In life and death, Princess Diana shook the House of Windsor to the core.
Critics have not always been kind to “The People’s Princess” in the decade since her death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, but none would deny she mattered.
Among royal watchers who spent their careers following the world’s most photographed woman live out a royal soap opera, few doubt her effect on a staid royal household that abhorred histrionics and never abandoned the British stiffer upper lip.
“She gave the monarchy a jolt. She was determined to make it less remote and she led by example on that,” said former BBC royal correspondent Jenni Bond, who spent almost 15 years covering the tribulations of the royals.
Lessons to be learnt
“The Queen said afterwards that lessons had to be learned from Diana’s death. Slowly they have been. There has not been a massive change — it’s a question of evolution not revolution.”
The Observer newspaper, summing up her contradictions when reviewing a flood of Diana biographies, asked: “Was she shy or just sly? Compassionate or coldly calculating? The Queen of Hearts or the self-promoting chief executive of Brand Diana?”
Diana espoused a string of causes — AIDS patients, lepers and landmine victims — which, by the force of her fame, became headline news.
“The royal family are not stupid and they looked at the effect she was having and realised they were missing a trick,” said royal biographer Penny Junor. “She was behind a lot of modernisation. The way that things are done now has been influenced by her.”
The 10th anniversary of her death has sparked the publication of at least a dozen Diana biographies that range from fawning hagiography to hatchet job.
Sarah Bradford, author of an authoritative study that avoids any gushing praise, said Diana had a paradoxical attitude to fame, bemoaning the paparazzi who hounded her to the end while at the same time assiduously cultivating tabloid contacts.
“She could be funny, witty, a lovely friend. She could also turn on people, she could be cruel, she could be hysterical.” And of course there was the fairytale marriage to heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, which ended in an acrimonious divorce played out in the full glare of publicity.
After writing three books on the Kennedys, biographer Christopher Andersen turned to Diana, arguing “What’s not to love? It’s the royal family, the longest running soap opera.”
A decade on, the British look back in astonishment at the uncharacteristically emotional way they mourned Diana — captured in The Queen with Helen Mirren, a film deemed to have built sympathy for the monarch.