Why the Royals Miss Diana

If you’re going to sup with the devil, it helps to have more than a long spoon. You should also take a minute to figure out what the old beast wants to eat. It might be you. That is a lesson the British royal family has never learned. For more than a quarter of a century, the royals have been complicit in a bizarre, co-dependent relationship with British media and pop culture.

In return for making themselves more accessible to the public gaze, the royals hoped that their claim to deference would be extended for generations to come. Since 1969, when the BBC was graciously permitted to film the Windsors “at home” — who can ever forget their picnic on a grouse moor? — they have thought they could control the terms on which they revealed themselves, and hence shape a “modern” relationship between sovereign and people. It’s been a disastrous policy, one that hit its nadir (for now) with suspicions that the Queen intervened to stop the trial of Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, because of royal fears that Burrell might tell stories about wrongdoing inside the Palace.

After the trial had ended, of course, those stories did emerge — filling the tabloids with allegations of homosexual rape among the Prince of Wales’ staff and tawdry tales about Diana. (Leaving Kensington Palace to meet her lover in just her jewels and fur — who knew she took fashion cues from the Velvet Underground?) The royals can’t say they weren’t warned. Walter Bagehot, the great 19th century hack, once said: “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it … Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” But it is not for the crime of ignoring such advice that the Palace and its advisers stand indicted; it is because they have so fundamentally misunderstood the nature of modern British society, where celebrities are knocked down as fast as they are built up.

I’m not surprised. Seventeen years ago, the Prince of Wales came to the Bagehotian establishment at which I then worked for a lunch with “people his own age.” Most of the conversation was taken up with an agonized appraisal of the Prince’s proper role, together with much royal muttering (conventional wisdom in 1985) that Britain had lost the dynamism for which it once was famous. I begged to differ, and implored the Prince to consider the new, entrepreneurial, street-cred economy being created at that very moment in the clubs and streets, the fashion houses and TV studios and advertising agencies of Soho and Covent Garden. I remember to this day the look of utter incomprehension on the Prince’s face as I made my case. Only later did a colleague point out the obvious; that with the exception of visits to the Royal Opera House, it was highly unlikely that the Prince had ever visited Soho and Covent Garden, much less wandered its streets picking up the vital signs of the new Britain. Had he done so, he would surely have noticed — as Andrew Sullivan recently put it — that “British society has morphed into a free-market melting pot of cultural brashness.” Reverence for the magic of royalty? You might as well ask the British to stop eating chicken masala.

To be fair to the House of Windsor (something that does not come easily), any strategy that it chose to modernize its image would sooner or later have foundered on the rock of Diana. The Windsors selected her as a future Queen on much the same basis as they would have bought a horse; she came from good stock, had excellent bones, and had never been saddled. Their fatal miscalculation was to forget that beautiful 19-year-old girls grow up, and develop the characteristics that come with age; revenge, among them. The key point about Diana, however, was less that she would not take her many humiliations lying down, and more that she understood precisely what modern Britain wanted — that she should be sexy, not dowdy; city, not country; clubby, not doggy. Above all, she recognized the voracious appetite that the most competitive media business in the world had for gossip and scandal, and dished it out as if there were no tomorrow. That just meant that the editors of the tabloids came back for more.

Diana knew exactly what she was doing, because she knew the kind of messy three-ring circus modern Britain had become. One or two of the Windsors’ hired spin doctors have shown signs of getting this — since Diana’s death they have worked with some success to rehabilitate the reputations of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. But when the latest crisis hit and Charles appointed his own private secretary, rather than an outsider, to conduct the obligatory investigation into the Palace’s handling of rape allegations, it was clear that the Windsors still understood nothing. The tabloids howled; Diana would surely have laughed. Alas for the Windsors — she was the only member of that benighted family who ever had a clue as to the true nature of the nation over which they are supposed long to reign. They’ll never admit it, but they miss her. So do we all.