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Lady Diana, the life and death of the People’s Princess
It was 1997 when Lady Diana died, but only today do we discover the Queen’s mistake and a background about those sad and complicated days. In that hot August, the death of the “People’s Princess” shocked not only her children Harry and William, but an entire nation.
As a documentary by Channel 4 however, initially the Queen did not grasp the significance of what had happened and reacted in a very particular way. When he received the news ofaccident in Paris of Lady Diana and companion Dodi Al-Fayed, was in Balmoral, Scotland, to spend the summer holidays. Some witnesses reveal in the documentary that the Sovereign, at least initially, would have been “indifferent” to the fate of Carlo’s ex-wife.
The Queen would have immediately taken care to protect Harry and William from the attention of the press, but she was convinced – explain sources of the Palace – that Diana’s death concerned the Spencer family and Al-Fayed not the Windsors, since the Princess had long been for her “a stranger”. The behavior of the Sovereign, however, caused not a few protests among the subjects who accused her of not paying homage to Diana and forgetting her.
The death of Harry and William’s mother was experienced as a collective mourning across Britain, between tears and memories, creating a popular sentiment never seen before. Palazzo sources tell in the unpublished documentary that Her Majesty would have been shocked by the accusations against her, still angry for the revelations made by Lady D about the Royal family. But soon he realized that he was making a serious mistake and that his behavior would jeopardize the popularity of the Crown.
For this reason, on the advice of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, he would give a televised speech paying homage to Diana, as Harry and William’s grandmother, but also as Queen. A move that proved successful and that saved the popularity of the Sovereign. “His image was never as threatened as in the days when he turned his back on the millions of subjects who worshiped Diana,” explained historian Dominic Sandbrook, according to whom Blair’s intervention would have allowed the Queen not to show “a heart so hard “against the former daughter-in-law.
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