The People's Princess: why Diana captivated the world

Summary

Summary of "The People's Princess: Why Diana Captivated the World" – History Extra Podcast

Episode Title: The People's Princess: Why Diana Captivated the World
Release Date: July 3, 2025
Host: Matt Elton
Guest: Edward White, Author of Diana World

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the History Extra podcast, host Matt Elton engages with Edward White, the author of Diana World, to explore the enduring fascination with Diana, Princess of Wales. Edward White delves into how Diana became a cultural icon, embodying various societal archetypes and reflecting broader changes in late 20th-century Britain and beyond.

Diana World: A Cultural Obsession

Edward White clarifies the focus of his book, stating, “Diana World, as the book is titled, refers to this vast cultural universe that spins around Diana at the center” ([03:16]). He emphasizes that the book is less a traditional biography and more a cultural history, exploring how Diana's life and persona became intertwined with the public's collective consciousness. White posits that Diana's personal experiences, such as her parents' messy divorce, resonated deeply with ordinary people, forging a strong connection between Diana and the public.

The Spencer Family and Diana’s Background

The narrative begins with Diana's aristocratic lineage. White explains, “The Spencer family is one of the grandest, oldest aristocratic families in England... They were one of the most prominent aristocratic families for centuries” ([05:46]). He discusses how the declining financial status of the aristocracy in the 1960s brought families like the Spencers into broader social contexts, setting the stage for Diana's relatable personal struggles amidst her royal obligations.

Media Representation and Mythologization

A significant portion of the conversation centers on the media's role in shaping Diana's image. White observes, “The way that the press presented Diana to us is utterly crucial... she was treated in the way that no other royal woman or person entering the royal family had ever been treated” ([08:22]). He highlights how tabloid sensationalism, especially post the Murdoch revolution, positioned Diana as a multifaceted figure embodying various cultural archetypes—from a modern Cinderella to a Mary Poppins-like nanny. This strategic framing allowed the public to project their own aspirations and fantasies onto Diana, enhancing her mythic status.

Fashion as a Symbol of National Identity

Diana's fashion choices played a pivotal role in constructing her image of Englishness. White credits French designer Catherine Walker for designing outfits that symbolized British traditions. He notes, “When Diana was going on a tour of the Middle East, Catherine Walker would design particular outfits that she felt would strike some kind of symbolic note and would bring out Diana as an Arthurian princess” ([15:40]). Conversely, Diana also used fashion to express rebellion against royal constraints, often donning American styles to project a more relatable and modern persona.

Diana’s Agency and Multifaceted Identity

Despite the media's extensive portrayal of Diana, White argues that she exercised significant control over her image. “She was a shrewd and pretty sharp, calculating person. And she did definitely manage to construct her own image to quite a large degree” ([17:40]). However, he introduces the concept of Diana as a "cut and shut princess," capable of embodying contradictory identities—balancing traditional Victorian motherhood with contemporary, post-feminist roles. This duality made her a complex and relatable figure for diverse audiences.

Representation of Femininity and Motherhood

Diana's portrayal as a mother was a cornerstone of her public image. White discusses how she was depicted both as a traditional Victorian mother and a contemporary, active parent. “She was both the Victorian mother, but also the post feminist mother” ([18:31]). Iconic images of Diana, such as her barefoot running at a school sports day, contrasted with official portraits, allowing her to resonate with both traditional and modern sensibilities regarding femininity and motherhood.

International Appeal and the American Connection

Diana's influence extended beyond Britain, particularly in the United States. White explains, “Diana came along at a particular moment when it was just a perfect kind of cultural moment... making Diana what I think of as the first consumerist princess” ([27:51]). Her relatable, consumer-friendly image allowed Americans to connect with her as embodying the "American dream," despite her British roots. This transatlantic appeal was further reinforced by Diana's personal relationships and public engagements, which resonated with American values of empathy and accessibility.

Cross-Cultural Connections and Ethnic Appeal

Diana's ability to transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries is highlighted through her connections with diverse communities. White shares insights from his research, such as her bond with South Asian communities in Britain, where Diana represented a bridge between traditional hierarchical structures and modern British society. “People in that community... saw Diana leading a life that has kind of grandiose parallels to their own” ([31:44]). Her relationships with individuals from various backgrounds underscored her universal appeal and her role as a unifying figure.

Diana and the Gay Community

Diana's relationship with the gay community is another facet of her broad appeal. White notes, “Diana was kind of embraced by a lot of gay people as being kind of an ally or an icon” ([34:16]). While some members of the community felt she was a genuine ally due to her compassionate public actions, others perceived her as an emblematic figure lacking true understanding of gay experiences. This duality reflects the complexities of her public persona and the varied ways different groups related to her.

Legacy and Cultural Significance

Edward White reflects on Diana's lasting impact, particularly in the context of national identity and societal changes. Drawing parallels between the public mourning of Diana in 1997 and contemporary events like Brexit and COVID-19, he observes, “Diana's importance as a symbol of British tradition, but also the future world that Britain was heading in, really came to the fore” ([36:41]). Diana's ability to embody multiple identities and her role as a symbol during pivotal moments underscore her unique place in cultural history.

Conclusion

Diana, Princess of Wales, remains an enduring cultural icon whose life and legacy continue to fascinate and inspire. Edward White's insights reveal how Diana's multifaceted identity, shaped by media representation, personal agency, and cultural connections, allowed her to resonate with a wide array of audiences globally. Her ability to embody both traditional and modern values, her international appeal, and her role as a unifying figure make her a compelling subject of historical and cultural study.

Notable Quotes:

• “Diana World... is more of a cultural history of Diana rather than a biography” – Edward White ([03:16]).
• “The way that the press presented Diana to us is utterly crucial...” – Edward White ([08:22]).
• “She was a shrewd and pretty sharp, calculating person. And she did definitely manage to construct her own image to quite a large degree” – Edward White ([17:40]).
• “Diana was kind of embraced by a lot of gay people as being kind of an ally or an icon” – Edward White ([34:16]).

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This detailed exploration of Diana's cultural impact offers listeners a nuanced understanding of why she remains a beloved and enigmatic figure in history. Edward White's Diana World provides a rich tapestry of narratives that highlight Diana's unique ability to connect with diverse audiences and her lasting influence on societal perceptions of royalty, femininity, and national identity.

Transcript

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Welcome to the History Extra podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. From her introduction into the royal family to her final tragic days, Diana, Princess of Wales, was a media sensation, a national talking point and a cultural icon. Edward White, author of the new book Diana World, argues that the mythologization of the people's princess can actually reveal a great deal about the world of the late 20th century, from Britain's relationship with its monarchy to the dominance of American culture. Matt Elton caught up with him to find out more.

[Edward White]

We are here to talk about what you describe as being less of a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales and more the story of a cultural obsession. Could you just, before you go any further, set out what the book seeks to do and also, I suppose, what it aims not to do?

[Guest 1]

Well, Diana World, as the book is titled, is refers to this vast cultural universe that spins around Diana at the center. And as you say, the book, really, I envisage it more as a cultural history of Diana rather than a biography. And it is essentially the story of how countless millions of people across the world became genuinely obsessed with Diana. The reasons for that are many, but in that sense, really, you know, it's more of a story about us than it is about her. Even though Diana is in every paragraph on every page of the book, it's really about our connection to her more than her life story. And as such, actually, one of the things that I wanted to do with the book was to do something that is very rarely done and explore the connections that ordinary, everyday people have with the royal family, with the institution of monarchy. It's always surprising to me that we've got this institution at the center of our society, at the apex of our system of government, that we just kind of accept that it's there. And we talk about it as though it's this closed off world that the royal family inhabit and they get to decide how the institution should be run, essentially. And they're always taking the lead on the relationship with the public. So this book, to that extent, is trying to redress the balance a little bit. The book is full of figures that don't usually get a look in in either books about Diana or books about the royal family in general. So I've trawled oral history archives and things like that and found a huge cast of characters, whether they be greasy spoon owners or professional Diana lookalikes, you know, just everyday people from various walks of life who have some kind of connection with Diana.

[Edward White]

And I'm sure we'll hear some of those voices and we'll hear about some of those groups of people as we go. Before we do that, you write very interest, interestingly, that the rarefied quality attributed to Spencer haemoglobin hasn't stopped the rest of the world trying to claim Diana as their own flesh and blood. Before we start talking about that claiming and about the impact that she had, let's rewind to the first part of that sentence because you mentioned there the Spencer family. We should talk a little bit. I know your book's not a biography, but we should talk a little bit about some of this background. Could you tell us about the Spencer family and I suppose also about the rarefied quality that these sorts of families were experiencing at the time Diana was born?

[Guest 1]

Yeah. Well, the Spencer family is one of the grandest, oldest aristocratic families in England. I think that their great ancestral estate in Northamptonshire came into their position in 1508. And it was in that time the family made a huge fortune, principally of sheep farming, I think, was the thing that really set them up. And in the Tudor period, they made a great killing and were elevated to an earldom. And there has been, as I say, they were one of the most prominent aristocratic families for centuries. By the time they get to the 1960s, the aristocracy has been buffeted by the winds of change. The aristocracy's place in Britain had obviously, they'd been financially diminished. Landowning was no longer the huge prize that it had been in the 19th century or before then. And so they were having to enter the real world, I suppose, as it were, and they were finding themselves subject to the same forces of social life that the rest of us had experienced and that they'd been insulated from for a great many years. And this, I suppose, comes through in the figure of Diana in that her parents go through this very, very messy divorce, in which is kind of the origin story for Diana, really, in terms of her desire for security and love, et cetera, that leads her into perhaps slightly wrongheaded marriage to pr. And I think that, you know, in the book, I posit that it's her experience of divorce as a young child that really connects her to the rest of the country. This is the first point of connection, something that I was interested in discovering when I went back to the original reporting on Diana from the early 1980s was just how often the story of her parents divorced was spoken about as integral to her personal story and to her connection with ordinary British people. 1969, the divorce reform act comes in. It's a huge social change for the whole country. And by the time of the late 70s, when Diana is leaving school, she remarks that, you know, most of the. Well, a good number of her classmates had also experienced the divorce of their parents, which, you know, 20 years earlier, this would have been a completely alien phenomenon to most people in the country.

[Edward White]

You mentioned there, the press reporting of Diana and how that shaped our relationship with her as a nation. How pivotal is our understanding of Diana in terms of its framing through the press, even in her very early years.

[Guest 1]

I think the way that the press presented Diana to us is utterly crucial. I have this sense that she's kind of like. She appears as like a cultural prefab is the way I think of it. She's a gift for tabloid editors, and there's a few reasons. The first is that she emerges into the tabloid radar about a dozen years into the Murdoch revolution of Fleet Street a couple of years before then. I think it's sort of 1978 or so. There's a famous article in one of Murdoch's papers that just says to the royal family, the era of deference is over. You shouldn't expect it and it won't be given. This characterizes this extraordinarily aggressive approach towards Diana. So that's the first thing to bear in mind that she was treated in the way that no other royal woman or person entering the royal family had ever been treated. And so they were never gonna be able to get past that. You know, that relationship was then set in stone from the beginning. The essential dynamics were there from the beginning. But also I think that she's a gift to tabloid editors because she seems to embody so many different really appealing character types from the moment she emerges. So she's obviously, she's the sort of the jolly hockey sticks beautiful daughter of a very, very grand member of the aristocracy. But because of her background as a part time nanny and a part time nursery assistant, she's also presented to us as this sort of Mary Poppins figure or a Cinderella figure, actually, because she does some part time cleaning for her, for her sister's friends. And she gets loaded with all these cultural archetypes from the very beginning. And it gives us a very, very strong fram. And it's something that she played up to as well. But I think really our relationship with her was very much set up by those early years of the tabloid press interest.

[Edward White]

You talk in the book a lot about the myths surrounding Diana, in terms of her mythic status, that is. And I was thinking about them largely in terms of how she has gone on to become a mythic figure. But it sounds like even from her very early years, she was being framed in terms of stories and fairy tales and sort of fictional characters. Is that fair to say?

[Guest 1]

I think it's exactly what was happening, yeah. I mean, there are so many of them and there's even. I mean, to go off on a slight tangent, I'll come back in a second. But there's even that famous photograph of her where her legs are backlit, where she's holding two children outside the nursery school that she works at. And it's an extraordinary photograph because sort of from the waist up, she looks like kind of a young Mother Teresa type of figure. But from the waist down, she's presented to us as one of the early page 3 type of photographs that they wear of where women were lit in very similar ways. You know, the backlighting through a flimsy blouse or something like that, or a flimsy skirt, in Diana's case. And so that's another of these archetypes, our cultural identities that are locked onto her. It astonished me to work out how excited people were. A particular section of people, I must say, not absolutely everybody, but there's a particular section of society that were genuinely excited that Diana was gonna be marrying Prince Charles because she was gonna be returning the royal family to its British roots. And I'd sort of. You know, I'd not really been aware of that before I'd started researching this book. And somebody. I think it was from. Either from Burke's Peerage or Debrett's or something like that. They worked out that any child that Charles and Diana had would be 58.8% British, which to me seems a staggeringly low percentage considering that, you know, if the queen doesn't count as British, if Prince Charles doesn't count as British or king as he now is, then there's not much hope for the rest of us. But she's kind of loaded with all these precursors. And so a lot was made of her Stuart ancestry. She descended, apparently from five different ways to Charles ii. And there's no end of fairytale stories attached to her, whether Cinderella or. And as I say, there's all the aristocratic stories that come from her own personal family background. It's often said of Marilyn Monroe, a figure to whom Diana is often compared, that Marilyn was a blank canvas upon which anybody could project their fantasies. With Diana, I think it's something different. And I think it's more apt to say that she is this storehouse of mythology and legend from which everybody can draw something that is relevant to themselves.

[Edward White]

That is really interesting. You say in the book that never has anyone been so often seen, yet so rarely heard as Diana, Princess of Wales. Do you think that the focus on her image, or I suppose, the ability for people to ascribe their own meanings to it is a key part of this mythic status of this process you've described?

[Guest 1]

I think it's absolutely crucial to the way that Diana is received by people. And it's the great benefit of silence. I mean, when she appeared in public as a public figure for years and years, hardly anybody heard her speak. I came across diary entries and letters and what have you from people that said they were quite surprised to hear her Talk in the 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir because they realized they'd never heard her speak before. So she went for, you know, huge for most of her public life, it seemed, with most people not really having much idea of what she sounded like. And the women that did the voices for Spitting Image commented on this that it was actually quite easy to do her voice because you just did a generic, posh woman's voice and it probably would be fine. And so that's the benefit of being silent, though, is that people can take from her what they find in her. You know, there are some academics who have likened Diana's public profile to that of a silent film star's. And actually there's some really interesting work done by Professor Therese Davis about how Diana's performance, as she calls it in the Panorama interview, is like this French silent film star, Falconetti, who gave this very famous performance as Joan of Arc in a silent film. It really plays to her strength that she is this powerfully present, visible figure, but there's always something kind of withdrawn about her, although many people believe that they can kind of discern what she's really thinking by reading her surface appearance, whether that's her very expressive eyes, the tilt of her head, or what she chooses to wear. So I think all those things are really important in helping people from very different backgrounds make some kind of connection.

[Edward White]

With her, to hone in on one aspect of that. You mentioned the things that she wore there, and you write in the book that Diana's body and her public position was a precinct for designers to indulge their fantasies. Going back to the idea you raised previously about her becoming this canvas for stories about Britishness and specifically Englishness, I think you specify in the book, to some extent, can you talk a little bit about how the things that she wore allowed for stories and narratives of national identity?

[Guest 1]

It's really interesting, I think, that it's the issue of the fashion designing that the person that's most interesting, I think, in the story, is in terms of building Diana's Englishness through her clothes, is actually a French designer called Catherine Walker. Catherine Walker moved to England without any particular background in fashion. She said at least that she wasn't even especially interested in it, but she began designing maternity wear. And that's where Diana first wore her clothes. But over the years, it seems Catherine Walker got very interested in designing things that would kind of exhibit Diana's Englishness. And so when, you know, when Diana was going on a tour of the Middle east, for instance, Catherine Walker would design particular outfits that she felt would strike some kind of symbolic note and would bring out Diana as an Arthurian princess. Or there'd be other outfits in particular colors that she thought would express the notion of an English garden in a desert landscape because she was in the midst of this Middle Eastern tour. So these are important things. I think, though, as well, that there's another thing that's going on with Diana is that she uses clothes to express her rebellion against Englishness. And that's certainly how it's seen by a lot of people in her orbit or, you know, a lot of her fans. So there's this phase that I'm sure people listening will probably remember where Diana started wearing a lot of American clothing in a kind of an almost completely over the top sort of way where she'd be wearing cowboy boots with denim jeans and American football sweatshirts and a baseball cap. So I think that she did a lot of that kind of deliberately in order to express her desire to break away, to some extent, from the constraints of the royal family.

[Edward White]

So she's not just this blank canvas. She does have the agency and the power to be able to control, to some extent, the messages that she's conveying. Is that right?

[Guest 1]

To some extent. She was a shrewd and pretty sharp, calculating person. And she did definitely manage to construct her own image to quite a large degree. That said, I think some people have gone a bit over the top with it. I know it's been suggested that Diana once wore a pair of red high heels because she wanted to suggest that she was like Dorothy in the woods, wizard of Oz, and that she desperately wanted to be able to click her heels together and disappear. And I think that's probably going a bit too far. But on the whole, yes, I think she was very conscious.

[Edward White]

One aspect, a very important aspect of this that we've not talked about is her gender, her femininity. Can you talk a little bit about the ways in which Diana came to represent ideals and notions of femininity at the time, or. Or I suppose, posed a challenge to some of them.

[Guest 1]

I think there's the thing that I always think about with this question is the way that her status as a mother was projected. And it's a really good example of the ways in which she, to some extent, forged her own path and consciously, deliberately did things to express her own identity and her break from tradition. But there's also plenty of examples of these other identities that we've been talking about being foisted upon her. So for instance, a historian called Colleen Deaney has done some really interesting work comparing Diana's official portraiture, where she's with her two young sons, to portraiture that was done of Queen Alexandra or as she was before Princess Alexandra back in the 19th century. And if you look at those images, they are almost identical where Diana is presented as this very, very traditional Victorian mother. Yet at the same time, there are other photographs of Diana as a mother that are utterly different and make her look like a very, very contemporaneous sort of a figure. I suppose maybe the most famous examples would be things like Diana running barefoot at the Boys School sports day or her taking them on the log flume at Alton Towers or whichever theme park it was they went to. I talk of her in the book as being a cut and shut princess. And cut and shut basically refers to this practice where people take two smashed up cars and they take the working bits from those cars and stick them together to form a new car. And that's kind of the rough analogy or metaphor that I use to talk about Diana in this, that she was capable of holding at the same time two extremely different sets of identities. So she was both the Victorian mother, but also the post feminist mother. Some people claim that she was just out and out a feminist, which I think is a more complicated argument to sustain. But it's one that certainly some people have attempted to shop 4th of July.

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[Guest 1]

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[Edward White]

A participating McDonald's to dive into what is a central but complex question. Does the ability that she has to hold these contradictory, these multiple images, these narratives together in the same person, does that say something about her as a person or Britain at the time that this was happening?

[Guest 1]

I think the idea of the cut and shut princess of Diana holding these different things together probably says a lot about what we expect of the royal family at that particular moment in history. I think one of the reasons that we became obsessed with Diana is because at a moment in the 1980s and 1990s, we were in the foothills of this creeping decay of trust in grand public institutions, and Diana became somebody, I think, that filled the gaps. And especially in terms of her public engagement, she had this. Well, she did have her own abilities. She had these tremendous personal qualities of empathy and compassion and fantastic social skills that allowed her to engage with people differently. But at the same time, people in this country in particular, still looked to the royal family to offer something that I think they felt that we couldn't get from politics or organized religion. And Diana, in her unique way, I suppose you could say Diana did manage to offer a type of public engagement that seemed to attend to some of our spiritual needs without her being an explicitly religious figure or an explicitly political one.

[Edward White]

I wanted to go back to a specific point you made earlier, which was the comparison between Diana and Alexandra. Were there other ways in which these two women were similar or that we can draw parallels between them?

[Guest 1]

Yeah, I mean, again, I have to give credit to Colleen Deeney for doing the work on this. But, yes, in terms of their engagement with members of the public, there seems to have been a lot of similarities, and I doubt very much that these were similarities that Diana was consciously aware of. But again, I think it's partly because in her role as Princess of Wales, it's very easy to fit her into her predecessor's narratives. So there's a story, for instance, of Princess Alexandra going to visit sick people in hospital, and apparently, I don't know what the injury was, but Alexandra had had an injury to her leg and she was meeting a man who'd had a terrible industrial accident and he was lying in bed, and apparently she did this thing of raising her leg up onto a table to show him, well, look, if I can rehabilitate my leg, then you can do the same with yours. And it was seen as an extraordinary thing to do, that she was breaking royal protocol and reaching out to an ordinary person in their time of. Which has kind of striking similarities with that famous idea of Diana, of doing exactly that, of going into hospitals, et cetera, and talking to ill people. Most famously, of course, when she went to the Middlesex Hospital and shook hands with patients with hiv. So, yeah, there are strong similarities, it seems, in terms of the. At least in terms of the reputations of Diana and her predecessor, Alexandra.

[Edward White]

There's a line in the book that I think is really interesting and I wanted to sort of focus in on. You say that throughout Diana's adult life, a recurring feature that appeared in British women's magazines was one that either imagined an alternate reality in which Diana had never become Princess of Wales, or in which she decided to pack it all in and turn herself into a normal woman. It was a rare reversal of celebrity media coverage. This is really interesting and I think speaks to a lot of the themes we've talked about. Can you just explain what you mean there?

[Guest 1]

I discovered in several women's magazines in the 1980s, there would be features about what Diana would do. Was she a normal person? You know, if Diana had not married into the Royal family? Or as we get later on into her story, if Diana ever left the Royal family. You know, once the tensions with Charles became public knowledge, these articles would speculate about what else she could do. So some people were saying. They would say, well, maybe she'll go back to being a teacher, or, you know, she'll go into nursing. And then other people would say, no, she's clearly gonna get her own chat or she'll move to America. There was a possibility at one point, by the way, that somebody sent her a script for a sequel to the Bodyguard. Kevin Costner, I think, actually was the person. And so that was one of the possibilities. And I was just really struck by this. You know, it's the idea that. There's this fascination with the idea that a. That, you know, Diana is one of us, but she somehow managed to slip off into this rarefied world of the royal family. And it allows us to imagine what our lives would be like if the same thing happened to us, or if Diana, who is now this extraordinary, mythological, almost creature if she were to suddenly leave it, what would she do? My favorite example of this, though, doesn't so much come from the women's magazines. It's from this novel that was published in 1994 by an American author called Peter Lefkoeur. And it's basically the idea it's a satire. But in it, Diana decides she's going to ditch the royal family. And she takes her sons, moves them to California, gives them crew cuts, dresses them in Nike trainers and Bart Simpson T shirts, and she gets a job. She buys a McDonald's franchise in this shopping mall in California. But this was a constant theme of the coverage of Diana. Basically, people just fascinated by the prospect that she might one day come back to Earth and be amongst us mere mortals.

[Edward White]

We've talked a little bit already about how Diana possesses this ability to speak to a whole range of different things in society. And I wanted to go through some of those examples, starting, I suppose, with America, which is the example we've just spoken about. Could you talk a little bit about how Diana, her image and her mythic status, I suppose, was received on the other side of the Atlantic?

[Guest 1]

For me, this is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole book. I think that Diana's relationship with the United States is utterly crucial to the fact of her immense fame at the time she lived. But her enduring fame in the last 28 years. There was this sense. I think it's quite a complicated backstory, but there is this huge interest in Diana in America. There is this sort of allure for princesses and royalty in general, but particularly this figure of the princess. It has a huge cultural currency in America. And Diana came along at a particular moment when it was just a perfect kind of cultural moment, when there was the technology available to make Diana what I think of as the first consumerist princess. And it's consumerist first in the way that we are able to carry out a relationship with her that we have. This is the era of color supplements for newspapers is just beginning. The foothills of satellite television, of VHS technology, et cetera, fast fashion. So people can kind of form a relationship with a princess in a way that nobody else had ever been able to do. And it's very much a consumerist relationship. You know, you can own experience and even inhabit Diana in some sense. And this is a really important part of her connection to the United States. But Diana herself is also seen as a consumerist figure. And in particular, there's this thing about her. This association between her and McDonald's comes up over and over again. And I noticed in the research that a lot of people, when they were asked, you know, in vox pops and that kind of thing, or on Internet forums immediately after Diana's death, American people would often say, well, you know, she was just wonderful. Not only was she a gorgeous and classy lady, but she was also just like us. You know, I saw her take those children to McDonald's. And she kind of. I think she lived her life in a way that American people connected to. And it really surprised me to find out that it wasn't just Americans who thought of her as basically being an American princess. It was also people outside the United States. So I talked to a couple of people, I interviewed a couple of people for the book, American fans of Diana's, and they said to me that they basically thought that she was like the embodiment of the American dream. I mean, one man said to me that the inspiring thing about Diana's story is that, you know, she shows that anybody can become a member of the royal family, which obviously isn't true. I mean, she started off as Lady Diana Spencer. That's why she married into the royal family. Her story, as it's conveyed in the United States, is completely different. And I found that fascinating. But I also came across people from outside the US talking about Diana who said that, well, no, no, she was an American princess. That's why we liked her. Because in this sort of post war cultural world where the United States is the cultural lingua franca, they didn't think of her. A lot of people, at least, didn't really think of her as being British or English. She seemed like an American. And so it's her American ness, I think, even though it's imagined. It's certainly she's no more of an American than the rest of us who live in the Western world. But it's her perceived Americanness that I think is the real key to her being such a gigantic.

[Edward White]

And it wasn't just American culture that she was able to tap into and touch. I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the other people of various ethnic backgrounds who felt an affinity to or a connection with her. Can you talk about some of the case studies from your book that explore that aspect of things?

[Guest 1]

Yeah. Diana basically cut across, it seems, national, ethnic, religious divides with the kind of ease that no other figure, except maybe someone like Nelson Mandela, has ever managed to do. I mean, it is really pretty extraordinary. The one case that I investigated quite a lot and go into a lot of detail in the book about is Diana's connection with South Asian people, in particular Pakistan, but other parts of the Indian subcontinent as well. And of course, Diana had some kind of personal connection with that, with her boyfriend, Hasnat Khan, which is. He was the last man that she was in a serious relationship with. And so she formed a close personal relationship with Pakistan. I interviewed people, you know, Shazia Mirsa, the stand up comedian, for instance, I spoke to her about this and she told me that basically people in that community, at least in her community, in the part of Birmingham that she grew up in, people were very heavily invested in Diana because that she seemed to lead a life that has kind of grandiose parallels to their own. She said to me that basically when a lot of South Asian people look at the Royal Family, they see family structures like their own. It's very hierarchical. And also, Diana seemed to have been engaged in what to them appeared to be an arranged marriage. And so there were lots of parallels. And especially for recent immigrants to Britain back in the 1980s, it was a kind of validation. This is what Shahzia was saying to me. Well, look. Look what Diana is doing. Look what the royals are doing. That's our lives. And it seemed like an affirmation of their own cultural backgrounds. And so that was very powerful for them. And to the extent that Shazia said that her. I think it's her mother. Her mother dressed in quite traditional Pakistani clothing, I believe. But when Diana had a new outfit, she would go out and she'd try and find material from that outfit to turn into a sari, which is, I just think, is a brilliant encapsulation of the kind of effect that Diana had and the ways in which people were able to take something from her and refashion it for themselves.

[Edward White]

Another group that I wanted to get into a little bit. We've already mentioned the famous stories of and images of Diana shaking hands with patients with HIV aids. Could you talk a little bit about the relationship she had with the gay community in Britain? And I suppose some of the tensions and contradictions that were inherent in that.

[Guest 1]

Yeah, Diana was kind of embraced, I think, by a lot of gay people as being kind of an ally or an icon. There's a particular parallel I draw in the book between Diana's interview, in their Panorama interview. It kind of has a parallel to other sorts of interviews of the time, such as George Michael's one, which is essentially like Diana doing a coming out interview in The Panorama in 1995, as much as it is a kind of a whistleblowing interview. She Became very heavily associated with the gay community. But I think a lot of gay people found this quite an uncomfortable parallel. There's an absolutely fascinating resource that I drew on that's called the National Lesbian and Gay Survey. After Diana's death, they asked their respondents to write in and give their take on Diana's death and how they felt and what they felt it meant to gay people. And there was only about a dozen people that responded to it. But they are. Each one of them is totally different from all the others. They are 12 or so completely different responses. And some people were absolutely horrified that Diana should be considered to be an important person in gay life at all. Because she's this ultra privileged. She's basically a poster girl for heteronormative couples. You can't get straighter than Princess Diana. And there was just sort of a sense of irritation and, I think, insult that she should be considered to be an important part of gay people's lives because she knew nothing about the experience of their lives. Other people, at the same time, felt like she was their most important ally and that she took the discrimination that gay people faced as part of their daily lives. And she did an awful lot to kind of combat it. And not just because of her involvement with the HIV issue, but because she was known to be friends with gay people and she was seen to be a great ally. Other people that wrote into this survey, they suggested that what was great about her is that she actually cut across all of these kinds of identities and that everybody could kind of find their own. Diana, whether you were gay, straight, or.

[Edward White]

Anything else, this is a story that is understandably shadowed by, and to some extent defined by the tragedy of its ending. I don't want to get too much into that tragedy. What I do want to talk about is whether or not the things we've talked about today help us understand that particular cultural moment in 1901. Whether you think some of the current. Some of the traits, some of the stories you've described help us understand how we as a society came to that moment.

[Guest 1]

I first got the idea for doing this exploration of Diana's reputation during the COVID lockdown. And it was because we'd just come through this period of, you know, these long wranglings over Brexit. And then immediately, once that was finished, we were plunged into this very strange time, this peculiar atmosphere that was obviously spreading right across the nation. It reminded me very strongly of things that I thought and felt during 1997. I was 15 when Diana died, and I remember it really vividly, I think, of kind of her death. It's almost like it's a turning point in my life. Not because I was particularly attached to Diana, I wasn't. I still don't have particularly strong views about her as a person. I'm not personally connected, connected to her, but I became aware that she was this extraordinarily potent figure for whatever reasons. When I went back to investigate what was happening in that week, Diana week, as you could call it, as it was sometimes referred to at the time as that, it became really obvious to me that there was the discourse around the mourning for Diana. The public morning for Diana was really strikingly similar to the kind of discourse that we'd had just coming out of Brexit, in that there were two groups of people, you know, people who. This is how it's portrayed in the media anyway. It's not actually probably quite this pat, but we were told there are two groups of people. There was one that was mourning Diana excessively and one that couldn't understand what on earth all the fuss was about. And that neither of these two groups of people could understand the other. And they felt like they didn't understand the country they were living in. You know, how could you be so overwrought or how could you be so heartless? That kind of thing. And it is as if national identity, Britishness itself seemed to be on the line because there were some people, those who felt that the crowds in London had lost their minds. They would over and over say things like, well, they're acting like this is what happened in Nazi Germany or this is what you find in North Korea. Or Boris Johnson described it, I think, as a Latin American carnival of grief. I think it was David Starkey who said he found the scenes reminiscent of Sicily. It seemed to be. Every critic of the morning was criticizing it on the basis of, this isn't Britain anymore. We've lost our national identity. We've lost something deep and profound and important about ourselves. At the same time, the people who were mourning were looking at, often criticizing the royals for being these kind of Teutonic, unemotionless, Germanic people. There's been a long running joke about how the British Royal Family isn't really British, they're Germans. And one of the reasons Diana was kind of celebrated when she entered the Royal Family is that she was British, she wasn't a German. And she was gonna be restoring the British family to the rightful custodians, that is the British people. And so I think in that week, a lot of those sorts of things came out. Diana's importance as a symbol of British tradition, but also the future world that Britain was heading in. They really came to the fore. The final thing to say about that is that it was noted at the time of the mourning. It was noted by lots of people, especially the young people who were mourning, seemed to embody a new Britain. That this definitively the case that we were heading on a different path because these young people were multi ethnic, a lot of them were gay and they were all. It was kind of seemed to be presumed by certain writers anyway, certain commentators, that they were all pro European. And the lesson of Diana seemed to be, Britain needs to accept its place in the new world, in the emerging European Union. We need to embrace our Europeanness, leave behind the stuffy traditions of the past, of Britain and empire and the monarchy and all that, embrace something different. And that's what Tony Blair was selling basically in 1997. But you fast forward to the end of the Brexit process, the beginning of the COVID era, and all that stuff was completely gone. And so I think that it was fascinating how quickly those presumptions about the kind of Britain that Diana embodied, how quickly those presumptions evaporated in the last few.

[Edward White]

And it remains fascinating that a single person can embody the narrative, the identity of a nation of different groups of people, all at the same time.

[Guest 1]

Yeah, it does. Although I do think that there is a huge amount written about Diana that is completely over the top and hyperbolic. It is true that she has managed to do something in the mere fact of her being and of her presence as a public figure. She's done something that nobody else has really been able to do and be a focus for all those different constituencies in British life and also at the same time, to be a hugely popular figure all over the world.

[Host 1]

That was Edward White, author of books including the twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock and the Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. Edwards latest book, Diana An Obsession, is out now. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Jack Bateman. This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he'd would say, don't worry, Sunny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes. Wherever you get your podcasts.