Meet the new Diana, just like the old Diana – temperamentally unsuited to being a royal, unable to deal with the pressure, and with a love/hate relationship with the media.
At first I was inclined to put all her problems down to racism, and there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of racism against her. Many right-wingers, and the right-wing tabloids, were immediately prepared to find fault with anything and everything about her. They simply don’t like someone who isn’t white marrying into the royal family and producing mixed-race children, and they never will.
But I don’t think everything can be blamed on that. She’s a professional actress who thrives on media attention, but only the media attention she wants. She wants to pick and choose how she is depicted in the media. She doesn’t have the stoic, stiff-upper lip personality that would get her through the media attention successfully, like Kate.
The ‘firm’ strictly refers to the senior royals, but it can have a much wider meaning.
The royal family has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of employees and many senior ‘managers’. They control, administer, and maintain many large properties, organise hundreds of public engagements a year (in normal times), organise travel and security, deal with the media, run the households, deal with finances, personnel issues, etc., etc. It’s a huge operation, really like a large company.
We can be sure that senior managers of the royal establishment have strong opinions about how things should be done, and try to push the royals in the direction they want. At the top level they are not just flunkies, they shape policy decisions. That’s always been the case.
