure, she had a miserable time, but that’s what it is to be Princess of Wales. Her sister Sarah said no to the job, but then Sarah was always smarter than Diana.

Being involved with Charles Windsor hasn’t been easy for anyone. Some of us remember Dale Harper, whom he met at a dance in Melbourne in 1964. Dale, better known as Kanga, the nickname Charles gave her, was bosomy, blonde, gifted with tremendous joie de vivre and a famously broad smile. In 1973 she was married off to Lord Tryon, but her friendship with the prince continued. After she was sidelined by Camilla, Kanga gradually became less and less discreet. She told journalists how the prince would call her out of the blue and ask whether he could drop by for what she called a “comfort stop”. Camilla Parker Bowles too used to joke with her Wiltshire cronies about such visits, that it was “whisky first and leap into bed”.

Background

In 1983 Tryon lost his job as a merchant banker and Kanga became the chief breadwinner for their family. With £2,000 she set up a designer-wear business called Kanga that she parlayed into millions. In 1988, Charles spent Easter with the Tryons at Balmoral. In 1993 Kanga was diagnosed with uterine cancer; in 1996 she was admitted to Farm Place for treatment for addiction. There she fell or threw herself from a window, broke her back and was left paralysed from the waist down.

Her husband began divorce proceedings. In June 1997 she was sectioned (ie, committed to a mental hospital); in November she was dead, of septicaemia after surgery for a bedsore. As Kanga’s life collapsed in madness and misery, Charles went about his royal business. She was buried privately and Charles wasn’t there. Like Diana, Kanga was convinced that moves were afoot to kill her.

Some say that Diana’s unhappiness and disappointment were only to be expected in a bride so young. Catherine of Aragon was only 15 when she was married to her Prince of Wales. She could only communicate with her husband by speaking in her native Spanish to a Spanish bishop who relayed her words in Latin to an English bishop who passed them on to Prince Arthur in English. In those days the Prince of Wales had to live in Wales, so the teenage couple was obliged to live in spartan gloom and cold in the castle at Ludlow.

Six months after they got there, when Arthur died of the sweating sickness, Catherine was still a virgin. Her father-in-law then proposed himself as her second husband, thought the better of it and betrothed her to his 14-year-old son Henry instead. Catherine had nothing like Diana’s dress allowance; she was expected to clothe herself out of her own dowry, which was slow coming through. When she finally became Queen Consort she had only two dresses left. The rest, as they say, is history.

After Catherine, there wasn’t another Princess of Wales for more than 200 years. Caroline of Anspach became Princess of Wales when her husband was created Prince of Wales by his father George I in 1714. The christening of her son Prince George William in 1717 provoked a family row which resulted in her and her children being thrown out of St James’s Palace, and her husband being barred from all public engagements.

Her marriage was a lot more crowded than Princess Diana’s, because her husband consoled himself by tupping practically all her ladies-in-waiting. Camilla lived 17 miles from Highgrove; Caroline’s rivals lived in the royal apartments alongside her and she saw them every day. Caroline did eventually become queen and her son Frederick Prince of Wales in his turn, but he and his wife Augusta fell foul of the king and were banished from the court. Augusta never became queen because her husband died in 1751, before his father, so she became Dowager Princess of Wales. The new Prince of Wales, her son George, didn’t marry until after he became king.

His son George, Prince of Wales virtually from birth, was not interested in acquiring a princess. He was eventually bribed to give up his live-in lover, Mrs Fitzherbert, with whom he had gone through a form of marriage, and take to wife Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel, whom he distrusted and despised. When she failed in the Princess of Wales’s prime duty, which is to produce an heir and a spare, and produced a daughter instead, he kicked her out. She was not allowed even to bring up her child.

When his father went mad and George became regent, he ignored his wife, who had returned to Europe where she allowed herself a James Hewitt or two. She was offered a generous allowance on condition that she gave up all claim to be queen of England, but she refused. When George III died, and Caroline returned to England for the coronation, she was welcomed by crowds in the streets, but it made as little odds being queen of hearts then as it would now. When questioned at the bar of the House of Lords as to whether she had committed adultery, Caroline did a Diana, saying that, yes, she had, with the husband of Mrs Fitzherbert. When she tried to enter the abbey for the coronation, her way was barred. That night she fell ill with stomach pains and vomiting; three weeks later she was dead, cause unknown. When Londoners mobbed her funeral procession, the Life Guards fired on the crowd.

Lady Diana Spencer was not a princess in her own right, as have been most of the princesses of Wales, but an English aristocrat. Though the aristocracy is sometimes referred to as the nobility, there is very little that is noble about it. In England it cannot be said that “noblesse oblige”. English aristocrats are usually poorly educated, vulgar and ostentatious in their tastes, and extravagant and licentious in their personal behaviour.

Diana grew up in the company of louche young lordlings and ladies, one of the most flamboyant of whom was her elder sister, Lady Sarah Spencer, the original flame-haired temptress. Diana was chosen precisely because she was shy and backward.

Though Diana pretended to have been an innocent at court, describing herself as a lamb being led to slaughter, her family were courtiers, thoroughly versed in the ways of the Firm, as the royals like to refer to themselves. Well might Charles have snapped at Diana, after a particularly venomous row about his relationship with Camilla, “Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress!”

And surely she didn’t. As a boy Charles had been advised by Lord Mountbatten to get as much sexual experience as he could, taking care to avoid any suggestion of scandal and avoiding entrapment. In doing so he would be following what was by all accounts his father’s example, as it seems he does in his parenting style.

The strategy has always been the same – a prince’s sexual partners have to be married women. Traditionally the husbands haven’t minded because having royal bastards in the family was the inside track for preferment. A wife who caught the eye of a monarch or monarch-to-be was an asset. It was as if she wore the label “By appointment to the Prince of Wales”, a guarantee of quality and friendly service. A wife’s relationship with a prince did not necessarily entail the cessation of a sexual relationship with her husband, but it was likely to follow, especially if the prince demanded it. Both Diana’s grandmothers were members of the royal household: Countess Spencer was lady of the bedchamber to the Queen Mother, and Ruth, Lady Fermoy, one of her women of the bedchamber. Diana’s father had served as equerry to both George VI and the present Queen; when Johnny Spencer married Lady Fermoy’s daughter Frances Burke Roche in 1954, the Queen and the Queen Mother attended. Diana’s brother was christened in Westminster Abbey with the Queen as principal godparent. Park House on the royal estate at Sandringham, where Diana lived as a child, was granted by George V to Lady Fermoy’s husband, the fourth baron Fermoy, as a token of his friendship with his second son, the Duke of York, who was to become George VI, the present Queen’s father.

When Countess Spencer died in 1972, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret attended her funeral in the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace. Diana’s sister Jane Fellowes married the son of the Queen’s land agent at Sandringham, and he later became private secretary to Her Majesty. When Diana presented herself to her adoring public as a guileless girl who fell in love with a chap who just happened to be heir to the English throne, only to have her innocent young love spurned, she was acting a lie.

Of the four Spencer children, Diana was the slowest. Her siblings called her Brian, after the dopey snail on The Magic Roundabout on children’s TV. Because of her slowness, she was easily found out in her preposterous fibs. Her fantasies were fed by the romances of Barbara Cartland, and later Danielle Steele. When it began to look more and more likely that her father would take Raine, Countess of Dartmouth, as his second wife, Diana, who was then at West Heath boarding school in Kent, persuaded a younger girl to write Raine a poison pen letter.

Apparently she didn’t have the courage to write her own letter, and instead used her influence over a younger child to get her to do it for her, not realising apparently that, if the stratagem had been discovered, her own part in it would have been obvious. You can understand why, in the struggle to cope with her sly malevolence, Diana said Raine Spencer repeatedly asked why she had to be “so thick” and “so silly”.

In adulthood Diana became more, rather than less, devious. In 1996 she visited an ex-member of the Kensington Palace staff at the Priory, where he was being treated for post-traumatic shock resulting from his service in the Falklands war. He apparently told Diana that more than 10 years before he had been twice raped by another member of the staff at Kensington Palace.

Diana suggested that he make a tape-recording of the allegations, and took it away with her. She kept it in a box together with a signet ring belonging to James Hewitt and some letters from Prince Philip, a box which mysteriously went missing from Kensington Palace after her death. The police, who were building a case against her butler Philip Burrell at the time, took it upon themselves to investigate the matter and interviewed both the rape victim and the alleged perpetrator.

Charles paid for a solicitor to advise the man accused, who could be proved not to have been in London on one of the occasions that his accuser claimed to have been raped there. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to pursue the case. In the course of the investigation it emerged that Charles had already had the situation investigated five years earlier by Fiona Shackleton, the solicitor who handled his divorce, who found then that there was no case to answer. The footman had been allowed to resign, and given a severance payment of £35,000. Diana’s willingness to use suspect evidence from a vulnerable person to build a case against the Firm – as if any such case were needed – is part and parcel with her manipulation of a younger child at West Heath.

We would expect that a child who grooms other children would be involved in pathological relationships of her own. Diana allowed herself to be dominated by her sister Sarah and willingly worked for her friends as a cleaner for £1 an hour. Sarah was certainly imperious but Diana, by her self-immolation, made her seem more so. Another example of disturbingly neurotic behaviour is Diana’s stalking of the art dealer Oliver Hoare; he received more than 300 nuisance calls that originated with Diana, though, as we have seen, it would be unlike her to have made them herself. The saddest thought of all is that Diana’s death may have resulted indirectly from another of her kack-handed manipulations; it is said that she only went to Paris with Dodi Fayed in order to make the heart surgeon Hasnat Khan jealous.

That Diana was desperately unhappy as Charles’s wife we cannot doubt; it is also clear that he never liked her much and ended by positively disliking her. Her supporters thought he made her neurotic, his supporters that she had always been neurotic. The story of how she emerged from her dowdy chrysalis to become the people’s princess is often told, but what is seldom assessed is just how much of a performance this was. The Daily Express photographer Steve Wood, who took the famous picture of 19-year-old Lady Di standing against the light so her legs and thighs were visible in silhouette through her skirt, says that when he first saw her, “I thought she was quite plain . . . I advised her to look down so her face would always be in shadow”. The photographic record shows how sedulously Diana followed this advice; looking at the lens from under her eyebrows exaggerated the size of her eyes and minimised the size of her nose.

The wedding, in a dress that was too big to fit into the Glass Coach, was the sign that Diana was now being coiffed, made up and costumed to play the part of media princess. Within a few months of her marriage Diana was being styled daily by professionals, some of whom marvelled at how biddable she was. One stylist who prefers to remain nameless reported, “If they told her to wear red gloves, she wore red gloves. If they told her to wear blue shoes, she wore blue shoes. Let’s just say she doesn’t have a lot of imagination.” Diana was never a fashion icon; she dressed to the same demotic standard of elegance as TV anchorwomen do, plus the inevitable hat. It is precisely because she was basically anonymous that Diana’s public could so easily identify with her; it should surprise no one that they then transferred their feelings to her and chanted as one that she identified with them.

The list of designers, coiffeurs and stylists who worked with Diana is endless; the stylists’ job included personal shopping, which resulted in armfuls of ensembles being delivered to Kensington Palace. It was said that Diana was incredibly extravagant; the truth seems to be that designers were only too happy to have her wear their clothes and made them available at cost or less. As a consequence, like an actress playing many parts, Diana went through look after look. Occasionally the performance went over the top; during the Royal Gala performance at Covent Garden in 1985 Diana made a surprise appearance on stage dancing a routine to Uptown Girl with dancer Wayne Sleep. Her husband and the rest of the Firm were mortified, as she must have known they would be.

The same foolhardiness was at work not only in Diana’s ill-starred sexual adventures but also in her orchestration of her public persona. After her separation, when she was making her bid to be queen of people’s hearts, she rushed into too many situations in which genuine angels would have feared to tread. Her habit of popping up in the midst of other people’s life crises must have startled some of her victims. It’s tough enough watching a relative die without having an immaculately groomed princess batting her mascaraed lashes at you, clutching your hand and fetching you cups of coffee. The media fell for it, even as they realised that this was a desperate woman seeking applause.

In death she has it, doled out in huge amounts. Her beauty has become legendary, mesmeric, dazzling, irresistible; at her funeral her brother made one of the 100 best speeches of the 20th century. He didn’t carry out his threat to remove his nephews from the royal madhouse. Instead he buried his unhappy sister on the family estate and charges her adorers £12.50 a visit.

Diana’s legacy is no more than endless column inches of adulation and speculation. The Firm is still in business. In the endless royal soap opera the Queen has taken to impersonating a sweet old granny — except when the showbusiness photographer Annie Leibovitz gets her goat. Meanwhile Camilla has been careful not to step into Diana’s shoes. She keeps a refuge in her own house in Wiltshire, doesn’t always take her place at her husband’s side, and hasn’t assumed the doomed title of Princess of Wales.

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