The jury in the inquest to decide how Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, came to be in a fatal car crash in 1997, returned a verdict today of "unlawful killing." The jurors ruled that the combination of Diana's driver's negligence and the paparazzi tailing her was the cause of her death. Nobody is being charged with anything, as the $6 million hearing — paid for with taxpayer funds — is more a public criticism than a trial.
Ironically, nowhere does Dianamania seem more irrelevant than in the place that was meant to be its shrine. Last summer I happened to find myself at the Diana Memorial at Althorp, her family's estate (you can rent it for weddings; two gay friends of mine did so) and had a look around. There were dresses, childhood photographs, condolence books.
Visitor numbers are way down from 1997, and no wonder: The whole thing feels rather irrelevant. Human beings naturally try to give deeper meaning to pointless tragedies—even where no meaning is to be found.
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Biographer Andrew Morton, whose past work downshifts erratically from a book on Princess Diana to another on Monica Lewinsky, has now set his sights even lower with the staggeringly bad Posh & Becks. While mainly just prosaic and useless, the book also manages to be quite racist. Take a look:
…[T]hanks to his taste in extravagant clothes and jewelry, penchant for rap music and his flash lifestyle, the blond footballer should be considered an honorary black man.
In a longer, more vitriolic passage that I'll not deign to reprint, Morton also notes that David is rich, fussy with his hair and not smart; making him an honorary Jew, woman and Pole, respectively.
If you've not yet nodded your head to the hot-like-fire banger that was Diddy's Concert for Diana performance, prepare to be dazzled. While the music probably won't grab you and the choreography could be considered anemic at best, what are things of wonder are Diddy's out of place call and response tactics. For some reason, "If you miss Diana, make some noise!" fails to resonate with me as appropriate at a memorial concert for a fallen princess. Big ups to Brooklyn, though.
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