Angela Mollard: The death of Princess Diana is one thing I don’t need to relive

The week that Princess Diana died was like nothing Angela Mollard has ever experienced and she does not want to re-live the trauma by watching season six of The Crown.

“This is going to be the biggest thing that any of us have ever seen.”

It’s a startling line, spoken by the actor Dominic West playing Prince Charles, in the trailer for the final season of The Crown. The light is dim, he has a phone pressed to his ear and while there is no ambiguity about what he is talking about, those words made me flinch.

The car crash that killed Princess Diana will not be shown in this, the final season of the show. But her death, aged 36, will weigh on every scene.

And for that reason, I simply can’t watch it. Not because it’s “cruel, farcical and a sick joke” as derided by one historian upon release of the trailer. Or because it’s too harrowing to bear. In my job you’re regularly required to put on a tear-proof vest and when you’ve walked through a community brought to its knees by a mass shooting you quickly learn to marshal your feelings.

Likewise, I’m not scornful of the ongoing fascination with the monarchy. Rather, I’m intrigued which is why I’m a royal commentator on television, radio and podcasts where I’m never short of an opinion on the family that appears to make a profession of dysfunction. I’ve loved the previous seasons of The Crown – Claire Foy was mesmeric, Olivia Colman disappointing and Elizabeth Debicki as Diana has faithfully captured a woman who was as luminescent as she was complex.

Princess Diana died at the age of 36 in 1997. Picture: Jayne Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images

I also don’t subscribe to actor Steve Coogan’s sneer that those interested in the royal family are “flag-waving idiots”. The royals are human and therefore interesting.

No, the reason I can’t watch The Crown’s dramatisation of the days that proceeded Diana’s death and its aftermath is because 26 years later I don’t want to be transported back into what was the most challenging and unsettling week of my career. I rarely let emotion outweigh curiosity but having worked round the clock in London reporting on those horrible seven days between Diana dying in a Paris underpass and her coffin being buried on an island at her childhood home, I don’t want to reawaken that profound sadness. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced, the opening of a vein into a shock and anger that was as intense as it was unpredictable. The Queen, the government and the public were flailing, yet because of the appetite the interest never dimmed.

I spent the following three months secretly locked down with a team of five compiling a 12-part tribute to her life which was promptly turned into a book. I know more than is necessary about Diana’s life. And death.

But more than that, I can’t watch it because in the ensuing years so much sadness has sprung from the tragedy. Diana’s youngest son is a broken man and I say that with compassion. Yes, he does great things – notably the Invictus Games – but the cracks in his psyche are self-professed and bleed from nearly every page of his memoir, Spare. Whatever his choices, and plenty are questionable, losing his mother has left him with lifelong grief and mistrust. He is riven with anger and hopefully he will eventually find peace but for now his struggle continues. His wife, sadly – and I say this matter-of-factly, not meanly – is not the salve.

Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in season 6 of The Crown. Picture: Daniel Escale/Netflix

Watching The Crown’s retelling of Diana’s death will also remind me of some of the more unpalatable media practices that swirled at the end of the last century. None of us could have predicted the rapacious interest in Diana, as evidenced by archival footage from historian Robert Lacey who has consulted on The Crown.

Back in 1981, following the engagement of Lady Diana Spencer to Prince Charles, Lacey told a television network: “I think we’re going to see a change in the attitude of the press. I think that now she’s palpably one of the royal family, all this telephoto lens business will stop.”

He was laughably wrong. As The Crown will show, it got worse. Diana died not knowing that she’d been duped by BBC journalist Martin Bashir into telling her story to Panorama. The discredited journalist fuelled her paranoia. It was cruel beyond words. Much has been made of Diana’s ghost reappearing in the series with creator Peter Morgan explaining he is not tinkering with the supernatural but illustrating vividly her impact on the royal family. It’s a dramatic device but I don’t want to be reminded of how iconic she was.

There’s arguably some hypocrisy in declaring myself unable to watch Diana’s demise on The Crown. I earn money talking and writing about this weirdly compelling family. But there is never a moment, either on television or in print, when what I say about the royal family is not informed by what happened in August 1997.

The final month of Diana’s life was mad and because she occupied that alluring axis of monarchy and celebrity, she did things and things were done to her that should never happen again.

Yes, it was one of the biggest things that any of us have ever seen. I don’t need to see it again.

Originally published as Angela Mollard: The death of Princess Diana is one thing I don’t need to relive