Princess Diana is remembered as the wronged wife, the hounded victim, the woman the institution destroyed. The documentary record disagrees. 300 silent phone calls traced from Kensington Palace to a married man’s home. 30 hours of secret tapes she denied for the rest of her life. A rugby captain’s wife filed for divorce.
A private secretary resigned. A BBC interview won by forged bank statements. and rehearsed in advance by the princess herself. The picture the British public chose to remember was assembled in the seven days between the Paris crash and the funeral. The police files, the household memoirs, and the BBC’s own inquiry had been quietly assembling a very different one.
This is the other Diana. Diana Francis Spencer was born on July 1st, 1961 at Park House on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. Her father was Edward John Spencer, the future 8th Earl Spencer. Her mother was Francis Ro, the daughter of the fourth Baron Fairmoy. She was the third of four daughters and a son.
The fact that she was the third daughter and not the long awaited son was by every account that has surfaced from the family a disappointment to her parents. The intended son arrived 3 years later, Charles the 9inth Earl, who would deliver his sister’s eulogy in Westminster Abbey 36 years later. The Spencers were not new aristocracy.
They had been one of the great English-landed families since the early modern period with seats at Althorp in Northamptonshire and Park House on the royal estate at Sandringham. They were richer than most of the British parage and considerably older. Diana’s grandparents had been close personal friends of the royal family.
Her father had been an equiry to King George V 6. Her grandmother on her mother’s side had been a lady in waiting to the queen mother for decades. Park House where Diana was born was a rented Sandringham property a quarter of a mile from the main royal residence. The Spencer children played in the late 1960s with the children and grandchildren of Queen Elizabeth II.
Prince Andrew and Prince Edward were near contemporaries. The connection between the Spencers and the Windsors was not in Diana’s childhood remote. The two families were neighbors. In 1967, when Diana was six, her parents separated. Her mother left her father for a married wallpaper heir named Peter Shand Kid.
The custody battle that followed almost without precedent in English aristocratic life at the time was settled after 18 months in the courts in favor of the father. Diana’s mother lost custody of all four children. Diana later described on the Andrew Morton tapes of 1991 the night her mother packed and left Park House. She said she remembered the sound of the car driving away on the gravel.
The story is recorded in Diana’s own taped voice. Whether it happened that way is in the surviving record less clear than the tapes suggest. Francis Shand Kid, who lived until 2004, gave a different version of the separation. So did the older Spencer children. Patrick Jeffson, who would later become Diana’s private secretary, concluded that Diana’s account of her childhood hardened over time into a version that suited the public. she would in adulthood become.
What is clearer from the documentary record is that Diana’s childhood after 1967 was unstable. She moved between her father’s house at Park House and her mother’s house in Sussex. She attended boarding schools she disliked. She was not, by any honest measure, academically successful.
She failed her O levels twice. Her sisters, who attended the same schools, did considerably better. In adolescence, she developed bulimia by her own later account, a response to the breakdown of her parents’ marriage and to her own sense of being the daughter no one had wanted. The eating disorder would last most of her adult life.
She would describe it in detail in the Morton tapes, then more publicly on Panorama in 1995. It would be in both versions the foundational fact of the unhappy childhood she spent the rest of her life trying to escape. The man she married had grown up across the road. Charles, Prince of Wales, was 12 years older than Diana.
They had known each other socially since she was a teenager. The relationship became something more in the summer of 1980 when he invited her to a country house weekend at the home of friends. Diana was 19 years old. Charles was 32 and being publicly pressured by his father, the Duke of Edinburgh to find a wife. The choice of Diana was by every account that has surfaced since, a decision shaped less by personal compatibility than by elimination.
The Prince of Wales had a long string of previous girlfriends. Most of them were Catholic, divorced, or considered unsuitable by the Buckingham Palace household. Diana was Protestant, the right age, the right class, and crucially in the 19th century language the palace’s older advisers were still using, a virgin.
Her own Spencer family connections to the royal household made the proposal essentially uncontroversial. Charles proposed in February 1981. Diana accepted. The engagement photograph taken on the steps of Buckingham Palace showed a shy young woman in a blue suit and a man 12 years her senior who appeared mildly uncomfortable.
In the engagement interview that followed, the journalist asked the couple whether they were in love. Diana said yes. Charles said whatever in love means. She heard the line. [clears throat] The phrase has been quoted by every Diana biography since. She would later tell Andrew Morton that she had wanted to call off the engagement after that exchange and had been told she could not.
The wedding had already been booked for July 29th at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The dress was being made. The presents were arriving from heads of state. The wedding itself was by some measures the most watched television event of its time. Approximately 750 million people in 73 countries watched it live. The dress designed by David and Elizabeth Emanuel had a 25- ft train.
The ceremony was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runy. The bride forgot the order of her husband’s names and called him Philip Charles Arthur George instead of Charles Phillip Arthur George. The British public found the slip endearing. What no one watching the broadcast could have known was that the bride had in the days before the wedding been crying in private to her sisters and asking whether it was too late to call it off.
Her sisters by the surviving account reportedly told her, “Your face is on the tea towels.” Meaning the wedding was now a piece of national infrastructure that could not be unmade. The Spencer family later disputed the precise wording of the exchange. The exchange itself in some form has appeared in every major Diana biography.
The honeymoon was on the royal yacht Britannia. Diana later told Morton that on the honeymoon she had discovered photographs of Camila Parker BS in her husband’s diary and that he had been wearing cuff links Camila had given him. She said she confronted him. [clears throat] He by Diana’s account did not deny the relationship. What happened next has been described by Charles’s biographers, by Diana’s biographers, and by their staff with very different emphases, but the basic facts are not in serious dispute.
Charles had been involved with Camila Parker BS for over a decade before the engagement. He had broken off the relationship at the time of the wedding. He had resumed it within a few years. Diana, learning what had happened, did what her own family had taught her to do in a crisis. She fought back.
Her tools were not the tools the royal family had ever had to defend itself against before. In 1991, Diana was 30 years old. She had been married for 10 years. She had two sons, William, age nine, and Harry, age 6. The marriage had collapsed in private. Charles had returned to Camila. Diana had begun a sequence of affairs of her own.
The royal household, the Buckingham Palace press office, and the Prince of Wales’s own staff were managing the marriage as a public relations problem. Diana was by every account that has surfaced from the period not consulted on the management plan. She had decided by the end of 1990 to do her own. The journalist she chose was Andrew Morton, a tabloid royal correspondent of average reputation who had been writing about Diana for the Daily Mail and similar outlets since the mid1 1980s.
The intermediary was a London osteopath named James Colthurst, an old friend of Diana’s from her teenage years. The arrangement was simple. Morton would send Colurst a list of written questions. Colurst would visit Diana at Kensington Palace. She would record her answers onto a tape recorder. Cold Hurst would carry the tape back to Morton.
Morton would transcribe the answers and write the book. The book that resulted, Diana, her true story, was published in June 1992. It was, by the standards of any previous royal biography, an explosive document. It described the bulimia, the suicide attempts, the affair between Charles and Camila, the hostility of the Buckingham Palace household, the loneliness, the despair.
It was sourced by Morton’s own account from Friends of the Princess. But the level of intimate detail signaled to every careful reader that the friends in question included. At the center of the network, the princess herself. Diana publicly denied involvement in the book. So did her press office. Buckingham Palace was furious.
The queen reportedly did not speak to Diana for some weeks. The relationship between Diana and the rest of the royal family, already strained, became openly hostile. What was not known at the time, because the tapes had not yet been released, was that Diana had personally recorded over 30 hours of testimony for Morton. [clears throat] Each tape had been delivered to the publisher in secret.
She had reviewed sections of the manuscript before publication. She had directed the structure of the book. She had decided which family members would be portrayed sympathetically and which would not. She was, by the documentary record now public, the principal author of the book. She spent the rest of her life denying she had cooperated with.
The deception was not exposed until after her death. Morton, freed by her passing from the agreement they had made, published the original tapes and his own account of the production of the book in a revised edition titled Diana, her true story in her own words, released in October 1997, 6 weeks after the Paris crash.
The book reproduced Diana’s testimony in transcription. It made clear beyond any further argument that she had personally directed the most damaging assault on the British royal family in living memory while publicly maintaining she had had nothing to do with it. The Andrew Morton episode is the foundational document of the case that Diana was a more strategic operator than her public image admitted.
It established a pattern. It also established a question whether [clears throat] the wronged wife narrative her supporters had built around her could survive contact with what she herself had been doing in private. The next episode of the pattern when it surfaced was harder to explain. Between 1992 and 1994, a London art dealer named Oliver and his wife Diane began receiving silent telephone calls at their home in Chelsea.
The pattern was specific. The calls came at all hours, including late at night. The caller would not speak. The line would stay open for between 5 and 30 seconds. The received over the period in question approximately 300 such calls. Oliver was at the time conducting an affair with Diana, Princess of Wales. The affair had begun in 1992 and had become by 1993 the worstkept secret in London society.
wife eventually told him she would not tolerate the calls. in late 1993 asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate. The Royal Protection Squad working with the General Post Office’s tracing facilities traced a substantial proportion of the calls. The traces showed they had originated from multiple lines, including lines registered to Kensington Palace, the apartments where Diana lived, and a mobile telephone the police identified as Diana’s personal device.
The investigation was not pursued further. By the surviving accounts, the police informed and his lawyers that the source of the calls had been identified and the matter was closed without charges. The story became public in August 1994 when Stuart Higgins of the News of the World published the trace results.
Diana publicly denied making the calls. She did so in detail on the record to British journalists. She said it was absolute nonsense. that she had made silent calls to anyone’s home. She suggested the story was a fabrication intended to damage her. The investigation file, the family’s testimony and the trace records told a different story.
So did himself, who in private conversations with friends in subsequent years acknowledged that he believed the calls had been Diana’s. So did Patrick Jeffson, her own private secretary at the time, who has written in his memoir that he believes the calls were Diana’s. The exact number of calls, the exact contents of those that produced sound, and the precise duration of the campaign have remained partly disputed.
What has not been seriously disputed by anyone who has examined the police records is that the calls were made, that the trace evidence pointed to Kensington Palace, and that the Princess of Wales publicly told the British public a story that the police investigation had already established was not the case.
This is the part of the documentary record that has been most carefully kept out of the popular memory. It does not fit the narrative the public has chosen to remember. It is however in the record. It happened. It was investigated. The police knew. The household knew. The press eventually knew. The public then and now has mostly preferred not to know.
The phone calls were not the only behavior of the period that strained the household around her. They were not even the most consequential. The list of Diana’s romantic relationships during the marriage and after the separation is substantial. The basic catalog has been established by multiple biographers Sally Bedell Smith, Tina Brown, Penny Jr.
, Andrew Morton himself in his post 1997 work and the principal entries are not seriously disputed. James Hwitt was the first major affair. He was a cavalry officer in the lifeguards, a riding instructor Diana met in 1986. The relationship lasted approximately 5 years. Diana acknowledged it on Panorama in 1995 in language that even by the standards of the interview surprised observers. Yes, I adored him.
Yes, I was in love with him. Huitt later sold his account of the relationship to journalists for substantial sums, which Diana’s defenders cited fairly as evidence of his own bad character. James Gilby was the second. Gilby was a businessman from an old society family. The Squidy Gate tapes, recordings of intimate phone conversations between him and Diana made on New Year’s Eve 1989, were leaked to the British press in 1992.
The simultaneous leaking of those tapes alongside the Camila Gate tapes which recorded a similar conversation between Charles and Camila Parker BS has never been definitively explained. Both leaks by the timing alone served to escalate the public destruction of the marriage. Whether either or both of the principles had any role in the leaking has never been established.
Will Carling was the third relationship that produced documentary evidence. Carling was the captain of the England rugby team and had been married for less than a year when the affair began in 1995. His wife, the former television presenter Julia Smith, filed for divorce within months. She gave interviews to the British press in which she described in considerable detail her view that Diana had pursued her husband knowing he was married.
The Carling’s divorce was finalized in 1996. Carling has spoken about the period in his own subsequent interviews. The basic fact of the affair and the basic fact of its consequences is not in dispute. Oliver was the relationship that produced the phone call investigation discussed in the previous chapter. Hnot Khan was the relationship Diana would later describe to friends as the most important of her adult life.
Khan was a Pakistanibborn cardiothoracic surgeon at the Royal Brmpton Hospital in London. The relationship lasted approximately 2 years and ended by Khan’s later account because he was unwilling to live in the public spotlight Diana’s life would have required. Khan has in the decades since been notable for his unwillingness to give interviews about her.
The dignity of his silence in the surviving record contrasts with the conduct of several of the men around her. Dodi Fied was the last. Fied was the son of the Egyptian-born billionaire Muhammad Al Fed, the owner of Herods. The relationship began in the summer of 1997. It lasted approximately 6 weeks. It ended in the underpass at the Pondelmma in Paris on the night of August 31st.
The catalog of Diana’s relationships is not by itself an indictment. Married women in unhappy marriages have affairs. Divorced women have new partners. The catalog matters in the documentary record only because of the way some of those relationships intersected with other people’s lives. Most clearly the Carling’s marriage.
The case the record makes is not that Diana had affairs. It is that the public version of Diana, the wronged wife version, did not always tell the truth about the conduct of the woman who was constructing it. She was, on the relevant questions, capable of lying. The interview was recorded in the music room at Kensington Palace on November 5th, 1995.
The BBC team had entered the palace undercover of an unrelated production. Diana had personally arranged the access. She had told no one in the royal household. Not Patrick Jefferson, her private secretary, not her press office, not her ladies in waiting. The interview was conducted by Martin Basher, a journalist who 3 years before had done relatively little notable work and had been chosen by Diana on the basis of a recommendation from her brother Earl Spencer.
What viewers did not know, what Basher did not disclose, what Spencer himself did not learn until many years later was the manner in which Basher had obtained access to Diana. Basher had commissioned forged bank statements from a graphic designer named Matt Whisler. The statements purportedly showed that members of the royal household had been paid by the British security services to spy on Diana.
Basher showed the statements to Earl Spencer. Spencer alarmed introduced Basher to his sister. Diana by Spencer’s later account was deeply shaken by the documents. She agreed to the interview. The Dyson inquiry of 2021 concluded that the documents were forgeries. It concluded that the BBC’s internal investigation in 1996 had been a cover up.
It concluded that the interview had been obtained by deceit and should not have been broadcast. The BBC formally apologized to Diana’s family. The director general called the conduct shocking. This is the part of the Panorama story that has been correctly used by Diana’s defenders to argue that she was a victim of fabrication. The argument is sound.
The documents were forged. Basher lied. The BBC failed to investigate properly when concerns were raised at the time. None of that is in dispute. What the argument does not fully address is what Diana said inside the interview. Regardless of how Basher had obtained it inside the interview, Diana described the marriage in clinical detail.
She acknowledged the bulimia. She described the self harm episodes. She acknowledged the Huitt affair. She suggested in carefully chosen language that her staff had been spying on her. The same allegation Basher had used to secure her cooperation, now repeated by Diana herself on camera. She suggested that the Prince of Wales might not, in her phrase, want the top job.
She suggested he might be temperamentally unfit. She positioned herself as the victim of a calculated campaign against her by the royal household. Some of what she said was true, some of it was not. The royal household had not been paying her staff to spy on her. The line about wanting to be queen of people’s hearts was by all surviving accounts, a phrase she had personally rehearsed in advance.
Patrick Jeffson, who watched the broadcast from his own home and learned about it from television, resigned from her service within weeks. He has described the decision in his own memoir that the Panorama interview was the moment he understood what he had been working for. The interview accomplished what it had been intended to accomplish.
The Queen, two weeks after the broadcast, wrote to Charles and Diana telling them she expected them to divorce. The marriage formally ended seven months later. Diana lost the title her royal highness. She kept the apartment at Kensington Palace, the security detail, and the title Princess of Wales.
She did not have 18 months left to live. The picture of Diana that emerges from the memoirs of the people who actually worked for her is the picture least visible in her public legacy. Patrick Jeffson served as her equiry, then private secretary, then chief of staff between 1988 and 1996. He resigned in January 1996, 2 months after the Panorama broadcast.
His memoir, Shadows of a Princess, published in 2000, has remained the most detailed firsthand account of her professional conduct ever produced. Jefferson is not, by any reading of the book, a hostile witness. He admired Diana. He was, by his own account, deeply attached to her. He also describes a working relationship he eventually concluded he could not continue.
Diana’s behavior toward staff in Jeffson’s account was unpredictable. Members of the household could be elevated to favored status one week and dropped without explanation the next. Junior employees who had served her loyally for years could be dismissed by Diana directly in person with no notice and no severance arrangement. Senior employees who attempted to raise concerns about her conduct could find themselves suddenly excluded from the room.
Jeffson describes meetings in which Diana denied having made statements he had personally heard her make hours earlier. He describes Diana telling members of the household one version of events and the British press the opposite version on the same day. He is not the only source. Anne Beckwith Smith, who had served as Diana’s first lady in waiting in the early years, was abruptly dismissed in 1990.
Ken Warf, her personal protection officer for a period in the early 1990s, was eased out of her circle in a slower decline of relationship from confidant to outsider. Wendy Barry, the housekeeper at H Highrove, wrote her own subsequent memoir describing a woman in crisis who was, in her judgment, not always the person the public had decided she was.
The pattern is not unusual for someone with the kind of psychiatric profile Diana herself acknowledged. The bulimia, the documented self harm, the panic attacks, the volatility, these are recorded in her own words on the Morton tapes. They produce in the medical literature a behavioral profile. Diana would not have been the first person whose mental health symptoms produced behavior towards subordinates that in the office of the Princess of Wales looked like professional cruelty.
What is documented beyond the medical question is what the staff actually experienced. The household by the time of Jeffson’s resignation was operating at a level of emotional stress that the senior figures of the British civil service had begun to flag. Members of her detail were leaving without prospect of similar employment elsewhere.
Job applications for senior household positions had become harder to fill. The reputation of the post inside the British establishment had become known. The princess at the center of the popular sympathy was in her own household a difficult employer. This is the chapter of the Diana story her sympathetic biographers tend to handle most carefully.
The staff were professionals. They had signed non-disclosure agreements. The memoirs that have surfaced have done so against various forms of legal and reputational pressure. They are not perfect sources. They are also, by the standards of the documentary record on this period, the closest thing the historical archive has to a contemporaneous independent account.
The picture they describe is not the picture on the front of the souvenir editions. The last 6 weeks of her life were spent in a relationship with a 38-year-old Egyptian-born film producer she had met in July. Dodi Fied was the son of Muhammad Al Fied, the owner of Herods. Dodie was a recent acquaintance. The relationship had been first photographed by paparazzi at the Al Fied family yacht in Sanrope in mid July.
By the end of August, the British tabloids had built the relationship into a daily feature. The paparazzi pursuit of Diana in the summer of 1997 is one of the few aspects of the period on which everyone agrees. It was relentless. It was frequently dangerous. It had by the autumn of 1997 become a form of international stalking that Diana herself had complained about to journalists, to friends, and to her own staff.
There is no serious dispute about this. The pursuit was real. It was constant, and it was not on any sustainable definition the responsibility of the woman it was directed at. What is more contested is the precise sequence of events on the night of August 30th and the early hours of August 31st. Diana and Dodie were staying at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, which the Alfaed family owned.
They had decided late in the evening to leave the hotel via the rear entrance to avoid the photographers waiting at the front. The driver was Henry Paul, the deputy chief of security at the Ritz, who had been called back to the hotel after his shift ended. Paul had been drinking. The car was a Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
The car left the Ritz at approximately 12:20 a.m. It was pursued by paparazzi on motorcycles. It entered the Pond Delma underpass at high speed. The driver lost control. The car struck the 13th pillar of the underpass at an estimated 65 mph. Dodie Fed and Henry Paul died at the scene. Diana was extracted from the wreckage alive, but in critical condition.
She was transported to the PTA Saletriè Hospital. She died there at approximately 400 a.m. Paris time. She was 36 years old. The investigation by French authorities concluded that the principal cause of the crash had been Henri Paul’s intoxication, his speed, and the pursuit of evasion of the photographers. The British inquest of 2008 concluded that the crash was an unlawful killing caused by the gross negligence of the driver and the pursuing photographers.
The conspiracy theories that have surrounded the crash in the years since, including theories advanced by Muhammad Al Fiad himself, have not on the surviving evidence been substantiated. The funeral on September 6th at Westminster Abbey was watched live by an estimated 2.5 billion people, the largest live television audience the world had recorded at that point.
Earl Spencer’s eulogy described his sister as the most hunted person of the modern age. The phrase taken at face value was true. The phrase taken as the whole of who his sister had been was not the whole story. Diana is buried on an island in a small lake at the center of the Spencer estate at Althorp.
The grave was chosen by Earl Spencer specifically because it would be inaccessible to the public. The island is reached by a wooden footbridge. Visitors are not in general permitted onto it. The grave itself is unmarked beyond a small monument with her name and dates. She had been one of the most famous women in the world for 16 years.
The grave was chosen by the brother who buried her so that she would never have to be in a public place again. The image of Diana that has dominated public memory in the decades since the crash was constructed in the days immediately after her death. Earl Spencer’s eulogy, the Elton John reworking of Candle in the Wind, the carpet of flowers at Kensington Palace that famously stretched several feet deep.
These were the cultural materials out of which the Diana of public memory was assembled. The materials were not designed to produce a complete portrait of the woman they were memorializing. They were designed to produce the picture a country in shock had decided it needed. The picture was more saint than person. It performed the work of the moment.
What was lost in the construction of the public Diana was the documentary record that had already accumulated about the actual one. The Morton tapes had not yet been released. Patrick Jeffson had not yet written his memoir. The phone calls had not yet been examined in detail in published biographies.
The Dyson inquiry would not happen for another 26 years. Most of the evidence that would in the decades following her death complicate the saintly version of her life was either still embargoed, still in the private notebooks of journalists or still in the police files. The complication came slowly. Andrew Morton’s revised Diana, her true story, in her own words, was released 6 weeks after the crash and produced the first major revision of the public record.
Patrick Jeffson’s Shadows of a Princess appeared in 2000. Penny Junior’s Books on the Marriage in the early 2000s. Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles in 2007. Sally Bedell Smith’s Diana in Search of Herself in 1999. Each of these books by careful biographers with substantial access complicated the Saint Version. None was framed as a hostile attack.
The cumulative effect of them taken together was to make plain that the woman who had died on August 31st, 1997 had been considerably more difficult, considerably more strategic, and considerably more capable of deception than the public memorial had allowed. Her sons have in the decades since defended her memory in public as their job and their right.
The Prince of Wales has spoken about her warmth, her playfulness, and her unfailing love for her children. The Duke of Sussex has done the same in his own subsequent statements and in his memoir. None of what they have said is in dispute. Diana was, by every account that has surfaced from the people who lived inside her household, a devoted and engaged mother.
The fact of her motherhood is not what this script has been about. The fact of her motherhood was real. What the script has been about is the gap between the public memory of her conduct outside the family and the documentary record of that conduct. The gap is not small. It is also not new.
It has been visible in the surviving record for over 25 years. It has for most of those years been politely ignored. The phone calls happened. The Morton tapes happened. The Carling marriage ended. The staff resignations happened. The Panorama interview, even setting aside Basher’s deception, contained statements Diana herself knew were not true.
These are documented facts. They were documented facts on the day she died. The decision the British public made in the days and weeks afterward to assemble a memorial portrait that omitted them was an honest decision made under the pressure of a real grief. It was also taken at the historical distance now available, an incomplete portrait.
The woman the popular memory has settled on is not entirely the woman the documentary record describes. Both are now visible. Most viewers have continued to prefer one of them. The Spencer family chapel at Great Bronton in Northamptonshire has been the burial place of 17 generations of the family.
Most of the Spencers are buried in a vault under the floor of the chapel. Two of them are buried elsewhere on the estate. One is Diana’s mother, Francis Shand Kid, who is buried on the aisle of Seal in Scotland. The other is Diana herself on the island in the lake at Althorp. The decision to bury her on the island rather than in the Spencer Chapel where her ancestors lie was made by her brother Earl Spencer in the days after the crash.
Spencer made the decision against advice from the Spencer family solicitors and against the wishes of some other members of his family. The reason he gave at the time was that the chapel could not be made secure against visitors. The reason he gave in subsequent interviews was that he wanted his sister, in his phrase, left alone.
The island has been left alone. It is reached by a foot bridge that is not in normal circumstances open to the public. The grass is cut twice a year. The four ornamental urns that surround the grave are checked annually. The grave itself bears no inscription beyond a small marker with her name and dates.
Visitors to the Althorp estate who come for the museum that Earl Spencer maintains in the main house can view the lake from the shore but are not permitted to cross. The Diana the visitors come to see is the one assembled in the 7 days between the crash and the funeral. The audio guide of the museum reproduces it.
The displays in the main house reproduce it. The signed editions of the books in the gift shop reproduce it. It is the Diana the public chose. It is also, by the standards of the documentary record, now 30 years old, not the only Diana available. The other Diana, the one in the Morton tapes, the one in the investigation files, the one in Jefferson’s memoir, the one in Will Carling’s interviews, the one in the Dyson findings is also available.
She has been available for at least two decades. She is not buried on the island in the lake. She is in the printed records, the police archives, the published memoirs, the BBC inquiry findings, and the surviving correspondence of the people who worked alongside her in her own lifetime. What that record describes is not the simple villain that the title of this script implies and not the saint that the public memorial constructed.
It describes a complicated, intelligent, sometimes charming, sometimes vindictive woman who suffered from genuine psychological illness, who had been failed by her marriage, who had been failed by her in-laws, who had been failed in some respects by her own family, and who, when she set about defending herself, did so with a directness and a willingness to cause collateral damage that her public memory has consistently underplayed.
She was 36 years old when she died. She had been Princess of Wales for 16 years. She had been a public figure for 17. The picture of her that is now carved into the popular memory was constructed in the 7 days between the crash and the funeral by a country in genuine shock. Working from the most generous possible reading of her life.
