In November 1995, Princess Diana sat down opposite the journalist Martin Bashir in her Kensington Palace apartment to film the now-notorious Panorama interview. Buried amid the better-known sound bites about Charles, Camilla and wanting to be “a queen of people’s hearts” was a sharp insight about Diana’s status as one of the most famous women in the world. “You see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well, and people make a lot of money out of you,” she told Bashir.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Diana had a pretty good grasp of just how marketable a “product” she could be. After all, this is the woman whose sisters brushed off her pre-wedding jitters by declaring: “Your face is on the tea towels, so you’re too late to chicken out now.” But her remark was also deeply prescient. Because if Diana was a “good product” back then, that status has certainly increased in the 27 years since her tragic death.
