Saturday, January 24, 1998

Departed princess deserves more respect as human being than 'The Diana Experience' affords

By ROY HATTERSLEY / The Guardian

LONDON -- Whatever else may be said about Earl Spencer, no one can doubt the contribution he has made to the study of the effects of childhood environment on conduct and character.

Thanks to him, we can be absolutely certain that it is possible to be brought up surrounded by great pictures, historic furniture and noble architecture and still retain the aesthetic instincts of a deathwatch beetle.

By building at Althorp what we shall, no doubt, soon be calling "The Diana Experience," he is creating more than a memorial to his dead sister. He is commemorating the defining vulgarities of the 20th century's closing years.

We can rely on it all being tastefully done -- even though some of the architect's drawings suggest that part of the mausoleum will be reminiscent of a shopping arcade. Taste of a sort is essential to the initiative's success. But that no more justifies the scale and nature of the enterprise than the promise to give away the profits turns it from a theme park into a shrine.

Some things too sacred

There are some things for which tickets should not be sold. And the grave of a young woman who died in a car crash is one of them. If it is impossible to accommodate the bus tours without charging an entrance fee, Diana, Princess of Wales, should be left to rest in private peace.

Perhaps the princess herself -- who was not adverse to the right sort of publicity -- would have loved the lines at the gate. But let us hope that that is not the side of her character which Lord Spencer wishes to commemorate. No doubt she would have been delighted to know that, after the costs of the burial site are covered, ticket money will be donated to charity.

Let us also assume, for a brief moment, that the same rule will be applied to the income from visitors to Althorp House -- although there must be a terrible temptation to use the celebrated grave as the loss leader in the stately supermarket. Even then -- even if the whole business is financed by the Spencer fortune -- it will be tainted by the commercial ethic.

The curse of our time is the belief that everything -- health, popularity, happiness, even youth -- can be bought and sold. Lord Spencer is proposing to sell the memory of the Princess of Wales. He is also perpetuating the idea of celebrity death -- a notion hideously illustrated by the BBC on the morning of the tragedy when, after a threnody to the princess and the brief biography of Dodi Fayed, the newsreader added as an afterthought "the driver also died."

Paying proper tribute

No doubt the Althorp mausoleum will pay proper tribute to Princess Diana's good works. But in spirit -- as the telephone bookings come in and the credit card numbers are carefully checked -- it will not be the campaign against landmines, the work for the poor or the identification with the homeless which make the tills ring. It will be the designer dresses, the fashionable health clubs, the exotic holidays and all the other attributes and activities which add up to the loathsome word glamour.

Although I barely met her, and suspect that we had little in common, I regret that Princess Diana's life should be treated with so little respect.

I admit to holding an austere view of death. It has always seemed to me that ostentatious grief and conspicuous mourning is less a tribute to the dear departed than a cry for recognition from the bereaved. When Laertes jumped into his sister's grave, Hamlet jumped in after him to show that he loved Ophelia more than 40,000 brothers would find possible.

Exhibitionism, I suggested to my teacher more than 40 years ago. Self-indulgence, she replied. Hamlet could have felt without showing his feelings. The anguish, when we lose somebody we love, is far too personal an emotion decently to become public property. Some people cannot hold back the tears.

Lord Spencer, on the other hand, did not have to read his polemic from the Westminster Abbey pulpit. Funeral services are no place for phillippics -- unless like Mark Antony you have a vested interest in perpetuating one controversial view of the life that the ceremony celebrates.

Lord Spencer, as he perpetuates his sister's memory at Althorp, will be entitled to argue Diana believed emotion to be better expressed than subdued. She was the high priestess of touch and feel. And her rejection of reticence, perhaps more than anything else in her life and work, made her an icon for thousands of men and women who feel imprisoned behind the duty to act with discretion and behave with decorum.

Respectable matrons

Many of the respectable matrons who climb down from the buses at the gates of the mausoleum will believe they are paying tribute to the free spirit whom they wish they had become. They ought to content themselves with the knowledge that if they had continued their youthful determination to "do their own thing," communities would have crumbled all over Britain.

The Carthaginian Hannibal decided his grave should be marked by a single stone which bore no other engraving but his name. That was, I know, a sort of arrogance. A single word would tell the passersby that it was the tomb of the Carthaginian who beat Rome in the Punic wars. But he might have hoped for an arch that listed his victories or even a temple that elected him to the status of a god. Instead, he chose the simple dignity.

I wish Earl Spencer had done the same for his sister. As I said, she deserves more respect -- not because she was a princess, but because she was a human being.

Roy Hattersley is a veteran British politician and journalist. He is a former deputy leader of the Labor Party.

Scripps Howard News Service