Diana at 50
After Diana’s death, nine years after the car crash in the Paris tunnel, I attended a ball at Althorp, her ancestral home in the English county of Northamptonshire. The party was hosted, improbably, by Mikhail Gorbachev (with Tatler magazine) to raise money for his late wife’s foundation. The crowd partying in the tent that night was Diana’s crowd—the London über-swirl of fashion and society and media. Had she been there, Diana would have lit up the gathering with her radiant blondeness. Sitting next to old Gorby, she would have caused his birthmark to flush deeper as she leaned in to hear him speak of his wife, Raisa, grasping his hand as she fixed her big blue eyes on him.
Back in Britain, to visit William and Harry, she would have enjoyed some elegant schadenfreude over the scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—the one that revealed that for years the British tabloids had been hacking into the phones of celebrities and royals and publishing their illicit skimmings. She would have sued for sure, and collected record-breaking damages (donating to the children’s cancer ward at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children). Is it possible that even Squidgygate, the embarrassingly steamy phone call between Diana and her lover James Gilbey in December 1989, was really one of the earliest examples of press malfeasance? I never believed the bizarre explanation, investigated at length in my book, The Diana Chronicles, that a radio ham named Cyril Reenan had picked up this call and offered it to Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun. Was Reenan, who later spoke of “being set up by a sinister conspiracy” and died in 2004, really a cover for a nefarious phone hacker? If so, Diana’s obsession about eavesdroppers in the last days of her life—often mocked as paranoia—was simply the sound intuition of a careful student of the folkways of Fleet Street.
Source: newsweek