Foreword to the New Edition

In June 2006, nearly nine years after Diana’s death, I attended a ball – hosted, improbably, by Tatler magazine and Mikhail Gorbachev – at Althorp, the ancestral home of the Spencer family in Northamptonshire. I looked up at the glowing windows from which Diana, during an unhappy visit with Prince Charles soon after their marriage, had gazed moodily at the rolling, moonlit grounds. The crowd partying in the tent that night was her crowd – the London demi-monde of fashion and café society and media. She would have lit up the gathering with her radiance and charm. It seemed all wrong for her to lie buried on that lonely island in the lake. All wrong for the laughter and the voices not to include hers. As the band played on and the summer night dwindled, I kept waiting for her to come down and join us and the last nine years to disappear.

Diana would have been fifty in July 2011. What would she have been like? Still great-looking: that’s a given. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, with her cornflower-blue eyes and well-turned legs, was a handsome woman to the very end. Fashion-wise, Diana would have gone the J. Crew and Galliano route in the same vein as Michelle Obama, always knowing how to mix the casual with the glam. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym.

Remarriage? At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Fayed’s hopeless unpunctuality (though staying on good terms with his father, Mohamed, who could still be relied on to cough up for a table or two at a charity dinner). After the break-up with Dodi she would have probably moved to New York, where I picture her spending a few cocooned years married to a super-rich hedge fund guy. Eventually, having wearied of the boredom of weekends in his big tasteless house in upstate New York, she would have shed him too, andmight have drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting – a former American president with a country place nearby, for example, or a globetrotting French finance wizard destined for the Elysée. Gliding sleekly into her forties, she’d have developed a taste for men of power over boys of play, international movers and shakers who’d invite her not just on extended trips floating off the Côte d’Azur but to brainy summits at Ditchley or private sessions at Davos. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general rumoured to have links to the ISI would have been a particular headache for the Foreign Office.)

Diana would have been well pleased with the scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World – the one that revealed that for years the British tabloids had been hacking into the phones of celebrities and royals and publishing the illicit skimmings. She would have sued for sure, and her collected damages would have broken all records. Is it possible that even Squidgygate, the embarrassingly steamy phone call between Diana and her lover James Gilbey in December of 1989, was really one of the earliest examples of press malfeasance? I never believed the bizarre explanation, investigated at length here in The Diana Chronicles, that a radio ham named Cyril Reenan had picked up this call and offered it to the Sun. Was Reenan, who later spoke of ‘being set up by a sinister conspiracy’ and died in 2004, really a cover for a nefarious phone hacker? If so, Diana’s obsession about eavesdroppers in the last days of her life – often mocked as paranoia – was simply the sound intuition of a careful student of the folkways of Fleet Street.

Politically, Diana would have soon parted company with Tony Blair, stung by his failure to use her, as she had hoped, for big peacemaking missions overseas. He would have tried to woo her back each election cycle, but Diana was shrewd when it came to the conducting of feuds. While I suspect she would have been reconciled with her mother, I doubt she would have ever forgiven her brother, Earl Spencer, for abruptly withdrawing the refuge of a house on Althorp’s grounds at the time she needed it most. Diana was too wounded in childhood and in marriage to forgive the people who let her down. Perhaps the Earl understood that, and guilt was the impetus for his fiery repudiation of the royals at her funeral (and also for his insistence that she should be enshrined at Althorp for ever). I believe her best male friend in later years would have been, poignantly, her reviled first husband. She and Charles had begun to reach a delicate understanding towards the end of her life. She would no longer have been impatient of Charles’s causes. Rather she would have empathised and asked his advice about hers. After so many loves and losses she might have even given up hating Camilla. The Duchess’s galleon-sized Lady Bracknell hat at William’s wedding would have offered satisfaction enough.

And Kate, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge? How would Diana have handled her son’s steadfast affection for a woman other than herself? The rising public adoration of Kate would have afforded Diana some tricky moments. Pleased, yes. But, like Frances Shand Kydd – who, days before Diana’s wedding, suddenly burst out, ‘I have good long legs – like my daughter’ – Diana would have had to adjust to a broadening of the limelight. Her edge over Kate, of course, was the epic of her princessly suffering, which would always make Diana’s story more interesting. (‘Happily ever after’ will never have the same allure to the press as ‘It all went wrong’) But she would have loved being a firm defender of the Middletons against the Palace snobs and ostentatiously made Kate’s dynamic mother, Carole Middleton, her new BFF. To William’s slight irritation she would also have begun to see his in-laws’ comfortable, relaxed house in Berkshire as a haven for herself, casting Kate’s solid, dependable father, Michael, as yet another shoulder to lean on. Diana was always searching for the kind of supportive family that she never had.

Would our heroine by now have found peace? Yes, I believe she would. Sustained by the two things she cared about most: her children and her work.

In July 1997, Diana told me she’d been discussing the idea of making television films to further promote her work on behalf of the victims of landmines, leprosy, and HIV/Aids. As the years rolled by, her foundation would have become one of the most prestigious in the world. For a woman whose private life was so ruled by her heart, Diana was a surprisingly good executive. She knew how to make things happen. She knew how to run a team. She had a galvanic focus when her compassionate feelings were stirred. Her Princess Diana Foundation, fuelled by a steady pipeline of Fayed and Forstman millions (her ex-boyfriend, billionaire Theodore Forstman, stayed in close touch), might have rivalled the Clinton Global Initiative by now. In the world disasters of the last few years – ⁹/₁₁, the tsunamis, the Pakistan earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, the Japanese nuclear catastrophe – you know Diana would have been first at the scene in a hard hat with a camera crew (and, by now, ten million followers on Twitter). She wouldhave kept her spotlight trained on individual sufferers whom she’d continued to visit and care for and touch. At a time when the world has disaster fatigue, I miss the generosity of her star power and what it could accomplish.

‘One day I will get you back your HRH,’ fourteen-year-old William told his mother at the time of her divorce. And in many ways he already has. He made considerable efforts to include the memory of his mother in the most important day of his life. The engagement ring he placed on Kate’s finger belonged to his mother. In the days before the ceremony there was a sacred trip with his fiancée to Diana’s grave on the island in the lake. The opening hymn at the wedding, ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’, was one of Diana’s favourites, chosen by William and Harry to close her funeral service and the memorial service to mark the tenth anniversary of her death.

The way William has matured has reflected so much of Diana’s tender messaging to him as a child. It made him sure and steady in his choice of the woman he loved after years of considered courtship. Like his scampish heart-throb younger brother, William is relaxed with the media and informal in his presentation to the public. When the couple drove out of Buckingham Palace in his father’s 41-year-old open-topped Aston Martin DB6 Volante, the gesture showed all his mother’s theatrical flair. Those huge blue eyes of Diana’s, gazing out from under an elegant but fashion-forward ‘fascinator’, in the front row of Westminister Abbey, would have shone with pride.

Indeed, so much of William’s current happiness could not have happened without the mother who fought for a different way of royal life. Thanks to the discreet Palace self-examination after the turbulent scenes before Diana’s funeral, the Queen, too, has profoundly changed. She is far more available to her people. Her advisers today are much more media-savvy, much less ‘top drawer’ than the crusty enforcers of tradition who cramped the life of the Princess of Wales. At Easter this year, the Queen was photographed riding in the woods at Windsor with her two youngest grandchildren, one of whom was attached to her by a leading rein. When she saw the picture, the Queen liked it so much she told the Palace to release it to the press. That would never have happened ten years ago, let alone twenty. It was a private moment that told a story: the Queen as Granny.

The picture, like the wedding, was a pure Diana moment.