Washington Life Magazine: Summer 2007:

TB She could have continued having royal bodyguards, but she thought they spied on her, so she didn’t want them anymore. She was at this point such a comodified creature with the press after her in every way; she really needed protection, strength, money behind her. She became more and more vulnerable, needing somebody who could sort of look after her. And the biggest irony of her last days was that she accepted the Mohamed Al- Fayed invitation because she thought the Fayeds offered protection.

CJ Mohamed Fayed, who was obsessed with the Royals, had very smartly put Raine Spencer on his board at Harrod’s. Through her, he was able to have a pipeline to Diana. And he knew that she needed someplace to go.

TB He did, he was well aware of it. For him, to have his son dating Diana was just an unbelievable daydream; he pushed Dodi to want it. He pushed Dodi into it.

CJ It’s Margaret Jay who says every woman, at one time or another, has a Dodi Fayed.

TB What Margaret obviously meant was that this was just a summer romance, it was a summer fling. It was a useful summer fling. He was meeting many needs. He’s a sweet, feckless, slightly hopeless former sort of coke fiend, now resting on his boat, who also had a miserable childhood. The truth is that Mohamed Al-Fayed – supposedly a doting father – was never there for Dodi. That was a bit like Diana’s childhood, so I think they had quite a lot in common.

CJ Is there a character in your story who doesn’t have some sort of dysfunctional upbringing?

TB It’s not a great ad for English social mores.

CJ At least not among the aristocracy.

TB Their family life is pretty hellish. Diana’s childhood was much more bleak than I had even realized. That’s one of the things I really felt keenly. When crossed, Diana was a really dangerous, wounded animal. This primal hurt of the family’s split was so deep that if she felt threatened or she felt cornered, she was very, very dangerous. This family was a hotbed of angry, buried misery.

CJ Was it also poorly carried out because of lack of education? Were these people who just didn’t learn how to function?

TB I call Diana the last uneducated British girl because at the end of the ’70s, she lived in Althorp, one of the great stately homes in England, and yet she went off to become a nanny and a cleaner.

CJ She lived this fantasy life of Barbara Cartland novels, and she set her cap on marrying Charles. The myth is that she got set up by two doddering grandmothers who decided these two should meet, but there was an awful lot of maneuvering on Diana’s part to be around him.

TB Well, the only thing Diana had really

been schooled for was that – catching the prince.

CJ Without any regard for who he was as a person.

TB He was a dashing guy, but Diana was 16 and she didn’t know that. She did know that the Prince of Wales could really be hers – and should be hers, she felt – and she watched her older sister have a dry run at it. Sarah Spencer dated Charles before Diana did, and she first brought him to Althorp to shoot. She watched very cannily as Sarah blew it, because Sarah talked too much. Diana watched that, and that was really the template for her to realize that you have to get the press on your side, you have to be smart as hell, you have to say nothing while being charming and that was part of the game of getting Charles.

CJ Well, Diana was really good at working people, the only person she couldn’t work was Charles, and the one person who could work Charles better than anybody was Camilla. And just as much as Diana worked it to get to the point where she married him, Camilla worked it to the point that she will always be in the picture. She was never out of the picture.

TB Camilla was never out of the picture, and she had it down pat. I mean, she just knew what Charles liked. She was all over him.

CJ I thought it was interesting what you make of Prince Philip. You said there are still women in the staff, at the palace, that find him astonishingly good looking. Had things been different, you wondered if the sparks between Diana and Philip might have been caused by an undercurrent of sexual chemistry.

TB I think there was a little bit of chemistry there. Philip had a bit of a soft spot for Diana until he decided she was a kind of basketcase.

CJ You think that Prince Charles and Camilla’s marriage is working out as well as?

TB It’s very interesting, I’m told that Camilla now is more sort of empathetic towards what Diana went through because now she finds the Prince of Wales’ consort is not an easy role to play. I think that she keeps a pretty steady eye on Charles because as Jimmy Goldsmith famously said, “When you marry your mistress you create a vacancy.”

Brown’s interview and others can be read at www.washingtonlife.com.

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