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when the second Diana Spencer married Charles, Prince of Wales, in 1981, they were thrilled that it was through them that Stuart blood was being reintroduced into the royal line.
Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by IRA terrorists in Ireland. By his own admission, Prince Charles went into free fall. He was devastated. He had adored his honorary grandfather.
Even though Amanda Knatchbull had turned down his proposal of marriage, the great-nephew and granddaughter of the last Viceroy of India huddled together to console each other. For Amanda, the loss was even greater than for Charles. Her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, and youngest brother Nichoas had also been killed, and both her parents seriously injured, her mother feared blind.
even Charles’s staunchest admirers admit that self-pity is one of his greatest weaknesses.
In the previous year he had proposed to two different women: his cousin Amanda Knatchbull and Anna Wallace.
An avid countryman who loved Balmoral more than anywhere else on earth, Charles was not one of those men who liked challenges. He liked women who complemented
An earl’s daughter with links to the Court, who’d been raised on the Sandringham Estate. Impeccable manners. Got along with everyone she met. He felt if he’d set out to invent her he couldn’t have come up with anyone better.”
proclaimed, was “not shy. The press thought she was because she tends to look down and hunch over, but she does that because she’s so tall. It’s nothing to do with shyness.” Her old flatmate Sophie Kimball also agreed,
Throughout September and October 1980, as the myth of Shy Di was taking hold all over the world, the determined woman who lay beneath that benign exterior was plotting and scheming how to hook the man she loved.
To converse with imaginary dignitaries employing the royal technique of asking question after question before moving on to the next person, where they repeat the whole process of question after question again.
she was so unpredictable he could never be certain whether she was going to drape herself around his neck affectionately, or lambast him.
So the question everyone wanted to know was: Is she a bulimic/depressive/self-mutilating neurotic, or is she a paranoid-schizophrenic whose symptoms are manifesting in those terms? Her behaviour certainly indicated that she was, if not a fully fledged paranoid-schizophrenic, suffering from a borderline personality disorder.
Her assertiveness seems at odds with the fact that so many people found her to be insecure, but Dr Panzer resolves that anomaly. “People who are afraid or insecure, people who are out of control, often seek to impose control externally. Insecure people often overreact. The more insecure they are, the more they assert themselves in order to cover their insecurity.
The Oliver Everett saga did more damage to Diana’s reputation both at the Palace and in the media than anything before and few things since.
described the handsome earl. Diana’s relationship with Henry Pembroke did not last long.
Twigg was a follower of the method of eating whereby you consume as much protein or carbohydrate as you wish, but do not mix them. Called the Hay Diet when first introduced, it allowed Diana to eat to her heart’s content without having to worry about gaining an excessive amount of weight.
chose Barry Mannakee, the King of Spain, Philip Dunne and James Hewitt, limiting myself to those four because the public was simply not ready to accept the reality that Diana had a voracious romantic and sexual appetite and had been unfaithful to Charles from shortly after Prince William’s birth.
Dr James Colthurst.
“The whole point of being in the Royal Family is that you go along like a procession of swans, keeping your webbed feet under water, not bobbing up and down all the time, saying ‘Look at my feet. I’ve got webbed feet. Look, webbed feet.’ Ruining the grace of the spectacle.”
One duchess, distantly related to the princess, summarized the prevailing mood, “I do wish the Spencers would get over their habit of washing their dirty linen in public. It is an unedifying spectacle.”
segments of the media accused her of being manipulative and insincere, of being a publicity seeker and egocentric, of putting her private, short-term interests before the longer-term interests of the family she had married into, of undermining the monarchy and, with it, her sons’ birthright.
Diana herself would say in 1996, “The Morton book was the biggest mistake of my life. He made me out to be a bitter, twisted crackpot.
He then published an updated version of Diana: Her True Story which bore no resemblance to the original work, though its contents were frighteningly similar to Diana in Private,
she was determined to become queen when Charles inherited the throne.
she wrung the concession out of her husband, whose stance was to avoid adding fuel to the fire by appeasing Diana wherever possible, that he would not seek a divorce and that she would be crowned queen upon his accession to the throne.
By the following day, there was general agreement that Diana had no right to be queen if she did not wish to remain the true wife of the Prince of Wales. She could not eat her cake and have it.
I can’t be queen, why should he be king?”
“It’s outrageous. She knows I am neither a stalker nor a threat. I’ve taken photos of her for ten years. But she’s very manipulative. She can shout at photographers, but then the next day she is tipping off someone so they know where she is and comes out smiling.”
Diana, of course, had a capricious streak in her nature. What seemed unreasonable or a change of heart to others, was, in her opinion, perfectly reasonable, because it answered her own needs. To an onlooker or to the receptacle of her actions, with no access to her thought processes, her behaviour could be baffling, because it bore no connection to what had gone on between them, only to what was going on within herself. That, it would seem, is the explanation for why she turned on the men whom she frequently tipped off one day,
As any royal or public figure knows, the best posture to adopt is one of pleasant blandness. By doing that, you create an atmosphere of steady neutrality, which is ultimately boring and does not make for good photo opportunities.
Diana never befriended, or even met with, Andrew Morton, who was from a working-class background.
Richard Kay was Diana’s Mercury. Whenever he used the words “friends of Diana said,” those in the know understood that this was the code for “Diana herself is the source,” a fact he confirmed after her death.
Dr Michael Davies said, “The Princess of Wales was a true narcissist.
Hasnat Khan,
Being royal is hard work, contrary to popular belief. Four, sometimes five, days a week, most royals work from early every morning till late every night, involved in charity work or state duties.
Another plausible explanation involves the white Fiat Uno, which has never been found, but whose paintwork on the Mercedes, and fragments on the road at the entrance of the underpass, confirmed that there was a collision between the two cars. The precise site of the impact is important, for the Mercedes entered the underpass in the right-hand, i.e. correct, lane for a vehicle that was not overtaking another one. It is a fact that airbags can be activated by lowgrade impacts. A vehicle can be travelling at no more than twenty or thirty miles per hour and graze one another, resulting in the
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While in the American edition of this book I expressed the hope that it would be managed well, its practice has proven to be otherwise. It has been involved in ruinous legal disputes in the United States, trying to lay claim to exclusive use of every aspect of Diana’s image and reputation. In the process, it has frittered away millions of pounds of donors’ money on litigation with such companies as Franklin Mint,
The lawyers, of course, got rich, while the fund’s grants to worthwhile causes has been disproportionate to the amount it has spent on litigation and legal fees.
the further people were away from her the more they respected her and valued her contribution to their lives. Many of those closest to her had more mixed feelings and mixed motives, and have either let her down or feel that they were let down by her. Whatever
what had happened in the four minutes between the departure of the Mercedes from the Ritz and its collision with the thirteenth column of the Alma underpass were unchangeable.
There was an overriding need to provide the court and the public with as many of the facts as could be gathered, so that reasonable conclusions could be reached as to the real cause of the collision and where responsibility for it lay.
responsibility for the collision resting with the deployment of the airbags in the first of the two accidents is, and has always been, the only explanation that makes sense of all the known facts.
