Ghost of Diana still lingers
2005-04-08 11:44
John Leicester
Paris - First day in Paris for Wojtek and Ilona, two young Poles in love. One of the world's most romantic cities awaits them. But first stop on their must-see list is the grimy underpass where Princess Diana met her death.
Nearly eight years after her fatal car crash, Diana's spectre, enduring popularity and unproven suspicions she was murdered loom over the weekend wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.
The prince, by all accounts, is finally marrying the woman he has loved for decades. For Diana admirers, that's the rub.
Disrespectful. Disgusting. The final betrayal. For Di-hard fans, hackles rise against Charles tying the knot with the old flame whom the princess blamed for the break-up of her marriage.
Parker Bowles will, through the wedding, get a royal title but Diana remains the people's princess.
Lovers can identify with the cruel irony of Diana meeting death just as she seemed, finally, to be finding love.
On that August 31, 1997, night, Diana's new beau, Dodi Fayed, was beside her on the back seat of the speeding black Mercedes driven by chauffeur Henri Paul.
They had dined in the Imperial Suite of the Ritz Hotel, owned by Dodi's billionaire Egyptian-born father, Mohammed Al Fayed.
As they waited for their limousine after the meal, Dodi slipped his arm protectively around Diana's waist. They may have been holding hands as Paris sped past the windows and when Paul lost control of the car that slammed into the 13th concrete pillar, running east-to-west, of the tunnel under the Place de l'Alma.
'It's unforgivable'
Janine Gallagher, from Lancashire in northern England, still smarts over what she regarded as the slowness of Diana's former mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, to react to the princess' death.
"It changed the way we viewed the royals, because of the way the Queen treated her. It's unforgivable," said Gallagher, another pilgrim to the gilded flame sculpture above the tunnel that has become something of a shrine to Diana.
This week, around its base and on chains that surround it were a dozen bunches of rotting flowers, an olive branch, ribbons, hairbands, and an empty perfume bottle.
"Nobody can take her place. In my opinion, that wedding should not be going ahead. It's disrespectful to Diana," Gallagher added. "The royals are supposed to set an example but they are worse than Joe Public."
Fans remember Diana's charitable works, her campaign against land mines, her many kindnesses captured by photographers who followed her around.
And while Diana was a fashion icon, Parker Bowles was recently savaged by British media for wearing an unflattering pair of denim jeans.
"The fashion world winced in pain," commented the Edinburgh Evening News.
Diana nicknamed Parker Bowles "the Rottweiler". Unfair, surely, but the bad image persists.
"She has no chance of beating Diana, ever, ever," said one of the Poles.
- SAPA