Julie Andrews, the immensely popular actress who ranked #59 on the BBC’s 2002 poll for the 100 Greatest Britons, had once remarked: “Behaving like a princess is work. It’s not just about looking beautiful or wearing a crown. It’s more about how you are inside.”
And what Diana, Princess of Wales, who died tragically 20 years ago this week, had on the inside, we came to realise as we watched her grow with her job, was a melancholic character. And on the outside, while she radiated glamour and poise, she had that downcast mournfulness that she always seemed to carry around her — except for those moments when she was seen with William and Harry, the two children she brought into the world to be second and third in line of succession to the British throne. Those were the moments when she radiated not so much beauty and poise as the earthy, rhapsodic peppiness of a loving parent.
But long before her divorce from Prince Charles, Diana was seen by the royals as irritant to that throne. And certainly after her death in that car crash in a tunnel in central Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997, that sentiment came out, for all to see.
In the opening scene of Steven Frear’s 2006 film, The Queen, Queen Elizabeth II, played by the incomparable Helen Mirren — in a role for which she won a well-deserved Oscar — is about to meet the recently elected Labour prime minister Tony Blair (played by the Welsh actor and activist Michael Sheen) at Balmoral Palace in Scotland, where the royal family was vacationing. Blair is there to urge Her Majesty, who resolved to keep the royal family aloof from the death of Diana, to show some expression of public empathy, to show that as a sovereign she was responsive to the collective grief that had gripped the nation.
After all, Diana, though by then divorced from Charles, remained the “People’s Princess”, a wildly popular figure whose death triggered the same outpouring of open anguish by Britons as that shown by Americans after the death of president John F. Kennedy in 1963. The icy response by the Queen (and only an accomplished actress like Mirren could make it appear, well, so chilling on the screen) was indifference — indifference to the news that her former daughter-in-law, mother of her grandchildren, had met with such a tragic death at such a young age; indifference, above all, to the sentiment of those millions of Britons who, at the time, were mourning in the streets.
Truth be told, Diana has long since become, in the eyes of the royal family, not just an irritant, but a misfit as well, a global superstar who travelled the world cuddling Aids victims, removing land mines left behind by war in Angola and visiting leprosy hospitals in Indonesia. Reportedly, the Queen once chastised Diana: “Why can’t you do something more pleasant?”
Let’s face it, British royals, attended to by house servants and civil servants, don’t do windows.
What was even more unpardonable was the fact that Diana flouted tradition by exposing her children to a non-royal life, sending them to regular schools and taking them around town to meet with London’s homeless.
And she did all that, as she confessed in an interview in 1995, while she suffered from Bulimia and suicidal tendencies, becoming afflicted with the latter after she discovered that her husband was seeing his ex, Camilla Parker-Bowles, behind her back. (In an interview with Martin Bashir, Diana famously explained, a touch tartly: “There were three of us in the marriage, so it was getting crowded.”)
Now the People’s Princess, or as the French morbidly took to calling her, Princesse Maudit, was now dead and popular anger was growing. Headlines in the tabloids screamed: ‘Show us you care’, ‘Where is our queen?’ and ‘Your people are suffering, Ma’am’. And why, pray tell, wasn’t the Union Jack outside Buckingham Palace flying at half mast?
It took the Queen five days to reverse course and return to London, to deliver a live broadcast and to emote — at long last and in her own way — with her bewildered subjects. Many, though, thought it was too little, too late.
So why the long silence by the Queen?
“The royals had been exasperated by Diana’s refusal to submit to being incarcerated in a marriage of mutual dislike,” wrote Jennie Russel, the well-known British journalist, in the New York Times last Friday. “They had hoped that her divorce from Prince Charles a year earlier had finally rid them of this troublesome princess, [but] they failed to grasp that with every mute hour that passed, they reinforced the powerful story that Diana had told — that they were a cold, hidebound lot.”
Among the stiff-upper-lip royals, who, by tradition as by nature, are enjoined against evincing warmth — indeed even emotion — the effusive Diana was just not circumspect enough with her feelings, not quite together, as it were. And who would forget that incident, barely weeks before wedding the 20-year-old Diana, Prince Charles, with his fiancee standing beside him, told a TV interviewer, when asked if he was in love with the future princess, replied: “Yes, whatever love means!”
There is no doubt that the Queen’s popularity among her subjects suffered grievously this day 20 years ago, as she waited five long days in Balmoral, 500 miles (805km) away in Scotland, before she made it to London to speak to them. Neither did the popularity of Prince Charles go unscathed. In a recent poll in Britain, for example, only 22 per cent of Britons wanted him to succeed Queen Elizabeth II, who is now 91, preferring that the Crown go directly to Prince William, who appears to have inherited his mother’s activism, earthiness and charm.
And yes, in that other poll, the one conducted in 2002 to choose the 100 Greatest Britons, Diana was judged by the respondents to be greater than William Shakespeare! That tells us something about her place in the collective heart of the British people and the durable legacy she has left them with.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
