Di-ing to live in the past: Columnists cannot shake their Princess Diana obsession
... and even 24 years after her death they think they can read her mind.
The upcoming ceremony to unveil a statue of Princess Diana has been catnip for the newspapers and the columnists in particular. With Princes William and Harry seemingly on the outs, it’s an opportunity for the press to detect elaborate psychodramas in the tiniest moments.
It’s also been an excuse for them to roll out their opinions about Princess Diana again on the eve of what would have been her 60th birthday. But despite the many newspaper supplements celebrating “Diana at 60”, she is not; she’s dead. It’s a statement of the obvious but one that most British newspapers seem keen to ignore. The next seance conducted by The Daily Express to get her latest opinions can only be days away.
In yesterday’s Times, Melanie Phillips took a shot with a column headlined Diana is an emblem of our self-absorbed times using the statue unveiling as a catalyst for some cod-psychology, cheap moralising, and bitter finger-pointing — her speciality! The deck says it all: “Death of the troubled princess marked the moment we began to wallow in victimhood”.
Phillips continues in the same chuntering manner:
… all those thousands were mourning someone they had never met. They knew only the media image which the princess had carefully cultivated, largely to hurt Prince Charles and damage the monarchy. By declaring themselves to be grieving, these “mourners” devalued the real grief felt over the loss of those who are truly close to us. The emotion on display over Diana’s death seemed largely to be projected resentment at the institution she had blamed for her distress.
An ugly mood rapidly developed and for a time seemed to threaten the monarchy itself. This was based on the belief that the failure of Prince Charles and the Queen to emote in public over Diana’s death was proof of their heartlessness…Yet no one knew what Prince Charles or the Queen actually felt, any more than they knew Diana.
As is so often the case with British columnists, Phillips removes a player from the scene: the media itself. After conducting a handbrake turn in their attitude to Diana as soon as she died — during a pursuit by paparazzi, remember — papers turned their ire on the Queen and the Royal Family’s “callousness” as an effective distraction tactic. The “ugly mood” did not simply “develop” as Phillips puts it, but was stoked and encouraged by the press.
Hours before the crash, The News of the World published a two-page ‘exclusive’ attacking Diana with the headline Troubled Prince William will today demand that his mother Princess Diana dump her playboy lover, Harrods heir Dodi Al-Fayed. It was bylined to Clive Goodman, the paper’s Royal Editor, who was later jailed for phone hacking.
On the same day The Sunday Times, where Phillips was to wash up in 1998, featured Oliver James psychoanalysing Diana, while her then-home The Observer included the ‘Mrs Blair’s Diary’ column spitefully concluding:
Diana has said publicly that the Tories were hopeless… It always slightly amazes me how the press picks up on stuff like this as if it were compelling genius insight of Aristotelian wisdom and Shavian wit, as opposed to the witterings of a woman who, if her IQ were five points lower, would have to be watered daily.
Once the news broke, the greatest reverse ferrets in British newspaper history took place and there was more buck-passing than during a heated game of Monopoly. As the news pages threw around praise where just a day before it had been buckets of shit, the editorials scurried to shift the blame. The Daily Mirror which had been as ravenous a consumer of Princess Diana pictures as any of the red tops wrote:
There are a number of unanswered questions about the exact behaviour of French photographers and why Diana’s car was going at 100mph in a 30mph limit… But today is not the time to analyse or discuss these important issues…
Curiously the right time never did arrive.
The Daily Mail which is once again engaged in both picking over the details of Diana’s death and hounding her youngest son wrote back then that…
The question of privacy will not go away for the British press — nor, moreover, for the media as a whole… But these are issues for another day.
The paper’s answer to privacy questions remains the same now as it did back then: “Who cares? And what can we get away with?”
The Daily Express, which increasingly became the Daily Diana in the years after her death, took a similarly ‘look over there’-style line with Ben Pimlott opining:
Who is to blame? Why do we feel so great a sense of loss? What will be the implications? … Such problems are for tomorrow, not today.
Yesterday, Phillips concluded her column with lines seemingly as solid as the statue she’s banging on about…
Many put Diana on a pedestal. Now she really is to stand on a plinth, the public are being urged not to turn her statue into another Cellophane-festooned shrine to victimhood. What will be unveiled this week is not just a memorial to a tragically lost mother and troubled soul, but to an emblem of our topsy-turvy, self-absorbed and emotionally incontinent era.
… but in truth, she’s just pulling out one of her greatest hits.
When someone is a columnist for as long as Phillips has been — she started out in that line of work back in 1987 — you’re bound to start repeating yourself. Just 4 years ago, she wrote a column for The Times with the headline We don’t need the cult of Diana revived again. Sound familiar?
Her column yesterday echoes the lines she wrote back in 2017. Where 2021 Phillips writes of a “cellophane-festooned shrine to victimhood”, her 2017 incarnation concluded, “… we seem to be back where we started with the self-absorption, the sentimentality, and the cellophane.” Presumably, she’ll dust these profound thoughts off again next year for the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death.
Allison Pearson, by turns a lachrymose conspiracy theorist and byline-touting bully, follows Phillips’ lead today in The Daily Telegraph with a column headlined Diana would be crying out for a reconciliation between her boys. But while the ever-malevolent Mel took the chance to scorn public grief, Pearson weeps and wails about a woman she didn’t know in the weirdest possible way. This is fan fiction of the worst kind:
Princess Diana would have turned 60 this week. It’s a major hurdle in any woman’s life, but I reckon Diana would have surmounted it with aplomb. With the dodgy, post-divorce boyfriends behind her, she would finally have found someone to give her the adoration and acceptance she failed to find in her first marriage. An American, probably, a wealthy humanitarian certainly…
It goes without saying, Diana would have been the best Granny in the world. She was potty about children and they were potty about her. She has five grandchildren who will never meet her, although both her sons strive to make their mother’s memory come alive for them…
Dodi Al-Fayed, who was Diana’s boyfriend at the time of her death, is deleted from history here in favour of an imagined American. Pearson even suggests that Diana might have coupled up with… Brad Pitt.
The keywords in the paragraphs I quoted are “I reckon”. Much of Pearson’s output is “I reckon”. She ‘reckoned’ about the MMR vaccine, spreading the conspiracy theory that it caused autism. She ‘reckoned’ falsely during the run-up to the 2019 general election that a photo of a child lying on a hospital floor was staged. And she has ‘reckoned’ all kinds of lies and conspiracies theories — in print and on Twitter — since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
In the case of today’s Diana column, Pearson’s ‘I reckon’ imaginings are just grim rather than dangerous. She applies the grotesque sentimentality of her fiction (“unrealistic and sappy romance” as one review described her second novel) to real people, imagining that she can transport herself into Prince Harry’s mind:
God knows what tumult will be going on inside Harry. Self-righteous rage at the snubs (both real and imagined) to his wife, a churning bile in his stomach entirely at odds with an ache for reconciliation, for things to be as they once and always were with his big brother.
Neither son could protect their mother when it mattered. Too young, too far away. Now, to somehow make it right, they each protect the woman who took Diana’s place in their lives and, in so doing, lose each other. It is properly Shakespearean.
These, we are meant to believe, are the words and thoughts of a top-tier columnist rather than an inebriated aunt on Facebook. But her conclusion deserves not to be in the pages of a national newspaper but splashed on an image meme of some pandas hugging:
The statue of Diana will not move but the sight of it may move her sons to remember how very much she loved them and how it would have broken their mother’s heart to think her boys were no longer there for each other. Then, wait for a miracle.
Pearson delivers a weird Diana column about once every couple of years. In 2015, it was insisting that William and Kate’s daughter should be named after his mother (As the nation waits, why the Princess must be called Diana), while in 2017 she turned Prince Harry’s marriage into another opportunity to be creepy (At last, Diana doesn't have to worry about Harry any more). Another instalment was clearly overdue.
In life, Princess Diana was a pinata for the press and 24 years after her death she’s a stick to beat Harry and Meghan with. In The Daily Mail yesterday, Andrew Morton — a man who hasn’t stopped making money off the princess since he wrote his biography of her in 1993— claimed Meghan would have “intimidated” Diana. Like Pearson, he engaged in fan fiction, made slightly better by the fact that he actually met her, suggesting she would have helped Prince Charles broker a peace between his sons.
British columnists and the newspapers that host them will never shake their Diana habit. She’s too reliable a topic — bringing clicks and eyeballs — and too easily turned into an icon for whatever line the commentator wants to take. Whether she’s the angel lost too soon or the icon of selfishness, she’s an easy target for columnists who long ago run out of ideas.