When the Queen of England was told of the death of her wayward daughter-in-law in a Paris car crash, her first words were: "Someone must have greased the brakes." So writes Ingrid Seward, claiming to give the lie to the story which circulated at the time that the Queen's first response had been "Was she wearing the royal jewels?"
Whichever of these alleged words you believe depends on your point of view, but the constituency Seward aims at could think no ill of the Queen (God bless her!) even if the melodramatic words attributed to Her Highness sound a little like the old joke about Tarzan's last words ("Who greased the v-i-i-i-i-i-i-nes!").
Seward is the editor of England's Majesty magazine, and as such one would hardly expect her to write a book condemnatory of a good live Royal, as opposed to a dead dispossessed one. So her The Queen and Di, the jacket of which proclaims an in-depth examination of the relationship between Queen Elizabeth and her first daughter-in-law, in fact deteriorates fairly rapidly into another episode in the still-running soap that depicts Diana as a crazy bitch and Elizabeth as a faithful corgi. Is it all part of a campaign to clear the decks for Camilla?
Indications of the agenda are given in the first few pages, when Seward writes of an interview with the princess conducted about six weeks before her death in the Parisian tunnel, on the last day of August 1997. She writes - in what initially appears to be a neutral tone - of Diana appearing for morning coffee "wearing a bright blue Versace cocktail dress - `dear Versace, he's so wonderful' - which . . . was worn tight but without a trace of a panty line . . . She wore a gold Cartier watch on one wrist and a slim diamond bracelet on the other, and her earrings were sapphires with a small diamond drop." Did the Princess always dress this way for morning coffee, Ms Seward wondered? No doubt in her well-concealed Marks & Spencer's drawers. She describes the meeting in what I suspect is Majestyese, but then the manicured fingernails start to sharpen.
"`Charles absolutely loved me,' she [Diana] said in a silvery voice which sounded as if it belonged to a little girl. `It's very hurtful to our children when people say we didn't love each other.' She paused, shaking her head and giving me a sidelong glance to see how I was reacting." Is that a squeaky door I hear, or did someone let a cat in the room?
And after that, there is a gradual descent into total partisanship. The claim to describe the relationship between the two royal ladies founders pretty quickly because they don't seem to have had much of a relationship at all. Awkward dinners a a deux between Queen Elizabeth and Ms Spencer during the Royal engagement are described, after which, Seward says, Diana went through a litany of excuses to avoid any repetition. Not many people doubt that Diana was extremely immature and most unsuitable for the stodgy old role her in-laws expected her to play. But nearly everything she did is eventually presented in this book as bad - even her consuming love for her two sons.
"What is there to say about a 19-year-old Englishwoman of no particular talent, experience or achievement? Nothing, unless her name happens to be Lady Diana Spencer." That world-weary comment, which appeared in a 1980 English year-book nearly 20 years ago, has come to my mind time and time again in the intervening years. The lie was given to it in a fashion - fashion being the operative word for the appeal that Diana had. And she was truly stunning with her tall, beautiful figure and gorgeous dresses. But she had no particular political views, no permanent interest in current affairs or history, no love of anything more sustaining than a new piece of jewellery: rather like the Windsors, if you substitute "horse" for "jewel". In a way she was the worst sort of female role model in history, there because she looked well and she was maternal. But just think of those crowds queuing to view her body in St James's chapel, or the sea of flowers outside Kensington Palace, three years ago. You don't have to be good to be loved, and certainly not, sweet maid, be clever.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist