DIANA cumple 50. (Transalation of piece by Jimmy Burns published in El Mundo (Magazine) on the occasion of Ist July, Diana Princess of Wales’s birthday –
This is not a fable but a story as real as it can be imagined about what Diana Princess of Wales might have become had her life not be cut short so tragically on that night in August 1997 in an underpass in Paris. Permit me , dear reader, some literary license in assuming that had it not been for that terrible accident, Diana would have lived on, along with many of the dramatis personae with which she had, for better or worse, coexisted, and that while history has kept on a path that is familiar to us, she has not remained untouched by its development. Indeed, her role has remained undimished as a personality, worthy of our times.
To the extent that Diana, as we all are, is as much a product of herself as her circumstances, this story must begin where that other one ended, or to be more precise, in a context where her death was not anticipated and where her life had become the latest chapter in a seemingly enduring telenovela, the outcome of which is uncertain.
In that summer of 1997 Diana alerted the tabloid press to a holiday she was spending on board a luxury yacht belonging to Mohamed Al Fayed, at that time the Egyptian owner of Harrods. London’s most famous department store had long since ceased to count the Queen of England and her more immediate bloodline as patrons. Al Fayed’s past business dealings were the subject of unresolved speculation, as were the reasons why he had been repeatedly denied nationality of his adopted country of residency by the British sate. Diana was not only on friendly terms with Al Fayed, content to receive supplies from Harrods at her residence Kensington Palace, but was being openly courted by the Egptian’s only son Dodi.
Employed by his father as one of Harrods senior managers, Dodi had shown his interest in pursuing Diana by breaking off his engagement with the US model Kelly Fisher. Diana’ own emotional state at the time was more complex. In June of that she had reluctantly broken off a two year old secret relationship with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon, a married man with children of his own. By all accounts, Khan proved a sensitive and reliable close friend to Diana- ‘the love of my life’ was how she described him to a girlfriend. Khan was certainly the most serious of a series of suitors Diana had become involved in following the breakdown of her marriage to Prince Charles. But Khan came from a traditional religious background whose family expected him to be married a Muslim,a prospect neither he nor Diana believed could be realised between them.
Following their formal split at an emotional late-night meeting in the park adjoining her London residence, Diana toyed with the idea of taking a summer holiday either in the fashionable Hamptons , Long island New York or alternatively going to Thailand. Instead she accepted an invitation from Al Fayed to join his son on holiday in the South of France. It raised the possibility at the time that Diana may have been seeking a frivolous adventure, off the rebound off her previous relationship, as a way of either forgetting about Khan or trying to make him jealous.
There is little doubt that in Dodi she found a willing partner. On the 30th August he visited an exclusive jewellers Repossi in Paris. Receipts from the visit shew he spent 115,000 french francs on what the jeweller noted as a baque fiancailles or engagement ring from the ‘dis-moi oui’ range. However Diana and Dodi had been in a relationship for only a matter of weeks, and several friends to this day refuse to believe that the ‘surprise announcement’ she had teased some journalists would be made that September would have turned into their marriage. Letters she wrote to Dodi that summer show her warmly thanking him for his kindness towards her. While he showered her with gifts, she gave him a pair of cufflinks belonging to her late father. But of the ring, Diana told her close girl friend Rosa Monkton: “ I know that Dodi is going to give me a ring, but it is going to go firmly on my right hand.” (engagement rings are placed on the marital left hand.)
Days before this, photographs captured aboard the Al Fayed luxurious yacht off the coast of France showed Diana and Dodi relaxed and intimate in each other’s company to the point of cuddling and kissing each other. But it was an image that underlined the lowest point that had developed in the relations between the Princess of Wales and the Royal House of Windsor rather than any profound love for the heir of the Al Fayed dynasty. For just as Diana’s social status and personality was also of a nature that conspired against any enduring emotional link to Dodi and his extended muslim clan, just as it had done in Khan’s case, her relationship with the British Royal family was not irredeemable.
Born into an old aristocratic English family with royal ancestry, Diana had become an important and popular public figure in her own right, managing to carve out a meaningful life for herself long after her fairy-tale marriage to Prince Charles had fallen apart. She is known to have privately regretted-believing it a betrayal of her loyalty to the crown- the interview she gave to the BBC in which she had admitted she had ‘adored’ an earlier extramarital lover James Hewitt, her riding instructor, while questioning her separated husband Charles ‘s suitability for the job of future King.
She had of course made much, long before then, of Charles own responsibility for the collapse of her marriage, pointing an accusing finger at the predatory nature of his mistress Camilla Parker Jones. But in the tug-of-war for the sympathies of the English public and her followers worldwide, she had maintained the winning edge , however much her detractors tried to tarnish her reputation as an unfaithful wife who was also a manipulative, publicity-seeking shopaholic, obsessed with her public image while suffering from a borderline personality disorder.
One royal biographer Sarah Bradford has suggested that the only cure for Diana’s suffering would have been the love of the Prince of Wales, which she so passionately desired, but which would always be denied her. And yet she had agreed to a closure of sorts by agreeing to a formal divorce from Charles on the 28th August 1996, which legally set them each freer to each pursue their futures, but within a consensual setting. Thus while Diana lost the title of Her Royal Highness, and thus renounced the prospect of being future Queen, she was allowed to continue with the title of Princess of Wales and thus officially considered part of the Royal Family, as the mother of the second –William-and third-Harry- in line to the throne.
Her dalliance with Dodi the following summer was nothing more than that, a measured act of independence which would give way to a new life without him, one which would build on those more positive aspects of her personality that countered the demons that had assailed her in the past. And here it is worth considering the evolving political context of Diana’s life story. In May 1997, less tha a year after her divorce, the British people had voted in with a commanding majority the Labour leader Tony Blair the youngest British primeminister in two centuries with a bold root-and-branch reform agenda after decades of occasionally scandal hit Conservative government. Within the traditional Labour party, Blair was something of an outsider. He was not a trade unionist, had soft hands, and was married to a lawyer. It was said that he had never memorised ‘The Red Flag’, Labour’s unofficial anthem, believing instead in a modernising agenda for his party more in keeping with the shifting social patterns of the 21st century.
Diana was also, for all her aristocratic backround, and enduring titles, something of an outsider who had seemingly challenged the complacency of a Royal family so rooted in tradition that it was in danger of losing touch with ordinary people, and the struggles of modern life. Even in her lowest points, Diana had shown herself a devoted and demonstrative mother to her children in contrast to the cold upbringing to which Charles had been submitted, and before him his father Philip. While conscious of her duty to ensure that William and Harry should grow up as princes with one of them ascending throne one day, she was determined to humanise them from an early age as an integral part of their education. Thus she carefully chose their ‘nannies’, dismissing one that had been imposed on her by Buckingham Palace, and remained closely involved in Willian and Harry’s engagement with the world beyond the palace walls. For example she took William when he was a young boy to his first football match, thereby instilling in him an enduring love for the ‘people’s game’ as a necessary addition to his experience alongside the traditional royal sports of polo and hunting.
As for herself, Diana balanced her reputation as a glamorous fashion icon with a commitment to causes that broke new boundaries in terms of the Royal family’s engagement with modern society. The pictures of her holding the hand of an emaciated AIDS patient or embracing children whose arms or legs had been blow up by mines contributed to raising her profile and that of millions of previously ignored victims around the world. When, in her famous BBC interview, she had declared her only ambition to be ‘queen of people’s hearts’, she had said so with the conviction that she was by no means alone in thinking that that was exactly what she had already become, or was fast becoming.
During the 1990’s when the Labour party was still in opposition before being returned to government, Blair and some of his closest friends had secret dinners with Diana where a strong bond of mutual appreciation was established. “The princess is absolutely, spellbindingly, drop-dead gorgeous. ..It was extraordinary just to see her in an ordinary house..She made us a cup of tea, “ recalled Alastair Campbell, one of Blair’s top advisers of a meeting Diana helped arrange, out of the media spotlight, in a “ordinary house” in a regenerated working class neighbourhood of East London. Campbell said he felt Diana “really felt she was part of the whole new Britain”, which Blair’s New Labour so successfully campaigned on.
As news of Diana’s death sunk in around the world, it was Blair’s live statement, as he stood outside his local church in his parliamentary constituency of Sedgefield that seemed to best capture a collective subconscious at the time. His “She was the people’s princess. And that’s how she will stay, how she will remain, in our hearts and in our memories, forever” would join some of Churchill’s wartime utterances in school history text books as an enduring epitaph.
Perhaps the myth was created by the nature of her death. But this story does not end there. It continues along an enduring line of supposition –“What if, she had not died?”- of tantalising fiction made reality, like a Borges creation.So that August in 1997, Diana found not a mortal cul-de-sac by the Seine but a new life in London, putting behind her Charles’s betrayal, and the unfulfilling nature of her own extramarital affairs- for time can be a great healer and an eye-opener- and finding huge comfort and reward in her dedication to others, less fortunate than herself, and being , what she had always strived to be , as good a mother as she could be, given the circumstances of her divorce, to her two boys.
Blair played a useful part initially in the process of Diana’s redemption –and the House of Windsor’s reform – suggesting as courteously but as firmly as he could-to the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s new advisers that the British people would be best served by a monarchy that used some of the Princess of Wales’s more exemplary qualities to guarantee its survival for at least another generation-more smiles, more touching, more genuine human engagement with all races and all classes, and please, no more hypocritical marriages, dressed up as fairy tales. Peace should be declared between the Houses of Spencer and Windsor, with the two counting on each other’s support at times of national need.
In a sense both Blair and Diana stopped being outsiders, and became part of the establishment. Blair sidelined those Labour party colleagues who wanted a Republic, while Diana forgave Charles and wished him well in his marriage to Camilla, his second wife and the real love of his life, even while privately thankful that the ex Mrs Parker-Bowles would end up a competent consort, not a people’s princess. That royal title Diana was happy to share with a much younger person who William had chosen as his wife-Kate Middleton. When William gave Kate the engagement ring that had once belonged to Diana,he did it to show he had learnt the lessons of his parents’ failed marriage and chosen his bride because he truly loved her, and because Catherine , Duchess of Cambridge had a mind of her own, while at the same knowing where her duties lay, as a wife, future mother, and member of the Royal Household.
Unlike Diana, Kate was not born into aristocracy .She had an airline pilot for a Dad, and an air stewardess for a mum- both running their own business of children’s entertainment- and an ancestor who was a miner. But Kate had had a more stable childhood , without the trauma of her parents hating each other, and had more time to prepare herself for a royal marriage so that when she came to it, she seemed to give an aura of self-assurance Diana always struggled with.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Diana’s birth, the newly weds are planning to move into Kensington Palace where William’s mother lived her good years and her bad ones and, according to our story, now has her own quarters- a small ‘granny flat’ which was once part of the royal stables. For Kate gets on better with her mother-in-law Diana than she could ever hope to do with William’s step-mother Camilla. They share a mutual pride in William- his nobility in spirit, whether soldiering or raising funds for a good cause, and of course, his good looks.
It’s a pity, Diana reflects, that dear Tony (Blair) made such a hash of things in Iraq, and that soldiers-less fortunate than her sons William and Harry -have to die in a war in Afghanistan that seems, like Libya, to have no end. But the Princess of Wales is doing what she does best, comforting the injured and the bereaved, and the socially disadvantaged. She has become a patron of Help Our Heroes, a charity for soldiers and their families while campaigning, as she was among the first to do, against the use of mines as a weapon of modern warfare. At Elizabeth Taylor’s funeral the other day, Diana’s presence served as a reminder that you can still mix glamour with campaigning for AIDS victims . And with natural disasters appearing with biblical regularity from Lorca to Tokyo, Diana is never short of foreign trips as a roving ambassador for Unicef.
Three years ago doctors diagnosed a malignant tumour on one of her breasts before she sucessfuly underwent treatment. The cancer scare fuelled a great deal of public sympathy, and helped Diana’s reconciliation with Charles and her estranged parents-in-law, the Queen and Prince Philip. She survived, more conscious of her own mortality, while at the same time finding a new serenity, valuing her friends and family more than she had ever done before, and filling, with her charity work, the emotional void left by ex-lovers. Diana has aged gracefully, in mind and body.
She is no retiring Jackie Onassis. Had she married Dodi, she probably would have ended up spending most of her time on a luxury yacht. Nor has she turned into a Mother Teresa. She remains something of a fashion icon, keeping in step with latest trends, as she matures in years. She takes a close interest in Kate Middleton’s excellent dress sense, as well as her own. Recently Diana joined Ali Hewson, the wife of the U2 rock-star, Bono, as she gave ecological style a fresh and funky image at the New York Fashion Week . The Princess of Wales much enjoyed the catwalk debut of Edun, the eco label Ali founded with her husband five years ago to promote trade in Africa, and which uses organic materials wherever possible.
After hugely enjoying William’s wedding to Kate- (their double kiss on the balcony made her cry with happiness for them)Diana is looking forward to celebrating her 50th birthday with a rock concert in Hyde Park which will raise funds for her various causes. U-2 will be the headline act, followed by guests appearance by her old friend Elton John, singing ‘Crocodile Rock’ and Chris de Burgh singing the song she most liked as a newly wed, ‘Lady in red.’ William and Kate along with Harry and his latest girlfriend (she worries about Harry sometimes as the less predictable of her two sons),are top of her invitation list along with several busloads of injured soldiers, HIV positives, tsunami survivors , victims of the latest budget cuts, and a Jesuit priest from the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Mayfair. The spiritual exercises of St Ignatius have helped her deepen her sense of self and God’s presence in all things, helping her remain chaste and fulfilled in recent years, while still knowing how to enjoy a good party.
She hasn’t see her old friend Tony for a while although she got a call from him the other day suggesting that she might considerer visiting the Gaza strip as a way of promoting a humanitarian solution to the issue of Palestine. Meanwhile she has dined on several occasions privately with David Cameron and his wife Samantha. Cameron would like Diana to help him portray the softer side of his coalition government’s policy, making her a kind of propagandist for his vision of a ‘Big Society’ , in which communities feel empowered to solve problems in their neighbourhood , with charities playing a bigger role in social action and responsibility.
Diana is looking forward to a holiday in Mallorca with the King and Queen of Spain with whom she has remained friends since her early days as a young mother. She also plans to pay a return visit to the Obamas when she is next in the US after they had the sweet gesture of dropping in for tea with her when they were last in London. She thinks that Barack and Michelle are both wonderful human being , sensitive, like she is, to the only mission in life that really matters – trying to make the world a better place to live in, having found peace within oneself. ENDS
