I didn't find it "meaningless." I think she was the peoples princess. She embraced the people and the people embraced her right back. When she passed the people mourned and it was a set of events that a great deal of people will never forget. Blair got it right, she was the people princess. Not just for Britain but for the world.

Curiouser and curiouser!

anbrida, you are the first person in a very long time to give us a bit of a reality check about Diana lifestyle and the press reaction to that lifestyle immediatly prior to her death. It was widely reported that Dodi was a "known" cocaine user and they didn't hold back about his playboy reputation and that Diana was seen to be buying into it at the expense of her charity work and worse, exposing her royal children to such a lifestyle. Flitting off to a "anti landmines" charity promotion then back to partying on a yacht with Dodi seemed to prove their point.

It was in this media reality that Blair (and his spin doctors) saw a window of opportunity, coined the phrase "People's Princess" and played it for all it was worth. The day before she died she was "exploiting her royal children", the day after, she was a Saint called The People's Princess. Pardon my cynicism

On itself Tony Blair bore no any responsibility for Diana Spencer. Exactly like today David Cameron is not at all responsible for Sarah Ferguson, Mark Phillips, Antony Armstrong-Jones or other former members of the royal family.

:flowers:

It was certainly well meant, but it never made any sense to me because there wasn't much behind it. What does it mean? Is the Queen "the peoples' Queen"? Who out of William and Harry is "the peoples' prince" or are they both? Is it the same as Pope francis being the people's pope?

The irritating thing for me was that Diana was allowing her life to be lived fully in the public eye, whereas I thought she was fed up with it. That last summer we saw her everywhere from Bosnian mine-fields to glamorous cruises in the Med to intimate dinners in Paris - all of it knowingly in the full glare of the media and it made no sense to me to live a double or triple life like that.

The horrors of mine-fields had to be highlighted and I'm glad she did it and I really do think that had she lived, her role in highlighting these terrible things was more valuable than we will ever know. But to turn around days later and live the jet-set life with a new boyfriend in tow and making odd statements like wait to see what I do next, sort of diminished the importance of her serious work.

As for Dodi, gawd only knows what she saw in him - I never understood it, but her taste in men was never great, bless her. But nonetheless, he may well have been right for her in the long run and we will never know - I wouldn't have objected to him as a new husband on any grounds other than his father being the way he is and interfering all the time.

I always hoped that had Diana lived, she would have ended up with a rich anthropologist or artist or someone a bit grounded who couldn't care less about the media.

IMO, double meaning to the phrase 'people's princess'.:

In the Panorama interview Diana said she wanted to be the Queen of Hearts. The Queen stripped her of her HRH, so Blair decided to make her the 'people's princess'.

Prince Edward, later King Edward VIII, was describes as the 'people's prince'. At the time of her death Diana's popularity was dropping as fast as Edward VIII. He also died in Paris.

Well, the Queen did not at all strip anything from Diana. The late Diana was a HRH and a Princess by virtue of her marriage. With the end of the said marriage, Diana automatically lost these styles.

Like any divorced lady once married to a titled gentleman, she could keep the style as a honorific behind her first name, as long as she remained in this divorced state:

Diana, Princess of Wales (Lady Diana Spencer)
Sarah, Duchess of York (Sarah Ferguson)

Widowers however keep the HRH and the style "Princess":

HRH Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent (Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark)
HRH Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester (Lady Alice Montagu Douglas Scott)
HRH Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (Princess Alice, Lady Cambridge)

:flowers:

There are some activities of Diana during that summer which might give us some insights of the reason of her relationship with Dodi.

The first thing is during that summer Diana had talked with a bunch of people of her plan to make film to promote some causes which were closed to her heart.

July 1997, during a lunch with Tina Brown, Diana told Brown 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
July 1997, Diana had a lunch with a group of friends from professional field, discussing how to develop her fledgling work as a TV filmmaker.
The secrets of Diana's harem | Mail Online

Sep 1997, had she not died, she would bring Dodi to see her indian friend Gulu Lalvani. Diana told Lalvani she wanted to to do a documentary on the AIDS epidemic in Mumbai, just like the documentary she had done on landmines in Angola. She told him she had approached the Indian high commissioner in London and that he had turned her proposal down. She was told that the Government of India might not like the idea because it would expose the AIDS epidemic in India to the world, it would affect tourist traffic to India. So Lalvani offered to hire a local camera crew and said to her, we will just go ahead and do it.


It is very clear that Diana wanted to more develop her role as a film maker. But only passion is not enough, you need money and professional help. Especially like India's case, she won't able to get any government fund to do the film. She would need to find the fund and professional crew herself. Diana was a perfectionist, she wouldn't be satisfied with a local camera crew. She always wanted the best in her work. And now please remember Dodi's occupation was a professional film maker with a very wealthy father.

Di's Indian Friend | Sanjay Suri, Archana Jahagirdar

The second thing is Tony wanted Diana to play a good-will non formal ambassador role, because her popularity all over the world. Even if a country is not friendly to Britain, it is very possible that she would be still friendly to Diana. The first mission Tony ask Diana to do, is to go to visit China.

Here are some articles about Diana's ambassador role

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/po...mbassador.html
Di's Indian Friend | Sanjay Suri, Archana Jahagirdar
Blair held secret talks with Diana over New Labour 'ambassador' role | Mail Online

July 6, 1997 Diana and Tony Blair had a meeting in Chequers, to talk about “what she could do for the country in a more formal way.

July, 1997 Diana had a lunch with Tina Brown, in which she talked about her wish to visit China, because "I'm very good at sorting people's heads out." she said.

July, 1997 When Diana was on Fayed boat, she was deep in discussions with her friend the Chinese entrepreneur David Tang, who was helping her make plans for her three-day trip to Hongkong on Sep 27, 1997. David Tang helped arrange her charaity appearances there and meetings with government officials. During the visit, Diana would also have a lunch with Beijing's top representative in Hong Kong.

Aug, 1997 Diana gave a birth party for David Tang.

Aug 30, on the way from southern France to Paris Diana talked to David Tang by phone about her appearance in Hong Kong in September. Diana wanted to know how were everything going with her trip to Hongkong. And she also wanted David Tang to help arrange a trip to mainland China. David Tang said she wanted to bring the two princes to visit China someday.

Sep 2, 1997 China's leading People's Daily on Tuesday eulogized Diana as an
''ambassador of peace'' and a ''princess of the people'' and then roundly condemned the Western news media. ''She sympathized with the hardships of ordinary people,undertook charitable works with all her heart and expressed a special concern for society's masses of weak and frail,'' the Communist
Party-run paper said in a eulogy. Please note that Diana had never visited China, but still the Chinese government created a new title "ambassador of peace" for her, besides the people's princess.

Here are some background information of her planned trip to China. On July 1st, 1997 Hongkong was handed over from Britain to China. However, the two governmets were very unhappy with each other, there were a lot of disagreements. So when Tony Blair met Jiang in Hongkong's handover ceremony, Jiang told to Blair something like "the Labor is a new government, you don't have that history burden, let's forget the past and look forward.

I think Tony would use Diana to make visit those not traditional friend countries, in order to warm up the relationship, such as China, Argentina and some Muslim countries. Due to Diana's unofficial status, it would be very convenient for her visit any countries under the cover of charity events.

I have noticed that for each major countries or region, Diana would have a friend she can rely on to arrange visit or meeting local official. Of course such a friend is very critical for her unofficial ambassador role. In China, she had David Tang, in Indian Gulu Lalvani, and do we need to ask who would be her such a friend in the Muslim world?

As popularity concerned, to be a successful ambassador, her popularity in the host countries, such as China, Argentina, Muslim world, and etc, would be more important than her popularity in the home country, Britain.

Diana was on her way to turning her life around after her divorce but she never got that shot. I just wish she didn't accept the Al-Fayed's invitation to vacation with them that summer. It seems her life went out of her own control after that.

And all this is just a snippet of her apparently complicated life I expect. I confess I am already exhausted! :wacko:

To the contrary, I think every thing were under her own control except for the last day. Going to Paris was Dodi's idea. She wanted go home. She even told Richard Key on Aug 30, she wanted to get away from the paparrazi and thought "British people must be sick of seeing me in the newspaper".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...e-network.html

You are right. She was on a major change in her life when she died. Besides the ambassador role, filmmaking plan, she also wanted to open a world-wide hospice network. But do charity also need money, and Al-Fayed was one of the few people who was very generous to her and willing to help make her dream come true.

Jacknch-you've perfectly articulated how I feel about the "people's princess" moniker and why I dislike it. Was the late, phenomenally popular Astrid Queen of the Belgians the People's Queen? She connected with average people too. Was JFK the People's President? Francis the People's Pope?

I wasn't meaning to denigrate Diana by saying that I found the title Blair gave her trite and meaningless. As unattractive as I sometimes found her methods and behavior, I was fascinated by Diana. Her death left me depressed for weeks.

Despite the troubles of her past, Diana was a beautiful light in this world and when it burned out, it was a great loss for everyone. She's been gone for a long time now but I still feel her loss as if it all happened yesterday.

Ah yes, but she was the mother of the future king and his brother. That is the difference. Had she been anyone else who married into the family, the situation would have been different.:flowers:

I was just reading Tina Brown's book earlier this evening. The place she wanted to visit was Northern Ireland because she thought that she "could sort people's heads out."

I completely agree.

If it was automatic why did Sarah keep it from her divorce until the Queen issued the LPs?

and

Why did The Queen even have to issue the LPs that stripped both women of the HRH?

It actually wasn't automatic as seen with Sarah still using it from her divorce until Diana's divorce.

Really?! As someone who was growing up in NI around that time, she clearly thought an awful lot of herself if she thought she could make any appreciable difference to the Troubles.

Clearly she was in need of a bit of a reality check at the time, in more ways than one.

This was an uncovered and until then pretty unthinkable situation. "Divorced wives of British Princes? Good heavens!". It was assumed that marriages always ended by death and then the widow kept the style and titles of the deceased husband. To end all possible confusion about this, Queen Elizabeth decreed that any former wife (other than a widow until a remarriage) of a British Prince is not entitled to the style of a Royal Highness. (LP of August 21st 1996).

So Sarah and Diana were not "scrapped" from anything. They were no Princesses or Duchesses in their own right. With the end of their marriages also the use of their former husband's style and titles ended. The HRH is no title or a dignity, it is a style, a honorific, a form of address. Sarah and Diana were HRH by virtue of their marriages. They were no HRH anymore with the end of said marriages. To take away any possible confusion about that, Queen Elizabeth made it clear for once and for all.

:flowers:

I forgot to mentioned that. Tina Brown is a nasty lier. The country she wanted visit was China. It was printed in a 1997 article on The New Yorker magazine,written by Tina Brown herself. I can't find the link to that article now. But I have a copy. And you can read the following bbc article printed in 1997, which will tell you the country is China.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/po...mbassador.html

I can provide more articles about her trip to China, but they are in Chinese. :ermm:

In her book, Tina Brown did mention Diana'd been talking with David Tang on phone from the boat to arrange her visit to Hongkong. But she gave a nasty reason why Diana would like to visit China. Here is an extract from Tina Brown's book

That is such a nasty lie. Gulu Lalvani is an Indian. He has nothing to do with China. Tina Brown knew very clear why Diana would like to visit China, but she made it sound like it was all because of man