Last Call: Saint Diana
Reid, Stuart
LAST CALL by Stuart Reid Saint Diana I T WAS A FAIRY-TALE FUNERAL. More than a million mourners watched the gun carriage bearing the coffin make its way from Kensington Palace to Westminster...
...Mother Teresa put the fear of God into people: like many real saints, she was not an attractive figure...
...One radio station offered free counseling to those in distress...
...As I write, the story is changing every minute, and so is the mood...
...SOVEREIGNTY IS NOW VESTED IN THE PEOPLE...
...a secular saint has been created by popular acclamation...
...And there were concessions to popular sentiment: the congregation, taking its cue from the pop concert crowds outside, clapped when Diana's brother, Lord Spencer, had finished insulting the press and rebuking the royal family...
...Within three days of the accident in Paris, a dozen people emerged from St...
...Inside the Abbey itself, last resting place of Edward the Confessor, 2,000 guests—from show business, politics, fashion, and the media—followed the specially tailored liturgy...
...Some blame the Freemasons, some MI5...
...What can have been going through their minds...
...The People, inflamed by the STUART REID, a frequent contributor, is associate editor for comment at London's Sunday Telegraph...
...So, perhaps surprisingly, did such robust and unsentimental thinkers as Paul Johnson and Auberon Waugh...
...We look at our own children and are consumed with guilt...
...In her "Panorama" interview Diana (all mascara and pleading, puppy dog eyes) suggested that Charles might not become king...
...Some blame him for Diana's death...
...There were concessions to tradition: Elton John did not wear earrings (or a tiara) when he sang his hastily revised version of "Candle in the Wind...
...Diana, on the other hand, made people feel good about themselves, which is why she is worshipped...
...The tens of thousands who turned up at Kensington Gardens to lay wreaths or teddy bears and to say a prayer were, of (Continued on page 85) 90 October 1997 • The American Spectator (Continued from page 9o) course, paying homage to glamour, but they were also paying homage to what they saw as —and what may have been ?genuine goodness...
...What is important here is that the bitterness between Diana and Charles provided the newspapers, broadsheet as well as tabloid, with endless copy, much of it meretricious and nasty...
...It remains possible, however, that he will step aside for William when Elizabeth dies, and hand over what remains of the British monarchy to a new generation...
...London went mad, making Los Angeles look like a city of monastic dignity...
...Diana had the common touch...
...ANYTHING IS NOW POSSIBLE...
...THE FUNERAL WAS THE BIGGEST EVENT EVER staged in London (only 300,000 saw Winston Churchill off in 1965...
...WHAT OF THE GOVERNMENT...
...All the grief that had attended the deaths of Elvis, Marilyn, James Dean, Jim Morrison, and John Lennon was focused on the cruelly broken body of the greatest icon of them all: Diana, Princess of Wales...
...But the People's Princess was very far from being of the people...
...The Queen of Hearts has become the People's Princess, less regal but more powerful...
...Tony Blair has come out of the tragedy well...
...The rest is history...
...He is the first Prime Minister to be more popular than the royal family, and he doesn't care who knows it...
...On the other hand, to the disappointment of news desks around the world, nobody booed the Queen...
...It was a wretched, shaming business, this orgy of bullying sentimentality...
...Both used the press for their own purposes, but Diana was better at it than Charles, because she provided the picture editors with the spreads that dreams are made of...
...There is one constant, however: the pain of the young Princes...
...He is riddled with guilt...
...He was condemned as wicked—or weak, since he was apparently obeying the Queen's orders—for taking William and Harry to church on the morning of their mother's death...
...Neither the Prince nor the Princess was innocent in all this, of course...
...AT 20, IN KEEPING WITH THE FAMILY TRADITION of royal service, she became a sacrificial virgin to the House of Windsor...
...WITH DIANA'S DEATH A CULT HAS BEEN BORN...
...The death of the Princess was treated as the greatest story ever told: greater than D-Day, greater than the moon landings, greater even than the Coronation of 1953...
...The one thing the Queen did not give the People was tears, but at least the Princes William and Harry wept, and we all bawled along with them...
...And if all else failed, as it sometimes did, there was always the fortune teller...
...Not even Oprah Winfrey would tolerate so loopy a comment...
...To her friends she was Mother Teresa with legs...
...He still appeals to the conservative and moderate and liberal instincts that linger in the English soul...
...There were calls for the creation of a new public holiday, Diana Day...
...It was he who, on the morning of the crash, reached out to his, and her, constituency and (rodent eyes burning with sincerity) proclaimed her "the People's Princess...
...Her mother was Frances Ruth Burke Roche, the youngest daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy...
...I have myself contributed to the process...
...At the end of the week the monarchy as we have known it for most of this century, a mixture of stoicism, decency, and cod medieval tradition, was dead...
...It came at the end of a week of hysterical grieving in which endless rivers of syrup had flowed from television, radio, and newspapers...
...Republicans are delighted...
...The newspapers did not kill Diana, however...
...in place of the shriving stool she offered the therapist's couch...
...She worked hard and raised vast sums for many worthy causes (let us not quibble about land mines...
...brutish tabloids, demanded public grief from the Queen, and they got it...
...In place of self-denial Saint Diana offered self-fulfillment...
...She spoke to the least powerful in the land, to the blacks, the homosexuals, the cripples...
...We look at William and Harry following their mother's coffin and we can scarcely bear the misery...
...The baseball cap had triumphed over the crown...
...The French police, less plausibly, blame the paparazzi...
...and she would certainly have wanted William to succeed in her former husband's stead...
...In doing so he was suggesting, albeit obliquely, that the legitimacy of the monarchy rests on the will of a sovereign people led by a democratically elected prime minister...
...James's Palace, where Diana's body was lying in the royal chapel, and said that they had seen the superstar smiling down at them from the corner of a portrait of Charles I. Soon, no doubt, miracles will be performed in her name...
...It undermined the monarchy as much as it undermined the unhappy couple...
...To HER ENEMIES, MANY of whom discovered a sudden warmth for her in the immediate aftermath of her death, she was a scheming, manipulative woman...
...Her Majesty made an unprecedented live broadcast and ordered the Union Jack to be flown at half mast over Buckingham Palace, something that had never happened before, even for a dead monarch...
...What Diana wants Diana is likely to get...
...In the Guardian a psychologist called Dorothy Rowe suggested that the church outing "was an act of child abuse meriting a call to the NSPCC...
...CHARLES, IN CONTRAST, doesn't make people feel good about themselves...
...Rita Rogers, the psychic Diana and Dodi Al Fayed consulted a fortnight before their fatal crash, went into mourning at the beginning of September...
...in place of the contemplative's cell she offered, and demanded, "space...
...Let us hope we never find out...
...Diana's friendship with the ancient nun, who, with poor timing, died in the same week, did neither of them any harm, but the two women had nothing in common, beyond an interest in dying children...
...Diana was descended from Charles II and James II, and is Charles's seventh cousin once removed...
...The Spencers had served the royal family for generations, her maternal grandmother having been a Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen Mother...
...They loved her...
...More than a million mourners watched the gun carriage bearing the coffin make its way from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey...
...Diana's death has not diminished Tony Blair...
...Her father was Edward John Viscount Althorp (pronounced, dyslexically, Awltrop), the only son of the 7th Earl Spencer...
...She fed the hungry and comforted the sick...
...In the week before the funeral a revolution took place in England...
...If ever Charles wears the crown, his head will lie more uneasy than most...
...Charles's position seemed hopeless immediately after Diana's death, but he had gained a lot of sympathy by the time of the funeral...
...The poor fellow doesn't feel good about himself...
...That (not murder) was their crime...
...they created her by promoting her far beyond her merit...
...Said a friend: "Rita is terribly upset, naturally...
...Naturally...
...The American Spectator ?October 19 97 85...
...You can't have everything, even in a fairy tale...
...The House of Windsor cannot hope to compete...
...DIANA WAS FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS, but she put her fame to good use...
Vol. 30 • October 1997 • No. 10
