Christopher Henning    

2,184 words

6 September 1997

The Age

London -- Ingenue, devoted mother, thwarted wife, fashion icon, good Samaritan.

ANALYSED, the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, does not amount to much. Born  into an aristocratic family, she had a miserable childhood blighted by her parents' acrimonious separation and divorce. She performed poorly at school and,  after leaving, took various jobs associated with child care.

She then met and married the Prince of Wales and bore him two sons. She had at least one affair before her marriage, too, ended in an acrimonious divorce. She had more affairs after it. Despite a running battle with her in-laws, she worked hard for a series of good causes and raised a lot of money for them. She died in a car crash with her latest boyfriend.

It is not a negligible life, but it hardly seems the stuff of which saints are made. Yet a saint - a secular saint, if such a thing is possible -is what Diana is becoming.

Millions of people - most of whom never met her - across the world are mourning her with grief as genuine as if they had lost a personal friend, a sister, a daughter.

Those who did meet her tell stories of her wonderful kindness that eased their suffering or brought hope into their misery, of how unprompted she remembered their birthdays, or consoled them for their husband's death. In London mourners report seeing visions of her appearing on a painting in St James's Palace.

What is going on? A key to the answer lies in her status as the perfect victim. Her youth, physical beauty and her simple but genuine desire to give and  receive love encapsulate in an ideal form the image everyone has within them of  their own self. She represented promise and innocence combined: she was the ideal of the innocent child going out and finding her way in a harsh and unfeeling world, as every child must do as it grows to adulthood.

In Diana's case, the harsh and unfeeling world took the form of her husband's  family. Without doubt it will become a film. Imagine the opening sequence: a beautiful girl, shot from below, walking slowly, wide-eyed towards the overwhelming, passionless facade of Buckingham Palace.

Her battle with the House of Windsor - which was the defining element of her life - was a hopeless struggle and ended in defeat. It was a pattern that is repeated in the lives of millions.

But her apparent weakness was in fact her strength: while she was in the process of being defeated and rejected, she spoke to the whole world of her vulnerability and hurt, and won the world to her side. The queues, the flowers and the tears that have inundated Britain this week prove that.

Moreover, defeated in life she remained defiant; in death she is triumphant. "She whom the gods love dies young" - the adage could have been written for Diana.

Instead of fading away into middle-aged ignominy as Lady Diana, Mrs Dodi al-Fayed, Queen of Eurotrash, she has been transfigured by death into a superstar, fixed forever at the zenith of her trajectory across the heavens. Diana, Queen of Hearts - not Everywoman or Everyman, but Everychild.

THE circumstances of her death - in a car driven at great speed to elude paparazzi - have brought into the foreground the role of the media in her life. Though she loathed them, the media were central to the myth she has become. They  were and are the means by which she has been transformed into the people's princess.

Initially an unwilling subject, Diana grew accustomed to the spotlight and learnt to use it to her own ends. Diana makes no sense unless she is assessed in  media terms. Her beauty was the key. Blonde, tall, athletic, physically robust,  she represented a feminine ideal.

The fact that she had managed to find a prince to marry consolidated every traditional view of the relationship between man and woman. Diana was an archetype.

In this media dream, her sense of style, and her growing confidence in her own taste for fashion, were major assets. She loved clothes and they loved her back. What she wore made news and created styles. When, as a shy 20-year-old, she appeared in frilly collars, jumpers and pearls with her hair cut into a low fringe, millions of girls went out and bought the same.

Later, when Diana had matured and was being advised by some of the fashion world's top designers, the clothes she wore were out of the reach of the public,  but this transformation from girl-next-door to super-consumer brought no resentment. She would one day be Queen, after all, and she should look the part.

With Diana as their model, British designers gained a huge boost in the fashion market. Designers such as Bruce Oldfield and Catherine Walker won global  publicity after Diana wore their creations.

(Notably, her divorce marked a change in her taste and not only in clothes. She was seen in fewer British and more French designs. She bought an Audi. It was as if she was saying to the British establishment and its dutiful, trade-based patriotism: "Right, I'm going to drive a German car and wear French clothes.")

But with fashion consciousness goes a body image that is the reverse of healthy. Diana's feelings of inadequacy in her marriage and her allotted public role found expression in bulimia, the slimmer's disease. But this, too, she eventually turned into a positive for herself. As part of her cathartic confessions after her split from Charles she told the story of her bulimia and reached out to millions who suffered in isolation, misery and guilt from the same condition.

Her enormous popularity was a potent political force, sustained by her choice  of causes. The most recent, her crusade to ban landmines, was a case in point. When Conservative politicians in Britain, concerned at the consequences of a ban  on Britain's arms industry, attacked her for meddling in politics, it was they,  not she, who were damaged.

Pictures of her in Bosnia and Angola with the victims of the weapons were sufficient rebuttal. "I am not a political figure. I am a humanitarian figure," she said - and that was that.

The campaign is going ahead,  and this week at a conference in Oslo, the Norwegian Foreign Minister recommended that any international agreement to ban them should be named in honor of the Princess of Wales. If it happens, it will be her greatest concrete achievement.

Once Diana had been rejected by the establishment - which chose to make its displeasure known in a thousand petty cruelties, such as the removal of her name  from the list of those members of the royal family mentioned in Parliament's prayers - she became a sort of de facto patron of British society's salon des refuses.

Here her relationship with Dodi al-Fayed fitted perfectly. Mr Fayed's father,  Mohamed al-Fayed, was a newcomer to the upper echelons of British society and one whose attempts to join had been rebuffed by the establishment. In this he was, somewhat like Diana, frozen out by the petty-minded.

Not long before her death, her closeness to the Fayeds was criticised in the Conservative press. Mohamed Fayed is a controversial figure in Britain for the role he played in exposing corruption in the Conservative Government of John Major. However hard he tries, the owner of Harrods will never be accepted at the  top of English society.

There is also an unspoken undercurrent in all this of horror that the mother of the future king of England should be connected with a Muslim family from Egypt. Diana would have relished their alarm.

They can't cope with difference; her self-created image as the Queen of Hearts, she was perfectly at ease pictured with outsiders of all sorts: women in  refuges, AIDS sufferers, mine victims, people from all races and creeds.

David Starkey, a lecturer in history at the London School of Economics, says Diana's political significance is deeper than the causes she embraced and the personalities she backed. She reflects a change in the nature of politics itself.

"Diana, objectively, is not a lot. Her achievement is tiny. But that does not  matter," he says. "It is truly irrelevant. What she is is the first world star.  We have called her queen of hearts. She is a new queen of a secular heaven. She  is the ultimate celebrity.

"This is the advent not so much of modernity as of the postmodern. We are moving into a new century in which there is a genuine democracy. I would say that the election of New Labour was the first signal. That was the emptying of all content from politics, all argument, all discourse. What we are seeing now is what has replaced it. It is a society of pure sensation."

Diana's legacy for the monarchy has been absolutely poisonous. The House of Windsor failed spectacularly to see, let alone exploit, Diana's talents when she  was alive. Now, in death, she is damaging them still. Alive she united the nation and in death she is doing it as well.

Mourner after mourner standing in the queues at St James's Palace and in big towns across the country repeats the line: "I'm not a royalist, but I had to pay  my respects."

Yet royalists mourn her too. In Northern Ireland, loyalists and nationalists are united in their grief. Even Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, whose military arm, the IRA, is believed to have intended at one stage to assassinate her, felt obliged to pay his respects.

Uniting the country is the task that the Windsors are supposed to perform. Diana has usurped their role, and performed it better than they could or can.

Who among the surviving royal family could achieve what she has? Thanks to Diana, the next king of England has the image in the general public's eye of a dim-witted, cruel, faithless twerp.

Partly that is through Charles' own ineptitude, and partly through Diana's own campaign against him and the establishment he represented. Such is the public feeling against him following her death that it will not be wholly surprising if at her funeral today he is booed as he passes the crowds lining the route.

Moreover, the next king but one is her own son, who was very close to her. Diana's estrangement from the establishment must have an effect on him, however much he is now surrounded and educated in kingship by the courtiers whom Diana loathed and who, by all accounts, hated her.

TWO generations of potential Windsor monarchs have thus been either undermined or subtly suborned by her influence - and the first of them is not even on the throne yet.

Even the Queen, who through all the troubles had remained above reproach, has  now come in for criticism for the way royal protocol and tradition have appeared to slight Diana after her death.

The Princess of Wales herself, of course - despite her self-confessed adultery, her waywardness, her self-indulgence, her expressed desire to leave Britain - is, in the days immediately after her death, beyond reproach. She is the brightest star in the heavens, whose brilliance obliterates any feeble glory  emanating from the Windsors' grim and chilly palaces.

According to David Starkey, the change is partly generational, and criticism of the Queen is therefore unfair.

"The royal family represent that older world of duty in which you were supposed to subordinate your personal feelings to public reputation," he says.

"The Queen represents the values that, after all, took Britain through the Second World War. Imagine if we had need to touch and kiss every time someone was killed in the Second World War. That older set of values is dead. The Queen can't be expected to change."

The death of Diana has brought the British monarchy to its lowest ebb since the abdication crisis of 1936 - but that does not mean Britain is about to become a republic.

The instinct for social subordination, of which the monarchy is both the foundation and the keystone of the highest arch, is too strong.

The quiet delight at perceiving another's inferiority to oneself is a pleasure too dear to the British - or at least the English - character for the monarchy peacefully to be overthrown.

Instead, Britain looks set to return to its pre-Victorian condition: lorded over by an isolated royal house for which its subjects feel either shame, contempt or loathing.