A new book about Prince Harry says things about his late mother that I found deeply disturbing.
Nil nisi bonum… and all that, but I was never a great admirer of that hysterical, manipulative and cunning woman. She was admittedly very good-looking, but then so was Eva Braun.
Unlike Eva Braun, however, Diana was also guilty of high treason, which is how our law classifies adultery committed by a royal consort. High treason, incidentally, is the only crime that our law says can still be punished by death.
A mere unsubstantiated suspicion of similar indiscretions cost Anne Boleyn her head, but I still doubt that Diana, even if charged and convicted, would have suffered a similar fate – even though the thought of it isn’t without some aesthetic appeal.
She didn’t, however, take lightly to her husband’s affair with Mrs Parker-Bowles, as Camilla then was – this even though dalliances by a present or future king aren’t considered treasonous under our law.
Apparently Diana kept ringing the rival for her husband’s affections in the middle of the night, when the transgressor was too befuddled by being woken up to mount any creditable defence.
“I’ve sent someone to kill you,” Diana would say. “They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?”
Since no assassin(s) was/were indeed lurking outside Camilla’s window, the threat was as empty as Diana’s head.
Still, in some quarters such telephone calls may be treated as harassment and terroristic threats. The former could have earned Diana an injunction, to begin with; the latter a prison sentence.
Admittedly either punishment would have been minor compared to the decapitation merited by her extramarital shenanigans. Nevertheless I’m deeply shocked, and I don’t feel that way easily or often.
True enough, by itself the fact that a wronged wife attacks the wronging poacher telephonically was by itself insufficient to produce such a deep emotional response in me.
My own mother did something similar when she found out about my father’s affair. In her case, the investigative process was simplified by the fact that father had actually moved in with the other woman.
Mother wouldn’t take that lying down. She’d do a Diana by ringing the offending female every day and abusing her in the language I never realised my mother knew.
I found the contrast between her prim exterior and the foul jargon she was using quite amusing, and so did our 20 neighbours in the same communal Moscow flat.
The only phone in the flat was attached to the corridor wall, within easy access to all. No privacy was therefore possible, and when my mother embarked on yet another colourful description of what she’d like to do to the woman taken in adultery, all the neighbours would come out to listen and enjoy.
My mother was fairer than Diana though.
First, she launched her attacks in the evening, not in the middle of the night. The woman on the receiving end was thus fully alert and theoretically able to fight back. In practice she never did, silenced as she was by the thunderous vehemence of the invective.
Second, even though my mother was rather precise in her detailed accounts of the ballistically improbable practices she wished to perpetrate on the offender, the poetic descriptions lacked so much in plausibility that no court would have interpreted them as realistic threats.
On the other hand, Diana’s threat to send someone to murder Camilla was open to such an interpretation, for it was plainly realistic. A Princess of Wales, especially one as blessed with male admirers as Diana, could have coerced someone to do violence to Camilla or at least to threaten it credibly.
One way or the other, given my familial experience with telephone harassment, I was unlikely to be shocked by it, and I wasn’t.
What I found deeply distressing is that Diana, as reported, followed a singular antecedent (“I’ve sent someone to kill you”) with a plural personal pronoun (“they are outside”).
How could our would-be queen be so given either to grammatical solecisms or alternatively factual imprecision? How much better it would have been had she said “he’s outside” or, if she wished to impress Camilla with the breadth of her contacts, “I’ve sent some people to kill you, and they are outside…”
I’m sure Camilla would have been much happier then – and so would everyone else who, like me, is appalled at the inroads political correctness has made into the greatest language in God’s creation.
P.S. My current book, How the Future Worked, describes many experiences similar to the one I mentioned above. You can get it from Amazon or directly from the publisher, RoperPenberthy.