THE INSIDE STORY
‘I WAS TOLD ONLY YESTERDAY BY SOMEONE AT THE PALACE JUST HOW DEEPLY DISTRESSING IT HAS BEEN FOR THE QUEEN’
FOLLOWING the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, a badly shaken royal family embraced dullness like a spouse returning gratefully to the marital bed after an affair with a gorgeous but unstable lover.
Tina says the queen made it crystal clear it could never happen again.
“The it being Diana’s explosive celebrity, the problem of the monarchy being upstaged, outshone by anyone other than the queen or the heir to the throne. The refrain most repeated at the palace was, ‘We don’t want another Diana’. Never again!”
So how did “never again” work out? That’s what I begin by asking Tina who, a quarter of a century after Diana’s death, has returned to the subject of the monarchy in her new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil.
It’s the result of two years’ work, speaking to 120 people intimately involved with senior royals and their households.
Tina observes drily that it’s been a somewhat challenging year for the royals. You could say that.
The Duke and
