GLASS SLIPPER LAND

I’ve just finished reading Tina Brown’s riveting The Diana Chronicles. “Not that stale old fairy tale?” I hear you cry. But this retelling of it is unputdownable.

What comes through is not merely the self-delusion, but the sheer unrelenting nastiness, of all the cast – including the People’s Princess herself. Yes: she had wondrous charisma, and empathy with the suffering; she was a head-in-clouds Romantic [according to her step-grandmother, Dame Barbara Cartland, “the only books she ever read were mine and they weren’t awfully good for her”]; and - fatefully for her and for the Royal Family - she was a walking incarnation of the old saw “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. Having refused to fit into the fossilized conventionality of the Windsors, and having been semi-ejected by them, she aspired to let some fresh air into the monarchy for its own good, and did not quail from behaviour which, from their perspective, resembled that of Samson and Delilah combined.

It is clear from the book that the Wales’s marriage broke down because of Charles’ unshakeable determination to stick like glue to Camilla Parker Bowles through thick and thin. It was this, and not Dame Barbara’s knicker-ripping verdict that it was Diana’s refusal to “do oral sex”, that broke the fairy-tale romance. For Diana, Camilla was the wicked witch who turned her glass coach into a pumpkin. She proceeded to wreak relentless revenge. Whether the marriage, without her ghastly end, could in time have been resurrected is one of those fascinating “might have beens” of history.

Tina Brown has trawled through all the published material with a fine-tooth comb, and has talked to many hitherto untapped sources, both on and off the record. It is this which gives her book its air of definitive behind-the-scenes knowingness, and embellishes it with some pricelessly funny vignettes illuminating the unequalled snobbishness, cluelessness, and on frequent occasions bitchiness, of our ruling claque.

Superb holiday reading!