High life
A woman wronged
Taki T.Gstaad he Princess of Wales is no longer HRH and as far as I'm concerned this stinks to high heaven. I've been at times a severe critic of Princess Di, but this is ridiculous. She has been downgraded for no other reason than the wish of the grotesque courtiers who rule within the palace walls to humiliate someone they consider a loose cannon.
Let's take it from the top. Yes, she did go on television to say that her husband was unfit to be king. Yes, she did tell close friends to collaborate with Andrew Mor- ton. Yes, she did have one affair while mar- ried. (It is pure guesswork but I'd bet that, Prince Charles aside, the only other three men to have been intimate with the divine Diana are the ghastly Hewitt, Oliver Hoare and Captain Carling.) Those are her only sins, sins that may have cost her that pretty head of hers 350 years ago, but this is 1996. However pro- monarchy and Prince Charles I may be, let's face it, he started it. The breakdown of a marriage is more often than not the man's fault, and is most definitely the case when the man is older, wiser and far more experienced, as is Prince Charles. Diana was an innocent and should have been treated with kid gloves by the Windsors. She was not. The emotional distancing which so characterises the royal family and the English upper classes worked miracles in the breaking down of the marriage.
So, like the brave woman that she is, she decided to fight back. She did use the press, but what other choice did she have? Going to see John Major or St John-Stevas would have been laughable. She was a woman wronged who got her own back and destroyed herself in the process. It is as simple as that. Now is the time for compas- sion and for understanding. Yet Bucking- ham Palace did the opposite and played hardball. Even Lord Wakeham, who should have known better, stabbed Diana in the back with his statement on the paparazzi. Basically, Wakeham has given the scum a charter to haunt her.
What does the future hold for Diana? Easy! It is very bleak. The tabloids and the paparazzi are not going to lay off. They will continue to hound, stalk and make her life intolerable. If the poor woman breaks down, they will report the breakdown with glee, and then stalk and hound some more. If she plays ball, they will up the stakes. They will not stop until she either commits suicide or leaves the country. Which is what I expect she will be forced to do one day during the next two to four years, espe- cially after her children finish school.
If she asked me for my advice, this is what I would say: Go to America, where on a large Connecticut estate within an hour's drive from the Big Bagel, she would find the peace so lacking in England. Small, exclusive townships in America have ordi- nances that prohibit the paparazzi vermin from ruining people's lives. It may be a free country, but freedom does not mean one is free to hound, harass and destroy another's life.
Jackie Kennedy escaped the Kennedy yoke by marrying An Onassis and making herself independently rich. Diana should do the same. There are very few, if any, Englishmen who could keep her in the style she deserves to be kept in, and to be able to protect her from the tabloids and the pests. In America there are such men, and it would be only a matter of time before she met one of them.
What your correspondent finds inexplica- ble is the inability of English law to protect someone like the Princess of Wales from the kind of scum who taunted her, swore at her and just about physically assaulted her. Is it possible that paedophiles and well- known criminals can enjoy their citizens' rights under the full protection of the law, whereas a single woman, a mother of two, a Princess of Wales, is left at the mercy of these perverse degenerates who nowadays pass as newshounds?
Jeffrey Bernard will return next week
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