If Princess Diana were alive she’d have dragged her warring sons together to resolve their differences, says the Edward White, the author of a new book exploring her enduring legacy – especially with Gen Z
Although it’s been 27 years since Princess Diana died, her grip on the public imagination grows stronger with every year that passes as Gen Z teens and twenty-somethings become the latest devotees to fall under her spell.
Many see her complicated, emotional personality living on in Prince Harry, who recently made headlines with a BBC interview in which he said, “I would love reconciliation with my family”. It certainly begs the question of how Diana would have responded to the enduring tensions between her sons.
“Doubtless, she’d have been horrified,” says author Edward White, who has explored her enduring appeal in his new book Dianaworld. “But her sons are arguing about what their mother’s true legacy is. Diana said that she was trying to raise a future king that would ensure the monarchy survived into the 21st century – and William is trying to do a Diana reboot of the monarchy, combining the best of his mother and his grandmother.“
But the other faction of Diana-ists could say that Harry is the real defender of her true legacy. “There’s something about Diana that encourages people to read whatever they want to read into her. The way people can look at Diana as embodying totally differing sides of an argument even applies to her sons,” he says.
But Edward is confident that Diana would have got the brothers in the same room to thrash out their differences. And, though he considers Diana and Meghan to be “extremely different people”, he believes that Diana would have warmed to her daughter-in-law.
“Meghan has this preternatural force to advance herself, she’s got strategies and plans. With Diana, it was all improvised and haphazard. But I think if Diana felt that Meghan made her son happy, she’d have been well disposed towards her. And Meghan and the two children seem to have brought Harry much more happiness than being a member of the Royal Family did.”
It has been almost three decades since Diana’s untimely death left a gaping hole in the lives of her loved ones. But her legend endures online – and Edward says it’s not so surprising that Diana is a poster girl for fans who weren’t even born in her lifetime.
“The internet is drenched in Diana,” he says. “The way she would talk about her mental fragilities, her problems with eating disorders, the struggle she had after her children were born… She was a trailblazer, and the godmother of a younger generation who talk about their interior lives a lot.
“And she would cry in public. Even before she got married, there were a couple of instances where she was crying in front of photographers. This was astonishing at the time. She also emerged at a point when there was lots of new technology, like VHS and VCR, so there are videos and documentaries about her.”
This footage all plays out online, where Diana is also a posthumous influencer and style icon. “She liked experimenting with the way she looked so there are loads of Instagram accounts set up to document her looks – ‘Diana’s revenge looks’, ‘Diana’s lesbian looks’, ‘Diana’s sporty looks’. There are loads of Instagram accounts because there are so many paparazzi photographs of Diana.”
But perhaps there’s a more fundamental reason for her enduring legend. “Her story is astonishing,” says Edward. “You couldn’t write a more extraordinary melodrama.”
Edward, who was 15 when Diana died, is by no means an obsessive fan. But, when lockdown struck, he felt that the national atmosphere echoed the mourning period that followed her death, and he began to research Dianaworld. How did the Diana who emerged from his deep dive differ from his initial perception of who she was?
“She was probably funnier,” he says. “Almost everybody says she’s very smiley. The word giggly comes up all the time in books about Diana. But she made people laugh. She had quite a sharp sense of humour. That’s surprising because in public, she’s completely sincere about everything. But in private, she was able to laugh at herself. She had more irony and self awareness than sometimes we give her credit for.
“It’s difficult to meet anybody who met her and had a bad word to say about her. People just instantly liked her. She had amazingly good social skills, she seemed to be very, very likeable, and I think sincerely cared about people. So there’s a huge amount to like about her.”
He found her contradictions fascinating. “She’s got this incredible mixture of being bashful, and being unbelievably bold to the point of sheer recklessness. She seemed to think that if she wasn’t taking the most extreme course of action to remedy a problem, then she wasn’t actually taking any action at all.”
He gives an example of her legendary Panorama interview, where she secretly smuggled a TV crew into Kensington Palace and spoke with unprecedented candour about her personal life. “I think she came to regret that because it caused upset and aggravation and genuine hurt to people around her. Supposedly Prince William in particular was very upset by it.”
Diana’s instinctive impulse to speak her mind made her the Royal Family’s worst nightmare. “She was only 19 when she got engaged to Prince Charles and she wasn’t a worldly 19-year-old at all. So it came as a shock to her. To this day, the monarchy rests on twin principles of secrecy and deference. But her approach to being a royal paid no heed to secrecy or deference.
“Everything was on the surface with Diana. It was like it was impossible for her to not communicate what she was thinking or feeling, even when she was saying nothing. The newspaper coverage of her from the early Eighties has so much discussion about her facial expressions. Everybody was convinced they could tell what she was trying to tell them with the tilt of her head or those big expressive eyes.”
Poignantly, in the last year of her life, Diana was exploring what the rest of her life might look like, and how she could channel her extraordinary public profile. “There was a suggestion that she’d used Mohamed Al Fayed’s money to open an international chain of hospices. So I suppose she was inching towards something that Prince Harry tried to do with the Invictus Games – those globe-trotting, jet-setting, international philanthropy projects.”
It’s difficult, Edward says, to generalise about who Diana was. “She was a very complicated figure. She was quite a capricious person. And she changed a lot during the 15 years that she was in the Royal Family. “But she became aware of and valued her personal agency. By the end of her life, her guiding precept was that she was no longer a Spencer or a Windsor or a princess, really – she was Diana.”
Dianaworld: An Obsession by Edward White (Allen Lane), £25, is out now
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