In the 20th year of Princess Diana's death, it is clear that she has not been forgotten
If Diana's ghost does exist, and King Charles III, the Mike Bartlett play in blank verse turned into a Masterpiece movie, suggests there is, it must be giggling madly, tossing back its blonde hair, and giving that famously sly, half coquettish/half bashful smile.
The second season of The Windsors, Channel 4's soap that presents an excoriating view of the royal family, suggests that Prince Charles is a talking-to-plants dolt, Camilla is a gin soaked, bronzed, oversexed power-mad wife, and Kate is a sullen gypsy outsmarted by her saucy sister Pippa.
Her beloved children are not terribly smart, but they are posh, and well-meaning enough. Sarah Ferguson, often her friend in crime, is a red-headed blob still trying very hard to freeload, while her daughters Beatrice and Eugenie are airheads of a spectacular sort.
The first royal to burst the bubble, Diana would have loved every minute of the broad satire, having achieved in death what she couldn't in life, reducing The Windsors to a joke. With the exception of the 91-year-old Queen that is, whose place in the hearts and minds of her people has been further entrenched, if possible, with the release of Netflix's marvellously stately The Crown last year.
In the twentieth year of Diana Spencer's death, it is clear that she has not been forgotten. As the late Tim Pigott-Smith said of Diana after acting in King Charles III: Diana was as divisive in death as she was in life.
Indeed, her ghost appears in a very Shakespearean way at odd moments, waking up her children at the palace, scaring her former husband, and delivering messages to Will: ''But now be glad,'' she tells the young prince, "you'll be the greatest king we ever had." Diana's ghost being like Diana, she says the exact same thing to Charles, setting father and son against each other in the movie after Queen Elizabeth's death.
For those who didn't grow up in the Diana Era, it is difficult to understand her aura, in the age before Facebook, Instagram, and snapchat. She was a cultural phenomenon and the first time she was introduced to the world, even before the engagement (where Charles, ever the gentleman, said so famously when asked whether he was in love: whatever love is – she should have run then).
It was that picture of her with the head cocked as usual, the blonde locks falling on her face, her diaphanous skirt showing off those lovely legs. Was there a single young woman in the world who didn't want to look like that – remember in the pre-Diana era, Charles was quite a polo playing, globe trotting catch.
Think of her as a posh Kardashian with an unlimited fashion expense account. No one, least of all poor Charles, could have predicted that she would end up a Beyonce, a powerful advocate of human rights, AIDS patients, battered women, abandoned and poor children.
No one could have predicted her flair for the dramatic, which she used to full advantage in the 1995 TV interview to Martin Bashir that effectively ended Charles' shot at the throne of England. "There were three people in the marriage,'' she said, "so it was a bit crowded." You could almost hear the collective hiss in Buckingham Palace. And then who could beat the clincher: "I'd like to be Queen of People's Hearts," she said when asked about the loss of her title.
And the comment that will always haunt Charles who so desperately wants to be king (he is now 69): "Because I know the character I would think that the top job, as I call it, would bring enormous limitations to him, and I don't know whether he could adapt to that."
Her popularity has been her greatest revenge. And popular she has been ever since despite all the revelations and the scandals, the Dodi al Fayeds and the James Hewitts (whose remarkable resemblance to Prince Harry has spawned as many conspiracy theories as Diana's death on August 31, 1997).
And she has remained forever young, which is why it is with a start you realise that she would have been 56 this year and no doubt a fully paid up member of the European jet set, holidaying in St Tropez in summer and Gstaad in winter, becoming the British version of Jackie O, finding her own Mr Onassis. Or maybe in the era of Instagram, she would have launched her own clothing/shoe/perfume/home decor line whose profits she would have ploughed back into Doing Good Deeds.
She would have been a star on social media – few had her popular touch. Whether it was hugging a child with AIDS, or being photographed alone at the Taj Mahal and sending a coded message of heartbreak to the world, or dancing with John Travolta at Ronald Reagan's White House or laughing with her children at an amusement park, she was a master of stage and scene. People's Princess? You bet she still is. And if anyone needed any proof, it was yesterday when the whole of Britain decided to have a good, old fashioned cry at ITV's screening of Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, a tribute by William and Harry to their late mother.