The Other Unfortunate Princess of Wales

The Many Myths about Diana

I got interested in conspiracy theories when I realized how many phony stories are floating around in the mass media. Even when it doesn’t matter, our media like to lie to us. Two cases in specific exploded the media’s credibility for me. One was about Amanda Knox (which is another story for another day) and the other is about the late Diana, Princess of Wales. Back in the 1980s, everything Diana did and wore was big news, from her fairy tale wedding to her two sons to her troubled marriage and subsequent divorce. I want to say everything she said was big news, but she never said much of anything. She was all image.

And since the Fourth of July is the day every American celebrates not having to care about the royal family, I thought I’d take July 5 to write about possibly the most interesting royal personage in the 20th century.

The story of Diana sold to the American press was a love story wrapped in a romance wrapped in British history. It was also a pack of lies.

Here is how the American press presented Diana to us.

• She was a commoner who married into the royal family, a world she did not know and could scarcely imagine

• She was earning her living working in a preschool or kindergarten to make ends meet

• She lived in a London apartment with four or five other flat-mates since London was so expensive

• Her meeting with Charles was serendipitous and they just had that “thunder-bolt” moment of attraction

• She believed Charles was in love with her

• She was madly in love with Charles

• The royal family was very cold to her

• Diana did everything she could to make the marriage work, but Charles ran around on her

• Diana was devoted to two things: her children and charity work

That all makes for a nice story, but it is not true, at least not entirely and certainly not as it was packaged and sold to a royal-hungry American population. And this is where I first figured out that the media was telling us stories. Sometimes plausible stories, often phony-baloney stories, but a prepackaged narrative.

Diana was a commoner, it is true, but royal watchers know that there are only two strata of humans: royals and commoners. Anyone not a royal is de facto a commoner. So Diana was a commoner, but in America this made it sound as if she was an ordinary person, born to ordinary parents. Diana was born into the British aristocracy. She was born to the bluest of the British blue-blood families, the Spencer-Churchills. (Yes, she’s related to that other Churchill.)

She was born at Park House which is a home that her parents rented on the estate of Sandringham. Sandringham was owned by the Queen, so Diana was born on the Queen’s property and the Queen was her parents’ landlord. Diana was of noble birth and she had a title. Even if she had never met Prince Charles, she would have lived and died as Lady Diana. (Lady is the female equivalent of Earl.)

As the youngest of five children, Diana grew up at Althorp, a nearby estate that had been in the Spencer family for 20 generations. Diana was raised in a world of servants, estates, titles, and money. The Spencer family in many ways is more British than the royal family, and it is likely for this reason that Diana was seen as such a good match for Charles. As the son of Charles and Diana Spencer-Churchill, Prince William has bluer blood than his father or grandmother.

Althorp is open to the public today and is also the residence of Diana’s brother, Earl Charles Spencer. It is home to a prestigious art collection of older works in a sort of in-house museum. When you grow up in a home that has its own art museum of Old Masters, you are not a “commoner,” at least not in the same way as a commoner who grows up in a working class flat in Liverpool.

I once heard a British man say Diana was “born and bred” to be queen one day. Charles was just the last piece of the puzzle. I am not sure her path to the palace was that certain, but she was definitely brought up as “the right stuff” for the crown.

The life of the royals is a mystery to those who are not royal—the royal family lives in a very protected and rather opaque bubble. But Diana was born as close to royal as you can be without being royal. She was born on a royal estate. She reports having played with kids in the royal household as a child and even called the queen “Aunt Lilibet.” However, during her childhood years and youth, she never met Prince Charles—that was a choreographed event later on.

As a child, Diana was nicknamed “Dutch.” This was a shortening of the term Duchess, a high title in the ranks of nobility and one that Diana unabashedly sought. She was born a Lady in her own right but she wanted to be higher up in the ranks. Duchess is the title right below Princess. The only way to be a Duchess is to be born a Duchess, be named a Duchess (the monarch can do that), or marry a Duke. The latter was the route Diana expected to take. So intent was she on upward British mobility that all her life, those nearest to her nicknamed her “Dutch.” Even when she became Princess of Wales, her friends like Sarah Ferguson called her Dutch.

Diana lived in an apartment in London with several other young women, but nobody told me that Diana owned the apartment. Actually, Diana’s family owned the apartment and gave it to her. Diana was the landlord and the other ladies living there paid Diana their rent, which was Diana’s walking-around money. Real estate in London is astonishingly expensive and Diana’s so-called “bachelorette pad” was recently valued at 2.4M pounds (slightly over $3M). The apartment was at Coleherne Court in the tony and super-chic Knightsbridge neighborhood.

Diana and her girlfriends worked at a variety of unlikely and menial jobs: some were maids, some babysat, some were sales clerks, and some waited tables. Curiously, this was a fad among the wealthy elite girls of London—known as Sloane Rangers after Sloane Square shopping district in uber-expensive West London. Diana was the quintessential Sloane Ranger: pretty young girls from privileged backgrounds destined to become socialites. Their main job was to marry well and stay married. Sloanes, as they were sometimes called, did not enjoy a reputation of being particularly bright, worldly, educated, or influential.

The Sloanes were not distinguihsed as hard or serious workers; they worked haphazardly, sometimes showing up for work, more often not, and working maybe a few hours a week, for a few weeks. The jobs were jokes to them, goofs. These low-level jobs were just something to fill the time between ladies’ luncheons and dates with prospective suitors. Diana worked in day care and sometimes babysat. She did not work because she needed the money, although the American press made her seem like a girl of humble origins. Her father, known as the first Earl of Spencer, was so rich that he married wearing a pair of shoes adorned with diamonds. (There is a Paul Simon song about a rich girl with diamonds on the soles of her shoes—but this was real.) Spencer’s diamonds were not just a couple sparklers, either. The diamonds on his shoes were valued at $3.8M and it was a frivolous fashion whim.

Diana may have worked as a helper at a day care center, but she most assuredly did not do so for the paycheck.

The three Spencer girls (Sarah, Jane, and Diana—Diana was the youngest) were always considered good candidates for a royal marriage, with Prince Charles, the next-in-line to the throne, being the best catch of all. In fact, Charles dated Diana’s older sister for a spell, but sister Sarah did not like him. Diana was much more infatuated with royal titles than her sisters.

The meeting of Diana and Charles was no “meet cute” event. Diana was vetted as an appropriate bride for a future king at a time when Prince Philip was pushing hard for his son Charles to get married. Their meeting was orchestrated and they only saw each other 13 times in total before they wed. Charles famously was asked in an interview if he was in love with Diana. He said yes, but quickly added, “Whatever love is!” Diana for her part claimed that she loved Charles, but she confided to her sister Sarah right before the wedding day that she wanted to back out of the marriage.

This was close to an arranged marriage. Charles needed a suitable young bride and Diana had the right pedigree. She was more than willing; this marriage would put her on the fast track to becoming queen one day. No Sloane Ranger had ever done better.

The story of Charles and Diana was portrayed in the media as a sort of romantic tragedy. Charles, an oafish fool, married Diana but ran around with the much older and dowdier Camilla. Poor Diana loved him madly but he ignored and rejected her. That was the media story. And it’s not true, either.

Diana grew up in the world of British aristocracy and knew that adultery was common in those circles. Her own parents shattered their marriage over extramarital dalliances. Such affairs were even more common among royals. Charles was notoriously interested in other women and had been seriously interested in Camilla over the years. It has been said that Camilla very much wanted to marry Charles and he wanted to marry her, but she was not quite in the same blue-blood league as Diana, who was younger and prettier to boot. In other words, Camilla knew she was out of the running as bride, but she never quite got out of Charles’ life. (By the way, Camilla is the great-great granddaugher of Alice Keppel who was the mistress of Prince Edward, another Prince of Wales and the great-great grandfather of Charles.)

At the royal wedding, the American newsman Tom Brokaw reported that it was known that Charles was “involved” with another woman, meaning Camilla. Now if a mainstream media and generally royalty-clueless guy like Tom Brokaw knew that Charles had eyes for Camilla, surely Diana did, too. In fact, Charles allegedly introduced Diana to Camilla to get Camilla’s opinion. Camilla gave Diana a thumbs-up, since on paper, Diana was the perfect future queen of England. Camilla was always more pragmatic than romantic.

On the day Diana married Charles, she became Princess and when she got the style (that’s what it’s called) of Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales, she jumped out of the mere blue-bloods into the ranks of the royals. She went from being a Sloane Ranger to being the second-highest-ranking woman in the United Kingdom.

Diana suffered from mental illness that was drastically downplayed in the media. She may have had borderline personality disorder. She on occasion had suicidal ideation. As marriage and motherhood started to change her life, the pressures built up. When Charles mentioned he found Diana “chubby” (the royal family prefers gaunt women), she devloped an eating disorder but lost weight. The royal family allegedly was very warm to her at first, even welcoming, but cooled as they found Diana was prone to manipulation and game-playing. Charles once called her a “schemer.”

Later on, Diana sent her kids to boarding school (which is quite typical for British royals) but one biographer reported that she shared a lot of her emotional issues with her son, William. It is really inappropriate for a 30-something woman to complain about marital infidelity and describe her own personal romantic adventures to a kid in high school, let alone to her own son. Yet she treated William as her confidante and friend rather than her child. It is not known how William dealt with being caught between his distant father (and his philandering) and his too-close mother (and her philandering).

Remember, Diana had affairs, too.

Despite the reputation of being a devoted nonstop mother, Diana did not always spend time with her children, although she spent more time with them than Elizabeth took with Charles. During the last year of her life, Diana spent a lot of time with Dodi Fayed—more than she took with her own sons. When she went on the famous television interview where she announced to the world that there were three people in her marriage (“it was a bit crowded”), meaning Charles was carrying on an adulterous affair with Camilla, I have a hard time understanding how a loving, devoted mother who put her kids above all else—would publicly out their father as a cheating dog. No matter what was going on between Charles and Diana, Charles was the father of her children. William was born to be king, and Diana was disrespecting his father.

Diana was well known for her charity work and her appearances at specific events helped these charities raise money. She is praised often for (literally) embracing AIDS patients at a time when Anthony Fauci was telling people that you can catch AIDS by having close contact with people who had the disease. Diana was celebrated for caring for marginalized people. She deserves a lot of credit for this.

She considered charity “her work” but the duties she performed were mostly things like going to parties in high-fashion attire and rubbing elbows with celebrities. This is not to negate the fact that these things generated money—they did. But Diana did not “work” for charities, she partied on their behalf and let photos be taken of her at events. When she felt like it. Diana was often credited for her whirlwind charity work, but Princess Anne booked more events in a year, year over year, than Diana ever did. It’s just that the appearances of the Princess Royal (Anne’s official style) garnered less press.

And Diana’s will, written a few years before her untimely death, left her money entirely to her two sons, with about $100,000 to her friend, Paul Burrell (who worked for her). Personal effects were to be distributed among her 17 godchildren. Notably absent from her will was even one pence for charity. None of those causes about which Diana was so publicly passionate merited any money from her estate.

Now one could argue most people leave their money to their family. But Diana’s family consisted of two extraordinarily wealthy young boys, one of whom was likely to become the King of England. Both sons, as royals, were born millionaires with silver spoons in their mouths. William, once he ascended to the throne, would have access to huge and largely tax-free incomes generated by the nation to support the king. King Charles III has an estimated net worth of $2.3B, some of which he inherited from his mother. Some say his net worth is more like $10B if one factors in the real estate (some of the palaces are the personal property of the monarch). And get this—the British crown jewels are held in trust for the monarch meaning that right now, King Charles owns them and it is likely William will own them one day, tool. Plus monarchs have personal jewelry, too. While Charles is a multi-billionaire, Prince William today has a net worth between $30M and $100M, but much of what his father owns now will pass on to him when he becomes king.

Remember, William is a man who never held a job, at least not in the conventional sense.

Harry’s net worth is estimated at about $10M but having stepped away from royal life and starting on ventures of his own with his wife, his situation is a bit different. It was said that Queen Elizabeth II in her will left more money to Harry than William because she knew William would be a wealthy man as king.

All of that is just to say that Diana had to know that her two sons were financially secure. Diana’s net worth when she died was around $30M, so her bequeathing money to William and Harry was a bit trivial. She could have easily diverted some of that money to charity, particularly since she made it a theme of her “life’s work” and her mission on earth.

In short, I found out after Diana’s untimely death that the fairy tale story we had been sold was just that—a fairy tale. Diana knew who she was marrying and why.

Not only that, Diana played the press like a fiddle. Many of the photos taken of her were arranged—Diana had all of the local paparazzi on speed dial (that was how we did it back then) and she would notify them of when she would be where so they could get their photos. While I admit that Diana at times was hounded by the press and public, she also encouraged a lot of their attention. She was so good at public relations she could bounce Prince Charles or the Queen off the front page of any tabloid by just calling her photographer friends and then stepping out on a balcony in a bikini.

One biographer told a story that when Diana learned of a medical debt amassing for one of her favorite paparrazzi, she gave him some exclusive photo opportunities to offset those bills. That was nice. Otherwise biographers sometimes say that Diana was friendly and pleasant; others said she was aloof and could be rude and difficult.

Please do not think that I am criticizing Diana. In fact, I rather like the true picture of her better than the dimwitted little commoner who fell hopelessly in love with a big mean man who treated her poorly. It just made me realize that the media had fed me a bunch of lies and half-truths to create a fairy tale.

The real story is that Diana was that of a rich aristocratic woman who married Charles to get the title just as he married her to get suitable heirs. It might have worked, but they were hopelessly incompatible and unwilling to change. Even Queen Elizabeth called her son Charles “hopeless,” but I’m sure she had similar words for her daughter-in-law Diana.

And all that brings me to Diana’s death. When Diana died I was told that her death was a terrible tragic accident. But the media had lied to me all along about who Diana was—so why should I believe them? However, the more I looked into her death, the more puzzling it seems. Diana’s death is the one conspiracy theory where I am very much on the fence. I am not convinced Diana’s death was accidental but I am also not convinced that it was a murder. Here is what we do know:

• Diana had lost her royal security detail when she divorced Charles. At the time she died, she was being protected by a private security company provided by Dodi El-Fayed’s family. One of these guys is Trevor Reese-Jones who, miraculously, was the only survivor of the car crash in which Diana died. Reese-Jones points out that there are many levels of security—security for political figures, security for rich guys, security for movie stars, and he said that Diana was in a class by herself. Her security demanded the highest levels of protection which were not always provided by a non-government force. In other words, following the divorce Diana was very vulnerable and the palace knew that (they were the ones who pulled her royal protection detail).

• Dodi El-Fayed, who died with her that evening, had been very indecisive during their time together. They had vacationed in the Mediterranean and had decided to weekend back in Paris. At first, Dodi wanted to take Diana to his home in Paris, then he wanted to go to the Ritz (a hotel his father owned), then he decided they should go back to his home. These two places were not far apart. However, Dodi could not manage to figure out when to eat dinner and where and where the couple should stay that evening. It would be hard to plan a murder with Dodi’s feckless scheduling. In fact, Dodi only gave security about 30 minutes notice once he decided around midnight to go to his home. Most security details want to know all movements of the protectee about 24 hours in advance, but more is better. For Diana, more advance notice is absolutely prudent. In other words, as diligent as this private security company might be, they could not really protect her because 30-minutes notice did not allow for an “advance team” to check out the route.

• Despite the fact that Dodi was presented as Diana’s boyfriend of sorts, he had been engaged to a woman in America right before this holiday. He broke the engagement when he had the chance to go out with Diana. Diana knew this. This was not a serious romance so much as it was a summer fling. It is speculated that Dodi’s father was more interested in Dodi’s marrying Diana than Dodi was.

• Diana had confided to her friends and said in writing she expected to die in a car crash and that her ex-husband would be behind it. Now if this were an episode of Columbo, that would be a major clue right there.

• And make no mistake, the various spy forces in Europe know how to kill people in car crashes. So before we get into motive and opportunity, we have to admit—the British services had those particular skills.

• There is no evidence that William or Harry ever considered their mother’s untimely death might have not been accidental. I often wonder what they think about her death. Surely, I am not the only one who wonders if foul play was involved.

• The driver Henri Paul was allegedly drunk behind the wheel, but there were numerous errors with his toxicology reports to the point that nothing can be trusted. Video footage of Paul right before he took Diana on her last car ride shows a man able to stoop down a tie his own shoe and walk normally—not typical of drunks.

• Henri Paul was a professional driver for the Ritz in Paris. He took a special car that night for Dodi and Diana. He was a regular driver for the hotel’s VIPs, but he was not licensed for this specific vehicle. It is not clear why he took that car and not one of his usual vehicles.

• Henri Paul was also reportedly working for more than one intelligence agency. He was no super spy or Jason Bourne, but Europe has a lot of that cloak-and-dagger stuff going on, particularly at luxury hotels and consulates and places like that. But even if you figure Henri Paul was a spy of some sort, it does not explain why he would embark on a kami-kaze mission.

• Henri Paul was a professional driver, yet on this night, he was clocked going 121 mph through a tunnel. That seems unlikely for a trained hotel driver. It was late at night, the roads were not congested, and they only had a short distance to go. Why so fast? Some say outside forces had taken control of the car.

• The car (a black Mercedes S280) was immediately returned to the manufacturer and demolished, so there is no way to investigate if it had been tampered with.

• The car ride took them through a tunnel under the Alma Bridge (the Pont D’Alma). All of the cameras in the Pont D’Alma tunnel were broken that night. Every one.

• There are stories about a white Fiat Uno and a blinding light that seem very strange.

• The ambulance took a very long time (45 minutes) to bring Diana from the scerne of the accident to the hospital, in fact, it bypassed another hospital on its way to get help for Diana. It also traveled at super-slow speed and even stopped periodically. This was “explained” by the fact that French ambulances often drive slowly because their concept of emergency medicine is to start providing care in the vehicle. I do not know if I ever heard of that.

At any rate, everything we know about Diana has to be taken with a big grain of salt. Had she lived, Diana would have just turned 63 on July 1 and would have five grandchildren. Had she lived, Charles may not have been able to marry Camilla (as head of the Church of England, he was permitted to divorce Diana but it would have been very dicey for him to remarry while his ex-wife was alive).

Diana generated a lot of ink while she was alive but she was the one who showed me quite clearly—the media lies to us.