CULTURE WATCH II Diana in Death - A fairy tale of another kind

National Review, April 17, 2000 by David Pryce-Jones

POOR Lady Diana Spencer. Hers was truly a bewildering fate. Born into one of Britain's most ancient and aristocratic families, she seemed destined through marrying Prince Charles to be a beautiful and fitting Queen of England. The whole world instead became privy to the infidelities of this royal marriage and the gossip surrounding its messy breakup. A drunken chauffeur in Paris then had an accident at high speed, killing himself and his passengers, Lady Diana and Dodi Fayed, the man with whom she had been having some sort of romance that summer.

Mass emotion is always mysterious. One of its essential features, though, is the conversion of hard facts into wish fulfillment. A much troubled and vulnerable personality, Lady Diana had been anorexic and on occasion had done herself physical injury. Mixing charm and manipulation, she had leaked to the media all manner of private stories harmful to herself and the royal family. Whether or not she realized it, she was establishing herself with maximum publicity as a woman wronged. World literature testifies to the lasting power of that image.

Following her untimely death, she was quasi-canonized in the wildest travesty of reality as the People's Princess and Saint Diana. Immense crowds gathered in London, milling about in search of a purpose. Revolutions begin that way, as a number of commentators observed at the time. The government panicked. A grimacing and lachrymose Tony Blair as prime minister took the lead in expressing the sudden outburst of national hysteria and compelled the royal family into gestures of self- abasement. But the bogus religiosity out on the streets in fact had no political content.

And there the matter might have rested, except for Mohamed Fayed, father of the unfortunate Dodi. From the moment that the car accident in Paris occurred, he began claiming to know details such as Lady Diana's last words and wishes. These have all been shown to be fabrications. His motives remain obscure, but the chauffeur and the security guards involved were on his payroll, and he may have been seeking to avoid responsibility. Soon Fayed went much further. "I believe in my heart 99.9 percent that it was not an accident. There was a conspiracy." Lady Diana and Dodi, he likes to claim, were murdered by the British secret services, upon instructions from the royal family. And the royal motive? Diana and Dodi were engaged to be married, and the royal family could not accept that Prince William, the future king, might have an Egyptian half-brother-a hypothesis that Fayed puts in crude and racist language all his own.

Fayed never ceases to astonish. Egyptian by birth, he has risen from very humble circumstances, owing much to his first marriage to the sister of Adnan Khashoggi, once a prominent arms dealer and commission agent in the Arab world. Fayed's own adventures range from Haiti to Dubai, and it is far from clear how much money he had really made by the time he arrived in Britain. At the end of a long struggle with another dubious tycoon by the name of Tiny Rowland, Fayed won control of Harrods, London's famous store. A government report then queried Fayed's finances and condemned his conduct. Fayed believed that this report too was the result of a conspiracy, this time inspired by Mrs. Thatcher, to ruin him. "I piss on the British," Fayed commented in his customary style. "I bought Harrods so I can sit up here and piss on them as they pass down there." Almost by way of a sideline, he has specialized in bribing and corrupting politicians for various ends of his own, entrapping or exposing them in the process, to leave a stain of sleaze on the country's public life.

In an unauthorized biography, Tom Bower, one of the most persistent of British investigative journalists, recently laid out the ascertainable facts about Fayed, and especially his instantaneous mood swings between love and hate. The CIA, it appears, had early reached the judgment that Fayed was "friendly and evil at the same time." Concurring, Bower further views Fayed as insecure, a fantasist badly in need of recognition but unable to distinguish friends from enemies, and therefore set on a path of "impetuous self-destruction." Correctly enough, Arabs everywhere see themselves as victims of some absolute ruler's "hidden hand." Even in democratic Britain, Fayed is no exception. His mind is filled with "infantile conspiracies."

And poor Dodi: There was not much to him. Terrified of his overwhelming father, he drifted on the allowance he was given, a would-be jet-setter and womanizer, a cocaine user, dabbling in film projects which mostly came to nothing. In the summer of the accident, he was apparently engaged to a model in California and first met Lady Diana on the Fayed yacht in the south of France. Lady Diana's instinct of self- preservation was certainly weak, but any sustained relationship with Dodi would have meant rebellion and calamity. For Mohamed Fayed, though, the capture of the mother of the future King of England as his daughter-in-law would have provided revenge on the British greater than anything he could achieve from the roof of Harrods.