– Dagny – 18/9/97
Now that the incredible public and media outpouring that has surrounded Diana’s death has subsided a little, perhaps we can hope to examine the issue with a bit more clarity and judgement. In the days following her death and leading up to the funeral there was such a hysterical fervour to the public’s response and to the media coverage that it was difficult to sort out the myth making from the truth. Few public figures have been mourned with so much intensity, and, it seems, with so much sincerity. The inevitable comparisons with JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean have all been drawn. Diana has also been likened to Mother Teresa, and it was one of those strange moments of synchronicity in the universe that Mother Teresa’s death came within a week of Diana’s, and was unfortunately eclipsed almost totally by the latter event.
For the first time and now, one suspects, for ever after, the media have been unanimous in their support and approval for Diana. It is a brave and hardy soul who dares to venture the opinion that Diana was not the saint she is currently being made out to be, or even tries to draw attention to the mass of contradiction that surrounds her life and death. For the first and only time, she can do no wrong. She was the People’s Princess, the champion of the sick and the poor, the Queen of Hearts. Never mind that she died in terribly unseemly circumstances, accompanied by one of the most disliked men in Britain; all the public and the media wants to see is a plucky little battler turned into the ultimate victim of a cruel and heartless media machine. This is ironic indeed, considering that the media machine would have been out of business were it not for the public’s insatiable hunger for every trivial detail of Diana’s life.
Why has there been such an incredible outpouring of grief for a woman who, in reality, was completely unknown by most of the world? We, the public, know Diana only through news footage and the snapshots of the paparazzi. Diana the real woman is completely unknown to us, but we have been deceived by the popular press into believing that we have a real relationship with her. Whether this deception is fuelled by the tabloids’ need to sell newspapers, or by the public’s own need for myths and heroes, is another question. But the point remains that the only people for whom Diana’s death is a real tragedy are her sons and her own family. The rest of us have only lost a glittering image that we ourselves created.
This obsession with Diana’s image is unlikely to go away now that she is dead. Already the literature surrounding her death is peppered with allusions, to the Greek goddess Diana (ironically, goddess of the hunt), to the Queen of Hearts, to Christian saints. All this will do is perpetuate the myth that Diana was some extra-special human being with a personal message for each and every one of us. Diana is being hailed as “The People’s Princess”, as if she had some special connection with the underprivileged. I would simply like to point out that Diana was a member of a wealthy and privileged class, and she spent a good bit of her time swanning off on costly holidays and buying expensive dresses, as well as holding hands with the sick and the needy. What’s more, it was not her own personal wealth that she was putting into any of these ventures, but British taxpayers’ money. It is also worth noting that someone like Princess Anne does as much charity work as Diana did (if not more), yet she is never lauded in the same way, presumably because she is not quite so pretty.
Diana herself was not completely innocent when it came to media myth making. While I agree that no-one should be subjected to the kind of intense media scrutiny that Diana lived most of her adult life under, I do not think that she was merely the media’s hapless victim. She knew how to exploit the media for her own ends, as we saw in that stunning BBC Panorama interview in 1995. It was in this interview that she herself coined the phrase that will now always be associated with her, “The Queen of Hearts”. In this one interview she managed to make us forget about the string of tawdry love affairs that she had recently been involved in, and see her only as the neglected, unloved wife of a powerful man.
I do not mean to say that I think Diana suffered no hardships. The Windsors must be the hardest family in the world to marry into, and Charles was a fool for listening to Lord Mountbatten and marrying her in the first place. Diana had to put up with relentless curiosity about her public and private life, and with the fact that everyone thought they had the right to pass comment and judgement on her. She probably was a nice, if somewhat flighty and sentimental woman, and she seemed to be doing a good job of keeping her sons away from some of the intense pressure that had obviously affected her so badly. She probably didn’t understand why the world was so obsessed with her image any more than I do. Perhaps it was because she was the only decent-looking member of a notoriously unattractive family, but perhaps I’m being too harsh. I was sick of seeing her face on every magazine cover, and as tired of reading the endless speculations about her hairstyles as she herself must have been. I don’t think Diana would have welcomed the fuss over her death if she really hated the paparazzi as much as she claimed to. The public, who are so concerned with her good works and saintly acts now that she is dead, were mostly interested in the tacky trivia of her life when she was alive. I do not think that her death will help us see her any more clearly, it will only add to the obfuscation caused by the fact that we never really knew her. But, unlike Elton John, I never expected, nor wanted, to know her. The world may well have been a better place with Diana in it, but the truth of that is for her family and her friends to know.
The remaining question for me is, what terrible gap in the public psyche did Diana fill that a world full of people who knew next to nothing about her feel that they will miss her so terribly?