Chapter Twenty-Four ‘A Girl Given the Name of the Ancient Goddess of Hunting Was, in the End, the Most Hunted Person of #3
I said to my family, as that week after her death progressed, that if you had taken a global straw poll of the one person in the world that people thought least likely to die, on the day before her fatal accident, Diana might well have come out top.
She was so young and healthy, and seemed vibrantly indestructible.
How could she possibly be a candidate for death?
I wished then, as I did countless times in the aftermath of her death, that Diana had known how very deeply loved she remained in her final days.
I am convinced that she had no idea – indeed, I fear she felt the opposite was true.
She read the British tabloids avidly, against the advice of us who loved her, because she could not stop herself doing so.
And, to her tearful despair, so much that was written about her at this time was critical and cruel.
Brigitte Bardot, the French film star who was similarly lionized and dissected by the world’s media a generation before Diana, once confided to a documentary-maker how she was made to feel ‘cornered, trapped, smothered, to the point of suffocation, to the point of just wanting to die’, and something deep inside me worried very much that Diana had felt the same when at her most vulnerable.
There is no doubt that much of the British media had turned against her.
That Sunday morning, as she lay dying, then died, several of London’s tabloids quickly changed their initial vicious headlines, feasting off Diana’s private life, to words of shock and mourning.
The News of the World and the Sunday Mirror went for DIANA DEAD in huge script, judging that their readers could not be expected to absorb any more than those two words.
While she lived, much of Fleet Street seemed to think she must be held tight in the bespoke stocks they had created for her. It was the fate they had decided she deserved. They saw that people lapped up their spiteful output.
But I believe that they had not properly understood their readers. Yes, people had an endless appetite for Diana stories. But if the coverage had been kind and fair, rather than as it was, I suspect their circulations would have gone up.
Many readers were not to be swayed when the printed media turned against Diana. A connection had been forged that forgave or understood her human failings, and there was identification with her battles.
After Diana’s death I heard from so many women, in particular, who had passed through the landmarks of their lives in step with her, even while living continents apart, and in wildly different circumstances.
They, too, had married young, had their children, then struggled in marriages with husbands unable to match their dreams or expectations.
They, too, had divorced, or had battled personal demons in their lives that echoed Diana’s eating disorders.
Such women felt that Diana understood them, and they reckoned they understood her in return.
That somebody so deeply glamorous could share their disappointments, their pain, while thrilling them with her charisma, her looks and her character, formed a unique, unspoken, contract.
Some also recognized that the causes Diana championed were important, not only to her but to the world.
Members of the gay community remained for ever grateful for what she had done for them by shaking the hand of that anonymous AIDS patient, in a London hospital, ten years before, without wearing gloves.
This called out the tabloid lie that termed AIDS the ‘gay plague’.
Diana would take her crusade against fear and prejudice global, visiting a hostel in S?o Paulo, in 1991, inhabited by children who had been abandoned because they were HIV positive or had AIDS.
She had done the same for those with leprosy. In 1989 she held the hand of a sufferer in Jakarta, Indonesia, and would travel to India, Nepal and Zimbabwe fighting leprosy’s stigma, again emphasizing that it could not be transmitted by touch.
In what would turn out to be the last few weeks of her life, I had received a long letter from Diana in which she wrote excitedly about her time in Bosnia, campaigning against landmines.
She described meeting many inspiring figures – victims who had lost their limbs or vision, as well as those who were fighting to end this manmade scourge.
Her commitment to this new cause was total, and thoughtful.
Yet she was frustrated by the media, which remained more interested in her love life – there had been a tug of war over paparazzi photographs of Diana and Dodi Fayed courting in the Mediterranean – than in giving her anti-landmine campaign serious coverage.
We returned to Jane and Robert’s house, and I stayed up very late that night, reading through my words again and again.
Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, recorded in his diary for that same day before the funeral, 5 September: ‘Piers Morgan called and asked me to do all that I could to stop Charles Spencer attacking the press.’ He was worried about what I might say in my eulogy.
Campbell, who I only got to know several years later, and had not even met at this stage, did no such thing.
In any case, by then it was too late.