Another anniversary of Diana’s death, another scrabble for fresh commemorative material – never easy but particularly challenging now, with the quarter-centenary of the Paris crash arriving so soon after exhaustive searches conducted for what would have been the Princess of Wales’s 60th birthday, last year.
What would the princess look like? That (“still a trendsetter”) was strenuously investigated, along with countless iconic moments and the finer aspects of her legacy (enhanced emotional intelligence in the nation that subsequently fell for Boris Johnson). Her sons’ awkward unveiling of a saintly birthday statue offered further pretexts for a new genre of Diana remembrance, a kind of counterfactual/“what would Jesus do?” hybrid that has yet to be attempted, for some reason, on the late Princess Margaret.
Where there is nothing new, simply imagine Diana if she were still with us, maybe in the pandemic. “Wearing scrubs and helping the nurses,” said her butler, Paul Burrell. Dealing with the William and Harry feud? “She would have banged their heads together and told them to sort it out,” Dickie Arbiter, the royal press secretary turned expert told a grateful Vanity Fair. “She would be just like me, obsessed with her grandchildren,” the Duchess of York said. Unless she’d become more like Andrew Marr: “As a British star she would have been offered big jobs; and she’d have taken some and made something of them.”
I like to think if she’d had any time over from being like Fergie, Marr and Florence Nightingale, Diana would have found a moment for the Observer, contributing occasional, sympathetic, commentary on the attempted rehabilitation of Camilla Parker Bowles.
The knack, it turns out, for media professionals keen to minimise fantasy content on the imminent anniversary of Diana’s death is to assume, perhaps correctly, that most people don’t remember much of what The Crown hasn’t got to yet.
Highlights of this anniversary currently include recycled revelations from a former Al Fayed bodyguard who first shared them with the Express in 2005 and again at her inquest in 2008: that Diana asked, after the murder of Gianni Versace, if she might be targeted and was considering moving to the US. Another is the re-re-revelation from her ex-bodyguard Ken Wharfe of the confrontation between Diana and Camilla that he first published in 2002. In fact, nothing brings home the years lost to Diana like the raw vigour and activity of contemporaneous royal experts on her marriage, divorce and death. What would they be doing 25 years on? Exactly the same thing, often, spookily, in exactly the same words.
Long after Diana studies lost their academic allure, after the cancellation of her predicted cult and diminishing interest in the once-consuming question of the national mourning (emotional transformation or – whither Britain – hysterical degradation?), we have these specialists to thank for one of the more definite lessons, this anniversary: for longevity, a royal-based career looks second only to the Mediterranean diet.
Some of its many beneficiaries, including those battered or discredited but Diana-ing on regardless, are displayed in this anniversary’s most ambitious commemorative exercise, the Channel 4 series Investigating Diana: Death in Paris.
After impressively persuading police investigators, French and British, to explain in cool, supremely rational detail how they arrived at the “mundane” truth of the traffic accident, the programme makers have also showcased, with many melodramatic flourishes, some of the wildest theories dismantled by two costly investigations and a 278-witness inquest. The risk being that conspiracy-minded viewers unfamiliar with its verdict, and who watch only earlier, unmediated footage of dodgy witnesses and voxpop speculation still come away believing their inventions had substance. They must watch on to discover that an assertion about, say, a pregnancy (naturally meriting instant royal assassination) was a proved fabrication, albeit one needing illustrated repetition of its utter creepiness, courtesy of more swimsuit pictures. It’s left to retired detective inspector Jane Scotchbrook to restore some dignity: “I don’t really want to talk about her period and stuff.” Spoilsport.
Added to the updated memoirs, Diana specials and freshly disinterred revelations, the C4-inspired renewal of conspiracy theorising (the Mail alights on the delay in passing on the “Mishcon note” about her 1995 fear of dying in a staged car crash, a “mystery” demystified at the inquest) promises to make this Diana anniversary among the more useful to date for the older royals.
While journalists are exhuming old fantasies or iconic moments, or picturing Diana’s unlived life in the US, or publishing an imaginary interview about her imaginary ambassadorial work (“Putin was very stressed and twitchy”), they are not, for instance, dwelling on the acquisition by Will and Kate, the beloved Duke and Duchess of Boden, of a third massive house. Or considering the still-subsidised whereabouts of Andrew, or asking whether the now well-advertised attractions of Camilla – reads books, has dog, is earthy – can ever fully compensate for Charles’s besetting weakness for foreign billionaires. True, they’ve gained an excellent decoy in Meghan, but she can still sue.
Whatever the earlier difficulties caused by Diana’s death – or, more accurately, by her in-laws’ inability to act sad, lower a flag or even protect her bereaved children from global inspection – these long ago allowed for a resumption of routine Windsor awfulness of the kind recently depicted in Tina Brown’s gossipy, massively enjoyable The Palace Papers. Gone was the competition from a dazzling and rivalrous lady of the sorrows, to be replaced, by 2011, with what Brown calls “a bubble bath of national goodwill” (since drained).
What the various anniversary recollections often miss, probably for impeccably reverential reasons, was how hilarious the liberated Diana was to watch, for the generations that got the benefit.
What would she be like now? That the question has come to sound even vaguely normal only underlines how many key suppliers of anniversary content are still as weird about the late princess – or as financially dependent upon her – as they were in 1997.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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