Princess Di "sleek but sad": speech

The following is the abridged version of Sarah Bradford's speech given at the SeaWrite Awards presentation ceremony which was held on October 12, 2007, at the Oriental. The author of an acclaimed biography of Diana the Princess of Wales, Bradford was the keynote speaker at this annual event which was presided over by Her Royal Highness Princess Sirivannavari Nariratana. 

Before I left London, I had been wondering what I should say to such a distinguished and literary audience. I had thought perhaps of comparing the worlds of biography and fiction, when a request came to talk about my most recent subject, Diana, Princess of Wales. Then by a curious coincidence a letter arrived for me from a Muslim writer based in Kowloon telling me of his experience meeting Diana, Princess of Wales, at another Mandarin Oriental Hotel, this time in Hong Kong. He had recently seen my on a BBC programme on the 10th anniversary of Diana's death and wanted to communicate his feelings about her. He wrote how he had told her about his striving days to achieve some dreams' and how, at the end of their conversation she had 'very affectionately and tenderly shaken his hand, saying 'Have faith in God and your self, my dear Muslim brother'. Upon this, he had burst into tears of emotion: Diana took out her handkerchief and dried his tears telling him not to be a crybaby, to be strong and believe in himself. Then she pressed into his hand a sealed enveloped telling him to read it 'only when you are far away.' When he opened it, he found what he described as 'a considerable amount of money in US dollars, which succeeded in making him cry again.

            So when I began to write this speech, I immediately thought of Diana's dear Muslim brother and how his letter illustrated her extraordinary universal appeal. Somehow Diana conveyed a message of compassion and humanity, which transcended borders and races. SO instead of talking to you about biography, I thought I would talk about aspects of Diana. Your immediate reaction may be "Oh no, we know it all". But I can assure you that you don't. The bare facts of her stellar life and dramatic death are well known: the reality them is the job of a biographer to reveal.

            It's now 10 years since Diana died in the Paris car crash. As her biographer, I have been inundated with requests from all over the world, to talk about her, to explain her extraordinary celebrity and why she is still remembered. In London this summer she has rarely been out of the news, first with the Princess' memorial concert for their mother, then the service on the 10th anniversary of her death when Prince Harry spoke so movingly of what Diana had meant to her sons. Last week, the final inquest into the drama of the crash in the Alma tunnel opened: no one doubts what we won't be for some six months of Diana-related headlines.

            It has always been like that. During the sixteen years between her marriage to the Princess of Wales in July 1981 and her death in Paris on August 31, 1997, she dominated the headlines. Public interest in her never wavered, reaching a crescendo of what can only be called hysteria in the week following her death. Recently a very successful film focused on that week and its effect on the Queen. Diana, it seems, in death just as in life, will not go away.

            You have to ask why this should be so. Why all this fuss about so Sloaney girl with no school qualifications and a prize for hamster husbandry. She was beautiful, charming, witty but when her dark side was uppermost even her friends would admit she could be a fiend. She could have been the original for the nursery heroine 'the girl with the curl on her forehead': 'When she was good she was very very good but when she was bad, she was horrid." So why the fame? How did this young, unsophisticated rather badly dressed girl metamorphosise before our eyes into a sleek, chic international celebrity, the most famous woman in the world, adored by millions? What was she really like? Was she, as she herself once said in a memorable piece of self-denigration, "thick as two planks"? Or was she, as her enemies - even some of her friends - would have it, a blonde fruitcake, self-obsessed, disloyal, manipulative and dangerous to know. Was she - perhaps the most serious of the charges against her - a threat to the monarchy - or as her admirers would say, the best thing that ever happened to the Windsors, a woman of extraordinary empathy, even a quasi-saint?

            The banal explanation for her fame was that she married the Prince, a guarantee of celebrity status. But Diana went on to be a celebrity in her own right when the fairy tale marriage became a nightmare and her life an extraordinary tragedy. It was the way she confronted the cruel hand fate dealt her that made her exceptional. This was a woman who took on the British royal and social establishment and charmed the world, yet nothing in her background indicated that she would be in any way outstanding.

            She grew up in the closed circle of English rural society in North Norfolk, a territory of large estates, vast horizons and closed minds. She was the third daughter of an aristocratic family in which women were considered inferior beings and only the male heir counted. Aged six her cosy family life was shattered when her mother left her father for another man and an exceptionally bitter divorced ensued. Diana was the principal victim of the breakup: it undermined her self-confidence and left her vulnerable to rejection and longing for love and commitment. But at the same time the tug of love over her between her father and mother taught her how to manipulate difficult circumstances to her advantage.

            She was exceptionally resistant to formal education with an almost mystical belief in her destiny and in her own instincts as a guide in life. Unfortunately for her future emotional well-being, her favourite reading was to be the novels of Barbara Cartland, hardly the ideal handbooks for a modern marriage. Poor Prince Charles, a spoiled bachelor set in his ways, was unsuited to the role of romantic husband and Cartland had not scripted a role for Camilla Parker-Bowles. Diana was only just 20 when she married: Camilla had orchestrated the engagement and Diana was deeply suspicious of her from the first but fondly imagined that when she became Charles's wife, his former mistress would fade into the background. When she did not, Diana was unable to accept it, and who could blame her?

            People have suggested that Diana married Prince Charles out of single-minded ambition and that theirs was a marriage of convenience. All I can say is that after Diana died, Prince Charles told an old friend: 'There was a time, you know, when we were very much in love'. Diana loved Charles from day one and, sadly, went on loving him and wanting him back to the day that she died. Unfortunately for her, Charles' love - 'whatever love means' - as he so worryingly put it at the time of their engagement, was not deep-rooted. When the marriage started to go wrong, when the country mouse he had married showed alarming signs of temperament, he withdrew, baffled. Traditionally royal wives were not supposed to act up as Diana was doing. Two steps behind were where they belonged and when the public wanted Diana up front, Charles was appalled. He drew away from her mentally and physically and within two and a half years of his marriage he went back to his mistress.

            Another girl from another background in another age might have put up with the situation but Diana's ancestry included some formidably strong women like Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, who went so far as to quarrel definitively with her friend, Queen Anne. Diana's Spencer family had a proud tradition of independence where the British monarchy was concerned. They had been among the founders of the constitutional settlement of 1688 which disposed of the absolutist and Catholic King James II and paved the way for Hanoverians. Indeed aristocrats like the Spencers tended to regard the members of the royal house of Windsor (or, as it formerly was of Saxe-Coburg Gotha), as upstart German princelings. Diana herself was heard to refer to her in-laws as 'the Germans'. While her grasp of history was vague in the extreme, she did not fail to absorb the significance of five centuries of illustrious ancestors looking down at her from the walls of the Spencer stately home at Althorp. As a child in Norfolk, she had lived within sight of the Queen's country house at Sandringham. Being invited to tea and a film by the royal children was quite normal to her and, she later claimed, not regarded as a treat. Diana was therefore not in awe of the royal family and reacted to them in a way which most people would not have dared contemplate.

            She was outraged that the family never showed any appreciation of her success in carrying out her royal duties which brought her such public attention. She was resentful at being considered as a mere adjunct to the Prince of Wales, never a person on her own right.

            Yet another strand in Diana's background had an even deeper effect on her - her mother's departure and her parents' divorce. A succession of Diana's friends have confirmed to me that her mother's leaving when she was six years old had evoked in her a profound fear of rejection and abandonment. More than most people she longed for love and protection and an unbroken family. Charles's rejection of her fulfilled her deepest fears, provoking suspicion, hysteria and even at her worst moments, paranoia, specifically the notorious BBC, Panorama interview in which she intimated people were out to get her and famously declared that 'she won't go away.' Now it has been confirmed that the letter she allegedly wrote accusing 'my husband' of planning a motor accident to clear his way to re-marriage, was written in October 1995 just weeks before that interview. Diana's insecurity led her to major mistakes - mainly over men. In an effort to keep her private life private, she committed one of her biggest errors, dispensing with her official protection and leaving herself open to the hunting paparazzi.

            'Whenever she made her big mistakes, it was because of Charles', one of Diana's closest women friends told me. Charles dominated her thoughts even in that final summer of 1997. The bitter battle of the Waleses was fought out in public through the media where Diana had the upper hand. Diana deployed all the weapons at her disposal, her beauty, her charm and her huge popularity but her refusal to compromise led to a series of mistakes and in the end, with her divorce, she lost the battle with Charles.

             Diana's final fatal mistake was to walk into the Fayed trap. When Mohamed al Fayed extended his invitation to bring her sons to join him in St Tropez in July, she leapt at it for two principal reasons. The first was that, sadly and surprisingly, the most famous woman in the world had nowhere to go for her summer holidays. 'How can I compete with Balmoral?', she asked friends. The second was her determination to upstage a 50th birthday party Charles was giving for Camilla at Highgrove, the scenario behind her public courting of the press: posing on the beach in a leopard print swimsuit and bounding out to a launch full of newsmen to announce that she was going to do something which would - in her words - surprise the world. In her own eyes she was making a defiant gesture at Charles, Camilla and 'the Establishment' who disapproved of Fayed. Fayed had baited the trap with a fifteen million pound yacht and provided his own son for romance and both Diana and Fayed collaborated with the press to picture her canoodling on the Jonikal with Dodi. Her antics in pursuing her summer romance roused a feeding frenzy among the paparazzi, which was to end in the Alma tunnel.

            Diana has been portrayed as against the monarchy and as a royal rebel. I don't believe this to be a true picture. I don't think that the Queen did see Diana as a threat to the monarchy, whatever people may say. It would however be true to say that some courtiers were more royal than the monarch regarding themselves as doing battle with Diana on her behalf. On one occasion Diana was told some every unpleasant things that had been said about her at a dinner party, and went to the Queen to complain.

            As far as the monarchy itself is concerned, Diana regarded her most important role as being the queen mother bringing up a pair of modern princes who knew their duty and knew what it was like to be less privileged than themselves. she used to take them to day centres for the homeless and unemployed, making sure they spoke at length to the people there.

            According to her staff who worked with her, she was witty, smart, raucously and vulgarly funny at times with a schoolgirl fondness for smutty jokes. She was also extremely efficient, conscientious, well brief and well organized. And she had real compassion in her work and a quality of empathy with people of all cultures and races which somehow communicated itself to her public and made her unique. She was more than many of the worthy celebrities who have followed her example - the Bonos and Angelina Jolies. Who else but Diana could have transmitted her silent sympathy as she did to the mother of a war victim in Bosnia or to children with their limbs shattered by land mines in Angola. People loved her because they thought they knew her and that she cared about them.

            And she did care. The public are not in the end fooled. As writers we feel we have a mission in life to explain our world, present or past. Diana saw her serious purpose in life as using her position to help people. Along with her preoccupations with fortune tellers an psychics, she had a spiritual side which few people saw. She truly believed that she had a vocation. According to one friend who saw a lot of Diana in that last summer, she planned a new career presenting well researched television documentaries about causes that meant a lot to her - Aids, land mines and curiously in view of her lack of academic qualification - the illiterate. She was planning to go to America for media training in order to do this when she was killed. 'She was such a good girl, Sarah', one of her mother figures told me.

            This summer we stayed at her family's ancestral home, Althorp. Will and I made a private visit to the lake in the grounds and looked across to the island where is buried. The grave itself is unmarked and hidden by trees and bushes. There was nothing to see; yet, there was an indefinable something about the place. Isolation perhaps, beauty certainly and perhaps also a sense of the tragic loneliness which, beneath the beauty and the sense of fun, had pervaded Diana's life.