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Ten years later, what I recall most vividly is the stench of the flowers. I never went near Kensington Palace - the destination of all those maudlin pilgrims who deposited bouquets - but on the way to a Prom concert at the Albert Hall a few nights after Diana's funeral, I was assailed by a sweet, sickly, cloying odour that spread through the air from a mile away.
The blooms that symbolised eternal life were dankly rotting. My nasal reverie may be the most concise summary of Diana: a festering lily, not - as Elton John warbled in Westminster Abbey a candle abruptly snuffed out.
In her Panorama television interview she prophetically threatened she would not go quietly. A decade after her death, she is still not silent. Or rather, her proponents and detractors continue to jabber and exchange insults on her behalf. Recent books about the self-appointed queen of hearts suggest the wounded, compassionate Diana was a mentally unstable slag, a spendthrift wag and a bigot whose politics were far to the right of Mrs Thatcher. The royal family tries to white her out of its history; the rest of us are left wondering whether the spasm of grief after her death was the start of a republican revolution that Tony Blair suppressed, or a sodden collapse of national morale. Caught in the argument, Diana no longer controls her own image, as she did with such cunning when she was alive.
THE MERCURIAL SYLPH
In the photographs Mario Testino took a few months before her death, now on exhibition at Kensington Palace, and seen in the book Diana, Princess of Wales, published by Taschen, she expertly projects the contradictory persona that beguiled us: shy but sly, vulnerable but implacably glamorous. At the time she was shedding official encumbrances by auctioning off dresses worn on stuffy ceremonial occasions. In Testino's photographs she dispenses with gloves, bares her feet and, almost scandalously relaxed, lolls on a sofa.
The woman can be seen emerging from the constraints of a role that cramped her. No longer relying on rank and its haughty distance, she had begun to perform for our amusement, like every other celebrity. A royal personage is meant to be monumental and immobile, like a statue on its plinth. Diana, mercurially moody, had turned into a series of happenings, reinventing herself every time she changed hairstyles or lovers.
Yet when Testino sent the prints for her approval, she was incredulous. Paul Burrell, the most loyal of her lapdogs, remembers she looked at the spangled sylph in the photographs and said, "Is that really me?" Of course it was not - at least not all of her.
THE MYSTERIOUS TARGET
Myth, according to Jean Cocteau, is a lie that becomes the truth, whereas history is truth that becomes a lie. During the past decade, Diana has undergone both transformations, so it's not surprising to find her as the pretext for two new novels, 12:23 by Eoin McNamee (Faber) and The Accident Man by Tom Cain (John Blake), both set on the day of her death and both determined to represent a chaotic, avoidable calamity as part of a sinister global conspiracy.
In Stephen Frears' film The Queen, Diana stays out of sight, except for snatches of television news film, while the other characters obsessively discuss her. In The Witnesses in the Tunnel, a controversial documentary shown in Britain last month, she disappeared behind a grey blob, which obscured the body the doctors were trying to resuscitate. Her minders in McNamee's 12:23 reduce her to a target, tersely and dismissively referred to as "Spencer". On her final day she is tracked through Paris by a hitman hired by arms dealers who resent her campaign against landmines.
Cain's thriller, The Accident Man, relies on the same paranoid hypothesis of assassination: accidents are philosophically intolerable because they make our world a playground of chance, whereas conspiracies pleasingly restore intention and localise blame. Celebrities are almost extra-terrestrial creatures, and as doctors prod and manipulate Diana's body in the crashed Mercedes, McNamee says she resembles an unknowable being, an entity with a domed forehead like the aliens who supposedly landed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
THE SPIRITUAL STARLET
Long-time butler Paul Burrell valiantly attempts to supply Diana with some mental furniture in his latest cooing, cloying memoir, The Way We Were (HarperCollins). As everyone knows, Diana flunked all her exams aged 16 and cheerily boasted of being "thick as a plank". Burrell, however, insists: "She was a deep thinker." It's a pity that, when giving details, he equates her capacity for introspective analysis with her habit of "spending hours on the telephone". Burrell lists Diana's pearls of wisdom. Apparently "she believed in God and embraced all faiths, from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism, Islam to Hinduism".
Naively besotted, Burrell seems unaware that most of his stories show her in a less than flattering light. She often sounds like a grabby starlet stockpiling goodie bags. "He's so generous!" she shrilled whenever Versace's latest consignment of outfits was trundled into Kensington Palace. She pocketed jewels given to her by Dodi, while claiming not to want the engagement ring she expected. Naffer and more official gifts she disposed of to Burrell himself, who curtseyed gratefully.
Not content to feel the pain of others, she appropriated their tragedies. When the journalist Dominic Lawson's wife gave birth to a stillborn child, Diana insisted on burying the baby in her walled garden at Kensington Palace, and - after Burrell's digging proved to be a little effete - she grabbed the spade and excavated the grave herself. Burrell told her the idea was "tremendous"; to me it sounds like a monstrous impertinence, since it means the site can now never be visited by the parents. After the ceremony, Diana disclosed her devious private agenda: "People will find this baby one day and say it was mine."
The most inadvertently damaging of Burrell's stories is about Diana's desire to move to America. Prosecuting the scheme, she took up with the New York financier Teddy Forstmann, "a politically well-connected billionaire" who offered her a lifestyle with private jets. Like a Lady Macbeth of Sloane Square, she considered Forstmann "capable of running for office". "How could we fail?" she asked - but eventually she iced the candidate, having decided he was too old for her.
THE GENIUS DIVA
Television advertisements for Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles (Century) have described her as one of Diana's confidantes; actually their meetings were few and rather formal. Nevertheless, as an unrivalled analyst of the ruthless politics of fame, Brown gets closer to understanding her than any other biographer.
The book, packaged in flaming and fabulous pink, beadily scrutinises its subject from the other side of the Atlantic. Brown, who went to New York to edit Vanity Fair in 1984, chuckles over the pedantic protocols of Buckingham Palace, where "tea trays for members of the royal family have their own personal map", showing how the milk jugs and sugar tongs and jam pots must be placed; she moans when describing the antiquity of Balmoral, where Diana spent her time vomiting.
Brown applauds Diana's plan to move to America and says she could "only ever feel at home in the culture that invented fame the size of hers". That fame literally seems to inflate Diana and makes her too large for Britain: gazing up at her as she stalks on three-inch high heels across the high-ceiling grill room of the Four Seasons in New York, Brown describes her as a tanned tower, emitting "a flashing cone of artificial light". Some besotted admirers regarded Diana as a divinity. For Brown she was a diva, which is the next best thing: the personification of imperious whim and "superstar entitlement", propped on spiky stilettos.
At the end of her book, Brown quotes a conversation with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who praises Diana for showing "a new way to be British". Blair, elected a few months before Dianas death, tried to modernise the country and failed. In Browns estimation, Diana did a better, swifter job of it. After her separation from Charles, she capriciously revolutionised her office, modelling it on a Madison Avenue ad agency. "Here she set about administering her celebrity like a global brand, promoting and conserving the Diana franchise". Despite Brown's enthusiasm, that sounds like a desolately empty endeavour: was Diana really no more than Victoria Beckham in excelsis?
When she had second thoughts just before she married Charles, her sister Sarah told her she had to go through with it because her face was already on the tea towels. Brown shrewdly observes that Diana based her power on a three-way marriage of commerce, society and philanthropy, a corporate phenomenon that in the London of the 1990s was new and directly Diana-related. Diana was an eager convert to the American creed that expects life to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy.
THE LONELY NUTCASE
Sarah Bradford's Diana (Viking) offers a more stolidly British appraisal, which gets its gravity from the author's long experience as a royal biographer. The book starts on a note of schoolmarmish tetchiness: Diana's turbulent childhood left her, Bradford clucks, with a tendency to self-dramatisation and "a reputation for lying". But the biographer's disapproval is equitably apportioned. She deplores the narcissism of the spoiled Charles and pitilessly documents the emotional anaesthesia of "the Germans", as Diana called her in-laws, who cope with problems by denying their existence. In her distress, Diana begged the Queen to act as a marriage guidance counsellor. "I don't know what you should do," the monarch shrugged. "Charles is hopeless."
Although Blair was affecting a misty eye and a choked vocal delivery in his churchyard eulogy, at Balmoral orders were given that no mention of Diana should be made in that morning's church service and the minister was authorised to proceed with a sermon containing "unsuitably jokey references". She had already become unmentionable. The ban left Prince Harry bewildered, and made him ask, Are you sure Mummy's really dead? I never thought I'd feel sorry for such a privileged hooligan; this anecdote, however, left a hairline crack in my leathery old heart.
Charles, incorrigibly pretentious, sighed to a friend that he was living through a Greek tragedy. But no inimical gods or arbitrary fates decreed the misery of this incompatible couple, who drifted apart into their separate orbits. Charles became dotty, Diana turned nutty. He cultivated his organic vegetables, she irrigated her colon. While he stiffened his lip, she liquefied in cascades of tears: during one row, William squeezed wads of tissues under the bathroom door while she sobbed.
THE PSYCHOTIC SLAG
The subtitle of Howard Hodgson's Charles: The Man Who Will Be King (John Blake) announces its more cravenly partisan intention: establishing Charles' moral right to the succession by vilifying Diana. First, the family title of which she was so proud is stripped from her, to complete the punitive withdrawal of the HRH. Although Bradford enjoys Diana's snobbery (she rejoiced in her ancient English ancestry and viewed the Windsor's as jumped-up foreign princelings, even sniffing that Highgrove was "small by Althorp standards, with only three usable bedrooms"), Hodgson leaves her no grounds for feeling superior: the Spencer coat of arms is a fraud, as their pedigree was purchased from a hard-up James I. Hodgson overlooks what this tells us about the monarchy itself, which sold honours and now more airily invents them, as when the Queen rustled up a spare earldom as a marital bauble for her youngest son.
Hodgson goes on to accuse his villain of psychotically violent behaviour. She knocks her stepmother down the stairs at Althorp and gloats that no one would put the Princess of Wales on trial for murder; she phones Camilla to say that she has sent someone round to kill her. Mostly she takes out her ire on the property of those who have crossed her, egging her lover James "Squidgy" Gilbeys Alfa Romeo, glueing the locks of a car of another false friend, adding water to someone elses petrol tank. Her good works are dismissed as exhibitionism; attending a heart operation to impress surgeon Hasnat Khan, she outraged surgical protocol by making herself up, wearing gold earrings and allowing her fringe to peep fetchingly from under her antiseptic cap.
The nastiest seam of innuendo and aspersion in his book, gathered from anonymous informants, concerns her supposed promiscuity. Rumour has it that Diana's maidenhead was verified by the court gynaecologist at the time of her engagement. Hodgson, however, claims that she lost her virginity at 17, having suborned a boy three years younger. She was on the pill when she met Charles and allegedly aborted a child during her affair with married art dealer Oliver Hoare. Hodgson describes a fling on a beach with King Juan Carlos during a Spanish holiday, which infuriated Queen Sofia. Back at home, he snarls, she had sex with "half of Kensington and Chelsea". Not content with cuckolding Charles, she additionally unmanned him, Hodgson says, by coaxing a valet to implicate him in gay hanky-panky at St James's Palace. Tina Brown adds that when Dianas ex-lover James Hewitt sold his story, she called down a curse on his penis, telling one of her soothsayers that she hoped it would shrivel up.
If Hodgson were a better writer he might have found a brittle, brilliant comedy of manners in the story; two incidents in particular call for treatment by Oscar Wilde. When Hewitt and Camilla's first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, convivially chat in the officers mess, the multiple connections between them require an excursion into structural anthropology: Parker Bowles was the husband of Hewitt's lover's husband's mistress. Equally good is the showdown between queening divas when, at a party given by Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Diana upbraids Camilla for pilfering Charles. Camilla listens to the tirade, then stalks out after making a deep and mocking curtsey.
THE DOOMED BIMBO
Sarah Bradford considers Diana to be the victim of her own poor judgment. She isolated herself because she cultivated treacherous hacks rather than amassing a network of influential friends who could weigh in against Charles' cronies when they badmouthed her. She squandered her moral and political advantage by blabbing about bulimia, self-harm, post-natal depression and infidelity on the BBCs Panorama. In the end she was fatally placed at risk because she dispensed with police protection and entrusted herself to Dodi al-Fayed's muddling entourage.
Bradford's analysis of these piled-up errors is sober and sadly plausible but, of course, Howard Hodgson has his own wilder version of Diana's self-destructiveness. Unsubstantiated anecdotes about high-speed chases with paparazzi on the M4, or occasions when Diana hurtled late at night through residential streets in a car without headlights after sexual assignations, lead of course to the final crash; for this she, as a reckless thrill-seeker, takes the blame. Hodgson gives us his word - backed, incidentally, by no actual evidence - she was yelping with revved-up delight as al-Fayed's car screeched into the Alma tunnel in Paris.
THE BROKEN BODY
So, in the end, were left with Diana's corpse. In Eoin McNamee's novel, a Special Branch snoop watches a surgeon at the hospital who has "his hand inside her chest, reaching into the cavity, the opened torso". A little later in the mortifying process, Tom Cain's thriller has the pathologist pump formaldehyde into Diana. That leaves only her butlers fussing over which cocktail dress the corpse should wear (with matching shoes) and Hodgson's declaration that because her head was injured, the last image on her face must have been distorted. He smirks at the distress of Diana's sisters when they saw her; his report is contradicted by Burrell, who was there and saw only a serene expression (after which he checked out her red-painted toenails).
The books make much of Diana's descent into the gritty concrete netherworld of the Ritz basement in Browns account, reflecting the fact her life of assignations and carparks was a world of secrets, the corollary to her life in a strobe light show. As she promised, Diana has not gone quietly.
- Observer
