Even without meeting her, millions if not billions of people, felt the power of Princess Diana’s extraordinary charisma. Her glamour and high birth, her palpable humanity and equally palpable private anguish: Such qualities worked a powerful magic, setting her apart from the ruck of contemporary celebrities. Long before the horrific Paris car crash that brought her life to an untimely end on Aug. 31, 1997, Diana had transcended mere iconic status and become a late 20th century super icon. The most photographed woman in history, the subject of interminable analysis and speculation, the 36-year-old princess was an apotheosis-waiting-to-happen. From the moment news broke of her death, it was inevitable that the tragedy was going to be a multimedia event of epic dimensions.
What no one could have anticipated was the extreme and unruly nature of the emotions her death would unleash among British people. Censorious commentators were soon jibbing at the faintly menacing character of the prevailing grief, the apparent obligation to display suitably raw distress about the princess’ death or else suffer public obloquy. Seldom, to be sure, can mass grieving have seemed to pose such a threat to the status quo. Few doubt that the tumultuous reaction to Diana’s death came within a whisker of destabilizing the British monarchy and triggering a constitutional crisis. The initial unwillingness of Queen Elizabeth II to order that the flag above Buckingham Palace be flown at half-mast in homage to the dead princess was not well received. As floral tributes to Diana piled up outside Buckingham Palace, it became overwhelmingly apparent that the monarch had badly misjudged the public mood.
In the aftermath of Diana’s death, two rival versions of Britain suddenly loomed dramatically into view: One, personified by Diana, was modern, feminist, multicultural, contemptuous of old-fashioned deference and incipiently republican; the other, epitomized by the queen and her crotchety husband, Prince Philip, was a tight-lipped, class-ridden, custom-bound country that had yet to abandon a conception of itself rooted in the Victorian age. For a fleeting moment, it looked as if Diana’s Britain might be about to sweep away the old British order, together with everything the monarchy stood for.
That this embryonic republican sentiment was strangled at birth owed more than a little to the prompt intercession of the new British prime minister, Tony Blair. Blair’s seemingly spontaneous description of Diana as the “people’s princess” articulated what many felt, appeasing the increasingly ugly popular mood while giving no hint that he himself was other than an impeccably loyal servant of the crown. Another politician might have turned the situation to his own advantage, but Blair is a true product of the British establishment, a tradition-soaked public school boy whose original presentation of himself as a committed modernizer was largely theatrical. Yet even allowing for the benefit it derived from Blair’s exemplary support, it is little short of astonishing how the House of Windsor has managed to rescue its credibility after the major crisis precipitated by Diana’s death and a spate of profoundly demeaning royal scandals during the 1980s and 1990s. Ten years on, there is lingering public distaste about the behavior of Prince Charles; the revelation that he was intimately involved with his current wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, formerly Camilla Parker Bowles, both before and after he married Diana, is one he will never entirely live down, and the ill-considered decision to invite his wife to this week’s Diana Memorial Service — an invitation the duchess has latterly felt obliged to turn down — has hardly helped his cause. But by this stage, even Charles, with his assiduous charity work steadily kept in public view, is perhaps seen in a more forgiving light than he was then. As for the 81-year-old queen, her own approval ratings are as buoyant as ever.
What is more than ever plain is that Britain’s royal family possesses a phenomenal instinct for survival. It has often been said that the British Conservative Party has proved the most irrepressible of all British institutions, but even the Conservative Party, currently experiencing a sharp dip in its fortunes, can scarcely match Britain’s royals when it comes to adapting to fresh circumstances. Not for nothing have they been nicknamed the “Firm”, a soubriquet inspired by their essentially hardheaded, pragmatic approach to keeping the royal show on the road.
One of the lessons Diana, with her brilliantly instinctive handling of the media, taught the Windsors was how urgently they needed to update their PR. In recent years, they have taken steps to recruit top media consultants and have spared no effort in selling themselves anew to what had seemed an increasingly skeptical and disaffected public.
Yet the truth is that all the PR in the world would not have availed the royals in the smallest degree if there were not a deep reservoir of royalist sentiment in Britain, one with which many among Britain’s newer communities seem as much infused as the old indigenous populace. “For most Britons”, Tina Brown observes in her book The Diana Chronicles, “the crown is the golden thread that connects the people to the most glorious moments of their history, exercising a force for stability in an otherwise bewilderingly changing world.” Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how British people will react if and when they are confronted by the actual prospect of Prince of Wales, with his blighted reputation, becoming their king.
It seems paradoxical that the restoration of royal credibility has been achieved in spite of the fact that in Britain, no less than in other parts of the world, many believe that Diana’s death was contrived by the British security services, possibly with royal complicity.
Diana herself feared that she was destined to be bumped off. It is the outspoken owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al-Fayed, who has been most vocal in maintaining that Diana and her last lover, his son, Dodi Al-Fayed, with whom she died in the Paris crash, were victims of an establishment plot springing from the horror felt by the British ruling class in general and the royal family in particular at the very thought that the former consort of the heir to the throne might be about to marry a Muslim.
If Al-Fayed has not become utterly discredited in the eyes of the British public, it is because the belief that her death was no accident is so widely held. In the period leading up to Aug. 31, 1997, Diana by all accounts toyed with the idea of converting to Islam — less, perhaps, because of her relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed than because of her earlier liaison with the London doctor and devout Muslim, Hasnat Khan, who shunned publicity.
What would have happened had Diana made a Muslim marriage is an intriguing question — especially in view of the troubled predicament of the British Muslim community in the wake of the Iraq war. Might she have become a pre-eminent bridge-builder between Islam and the West?
In any event, Diana’s philanthropic endeavors will long be remembered, with her intrepid efforts to draw attention to the scourge of land mines ranking as her most notable achievement.
Tina Brown quotes Tony Blair’s opinion that Diana “taught us a new way to be British.” Certainly, she was the first establishment figure to appear wholly at ease with the much-altered Britain of the late 1990s, the country whose startling social diversity was laid bare by the crowds that poured onto the streets of London to mourn her passing. At the same time, for good or ill, she helped license a fresh emotional candor.
With all her flaws, Lady Diana Spencer brought light into many people’s lives, vouchsafing them a glimpse of a better world. That is rather more than can be said of Blair, the former British prime minister whose neoimperialist warmongering has represented the very antithesis of her humanitarian stance.
