Diana: In Pursuit of Love (45 page)

In many respects, though, if Queen Victoria came back today, she would be unsurprised by his upbringing. Like many children of the aristocracy he was sent away from home to boarding school, he attended Eton, still seen as the most elitist school in the land, and is now at St Andrew’s university, which has among the highest proportion of privately educated school pupils in the country.

Again, like his forebears, the Prince’s pastimes are predominantly upper class, fox-hunting with fashionable meets near his father’s Gloucestershire home and joining shooting parties at Sandringham and other country houses. ‘I do think I’m a country boy at heart,’ he said unsurprisingly. A country boy who, when he is at his father’s house at Highgrove, will have the services of one of three valets to lay out his clothes in the morning. A country boy who will inherit a £700-million fortune one day, maybe even becoming the first billionaire Prince of Wales.

Yet by royal standards he has led a much more relaxed and informal lifestyle than his father ever enjoyed. The very fact that he appeared barefoot and in a torn sweater at the photocall for his first ever interview is testament to a more casual style. If nothing else, as a result of his mother’s tragic life, William will, as Earl Spencer observed, be able to choose the bride he wants rather than having her chosen for him. That though has not stopped British TV shows trying to pick a bride for him, albeit tongue-in-cheek. The experience of his college friend Kate Middleton, who hit the headlines when she accompanied the Prince and the rest of the royal party on a skiing holiday to Klosters in Switzerland in 2004, shows that the media’s fascination with royal love life will be as intense as during his father’s days.

He will though inherit an organization more in tune with today’s world, modernizing work having been undertaken by Buckingham Palace and now, belatedly, by Prince Charles. As Earl Spencer told Ian Katz, ‘One of Diana’s greater legacies to her sons and their successors is that she has made many more things acceptable in a royal context and showed the old guard at
Buckingham Palace that, in fact, a lot of that stuff is wanted by the people as a whole.’ Indeed a YouGov poll said that ‘humanizing the royal family’ was Diana’s greatest achievement, ahead of her landmine campaign.

For all the attempts to diminish and dismiss her, the Princess still looms large in the popular imagination. In a BBC poll in 2002 she ranked third, behind Winston Churchill and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as the greatest Briton, easily outstripping any other member of the royal family, dead or alive. Her death, according to those who responded to a poll for the History Channel, was perceived as the most significant event of the twentieth century – ahead of the beginning of the Second World War.

People responded to her death precisely because her life had so much meaning. As a woman, a mother, a daughter and a public figure, she reflected many of the dilemmas and conflicts of our own lives as she tried to discover who she really was. Her courage in defying a powerful family, her decision to live by her own lights, her haphazard, sometimes foolhardy, search for love, as well as the way she challenged and embraced her past are windows into a complex personality that struggled to face up to and overcome her demons, be they related to her body, her self-belief, her self-esteem or her ambitions. She was never standing still, always looking to assert herself, through her speeches, her humanitarian work or her lifestyle. Diana was a woman who was growing and developing rather than sitting on her laurels.

Yet the prevailing orthodoxy is that she was out of control and pretty well out of her mind. The evidence for that contention centres largely around the paranoia that infected her life at the time of her infamous BBC television interview. In this book I have tried to demonstrate that, given the way her fears were being cleverly fed by reporter Martin Bashir, as well as hearing other alarming information relating to the boys’ nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke and Prince Charles’s orderly George Smith, she had every right to feel physically afraid as indeed would any other person under those pressures at that time. Perhaps this re-evaluation of the facts of her life will lead to a fresh look at who she was and where she was heading, a richer appreciation of a woman striving
to make sense of a multifaceted lifestyle, rather than a mournful individual on the fringe of sanity. That she learned so much and travelled so far is testament to her strength of character and indomitable spirit. The truth is, as I have argued, that the Princess was leaving her demons behind and using her great gifts of empathy and communication in a worthwhile, satisfying work.

Perhaps the last word about this extraordinary woman should go to the woman she once reviled and then came to admire, her stepmother Raine, Countess Spencer: ‘She managed to get through very difficult parts of life with enormous courage and turned herself from being a very shy, insecure girl, not nearly as pretty as her other two sisters, into a world-class beauty, a world-class fashion model who had a world-class heart. She loved people, and loved helping them. It gave her a tremendous boost, the feeling that she could make a difference. She was a very remarkable, unusual and extraordinary person. Truly an icon of our time.’

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