[quote SemperIdem]@MrsNewms85 how old are you to be bleating “she was someone’s mum, be kind?”. She had value aside from being a mother.
It is not disrespectful to acknowledge that she was a very damaged woman whose behaviour impacted others negatively and would have continued to do so if she had not died tragically young.[/quote]
Indeed. I have no strong feelings about her, whether negative or positive, other than a baffled pity that someone so privileged should have been launched on the world at the end of an expensive education with so few skills, which must have contributed to her later vulnerability.
But I think people interestingly, many of the same people who on here decry Prince William's alleged affair, or the publicity-courting shenanigans of the Sussexes are forgetting how salacious much of the media coverage of her was when she was alive, sometimes with her own explicit collusion.
To put it bluntly, part of her popularity was because her life, especially her later life, was often a pretty undignified soap opera, with Squidgygate, Camilla as third party in the marriage, naked boyfriends discovered behind plants in KP during fire alarms, rumours that one of her sons was fathered by a lover etc.
Press coverage was by no means uniformly positive. Royalist commentators saw her lack of a sense of 'duty' as damaging to the royal family, and her charity work as self-indulgent. Euan Ferguson in The Guardian wrote just before her death that if her IQ were five points lower, she'd need to be watered daily.
Frank Kermode's review of Sally Bedell Smith's biography summarises it as follows:
Diana, we gather, was unpredictable, egocentric, aggressive, insecure, manipulative, paranoid, possessive, easily bored, uneducated and a habitual liar. She was the victim of terrible mood swings. She was an eavesdropper. She steamed open other people's letters. Altogether her life is ''a sad tale of adultery, mental illness, betrayal, mistrust and revenge.''
Part of the reason people were sad when she died is that a soap opera got cancelled before they got to find out what happened.