Daniella Elzer: Diana Lessons Prince Harry Needs to Learn Before Publishing Book

opinion:

The year was 1991 and those closest to Princess Diana believed she was at a crossroads. According to her biographer Tina Brown, she had the choice of “exploding or imploding.”

At that point, after 10 years of marriage to Prince Charles, a suicide attempt, a long period of eating disorders, postpartum depression, and an emotionally unstable relationship with a man who was in love with another woman, Diana needed it. A world where she sees her stark reality.

Using her old friend James Colthurst as an intermediary, she interviewed journalist Andrew Morton on cassette tapes she had smuggled out of Kensington Palace. She lit the fuse when she decided to tell the whole thing through. The end result, Diana: Her True Story, landed the following year with a percussive blast that rattled the Queen’s stuffing.

When the first excerpt from Diana: Her True Story was published by the Sunday Times on Sunday, June 7, 1992, it set off a shockwave unlike any other story to hit Buckingham Palace before or since. rice field.

There is a reason for this history lesson. That’s because, just 30 years after her, Diana’s son, Prince Harry, is about to follow in her footsteps and release her memoir, Spare.

The manuscript remains the most closely guarded secret of publication since Paul wrote the New Testament, but the question is how devastating it will be for everyone below King Charles. I mean, is there a possibility?

In October, a source familiar with the book told The Telegraph that it was “not a take-down or tell-all story. It’s a story about his truth.” Could be another HRH hell.

Thanks to The Crown’s latest series, Diana’s guerrilla campaign puts the royal family in the spotlight, and the clock ominously ticks to spare D-Day. .

I can totally understand why Diana did what she did, but there are so many cases where it was a grave miscalculation on her part.

Please let me explain.

The year is 1992 and Diana’s Morton escapade begins with a severe explosion. The Times serial left not only Britain but the world both shocked and horrified by her pain and misery.

A friend of Oona Shanley Toffolo’s reportedly said, “She’s a prisoner of the system, just like the women incarcerated at Holloway Prison.”

If the princess wanted exact retribution from the palace for the apparently unfinished deal they forced her into in the form of marrying Charles (and the expectation that she would quietly wither away), boy, would she do it. (Republican sentiment reportedly soared after Diana’s publication).

According to Brown, her personal triumphs extended to her mental health, with the princess’ bulimia waning at least for a while and being able to sleep properly for the first time in a decade.

But her joy and hard-earned peace did not last long.

A week later, in mid-June, Diana attended a meeting at Windsor Castle with the Prince of Wales and her parents, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, according to Colsart’s diary, and she was “disturbed and stiff”.

Not long after, Diana, who had dutifully followed Ascott, was left in a “flood of tears,” a Royal Box guest told biographer Robert Lacey.

“The atmosphere was horrible. No one in the family was talking to Diana. They kept her completely under wraps,” they said.

Basically, she broke her rank and was never brought back.

It’s one thing to be the bane of the Queen and Prince Charles behind the thick curtains of palaces and Highgrove Houses, and another to spread the same unruly attitude and expose the royal family’s dirtiest secrets. That was it. It was the ultimate unforgivable crime.

While the move helped the princess achieve the separation she was seeking (which Prime Minister John Major plans to announce in parliament in six months), it was a short-term victory. Whether she did or not, Morton never returned from Diana’s apostasy, and the palace’s trust in her reportedly evaporated.

It should be noted that her participation with Morton in the book was only officially confirmed by him after her death. However, she arranged for one of her old friends and one of Morton’s main sources of information on Diana to visit one of Morton’s main sources of information to take her picture, a few days after her book was published, and that her book would be published. gave her seal of approval.

After the book’s publication, the separated princess’ new life may have been “free.” I finally won the freedom to pioneer the humanitarian paradigm of globe-trotting celebrity. Royal, but not quite.

Sound familiar?

As Brown writes in the legendary Diana Chronicles, she was “a semi-independent princess of Wales.”

The moral of the story here is that Diana got what she wanted – for the world to understand and acknowledge her pain and anguish – but her catharsis comes at a very high price. I got

It’s also possible to trace the line from Princess Diana to the Prince and Princess divorce four years later, which Princess Diana reportedly didn’t actually want. Prompted to agree to participate in Belby’s licensed 1994 biography and associated television interview in which he admitted to being lost, Diana went on to give a panoramic self-immolation interview that same year. formally ended the marriage).

The “why” is not the subject of discussion here. It’s totally understandable that both Diana and Harry wanted the world to see and recognize what they had endured for the monarchy.

And if the Duke of Sussex’s reported $65 million multi-book deal with the publisher played a role, given he now has to pay for his own gas bills and Mama and Me’s Reiki classes. (He also pledged $2.27 million to the Sentebale charity and $531,000 to WellChild).

No, the question here is not one of motivation, but did he really think about the irreparable consequences of severing ties with the royal family in this way?

God, I hope the 38-year-old has spent days and weeks contemplating that writing this book is letting a genie out of the bottle that can never be pushed back.

Once Spare is freed, he and his family will have crossed the Rubicon. If he breaks the royal order, is there any chance of the breach between him and his brother being repaired or things going back to the way they were? It has more parallels than the infamous Code of Silence).

Harry is about to commit the same “crime” as his mother, and to really flog the trope here, in her case, a life sentence was handed down.

The 90s, the decade covered in Season 5 of The Crown, must be remembered as the worst years since the Hanoverians took over the monarchy. How much of the Netflix series is fact and how much is fiction is a conversation for another time, but if there’s one indisputable lesson from that time, Palace’s propensity is: Again and again, let go of HRH’s anger and hurt.Ignored leads to only one thing: BOOM.

Daniela Elser is a writer and royal expert with over 15 years of experience in leading Australian media titles.