The weirdest part about our obsession with Diana? How shallow it turned out to be
Ask anyone over the age of 40 where they were when the Berlin Wall came down and they will probably have to dig deep; ask the same about when Diana died and they will tell you instantly. Yet her own influence has proven far weaker.
The traditional biography is dead. The vogue today is, instead of getting bogged down in the subject’s life, to focus on their place in cultural history. The great benefit to readers is that biographies are no longer just about one person, but about all of us. “How does this relate to moi?” as Miss Piggy might have said.
Also, announcing that your biography is not a biography is now de rigueur, and Edward White ticks that off on page two of Dianaworld: An Obsession. His book about Diana, Princess of Wales is, he says, “less a biography of Diana, more the story of a cultural obsession”. To tell it, he leans on the Mass Observation social history project and the Great Diary Project archive, in which members of the British public recorded their thoughts about their daily lives, which occasionally included Diana.
I found these sources somewhat less interesting than White does, partly because I don’t need a book to tell me Brits were fascinated by Diana, but mainly because the examples he finds out in the wider world are so much funnier. “The Princess of Wales might seem perfect,” the Reading Evening Post revealed in 1994, like it had the next Watergate on its hands, “but … she is a nail-biter,” White writes.
White told the cultural history of Britain’s still best-known film director in his 2021 book The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock. His problem with Diana is that, even by the standards of cultural history biographies and their invariably well-known subjects, she is well known to the point of nausea. I consider my appetite for royal gossip to be pretty near inexhaustible, but even I could live quite happily without ever hearing again any references to the love-rat-James-Hewitt, Mohamed Al Fayed’s conspiracy theories about her death, and so on.
The usual justification for rehashing Diana’s story is that she – a barely educated aristocrat who married a future king – is just like us, whoever we might be: feminists, gay people, Jews, Asians, Americans. White is very aware of this and rounds up some of the dafter examples of such deluded narcissism. Journalist Julie Burchill once claimed that Diana ticked off all the classic traits of a Jewish woman: “Profoundly maternal, disliking horses, strong-nosed, comely, needing too much and giving too much.”
White’s description of Diana’s persona is a lot more accurate: “Consisting of overlapping layers of the archaic and contemporary, much like London’s ahistorical skyline, where 21st-century towers of steel and glass loom above Georgian mansions and 1960s tower blocks.”
His focus is primarily – and illuminatingly – on how she was such a creature of her time. By the time Diana was bolted on to the Windsors, it was clear that the royal family needed her more than vice versa. Post-empire, the “House of Windsor became more of a symbol of an inward-looking Britishness than ever before – despite being widely regarded as a bunch of Germans in disguise”, White writes.
Diana, by contrast, was a proper aristocrat, meaning she brought not just some much-needed glamour to the family but also a reassuring glaze of legitimacy. The feminist magazine Spare Rib commemorated the royal wedding with a tea towel that read “You start by sinking into his arms and end up with your arms in his sink”. But any feminist fight against Diana was short-lived, and the year she died the Disney catalogue started selling princess costumes for adults.
She turned up when the media’s attitude to the royals was shifting. The deference of the first half of the century was pretty much over by the late seventies, and in 1978 a columnist on The Sun wrote that, when it came to the royals, “admiration is no longer automatic and there is no reason why it should be”. Diana – always more of a celebrity than a traditional royal – was the perfect princess for this new era, offering stories to favoured journalists and flirting with the cameras in a blatant quid pro quo.
In 1995 she advised Tony Blair that if he wanted to cultivate an image of compassion, he should “touch people in pictures”, ideally “children with no hair”. When Dodi Fayed’s bodyguards announced that the princess wanted complete privacy while on the Fayed yacht that fateful last summer, Joan Collins retorted from a neighbouring yacht: “What, in St Tropez in mid-August?”
Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story was published in 1992 and retailers from Harrods to Tesco were so shocked they refused to stock it. The Sun and The Sunday Times serialised it, prompting The Daily Mirror to refer to its rivals as “the republicans down the road”. But White points out that Diana was – as usual – very on trend by dabbling in the defining literary genre of the decade: the misery memoir. You could barely move in that decade for books about unhappy childhoods, from Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It” to Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and Diana’s youngest son and her brother have continued the tradition, Prince Harry with his memoir Spare and Charles Spencer with A Very Private School.
Chuck in Paul Gascoigne sobbing in the 1990 World Cup and you have a weirdly emotional decade in Britain, one with which Diana was far more in tune than the hatchet-faced Windsors. Her funeral – which White memorably compares to Ronnie Kray’s – was the climax of that tendency. But despite the sneers from sceptics, her death has retained an extraordinary cultural hold. Ask anyone in this country over the age of 40 where they were when the Berlin Wall came down and they will probably have to dig deep; ask the same about when Diana died and they will tell you instantly.
Yet her own influence has proven far weaker. Prince Charles – as he was then – was so hated after his separation from Diana that Tatler imagined Prince William becoming king, Diana standing behind him, and Charles “nowhere in the picture”. But now we, the capricious public, love Charles and the once demonised Camilla, and we hate Harry, the true inheritor of his mother’s tendency to act first, think later (if at all). Meanwhile, probably the most famous memorial to Diana was Al Fayed’s fan fiction statue of her and his son, titled Innocent Victims, which was on show in Harrods until 2018.
Dianaworld is an amusing trip to what already feels like a distant past, yet it left me with a kind of bleak hollowness, like at the end of a love affair: how odd so many of us once cared so much about that woman, and how soon we moved on. The weirdest part of our once bottomless obsession with Diana is how shallow it turned out to be.
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