John Ezard
Frailty, the apparent brave frailty of a candle in the wind, was always Diana’s supreme public quality in life. In death it will combine with her other merits and faults – her genius for intimacy, her great persisting beauty and her turbulent spirit maimed in childhood – to perfect her legend. That legend is the one she wanted, the one she asked for in her famous Panorama interview. Death has sealed it, made it certain, permanent and untarnishable; her step-grandmother Barbara Cartland’s forecast early in her marriage has come true in the most wretched way.
She will, as Dame Barbara said, “reign forever as the Queen of Love”, the first unofficial queen of her kind in 1000 years of English monarchy, perhaps the last fabled, troublesome princess to be linked with the royal family.
This fate leaves might-have-beens which are full of anguish: the successful second marriage that cannot now occur; the supplementary family of children who will not be born; the unfillable seat in the Abbey at William’s coronation and – most griefsome of all – the possibility that she might, in time, have learned to diminish from being a hunted, attention-addicted superstar into a more ordinary, happier, more private woman.
The role she will instead fill in public myth and memory was evident all over Britain yesterday. It was clear in the grey faces of people touched everywhere by a sense of catastrophe, in the public announcements of her death at railway stations, in the spontaneous mass wreath- laying and in the voices of passers-by fumbling back to a very old, chokingly understated form of words: “She was very well liked.”
Not since the death in 1952 of George VI has that been so widely said about a royal. As the day went on, comments became more eloquent.
Among the inscriptions on flowers left by some of the thousands of people outside Kensington Palace were: “born a lady, became a princess, died a saint”; “princess of hearts, you will live on in all of our hearts”; and “the nation has thrown away a jewel more precious than its whole empire”.
Her death was more shatteringly felt than Earl Mountbatten’s assassination in 1979, or even than Winston Churchill’s long- expected passing in 1965.
The only event comparable in reaction with yesterday’s was the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy, the first post-war figure to be canonised by the media in his lifetime.
Kennedy – like Diana – fed on his cult and learned to exploit it. Like Diana, he saw his personality being inflated beyond human proportions. Unlike her, he had the personnel and staff resources to control this process and to conceal his adulteries.
More than 16 years ago, the 19 year-old Diana Spencer flinched and quailed in shock outside her London nursery school as the media discovered that almost any cobbled-up material about her raised newspaper sales and TV audiences.
The same look of stress – the look of a highly vulnerable woman steeling herself before a firing squad – was there a few months later on her first Welsh tour as princess and later in the 1980s during tours of the Gulf and Hong Kong. But she had her own delightful armoury: a half- flirtatious glance through eyelashes at the cameras and – as the crowds and her charities discovered – a bright, darting and tender though usually brief interest in ordinary people.
Over the years she learned to leak material. She became drawn towards the media, and the public they embodied, like a moth to a flame. But between a moth and a flame there is only one outcome. The destroyed mega-celebrities she has now joined include Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. The omens for William, to whom the pursuit will now switch in all its relentlessness, are mind-breaking and heartbreaking.