Diana's demise shakes the House of Windsor

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The poem popped into my memory within hours of hearing about Princess Diana's death, but at first it seemed trite and even crude in this context.

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

-- The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell, 1942

Jarrell's poem has obvious resonances with Princess Diana's life and the manner of her death. She fell into the hands of the royal family very young; she learned to live at rarefied altitudes that wither the unprotected; and in the end the nightmare paparazzi chased her to a brutal death. But why do we need a poem from the World War II to tell us what we already know?

Yet the Ball-Turret Gunner would not go away, and over the succeeding days, as Britain began to shift underfoot like a huge ship coming round slowly in a storm, the poem's relevance gradually became clear to me. Because though it shuns high-flown rhetoric and emotional grand-standing, it is not actually about a pointless, needless death. On the contrary.

Randall Jarrell was writing in the midst of war for people who understood the context. The deliberately flat and unromantic tone is typical of people who fought on the Allied side in World War II, but they did not believe all the deaths were wasted. On the contrary, most of them believed that even the lonely, ugly, apparently meaningless deaths of young men in shot-up bomber turrets were a necessary part of defeating a great evil.

The scale of reality in today's Britain is far less heroic. There are no bomber crews, no nightmare fighters, no great evil. Just a lost princess trying to find a role; and buzzing paparazzi and a drunk driver and a car crash; and a moth-eaten, dysfunctional royal family that symbolizes all that was oppressive and downright mean about the old British social order.

There's nothing wrong with royal families in principle. Constitutional monarchy is an excellent form of democratic government if the royal family is modest and unostentatious, as in Sweden, the Netherlands, or Spain. Even a grander establishment like the House of Windsor is tolerable for countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the monarch lives elsewhere and only visits occasionally. But it is a disaster for Britain -- and Diana may have ended it.

Three days after the Princess of Wales's death, British journalist Julie Burchill wrote a gloriously vitriolic piece in The Guardian in which she called Diana "the greatest force for republicanism since Oliver Cromwell."

"She was treated by her husband and his parents with a level of deliberate exploitation, manipulation and deceit that would be dazzling if it wasn't so vile," Burchill wrote. After Diana's divorce from Prince Charles, the royal family, "with staggering mean-mindedness", even had her name removed from the prayers said daily for the House of Windsor by the Church of England.

And now the royal family, having frozen her out in life, was trying to reclaim her in death. But it wouldn't work, said Burchill: thanks to Diana, the British have finally rumbled the royals.

Let me quote some more, because Burchill's rage gave her wings. "Very soon -- with the dry, very English, self-mocking wit which provided a welcome balance to her occasional over- emotional, therapised American (mannerisms) -- (Diana) was calling herself the Prisoner of Wales. And from the scraps she was thrown, sitting there in her sumptuous scullery, she made a life: a real, well-lived, well-used life in which she visibly pushed herself from a state of bovine upper-class ignorance (the only qualification she took from Heathfield School was a certificate for Best-Kept Hamster) to a state of inquisitive, crusading sentience."

"And in getting herself a life -- in wanting to know, in daring to look naive -- she showed the House of Windsor up for what it was: a dumb, numb dinosaur, lumbering along in a world of its own, gorged sick on arrogance and ignorance."

British journalism is a jealous, highly competitive business, but the next day the London Evening Standard reprinted Burchill's article uncut. So did a variety of other papers all over Britain, and in fragments of conversation in shops and on trains and buses you could hear the same sentiments. The acres of floral tributes on the pavement in front of Buckingham Palace are not tributes to the royal family; they are fingers pointing at it in mute accusation.

So what? A week of mourning, and then it'll be back to business as usual. People's memories are short, and the British press is always being savage about somebody or other. Why, just last Sunday, in the very same Observer that reported Diana's crash on its front page, the newspaper's regular satirical column Mrs Blair's Diary had the prime minister's wife purportedly describing Diana as "a woman who, if her IQ were 5 points lower, would have to be watered daily."

But this time it won't go away. Just before Diana's death, for the first time ever, an opinion poll reported that under half the population actively wants Britain to remain a monarchy. Nobody has the nerve to run that poll again at the moment, but the result would probably be a healthy majority for dumping the Windsors. And though the figures will doubtless fluctuate once emotions subside, this is probably the new equilibrium of British public opinion.

The best survival strategy for the royal family is to wait until the uproar over Diana's death dies down, and then skip a generation. Prince Charles -- scathingly described in Burchill's article as "a third-rate mind with delusions of adequacy, a veritable human jukebox of philosophical cliches" -- is now a total liability. But maybe if he steps down, and the present Queen lives long enough, the throne can be passed down to his and Diana's elder son, the 15-year-old Prince William.

Maybe -- but maybe not, because the ghost of Diana Spencer will not go away. As Burchill concluded: "If Diana had lived she might well have become -- thanks to the incessant whispering campaigns of the Windsors and their media lackeys -- a joke: Lady Diana al-Fayed, an Arab merchant's bit of posh, endlessly sunning herself on the deck of some gin palace hooked up in the Med, toasting herself until her skin lost its bloom and she lost her husband to a newer model."

"But her death has preserved her forever at the height of her beauty, compassion and power. She will be the mourner at every royal wedding and the bride at every coronation. Her brave, bright, brash life will forever cast a giant shadow over the sickly bunch of bullies who call themselves our ruling house." As long as they remain the ruling house -- but that may not be forever.

The young man in the bomber turret who died in Randall Jarrell's poem never really chose to be there, and he certainly didn't want to die, but he helped to bring down a great evil. The dead princess never had any real choice about her roles either, but she sometimes used the power that her fame gave her for worthwhile purposes -- and by her death she may have hastened the end of a minor but quite unpleasant nuisance: the British royal family.

They're not wicked, but Diana showed them up as cold and shallow and vindictive, none of which plays well in a Britain where the old deferential culture is dying on its feet. They are also so stupid that they have to be watered daily.