Thursday 7 September 2017

Diana and the politics of emotion

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Diana, Princess of Wales changed the monarchy and changed Britain in a way that is still very evident today.

Diana's famous sad-eyed TV interview with Martin Bashir in 1995, in which she said there were three persons in her marriage, was a cleverly stage managed display of fake emotion. There were, in fact, several other people in the marriage too. She made displays of emotion mandatory, especially when she died, which is why Theresa May lost a lot of what support she still had (not much) by not crying at the Grenfell Tower and why Corbyn wept at the mosque where a British Muslim was murdered by a white man (but not at the locations where the reverse happened). Even H.M the Queen now emotes though she found the Diana epoch hard to adjust to. I remember that Diana was said to have tried having a heart to heart with the Queen and to have said, 'I need space'. A mystified HMQ replied, 

'Well, Kensington Palace is not exactly bijou'.
A friend of mine pointed out to me that Diana had the same eyes as Myra Hindley, the sadistic child murderer.

William Langley, who covered her funeral, described her as

something both necessary and inadvertent - a piece of dynastic space debris that crashed on the monarchy, burning up the all the pretence and witlessness, and, without really intending to, leaving a better thing.
I don't quite think I agree with that. I think that, as James/Jan Morris said at the time of her wedding, she did the monarchy great damage by making it glamorous. It was I suppose an important step in the absorption of the monarchy in the of celebrity industry, one of the biggest effects of the 1960s social revolution.

She was a very cunning megalomaniac, without scruples, rapacious, cruel, a pathological liar, without any loyalty to the monarchy as an institution or to the Queen. She made Becky Sharpe look like St Teresa of Avila.



She was probably suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder, though I am not sure if suffer is the right word. It was the prince of Wales who suffered). She reminds me of two or three female psychopaths I have known.


Martin Bashir's career was made by one woman and destroyed thanks to another, Sarah Palin, of whom he said “if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood [who made one of his slaves defecate in the mouth of another] then she would be the outstanding candidate.” He was fired after she complained. 


Last month the BBC gave him a fresh chance and made him a religious correspondent. In case you wondered, he is a Christian of Pakistani origin.

3 comments:

  1. Would it be OK if I cross-posted this article to WriterBeat.com? There is no fee; I’m simply trying to add more content diversity for our community and I enjoyed reading your work. I’ll be sure to give you complete credit as the authror. If “OK” please let me know via email.

    Autumn
    AutumnCote@WriterBeat.com

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    1. Please do and please post more of my stuff. Please add a link to my blog.

      Sorry I haven't found time to be active in your site. P.

      Delete
  2. As much as the woebegone Diana and the boorish redneck Sarah Palin, Bashir's career was also made by a high-profile interview with the strange and miserably unhappy pedophile Michael Jackson. Strange company Martin kept.

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