Updated: August 30, 11.45 BST.
In the comments section of this website we can always rely on hard-fought debates whenever Diana, Princess of Wales crops up in the news.
Now, with the approach of the 10th anniversary of her death and the Memorial Service on Friday, together with the Inquest in October, the arguments are flying thick and fast.
What is the truth about Diana? Was she the secular saint portrayed by her supporters, or the “devious moron” proclaimed last week by the feminist writer and academic, Germaine Greer?
Whenever a person polarizes opinion in the way Diana did and still does, we must suspect a multi-faceted personality at work. How else is it possible that one observer can be repelled, like Greer, while another becomes a devotee for life?
Diana was undoubtedly a very sweet person. Testimony is overwhelmingly supportive of the view. You can’t ignore the disbelieving shock around the world that greeted her untimely death in a little-known Paris tunnel late one August night. The reaction vouches for the conclusions of millions who think her the most adorable person of the 20th century.
The response totally baffled people who don’t have the need for a mother figure in their lives. Greer’s response is typical of clever, self-sufficient individuals who are appalled by the outpouring of what they see as second-hand emotions using a deeply troubled woman as focus.
But there was a darker side to Diana’s nature that can’t be denied. She could be utterly unforgiving and vindictive to anyone she thought had crossed her. The treatment of loyal aide Victoria Mendham, who has never cashed in on their friendship, remains unexplainable in terms of her outer persona. [Prince William has now invited Victoria to the Memorial Service.] There are many other well-documented cases of this “mark of Cain” damnation towards her perceived enemies.
Her father, Earl Spencer, is said to have remarked before the wedding, “Wait till Charles finds out how difficult she is when she doesn’t get her way.”
Hell hath no fury like a woman who imagines she’s scorned. Diana seems to have had a strong sense of inferiority about her intellectual abilities, which quickly concluded she was being patronized or dismissed, even when she was not.
When I read the eulogies of her passionately devoted fans, I’m reminded of R.L. Stevenson’s book, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It’s as if her supporters have read the book while blanking out Mr Hyde completely. You can never underestimate the need for heroes and the lengths people will go to convince themselves they have found the real thing.
On the other hand, taunts of madness levelled at the Princess are overdone. In many senses she was saner than many of us. That eerily accusative mental illness, Borderline Personality Disorder, always seems to me like something that can be found in anyone if you look hard enough.
When the going got tough, as it inevitably did for such a trailblazer, she usually fell back on a near childlike personality, which projected a blank canvas for others to paint their own pictures of how they wished her to be. Like many women, she discovered the “broken wing” strategy worked a charm with men, who fell over themselves to protect her. It also drew out the maternal instinct in women, who remain her most devoted supporters. In her later years she was seen as both madonna and child simultaneously. There was more than a touch of magnetic Harry Potter “magic” about Diana.
You might conclude that it was a brilliant strategy for operating in the dark corridors of power, but I doubt it was a conscious plan at all. Her school report said, “she lacks all intellectual curiosity”, so it was probably more of an instinctive survival mechanism in a world that had already proved untrustworthy by the time she was six years old.
Whatever it was, it certainly had a stunning effect on the people around her, once she had reached high status in the Royal Family. I can’t help wondering how she might have developed had she mastered the Mr Hyde aspect of her psyche.
The fact that she could handle the world’s projections put upon her at all is the most remarkable part of her character and story. That alone, in my view, makes her an historical figure of some note.
But perhaps no human is allowed that kind of influence in this “vale of tears”.
Prince William has invited Camilla al Fayed (pictured), daughter of Mohamed and half-sister to Dodi, to attend the service for Princess Diana on August 31st.
