‘Always be nice to girls, you never know who they’ll become’ was a common saying among the generation of upper-class Englishwomen born around 1900. Diana Spencer’s life was a spectacular demonstration of its wisdom. It is now almost impossible to conceive what little consequence accrued to a third daughter, born between two prayed-for boys – the elder dead in infancy, the younger living – in a primogeniture-practising family in the middle of the last century. Yet this lowly person became the most famous woman in the world. We can only imagine how her brother felt.

That gymnastic overturning of childhood expectations lies at the bottom of many of the contradictions and paradoxical behaviours examined in Dianaworld, which analyses what that girl did become. Not just to herself, but to the various tribes and individuals who followed her progress, helped her, obsessed over her, tortured her, fantasised about her, used her, and in one way or another couldn’t leave her alone – a state of affairs she craved and feared in equal measure. Edward White’s categories are extensive. Her relationships with hairdressers, Americans, clothes designers, politicians, gays, newspapermen, staff, family members, superfans, lovers, prostitutes, children (hers and other people’s) are paraded here in an effort to unpeel the lacquer of mythology that accumulated on her persona and made her shine with such appalling brightness.

What, asks White, did all these people see in her? In most cases, the answer was themselves – in a white mirror that showed the aspects of themselves that pleased them most. For Tony Blair, she ‘throbbed with non-conformity’. Americans saw her as a wild spirit who could spread her gorgeous wings in the land of the free. South Asians saw her as the product of an arranged marriage, and her position essentially that of a ‘daughter-in-law’. Paul Burrell, her butler, felt she had a great deal in common with butlers, as she, like them, pursued a ‘life of service’. The gay celebrity vicar Richard Coles found she was ‘a gay man’ who came out; and if you can accept that, you could even say she was a gay celebrity vicar with an unusually large flock.

It’s normal for people to identify with the famous. What was unusual in Diana’s case was that the feeling was reciprocated. She believed herself to be an ordinary person – which, by comparison with the family she married into, she was – and hence able to appreciate the sorrows and ambitions of ordinary people. America ‘is a land where anyone can achieve’, she told Burrell wistfully. She identified especially with the outsider, the unloved, the outcast; in a curious elision of modern empathy and the ancient magical powers of royalty, she thought she could succour them. ‘I can talk to them because I am one of them,’ she said of marginalised people. ‘Nobody else understands the rejection they feel.’ This conviction of exceptional ordinariness must partially have derived from the very low bar for ‘normality’ that the royalty-dazzled public set for her. The fact that she was thought, for example, prodigious for knowing the word ‘camp’ puts into perspective her much-publicised decision to shake the hands of HIV patients, courageous though it was. As White points out, Norman Fowler, secretary of state for social services, had done the same thing a year before, with no resulting sensation.

White calls this persona of Diana the ‘wounded healer’, and she used it against her husband in their public war. This is one of many arresting phrases (‘soap opera widow’ for Diana’s get-up at the BBC Bashir interview, is another) in Dianaworld. I didn’t think it possible to produce an interesting book about Princess Diana at this juncture, but, by George, White has done it. There are few new facts for Diana watchers; nor can any be expected. But there is an admirable intelligence at work here. White identifies behavioural principles from disparate actions. He sees the way she did as she was done to – how the stalked started stalking, the watched began watching. Also, he perceives how her positive social contributions threw a negative shadow onto her private relationships: all the nurturing and ‘love’ she distributed obsessively were contrived to make conspicuous the lack of such things in her own life. He’s very good, too, at showing how the pristine archetype of the ‘English rose’ eroded over time, so that the frantic mourning for her was performed more by immigrant Britons and Americans, and less by the tribe she came from, who perceived her as a class traitor. 

There are some missteps and misunderstandings here. It’s only three decades since she died and yet some aspects of her environment and effect have been wholly misconstrued, making one wonder whether social historians writing about, say, the 1840s are getting anything right at all. For example, the Sloane Rangers, for whom she played – at least at first – a role akin to that of a regimental mascot, weren’t ‘young, idle, and rich’; they were an urbanised rural class clinging together in the face of postwar decline. Diana was never well dressed. To her contemporaries, she looked like the mother of the bride at a Home Counties wedding. There are some stories, too, that White hasn’t attempted to tell, perhaps because nobody has. One is that of her relationship with her long-hated stepmother, Raine Spencer, with whom Diana reconciled after the divorce – whereupon Raine immediately sold her to Mohamed Al-Fayed, her boss at Harrods, with results we all know. 

White provides a reminder that Diana’s lover Major James Hewitt was initially engaged as her riding instructor. One of the few people to pick up on her little-noted equestrian interest was General Mustafa Tlass, the Assad family’s ‘long-serving henchman’, who amassed the largest collection of Diana-themed books in the world and tried to send her, among other gifts, a horse, perhaps thinking this was the secret to Hewitt’s success. How did the riding lessons go? If Dianaworld had been written by Craig Brown, we might have had a whole chapter about Diana’s adventures with nosebags, saddle soap and gymkhanas, perhaps in the style of Josephine Pullein-Thompson. This is not that book, but it is very fine nonetheless.