ANOTHER VOICE
For each princess kills the thing she loves
CHARLES MOORE
Having attacked press intrusion into royal privacy, I feel in quite a strong posi- tion to defend the press from the latest charge, that it has driven the Princess of Wales from private life. It is her separation from her husband, and that alone, which has changed her role.
The Princess is only royal by association. If that association weakens, so must her status. Princess Margaret divorced Lord Snowdon and he sensibly got on with taking photographs. Princess Anne divorced Cap- tain Mark Phillips, and now he teaches people in Ireland how to hunt. The Princess of Wales cannot avoid being sub- ject to the same process of relegation. Try- ing to continue as before was bound, even with the best will in the world, to be com- petitive. And the best will in the world was not there.
So the speech she made at the Headway luncheon last Friday was in bad taste. It was melodramatic to choose the occasion which she had attended a year before on the day that her separation was announced. It was unnecessary, in fact, to make a speech at all. A statement could have been issued (and should have been issued at the time) saying simply that, in view of her sep- aration, the Princess was withdrawing from public life and intended to devote herself to the upbringing of her children.
Instead of which, the Princess decides that this is an occasion for telling us her feelings. She says that press interest affect- ed 'my personal life, in a manner that has been hard to bear'. Yes, it has been terri- ble, but who let her friends talk to Andrew Morton? If she were still with her husband, press intrusion, however vile, could not hound her out.
`I hope you can find it in your hearts,' the Princess goes on, 'to understand and to give me the time and space that has been lack- ing in recent years.' Why should it be a question for our hearts? Why should we, the public, be invited to say, 'Yes, we love you, Diana. And because we love you, we'll let you leave us', the implication being that, loving her still, we shall have her back later? It is irrelevant whether we love her. It is irrelevant whether she needs time and `space' (what depths of rubbishy psychology are plumbed in that single word). All that is relevant is that she is gradually becoming unroyal and should therefore retire from the scene.
Even in her thanks to 'the public in gen- era]', the Princess turns what should be a matter of courtesy into a play on the emo- tions. We have given her, she says, 'heart- felt support', and our `kindness and affec- tion have carried me through some of the most difficult periods'. But that's not what our kindness and affection were there for. They weren't there to carry her through anything, though it is nice that they did. They were there in deference to the monar- chy, in whose life she played an important part. We thought that she played it extremely well, and were grateful. It is becoming clearer that, despite her real gifts, we thought wrong.
In a pedantry which irritates my col- leagues at the Sunday Telegraph, I am for- ever saying, 'There is no such person as "Princess Diana" ' and insisting that she is given her proper title in all copy. I am right technically, but wrong psychologically. She is 'Princess Diana', a person who has come to imagine herself as inherently royal rather than royal only in reference to a relationship with somebody else, a woman with a sense of destiny rather than a sense of duty, a heroine from a schoolgirl's maga- zine. 'The Princess of Wales' is a descrip- tion, a title held by several women in histo- ry. 'Princess Diana' is she alone, beautiful and dangerous and unstable.
It is harsh to say all this about someone who came to something very difficult very young and has suffered since, but it needs saying because the Cult of Diana goes on and may even flourish more in her retire- ment. The Cult of Diana is part of the reli- gion of sentimental egotism which is replacing religion itself. It was no accident that the Princess's last big engagement before her speech was to attend a Concert of Hope for World Aids Day, or that Esther Rantzen attended the luncheon and
declared herself 'profoundly moved'. All those egos scrambling for 'personal space' like the great powers used to scramble for Africa. All that display of emotion as a dis- play of self. All that lighting back tears' so that people know how interesting and vul- nerable you are. 'You do not cry about yourself,' said this paper's thoughtful High Life correspondent on Desert Island Discs last week, 'but about things like soldiers marching.' That principle is not understood by the Cult of Diana. . the curse of sentimentality,' writes I.A. Richards in Practical Criticism, ' . . . is not that its victims have too much feeling, but that they have too little, that they see life in too specialised a fashion and respond to it too narrowly.' Sentimentality is emo- tion for its own sake, deliberately willed or deliberately partial, emotion whipped up or played for, self-dramatised, not self-under- stood. Sentimentality takes a good cause Aids victims, abused children, the royal family — and exploits the emotions associ- ated with them. It is the guiding principle of the Cult of Diana.
The material for that exploitation is always there, Richards points out, but any- one with proper feeling would treat it with restraint: If the mere fact that some girl somewhere is . . . lamenting were an occa- sion for emotion, into what convulsions might not the evening paper throw us nightly.' The Cult of Diana glories in such convulsions.
They are very destructive and very exhausting, particularly for an institution like the British monarchy. Some newspa- pers claimed this weekend that the court or `the Establishment' had been ruthless in harrying the Princess of Wales. Ruthless! They have been restrained almost to the point of insanity. They have not been able to stop her acting as she wishes or saying what she wants; and when her Cult has attacked them, they have had no power to answer. Indeed, they remain bound by a loyalty to her, so long as she is Princess of Wales, which the character called Princess Diana seems neither to recognise nor recip- rocate. Imagine them pleading for lime and space', and you see at once how much higher standards we impose on them than on her.
But in the end the Princess is right. It is her we should feel sorry for and find it in our hearts to understand. For the Cult of Diana is killing the thing it loves.
Previous page
