Our fixation with Princess Di

Dianaworld: An Obsession

Edward White

Allen Lane, £25, pp400

In the world of books, 1992 was a strange, splashy kind of year. In the US, a baby-faced relationship guru called John Gray published Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, a best-selling manual – 15m copies to date – in which he argued the sexes might as well come from different planets for all they have in common. Under stress, he said, men like to retreat into their “caves”, while women want only to talk (something of a problem should the cave door be closed). Meanwhile, in the UK, Diana: Her True Story appeared as if from nowhere in all good branches of WH Smith – the work of an equally baby-faced journalist called Andrew Morton.

Its sales, ultimately, would be far lower than those of Gray’s book, but the two had a lot in common nevertheless. A man who liked to commune with plants. A woman who longed for connection. A series of stately caves policed by unhelpful servants. Some people (not me!) surely must have read both, and my guess is that the Princess of Wales might have been one of them.

In his new book, Edward White mentions Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus only briefly; he isn’t able to tell us whether it was on the coffee table at Kensington Palace, there to be mournfully flicked through after Casualty (following the fallout from Morton’s book, the Prince and Princess of Wales separated, and she rattled around KP alone). But then White has a lot to get through when it comes to his subject’s long quest for enlightenment, self-love and generalised woo.

Where to start? Diana adored psychics, therapists and healers, and, by their telling, her body kept no secrets. Into the hands of Stephen Twigg, holistic health practitioner, she sent pulsating waves of “turmoil and confusion”; on the phone to Simone Simmons, “self-described energy healer”, Diana sought help for everything from sex to the media (though she also liked to hear about the goings-on in the Tesco supermarket above which Simmons lived in Hendon, north London).

The net result of all this was not, of course, to make the Princess any happier or more sane. But, as White explains, it did have a marked effect on her progress through the world. In the end, she came to believe that she, too, was a healer of sorts, her visits to hospital beds as crucial to her sense of self as any dress by Catherine Walker. Like Charles II, who famously touched sufferers of scrofula, she was always ready with a hug; her friend, the journalist Liz Tilberis, believed she owed a good response to chemotherapy to what White calls Diana’s “intercession”.

At a distance of years, all this seems pretty creepy in itself. But perhaps it’s worse than that. Ninety pages later, White describes a meeting the princess had with Tony Blair in 1995, in which she encouraged the Labour leader to “touch people in pictures”: photographs with “down-and-outs” and “children with no hair” were, she insisted, especially effective when it came to projecting compassion.

White, the author of previous books about Alfred Hitchcock and Carl van Vechten, the American photographer who was Gertrude Stein’s literary executor, has set out to write not a biography of Diana but “the story of a cultural obsession”; his primary interest lies in her effect on others, whether Aids patients or British Asians, her servants or the paparazzi. The result is peculiar: enjoyable, even fascinating in places, but also somewhat unfocused, Diana’s fans being nothing if not multifarious. On the one hand, it struck me as I read that the very beginnings of a certain kind of 21st-century madness may be located in the years of her extraordinary fame. How many selfies would Diana have posted on Instagram had she lived? How much further would fact and fiction have blurred for her? (Sacrilegious as it may be to say it, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex is her natural heir.) A good PhD thesis is buried here, I think.

But this is also a compendium of some of the battiest, most unedifying trivia you’ll ever read. Craziness and grifting abound, not all of which emanate from Di. I’ve read rather too many royal books (work, I promise). Until Dianaworld, however, I hadn’t fully grasped just how many people seriously lost their minds between 1981, the year of her engagement, and 1997, when she tragically died in Paris.

It’s as if Diana were a virus, and half the population became infected. On television, people tried out her famous haircut, the work of a man she later excommunicated called Kevin Shanley. (He was cast out having ill-advisedly told her not to wear an updo for the state opening of parliament in 1984.) One of those who did so was Wee Jimmy Krankie, the 10-year-old schoolboy who was played by a thirtysomething comedian, Janette Tough.

But this was only the start. In 1995, Channel 4 decided to capitalise on the debate around her mental health – Nicholas Soames, the Tory MP, had described Diana as being in the advanced stages of paranoia after her interview with the BBC’s Panorama – by commissioning Psychoanalysing Diana. The programme featured a shrink, Dylan Evans, who would put her on the couch; she would be played by a professional lookalike, Nicky Lilley. In the end, there was an outcry, and it wasn’t screened. (Michael Gove – yes, that Gove – who somehow saw it, later revealed that Evans described Diana’s romantic relationships as an echo of her bulimia, all “consumption and regurgitation”.) But just try to imagine the mind of the producer who dreamed it up.

Novels were written about her, by serious writers (Monica Ali, Emma Tennant). In polls of great Britons, she came near the top, above Isaac Newton and Shakespeare. Most astonishingly, in 1994, a period when Charles and Diana’s parenting was much discussed in the press, the Labour MP Frank Field proposed that a “panel of parliamentary wise men” be given the responsibility of raising William and Harry (the speaker managed to stop him raising this in the Commons).

Was Field deranged? In the cold light of day, yes. In context, no: he was simply joining in. Diana, of course, would have been appalled by his idea, not least because some part of her believed she was beyond criticism: an immaculate, even numinous being. She once challenged the spiritual credentials of a startled Peter Nott, the bishop of Norwich, on the grounds that he refused to tell people, as she liked to, that we’re protected in life by the spirits of dead loved ones.

The cruel, ruthless way Diana’s privacy was invaded is well-documented, and White devotes many pages to it; James Whittaker, the late, tomato-like royal correspondent of the Sun and the Mirror, comes in for special attention. But it’s Dianaworld and its accumulation of tiny details that in the end most forcefully reminds you of what it might have been like to be her. Her giant head! Her vibrator, which she called “le gadget”! The fact that she was 30 before she knew how to cook pasta! Some days, she must have been wrapped in embarrassment.

Yet one’s sympathy is ever limited. White makes no judgement. He’s a social historian type, not Tina Brown. Such coolness and distance, however, only serve to make it the more remarkable how rarely Diana emerges from the pages of his book with full credit. No one seems to remember now that even Norman Fowler, the Conservative secretary of state for health, publicly shook hands with HIV-positive patients before she did.

Dianaworld by Edward White (Penguin Books Ltd, £25). Available soon from our new shop observershop.co.uk. Delivery charges may apply.

Photograph: Anwar Hussein/WireImage