Why Princess Diana still fascinates us

Suddenly, something different
Then, into this starched and diamond-encrusted world, burst Diana like a gust of wind blowing over a desert. She was natural, shy and pretty. The man she was to marry, on the other hand, was awkward, restrained and older than his years. It seems strange now that anyone might ever have thought them well-matched.

But they fell in love (“Whatever 'in love' means,” as Prince Charles revealingly told a TV interviewer on his engagement to Diana) and the country fell in love with them. Their wedding in 1981 was a giant street party across the United Kingdom. Never were the words “fairy-tale romance" so overused — or undeserved. 

Charles was already committed to Camilla, and never wavered. As Diana famously later said: “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

What made this truly different was the media’s — and thence the public’s —obsession with the royal couple. Was there ever a woman more photographed than Diana, or ever so much interest in a marriage? And was there ever a breakup played out so much in public?

It was unprecedented and bloody. In 1994, after years of unhappiness, Charles went on TV and confessed his adultery.  A year later the princess gave her own interview and admitted to hers. It was astonishing, tit-for-tat, toe-curling stuff.

A doe-eyed princess talked of her husband, his affair, her own misjudged extramarital relations, her depression, her bulimia, her in-laws.

We’d never heard a royal talk this way: “Friends of my husband's were indicating that I was unstable, sick and should be put in a home of some sort to get better so I wouldn't be an embarrassment."

And, tellingly, this: “The most daunting aspect was the media attention, because my husband and I, we were told when we got engaged that the media would go quietly, and it didn't; and then when we were married they said it would go quietly and it didn't; and then it started to focus very much on me, and I seemed to be on the front of a newspaper every single day … and the higher the media put you, place you, is the bigger the drop.”

She didn’t know how right she was. As she dined at the Ritz Hotel in Paris on Aug. 30, 1997, she was surrounded yet again by the press.

The role photographers played in her ensuing death in the early hours of the next morning is still disputed. But what seems certain is that she was trying to get away from them when her car drove at high speed into the narrow Alma tunnel by the Seine.

As the world now knows, her driver, Henri Paul, lost control, smashed into a concrete pillar and bounced into the wall at close to 80 mph.

Ten years on, the fascination seems barely to have diminished.

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