GETTY IMAGES. TIM GRAHAM PHOTO LIBRARY.lunch, she was wistful as she
spoke to me – not of her success as
a humanitarian leader, but of the
loneliness of the summer ahead.
In August, the boys would go, as
they did every year, to stay with their
father and their grandparents at
Balmoral. The world assumed, she
told me, that everyone would vie to
invite her as their guest. But hosting
her came at a price of lost privacy
that most of her friends did not
want to pay.
In another of the great ironies of
Diana’s fate, the invitation to cruise
the south of France by yacht with her
new admirer Dodi Al Fayed primarily
meant safety. “He has all the toys,”
she told her friends, meaning the
accoutrements – the private plane,
the car and driver, the servants and
bodyguards belonging to his tycoon
father, Mohammed Al Fayed (who
also owned Harrods and the Ritz
Hotel in Paris) – that were required
to protect her.
The crash and the frantic,
unsuccessful attempts to save her
at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital were
followed by “the Great Sorrow” –
a wave of pain that swept the British
Isles and the world as a numb and
disbelieving public learned of Diana’s
loss. Today, the courtiers who work
at Buckingham Palace refer to the
upsurge of anger against the Queen’s
refusal to return from her Scottish
palace at Balmoral as “the Revolution”- because it nearly was.
It was as if Diana’s death had
allowed England’s stiff upper lip
to tremble at last and acknowledge
that it was no longer a hierarchical,
class-bound society imprisoned by
the cruel expectations of conformity
it had shown the Princess during
her life.
In 2007, I asked then Prime
Minister Tony Blair what, if anything,
Diana’s life had signified. A new
way to be royal? “No,” he replied,
without hesitation. “A new way to
be British.”AW W
This is an edited extract fromRemembering
Diana: A Life In Photographs,published by
National Geographic, on sale on August 1.ABOVE: Diana and her attendants on her wedding day, July 29, 1981. Diana’s dress, made
of ivory taffeta and antique lace with sequins and pearls, featured a 25-foot-long train.
BELOW: Diana and Prince Charles photographed on their honeymoon at Balmoral Castle.