Does Tina Brown's new book, The Diana Chronicles, tell us anything new about a troubled princess - or more about our reaction to her death, asks Kathy Sheridan
Ten years on, Diana can still trigger a good sulk. As the 480-page Tina Brown opus lands in features offices across the world, their occupants are split down the middle - the "who cares?" cabal versus the "but it's by Tina Brown" brigade. It's a brave little soul who pipes up that he or she might, um, actually still be a bit interested in that whole, eh, Diana thing.
For Tina Brown, the whip-smart former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Diana - as in The Diana Chronicles - represents a cool £1 million (€1.48m) advance and, possibly, a decent shake for the dead princess. For others, Diana spells unfinished business. What in the name of God came over us when a rich, manipulative, delusional 36-year-old smashed into a Parisian pillar with her boyfriend? Did we cry? Worse, did a few hot, furtive little tears escape while Elton John criminally assaulted a piano and ululated about a candle in the wind? Yes, your honour, they did. I admit it. And no, I still can't explain it.
Nor can the millions of decent, normally stoical Britons who blubbed their way through those extraordinary days. Anyone who found themselves around Diana's London stomping grounds that week may still gag at the sickly whiff of dying lilies, but one thing is for sure: they remember.
Brown's final chapter, "Remember Me", gets to grips with it, and, for some, it may make the previous 21 more bearable. For all the hype (the word barely covers it; the London launch party list included the Blairs and Camerons through to Jimmy Choo), only anoraks will be capable of distinguishing the "new" gobbets. For example, the published extracts, bound to fillet the new and juicy bits, focus on the claim that Camilla never wanted to marry Prince Charles. Surely we knew that already? No? Well, do we care? Ah, well, that goes to the heart of why anyone might want to read this book.
If you believe that your crying jag 10 years ago was rooted in the cynical betrayal of a 20-year-old, shy, damaged, giggly, Mills & Boon-addicted, fairytale-believing, virgin bride - who could just as well have been your vulnerable daughter, sister or friend - then you may well care a little.
BROWN, CLEAR-EYED about Diana's alarmingly nutty, mood-swinging side, also shows a highly enjoyable, well-referenced contempt for the scheming, braying, brown-nosing, adulterous toadies that formed Charles's Highgrove circle and the machinations of the Queen Mother and Diana's own grandmother, who targeted Diana as a suitably unsullied, malleable, brood mare. She concludes that before the birth of Harry in 1984 (three years into their marriage), "Charles had gone back to his mistress [ Camilla] physically as well as emotionally and that Diana knew it". In fact, it appears that Camilla never went away and that Diana was not the only arch-manipulator of the tabloids. A former editor of the Sun, Stuart Higgins, claims to have been briefed around once a week by Camilla about the Charles/Diana relationship from 1982 to 1992.
Brown, clearly driven by a belief that the Wales' marriage had a chance if Camilla had been honourable, is unremittingly cynical about the mistress and her motives. She suggests that Andrew Parker-Bowles, her philandering husband, was the true love of her life and that she would have had little interest in Charles had he not been the Prince of Wales. She quotes Camilla's brother-in-law: " . . . [ Camilla] thought that Diana was someone whom she could manipulate . . . She never wanted to marry Charles. She wanted to continue to be his paramour but her game plan was to stay married to Andrew . . . She wanted two things from her life: to retain her special relationship with the Prince of Wales, and a marriage to someone she was genuinely fond of." But the game was up when Charles's BBC confession forced Andrew Parker-Bowles's hand. Divorce, with its inevitable cash problems, ensued - a friend attests to Camilla hiding when the fishmonger called for payment. But, of course, a strategy was devised.
This, said a "friend", was for Camilla to be made "'cash poor' to trigger in Charles not so much his sympathy as his responsibility towards the woman in his life". It worked wonderfully. Her groceries were bought, her debts were paid, her dress allowance covered. She learned to get by on a stipend of £180,000 a year until the final triumph, when she attained the title of the Duchess of Cornwall.
"Now that Camilla's image reversal is complete," writes Brown, "former St James's Palace staffers are amused that the favoured storyline in the press is of the patience and fortitude of the 'woman who waited'. From the inside it sure didn't look that way. 'It was Bolland [ Charles's shrewd PR man] who invented that fiction,' said a former colleague of his. 'And, I can tell you, it was quite an aggressive campaign'." This then, in Brown's view, is the woman slated to become the consort of the king of England.
TEN YEARS AGO, as Britons streamed into London to mourn Diana at the rate of 6,000 an hour, and to turn Kensington Palace into "a gigantic floral snowdrift", with a soundtrack "not simply of crying, but deep, gasping sobs", the outline of the story was already there. But it was hardly that alone. "For 16 years," writes Brown, "millions of Britons had felt themselves to be not spectators of but participants in her evolution and her struggles; the shy teenager who became a fairy princess and a mother; the wronged wife who searched for love and was always betrayed; the compassionate crusader who seemed to become more beautiful the more she shared the miseries of others."
Brown notes, above all, "the miracle" of the diversity of the crowd, all ages, all colours, "in shorts and saris and denim and pinstripes and baseball caps and hijabs. The death of an aristocratic girl who became a princess but refused to let palace walls enclose her had somehow triggered a historic celebration of inclusion."
The then London bureau chief of the New York Times, Warren Hoge, was transfixed by the sight and sound of a country discovering itself, she writes. "Britain, he says, 'had no idea it was this racially mixed, this driven by women, this aspirational until it asked itself: Who were all these people in the green spaces of London coming out for Diana?'" It was partly, of course, that she was the first great glamour icon to die in the 24/7 multi-media age, creating what Brown calls "the first great grief-a-thon".
Shrewdly, Brown also places it at a moment of political transition. "The British people in mid-1997 had had enough of stone-faced authority figures giving them castor oil and telling them to sit up straight. It's why Tony Blair won the election for Labour in May with the biggest landslide of the 20th century, after 11 years of Margaret Thatcher as Nurse Ratched in Downing Street, seven years of John Major as a furled umbrella, 16 years of the royal family failing to understand that the warm, golden, flesh-and-blood girl in their midst was the best thing to happen to them since the restoration of King Charles II. Now the British people's pent-up desire to feel found its release in the death of a princess who always gave permission."
It was perhaps the last - the "permission" - that stands out for this writer, moving among the crowds at Diana's funeral. Hyde Park seemed to become one vast confessional. Strangers swapped stories of grief and bereavement and disorders, and when they sobbed during Candle in the Wind and cheered Earl Spencer's "reckless eulogy", their tears were less about the sudden, stupid death of their very human, golden princess than their own buried grievances and sorrows.
All of which may explain why, within a year, the mere mention of Diana evinced embarrassment rather than nostalgia. The continuing military-style machinations of Charles and Camilla's PR people did the rest.
A final lesson to all young Mills & Boon addicts, though too late, alas, for Diana, the genre's number one fan, is worth recounting. It came from the Queen of Romance herself, Barbara Cartland, in a comment on the Charles and Diana fairytale: "Of course, you know where it all went wrong. She wouldn't do oral sex."