Diana: In Pursuit of Love (44 page)

At the same time, many of the grandiose plans to honour Diana’s memory had petered out. Senior politicians, who in the immediate aftermath of her death had suggested renaming Heathrow airport and the August Bank Holiday in her name, fell silent. Even those schemes that were launched were mired in endless controversy and acrimony. For a woman who considered herself a healer, her legacy was smothered in rancour and bitterness. A £3 million water feature in Kensington Gardens to
commemorate her life symbolized the difficulties. During her life she had always sought out water, either by the riverbank or sea shore, as a soothing source of solace and reflection. Yet when the Memorial Committee, chaired by the strong-minded Rosa Monckton, came to select the final design, they were so divided that the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell was called in to make the final decision. She chose the design by American landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson in preference to one submitted by the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor. No sooner had she made her choice, than the critics piped up, Diana’s mother saying that the fountain ‘lacked grandeur’. A place of contemplation and deliberation was turned into an unseemly but all too predictable wrestling match about what she would have wanted. In the face of sustained criticism of the royal family and of their treatment of the late Princess, the Queen agreed to unveil the principal memorial to her at a ceremony in the summer of 2004, attended by Spencers and Windsors. The move was seen as a long-overdue attempt at reconciliation between the two families.

A children’s playground and a memorial walkway in Kensington Gardens fared better and are both now enjoyed by the public. Noticeably no member of the royal family attended the opening of these projects, much to the ‘sadness’ of Rosa Monckton, who, accompanied by Earl Spencer, opened the playground, and the ‘irritation’ of Chancellor Gordon Brown who inaugurated the walk. For the royal family seem all too happy to let Diana rest in peace, her memory unobserved and all but forgotten. They are conspicuous by their absence at any event relating to the late Princess. So a hospice outside Cardiff, a hospital in Grimsby, a community-nursing scheme for sick children and other projects, all named after the late Princess, have been dedicated without remark or support from the royal family.

They took no part in discussions about a memorial and left the Memorial Fund charity to fend for itself (although unnamed courtiers were always quick to express ‘dismay’ at its many and varied difficulties). Even Prince Charles’s former spin doctor Mark Bolland was moved to suggest, ‘If the royal family want to learn lessons from Diana it is still not too late. Why don’t they
build their own memorial to her? Encourage William in some way to honour his mother’s memory in a public way?’

The response was a collective shrug of the shoulders. After all, the huge turnout for the Queen Mother’s funeral – the controversy over the fact that BBC newsreader Peter Sissons wore a lilac, rather than black, tie showed that knee-jerk deference was not dead – and the affectionate popular response to the Queen’s Golden Jubilee confirmed the monarchy
sans
Diana in people’s hearts. At a parade which formed the centrepiece of the Jubilee celebrations, the late Princess was relegated to a drive-on part, appearing as a cut-out figure on one of a convoy of floats that paraded down the Mall past the royal party, which included Mrs Parker Bowles. The irony would not have been lost on the late Princess. As the writer Robert Harris was moved to point out, ‘Not since Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 has a prominent public figure been so comprehensively airbrushed out of a nation’s public life.’ When the royal yacht
Britannia
was decommissioned in December 1997, it was noticeable the Queen and the rest of her family shed more tears for their floating palace than they had for the late Princess. ‘Diana is never mentioned, it was as though she never existed,’ commented a friend of the royal family.

Forlorn, foolish and forgotten, seven years after her death the impression is now given that the Princess inhabits a nether world where the flames of her memory are stoked only by scandal, her celebrity enduring by virtue of the latest sensation, be it voyeuristic TV shows revealing tantalizing glimpses of her dying in the underpass in Paris or titbits of gossip from former servants. It seems that the woman known to those in her circle, the irrepressible, kind, emotional, vulnerable yet sophisticated individual, never really walked on this earth and that her legacy is a chimera, a splendid firework that exploded dramatically and faded as rapidly. This one-dimensional portrait is now equally as misleading as the saccharine caricature that she was a saint in designer clothes. Her life, like her legacy, is much more complex and elusive, a journey of endless twists and turns. Ironically it is a journey to one of the world’s most remote and unknown regions which yields important clues to one of the century’s most famous women.

E
PILOGUE

Passport to Parachinar

P
ARACHINAR IS NOT A PLACE
for the unwary. This remote town lies in the notorious mountains of the North-West Frontier, the crossroads between Afghanistan and Pakistan. For centuries it has been an anarchic haven for drug smugglers, gun runners and refugees. In the local bazaar, hashish, opium, and Russian and homemade rifles are sold alongside mixed fruit and cattle. There is no civil law, only
Pashtunwali
, a tribal code of honour and conduct. Levels of literacy are among the lowest and those of child mortality among the highest in the world. Curfews are a regular feature of life, gun battles between feuding tribes not uncommon. One vicious firefight in September 1996 left 200 dead and scores of women and children raped and kidnapped. Bullet holes still scar the minarets of the local mosques. ‘The atrocities were out of the Stone Age,’ according to a paramilitary official.

Over the years these fierce mountain warriors, the Pashtuns, or Pathans, have fiercely defied attempts by the Moguls, the Sikhs, the British, the Soviets and the Pakistanis to control them. They have paid a high price; during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, helicopters and planes indiscriminately dropped thousands of landmines and booby traps that have killed untold thousands and left many, mainly women and children, brutally scarred and maimed. The impoverished North-West Frontier adds significantly to the annual tally of 26,000 victims of landmines around the world.

In this backward country it is now the turn of the United States to attempt control. Just a few miles north, the Americans and their allies unleashed their full military fury at the Tora Bora caves, the hideout for Osama bin Laden and his Taliban and al-Qaeda followers. Today American intelligence reckons that bin Laden, who escaped the pummelling, is hiding within a ten-square-mile radius of the town of Parachinar which is the capital of the Kurram tribal agency. Slogans on the walls proclaiming L
ONG
L
IVE
O
SAMA
B
IN
L
ADEN
reveal where local sympathies lie. These days it is a not a place where Westerners are welcome.

Yet, in the local general hospital, an enlarged photograph of Diana, Princess of Wales dominates the entrance to one ward, where men and women wait for artificial limbs to be fitted. In this region where suspicion and defensiveness are ingrained, her image is a passport, a guarantee of safe passage for the handful of Western aid workers. For the last year, a British charity, Response International, has been one of the few outside aid organizations allowed to work in this lawless land. Not only are its workers organizing the fitting of artificial limbs for landmine victims in the hospital, they are travelling around forts and villages teaching landmine awareness, first aid and trauma care. Everywhere they go musicians, children dancing and armfuls of flowers greet them. The reception is all the more extraordinary as the very idea of charitable organizations is alien to this proud, self-reliant people. Just one word guarantees a warm welcome and an assurance of security: ‘Diana’. The charity, which focuses on the forgotten victims of conflict in remote parts of the globe, has been financed in its work by the Memorial Fund set up in the Princess’s name, a tangible and practical legacy of her humanitarian work. The charity’s chief executive, Philip Garvin, was genuinely astonished by the impact Diana has had on the people in this remote region: ‘I was treated like a king because I had the image of Diana hanging over my head. We used her name ruthlessly to get things organized and make contact with local people.’ Her appeal lies in the fact that she is not seen as English or a typical Westerner, but as an apolitical humanitarian who worked for the removal of the landmines that were killing or maiming so many of their people.
In a world where assassination is a way of life, the widespread belief that she was murdered by the royal family merely adds to her kudos. There is too a curious cultural symmetry about her appeal in this forbidding land; she is a heroine in a world where Osama bin Laden is a hero. At the beginning of the new millennium they are iconic bookends, one strove to bring East and West together, both in her relationships and her humanitarian mission and vision; the other is now violently and fanatically attempting to divide the world on religious lines.

So, much as the royal family and her critics would like not to imagine otherwise, Diana’s work does continue, unacknowledged and unremarked, helping the dispossessed, the unpopular and the forgotten, the very people that in her life she so fulsomely embraced. Since its rocky inception the Memorial Fund in her name has handed out more than £50 million in grants for 300 or so projects, ranging from assisting refugees to helping youngsters with learning difficulties in Britain and abroad. While it can never take the place of the Princess – ‘No one has come close to her since she died,’ in the words of David Puttnam – it has the money to make a genuine and continuing difference to people’s lives.

Mired in controversy from the moment the first one-pound coin stuck to the back of a postcard arrived at Kensington Palace, the Fund has been seen as a bastard child by the royal establishment, unwanted and unloved. It has never been visited by a member of the royal family, nor have Diana’s children, William and Harry, ever taken part in any of its work, either in private meetings or public events. This is one of many ticklish challenges facing Diana’s sons.

For in three years’ time, when Prince William is twenty-five, he will be entitled not only to the money she bequeathed him and his brother in her will, but also to take a substantial role at the helm of her charity, at some stage presumably taking over the role of Diana’s sister, Sarah McCorquodale. His brother has already spoken publicly about his desire to follow in her footsteps. On his eighteenth birthday Prince Harry, now destined for a career in the Armed Forces, talked for the first time about his mother and her legacy: ‘She had more guts than anyone else. I want to carry on
the things she didn’t quite finish. I’ve always wanted to – but before I was too young. She got close to people and went for the sort of charities and organizations that everybody else was scared to go near, such as landmines.’

Besides the rhetoric, the litmus test of the boys’ determination to carry on her work will be the extent of their involvement with the Memorial Fund. There are many powerful voices, not just inside the Palace, who would like to see the charity wound up, adding to the pressure on Prince William, who is already concerned about finding a role that does not compete with his father. That conflict may be inevitable, as Mark Bolland pointed out: ‘The real worry is for Prince Charles, who can’t seem to get in the papers now without standing next to his son. That was always one of his nightmares. It’s clearly coming true.’ Yet it is the vulnerable and voiceless, like the crippled children waiting patiently for artificial limbs in Parachinar general hospital, who will be the ones who suffer if the young Princes walk on by.

During her lifetime the Princess gambled everything on her boys. They, particularly Prince William, are her living legacy. ‘All my hopes are on William now,’ she told Tina Brown, then editor of the
New Yorker
, in June 1997. ‘It’s too late for the rest of the family. But I think he has it.’ For the next decade at least, this good-looking prince will be the pin-up of the royal family, the flag bearer of the future, not just of the monarchy but of his mother’s memory. That is important. For while courtiers believe that he is far more of a Mountbatten-Windsor than a Spencer in character, his public image is that he has the same diffident appeal as his late mother. In an age where image is everything his casual good looks and unstudied easy charm guarantees the similar glamorous appeal as Diana. ‘As a modern young royal, William has been fortunate in having much more freedom than any previous member of the family,’ observes his biographer Brian Hoey. ‘He is undoubtedly the star of the future, the one on whom the royal family’s hopes rest.’

The time Diana spent taking her sons to hostels for the homeless and to hospitals so that they could understand real life more clearly seems to have paid off. ‘I was influenced a lot by my
visits to hostels with my mother when I was younger,’ said Prince William, during an interview for his twenty-first birthday. ‘I learned a lot from it, more so now than I did at the time.’