Manipulated manipulator

Gold dust flies off celebrities like down off a poplar tree, and many snobbish hangers-on jump up in the air hoping to catch some of the glitter.

For a few years during her life, Princess Diana’s power to draw such acolytes was second to none, and she has retained some of it even 23 years after her death.

This brings me to Rosa Monckton, otherwise known as Mrs Dominic Lawson. Mrs Lawson still goes by her maiden name that’s considerably more illustrious than the one she acquired through marriage.

That’s understandable. If, say, a Cavendish girl married, say, a Jones, she’d have to be unrealistically free of any snobbery or class prejudice to become Mrs Jones, wouldn’t she? Miss Monckton isn’t entirely devoid of such qualities, which is why she is still tirelessly establishing her credentials as a PROFROD.

I use this acronym for the sake of brevity, since Professional Friend of Diana is unwieldy. Yet this is the role Miss Monckton has been playing for years, squeezing every particle of gold dust out of her association with Diana.

Why anybody would be proud of friendship with a conniving, not particularly bright egotist is beyond me. But gold dust gatherers don’t ever think about such incidentals. Their thirst for social elevation by association is unquenchable.

Yet Miss Monckton doesn’t have regular access to a wide audience gagging for yet another reminder that she’s a PROFROD. Her husband, he of the family where the girls are named after their fathers, does.

Mr Lawson is a popular, and often good, journalist, but he too likes stressing his vicarious ties with the dead princess, and one would think being married to a Monckton would be enough to satisfy most men’s social ambitions.

Hence his article today, snappily titled Callous, Cruel and Calculating, Martin Bashir Poisoned Princess Diana’s Mind. No Wonder She Told My Wife She Regretted It.

The old cynic in me suspects that the only load-bearing words in this title, indeed in the whole article, are ‘Princess Diana’ and ‘my wife’. But, though brevity may be the soul of wit, these four words don’t quite work as a cogent piece.

Hence Mr Lawson fumed for another 1,400 words about the awful BBC and that scumbag Bashir who tricked the saintly girl into agreeing to that infamous interview. Or rather fewer than 1,400, for some of those words were used up to remind those slow on the uptake several times that “my wife Rosa Monckton was one of the Princess’s closest friends”.

Apparently, “it has become clear that the BBC man had, quoting ‘intelligence sources’, been poisoning the Princess’s mind with concocted tales of nefarious plots, even including the disgusting assertion that her son, Prince William, had a watch which was secretly recording their conversations.”

Now, I don’t doubt for a second that Bashir was perfectly capable of resorting to such tactics. He isn’t the first sleazy hack to get a story by dishonest means and he won’t be the last.

However, Mr Lawson also tells us that Bashir didn’t plant such fears into Diana’s mind: “It is true that Diana had for quite a while been convinced that she was the victim of some sort of conspiracy.”

But “he knew that this was Diana’s great fear, played on it ruthlessly and dishonestly to win her confidence – and thus the interview that every broadcaster in the world coveted.”

Nothing in this story sounds unlikely, especially the Bashir part. Yet the Diana part doesn’t quite add up.

I’m sure that the hack had to exaggerate only a little, if at all. For our security services would have been grossly negligent had they not kept a watchful eye on Diana’s shenanigans.

For the princess had been at war with the royal family practically from the first day she joined it. Diana was either too stupid, or more probably too self-centred, to realise that the duties of being our future queen are as onerous as the rewards are spectacular.

Marriage to the heir to the throne isn’t a culmination of a love story. It’s a lifelong job, involving hard and self-sacrificial work. A royal marriage has little to do with ‘lurve’, and much to do with service.

If the heir to the throne cares more about his mistress than about his wife, that’s unfortunate, even deplorable. But it’s not the same as, say, a salesman playing away from home. The nature of the marriage contract is different.

Diana, being a thoroughly modern young lady, couldn’t get her head around that. And being vindictive, she started fighting her husband and his family. At first her response was merely self-destructive, taking the shape of various eating disorders, deliberately falling down the stairs and other such attention-seeking excesses.

In due course, however, she began to fight back in earnest. To that end she recruited a whole army of hacks and paparazzi who were surreptitiously directed to Diana’s whereabouts. They would then descend on her like a swarm of bees on a honey tree – only for the princess to complain bitterly about being haunted by reporters.

Soon, to score hits on her real enemy, she began to weaponise her lovers, of whom Captain Hewitt was far from the first. Again, reporters followed, having been quietly tipped off.

Eventually the couple separated, and Diana began to sow her wild oats on an even wider field, carefully choosing paramours who would most enrage, and more effectively compromise, the royal family. However, she still remained the wife of one future king and the mother of another.

That made her behaviour technically criminal, for adultery by the wife of a present or future king is high treason in English law. Yet no one would have thought of enforcing that. Of greater concern was the potential damage Diana could have caused by consorting with shady characters whose feelings for Her Majesty’s realm were tepid at best.

So yes, while I find it improbable that the royal family was plotting against Diana, I’m sure somebody was keeping an eye on her activities. Now what could she do about it?

One obvious response would have been to divorce Charles, withdraw from the public eye and do whatever she was doing more discreetly. That, however, would have done nothing for her war on the royals.

Instead she allowed Bashir to seduce her the same way she allowed her lovers to seduce her. In each case, the relationship was bilateral: she was seducing them too, with equal gusto.

I can’t quite follow the logic of why admitting to adultery before an audience of millions solved whatever problem Diana was supposed to have with dastardly conspiracies against her. The logic of wishing to cause maximum pain to her enemies was, on the other hand, unassailable.

That Bashir and the BBC behaved in an immoral, possibly actionable fashion is beyond doubt. But it takes an inveterate PROFROD to portray Diana as the innocent victim. She was no more a victim of Bashir than she was one of Captain Hewitt.