At half past six on the morning of Sunday 31 August, 1997, I was woken by the telephone. It was the deputy editor of The Scotsman, telling me that Princess Diana had died, and I needed to get up and start working on her obituary. “About 5,000 words should do it,” he said.
This being the era before the internet had got into its stride, I headed immediately for the newspaper’s library, to discover the system had crashed and they could not access their files. Half an hour later I was the first of the day’s customers in Waterstones, buying an armful of biographies.
The rest of that Sunday was a blur of reading and typing, with my editor calling every half hour to find out how I was getting on. I was so focussed on meeting the deadline that the impact of Diana’s death did not hit me until the following day. As I watched footage of mourners gathering at the gates of Buckingham Palace, and the growing bank of bouquets, the enormity of what had happened, and the reverberations that would likely follow, became clear.
That was almost 30 years ago and yet Diana remains as vivid in the public imagination as if it was yesterday. Now, thanks to her brother Charles’s memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, she is dominating the headlines and news schedules as she did when alive. As so often before, her name is being lobbed around as if it were a grenade. It makes you wonder when – if – she will ever be allowed to rest in peace.
With the reheating of grievances, and the settling of old scores, it all feels tediously familiar. We will probably never know whether the king made the heartless comments before Diana’s funeral attributed to him by his former brother-in-law. Watching Earl Spencer’s BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the claim has the ring of truth. At this distance from events, though, does it matter anymore?
Although anything with Diana’s name or image on it sells, Spencer’s motives for publishing Swan Song might not be mercenary or malicious; perhaps, as he says, he wants simply to set the record straight and honour his long-gone sister. Again, we will never know for sure. What is certain, however, is that while the world in 2026 is in some ways almost unrecognisable from 1997, one thing is unchanged: interest in the former princess and her tortured relationship with her ex-husband remains intense.
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Yet what more can be said about Diana that is worth knowing? Among the Earl’s ‘revelations’ is that his sister slapped their father when she discovered he was marrying Raine; and that she once pushed her waspish step-mother down the stairs. Also that, as a girl, when she was helping to empty lobster pots off the Scottish coast, a conger eel got into their boat and, while it was writhing around, she stabbed it behind the eyes with a penknife.
Why does her allure persist? And why do even those who would prefer the monarchy to be abolished continue to find her fascinating? The answer, I suspect, lies in her complicated personality and the dramatic arc of her story. Despite everything we’ve learned about her from family, friends and onlookers, she remains in some ways elusive and unknowable. In this she reminds me of Mary, Queen of Scots, another redoubtable royal with whom Diana shares certain attributes: beauty, charisma, courage, a charitable heart, a love of finery and glamour, but also poor judgement and a mercurial, headstrong personality that was partly to blame for her undoing.
It is also true that, while the word had yet to be coined, Diana was the world’s first and most inspirational influencer. Social media was made for a woman like her, with her shrewd and theatrical gift for self-promotion. She had an instinct for presenting herself to best advantage – and manipulating the image of others – while seeming to be guileless.
Social media would also, of course, have made her existence even more hellish. Bad enough the paparazzi of the 1990s; infinitely worse the culture of the 2020s, when there’s a camera and tape recorder in everyone’s pocket. Quite how she would have coped with modern levels of intrusion on her privacy is hard to imagine. We can, perhaps, hazard a guess from the obvious distress of Meghan and Harry, who have to endure perpetual flak and pitiless reams of media commentary.
Before Diana, the word celebrity was mainly reserved for Hollywood actors and rock stars. As she became the most recognised face on the planet, she entirely reshaped our ideas about celebrity. Her stratospheric fame began to feed an insatiable appetite for news, images, sightings and gossip. Viewed as public property rather than a private person, Diana’s unfolding fate epitomised the uneasy pact between the revered and their fans. From the moment the spotlight picked her out, Diana lived under a merciless glare. Admittedly she tried to manipulate it to her ends, but it also cruelly exploited her. Those who professed to worship her – witness the distraught scenes after her death – seemed not to recognise their role in making her life intolerable.
In the wake of Diana, celebrity culture has ballooned beyond anything we could once have conceived. Today, if you’re not a celebrity, you’re a nobody. Behind all of this lies Diana, the epitome of stardom. No matter how miserable it often made her, she was and will remain the lodestar of celebrity, the woman on whom the concept as we understand it today was modelled.
The timeless tragedy of Diana’s story, and the way it continues to play out within the royal family, will keep her name alive for as long as there are Mountbatten-Windsors on the throne. The rift between William and Harry, and the coolness between Harry and the King, are among her most regrettable legacies. For the rest of their lives, whenever any discord or discontent arises among them, she will be at the forefront of everyone’s minds.
In many ways, Spencer’s memoir has only underlined what everyone always suspected about the emotional dysfunction in the palace around the time of Charles and Diana’s separation, divorce and her death. In that sense, it is saying nothing new. In another, it shows just how long love, grief and the urge for revenge can last –in other words, a lifetime.
Rosemary Goring is a columnist, historical novelist, and author of books on Scottish history. Her latest is Exile: The Captive Years of Mary, Queen of Scots.
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