To still not understand the Diana "thing"?

[TeaCake5]

As William and harry said they were bewildered by people who didn't even know her acting in the way they did. Yes it was sad that she was killed but to hand around kensington palace for days crying? Ridiculous.

not a bean went to her charities in her will
AFAIK Diana hadn't made a new will since her divorce and she died intestate. A huge chunk of her £17m was owed to HM Customs & Excise.

I am fairly sure she had. I think what in fact made me look was that it was finally published and I followed a media link.

you could be right.

It's a fairly serious flaw to choose an expert and then ignore them.

I repeat

She was 19, a kid for goodness sake.

Can't stand the monarchy, anyone who chooses to have Saville as a close friend has very poor taste. I have a soft spot for Diana though, we lost a family member to aids and she really made a difference.

I was sad when she died but not as sad as I was when Bowie died.

Great posts SGB. Utter bobbins, all of it.

the difference is that we don't do so with such an outcry of mass hysteria. Well I think the hysteria was a one off due to a combination of factors and may not be repeated. It happened. Some people felt sad some didn't. Why people are choosing to be vile about Diana I can't imagine. My DB died young over 20 years ago. I think about him every day warts and all. But no one has mentioned his faults to me since his death. Would you say all this stuff to William and Harry's faces - the two you profess to care about so much.

She knew what she was doing My dh is from a different culture and religion. I met him when I was 19 and got married when I was 24. So many people tried to warn me and him about how difficult it would be. Of course we knew it all and ignored everyone. While I wouldn't have picked anyone else, it's been so much more difficult than I expected and so much of what I was told came true. You really don't know what you're doing at 19.

I guess I was in the small minority who really didn't buy in to the Diana "thing". I didn't mourn her death and I'm really rather bemused by all the current media hysteria.

I think Blair (and probably Mandelson) were behind the 'Republicanism' crap - Diana might have had a grudge against the members of the Royal family but she wanted William to inherit the throne.
But Blair always fancied himself as President, so he was quite happy to subtly diss the Queen by piggybacking Dead Di to position himself as The People's Choice. Murdoch and co would have been content to go along with this as, TBH, it would be no big deal to them whether the Queen went or stayed: they'd still have things all their own way.
But they didn't, quite, pull it off. People had settled down and got over it within a month or so, once the giant compost heap outside the Palace had been removed (I never went near it but can imagine the stench of rotting flowers, that very warm September).
Ever since then, the rightwing press have been keen to encourage both emotionally incontinent griefwanking - and irrational fear and prejudice. I'm pretty sure this is the main reason why Dead Di is being dredged up again to this extent. Grenfell simply Won't Do for chinstroking about how we are in touch with our emotions and the nation is mourning (and should therefore shut up about austerity and Brexit) ... because far too many black and brown and foreign and poor people died there and they don't seem to have managed to find a pretty white woman to focus everyone's attention on.

Her 21 million fortune was left to her sons with a large handout to the Burrell dude. Charities? Nada.

At the time it was all very odd, slightly attention seeking behaviour. I remember feeling very disconnected from it at the time, and unable to say I wasn't feeling the same for fear of being called hard or uncaring. And then the press so deftly turned attention away from themselves onto attacks on the Royal family for not displaying their grief like performing monkeys, now that made me feel a lot, pity for a bereaved family, anger at the media who chased her into that tunnel and took photos afterwards, and exasperation that the wool could be pulled so obviously over the "mourning nation", who actively seemed too eager to participate in this deception. I guess at the end of the day no one really wanted to give up theirs tabloid fix enough. The phrase "people power" was banded about at the time, it's sent chills down my spine ever since.

I thought Blair's speech was cringey and didn't much care for it, but I don't think he was trying to be presidential about it. I think he had to say something, and the mood was very much for it to be something like it was. I don't think it was 'subtly dissing the Queen' - she chose not to say anything for a while, and she had that choice.

(Don't like her, but can't blame her - if I got smashed up in a crash with my new boyfriend after slagging exdp and his family off in public for years, I hardly think his mum would be jumping up and down to say how great I was).

But I don't think it's fair to blame Blair for doing what was expected, and what the public were clearly desperate to hear for some reason

Ceto it's like the conspiracy theory that they killed her because she was pregnant with Dodi's baby. She'd only met Dodi six weeks before her death so even if she got pregnant on the day they met him, she would only have recently found out herself.

CherryPie: I despised her for being a pampered, whiny attention seeker who was happy to use her kids as pawns. Sure, there are plenty of much worse human beings in the world but 'look at me doing a lot for charity when I'm so saaaaad' types have always got on my tits. She had enough money for any type of therapy she wanted, never had to stress about whether she would be able to feed the kids that week post-divorce, and yet she was still forever moaning and whining and performing.

She took her curlers out too soon

But it was an example of something she would do time and time again - ignore expert advice because she thought she knew better.

I'm so saaaaad' types have always got on my tits

I was a big fan of Diana's at first but as time wore on I changed my mind. She totally lost me at the Taj Mahal - completely and utterly staged.

It's a shame that wasn't in the Elton John song:
*Goodbye England's rose/ you took your curlers out too soon....'

I don't think she knew what she was doing as such, I think none of them did to be fair, if they did, they'd never have went ahead.

She was expected to marry well, and breed babies, marrying the prince of wales probably seemed like a fairy tale to a young, titled, naive 19 year old in her position. I imagine she was more focused on the fact she would be rich, famous, married to the future king, her children would be princes or princesses, rather than if she actually wanted to be married to Charles as a person and what that meant.

She will have known The implications due to her sister, she would have told her, they were very close, but being headstrong, like many 19 year olds, they often know best.

No one would have known looking at that shy 19 year old, that she was actually a very opinionated, determined, manipulative, attention seeking woman, who would never just breed the heir and spare then settle down into a pampered royal wife, turning a blind eye to her husbands mistress and filling her time with charity work and pretty public appearances, as she was signed up for.

If she had, she'd still be here today, they'd still be married, those boys would still have a mum, Kate would have a mother in law and her own engagement ring, the grandkids would have a grandmother, and camilla would still be the mistress in the background, as was all the queen ever intended her to be.

Wasn't she 19 when she got engaged? Or when she was chosen as the virgin brood mare...

Of course she wasn't a saint, but she was chewed up and spat out by the royal family, and I think people felt very sorry for her for that. Charles was 30 or 31 when he married her, had had many girlfriends, and was patently in love with Camilla from the start.

Diana was a very unacademic (called herself thick) young woman who wasn't let into the truth of the deal. She had had a really fucked up childhood and had been looking for love all her life. Sounds trite but it's true.

She was trapped in a miserable marriage, with a v unsympathetic and distant 'blood family' of her own, and hounded by paparazzi to an extent that would drive most people literally mad.

Yes the collective hysteria was bonkers, but to say she knew what she was doing, that her affairs match Charles' cold and determined cheating, and that she was lucky because she was rich and could go on holidays? How could anyone really believe that stuff?

She was desperately lonely and tortured, with no escape. She also knew her boys were being ever more integrated into The Firm. It must have been a hideous, hideous existence.

It sickens me that Charles ended up marrying Camilla - it may prove that she was his one true love but how dare he use a 20 year old woman as collateral damage? And WTAF was he doing going to get Diana's body back from France and walking behind the coffin? I'm sure it's the very last thing she would have wanted. Rank, rank hypocrisy