Diana's death 25 years on: David Starkey criticises everybody's 'deliberate starting of rumours'

it was a year after it was we were there for the first anniversary of dieter's death that is the first anniversary correct and and by that point we were already in some ways into a situation which anticipates where we are now diana really is the beginning of that re-mass emotionalization of british politics and of course to an extent america she was even bigger there there became only one thing you could say publicly which was that diana was perfect that charles was wicked that diana was a saint upon a monument well of course she wasn't completely good and charles wasn't completely bad what strikes me in retrospect i'm thinking i've been thinking about it a lot knowing i was going to be doing this today it's just the sheer awful human muddle and mess of everybody's behavior and motives the what we know about the deliberate if you like pollution by particularly muhammad al fayad the deliberate starting of rumors to conceal the fact that the chauffeur that diana had been given was drunk concealed the fact that the car was a hired vehicle that actually was a faulty one every single thing and the our mixture of motives too as i said our desire or the desire of a significant part of the public really to turn diana into a saint it was medieval the uh the piling up of of uh ev every kind of object from teddy bears the bunches of flowers to everything it's like the death of a unexpected violent death of a royal in the middle ages henry the sixth murdered the second murdered they become sort of impromptu saints and you get these tidal waves of mass emotion which of course are profoundly dangerous we forget the fact that we're two other littles we forget the fact that there was our husband widowed in the most hideously bubbly we forget of the extraordinary doubleness of memory the fact i think there had been even though charles uses that extraordinary phrase whatever love means and at the same time they've been the bitterness diana's bitterness again we've all been talking about the bashir interview or william has to pretend that diana was trapped in saying those things she awesome she wanted to say she wanted vengeance she wanted to damage she wanted to hurt so alongside the good alongside the aids alongside the landmines alongside that reaching out there was that very human mixture of motif and of course it's the job of us the historian looking back to try to recover that doubleness that mixture that confusion i was just saying to ella wheeler my studio guest david that there was a kind of um madness in the air that week and it was stoked by uh yes the journalists by politicians by commentators from the public itself and we got a kind of on unwillingness to accept the version uh or some of the questions you raise you know private eye was taken off the newsstands for having a an insufficiently respectful front cover this is a satirical magazine uh i'm mindful we've not got as much time as we'd like i just want to skip this on if we can if she was what kind of person would diana be now were she still alive it's an impossible question to to answer obviously but i reflect on this david for that first anniversary that we talked about a moment ago i went to paris uh fired people got us into the the the flat just off the champs-elysees where they were heading dodie and diana they were heading there on the night of the crash i'm not going to go into details they're personal um but the flat was a playboy flat it was i'll say no more than this it was a little bit grubby david and i just wonder what kind of like she you know she died in her in her prime what kind of person would she be now what would be looking at now i am now going to commit the sin against the holy ghost she would have been wouldn't she all-purpose euro track and that was the fate if she'd gone ahead i suspect her good taste which finally she had would have pulled her back but if you look at the tordrenous of that circle around and again it's so painful colin to say this whatever one may think of al fired he lost his son right the person who's flat you're describing as grubby and yet there's an extraordinary piece by tom bower tombawa who knows more about this probably than anybody in the times today pointing out that dodie already had a fiancee on the next yacht at santope who was unceremoniously dumped to make way for diane so in one sense diana was deliberately being entrapped in a man who hated the british establishment because it fired but it felt it had excluded him saw or thought he saw that she could be a kind of bulldozer to force his way not simply into british society but heaven's sake into the royal family with a son who was the father-in-law of the air the ultimate heirs to the throne so this again this extraordinary confusion of motive but look at the punishment that that man had for his ambition if shakespeare were writing it he couldn't have done better the universal misery that's inflicted on everybody it is in some ways it is torture you use the right word but in other words in other ways it is a genuine tragedy and i think by focusing simply on the in many ways the absurdities of the popular reaction and the these that wonderful phrase of the great historian lord mcauley that you and i have talked about before nothing is ridiculous as the british public in one of its fits of morality well that was a supreme fact that they were going through it is ridiculous but it has the most terrible consequences but it wrapped you look at those two boys at the funeral look again frankly but a man for whom i have the highest respect at charles earl spencer look at the absurd speech that he gave we her blood family shall shield you know forgetting of course the profound ambiguities of his own relationship with this if you see what i mean everybody in a sense behaved badly everybody was found out including who david including members of the public who simply couldn't accept that it was a drink-driving accident i remember interviewing trevor east jones former special former soldier who was the survivor the only survivor in the crash why did he survive because he took the trouble to put his seat belt on they didn't in the back and they both died the driver of his head on drink and drugs hungry paul he died as well but the public simply couldn't accept such a mundane answer that it was a drink driving accident they had to it had to be the white fierce it had to be prince philip it had to be mi5 or mi6 it doesn't really matter it was shady or it had to be the paparazzi it had you see again the extraordinary thing the british public depended on the paparazzi to know about this how otherwise did we know about diana on the yacht but of course the moment the crash happens the wickedness of the paparazzi the disgraceful behavior of the press which the british public have been lapping up in every single detail you see what i mean it is this we're all caught out we're all found out

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Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022