By Emily Hourican
Sunday Jun 26 2011

SO indelible is the imprint that Diana Princess of Wales has left on our culture, it is hard to believe she died at just 36. The clay of her own life and personality was then barely moulded, let alone set; and yet she had lived so much in those years.

From the seclusion of her childhood and obscurity of her later teenage years as a nursery school teacher, she was hustled into a spotlight that became a searchlight, one that remained trained on her until she died and even beyond. Because the fascination the world felt for Diana did not die with her. As we approach what would have been her 50th birthday, on July 1, the commemoration industry is going into over-drive. Plates, calendars, coins and jewellery marking the date are all going on sale, Life magazine has issued a hardback book of photographs, Diana at 50, Gambia has produced a series of commemorative stamps, while Barbuda, a small island in the eastern Caribbean, has named a beach after Diana. Clearly, she will not grow old as we who are left grow old.

Instead of the inevitable grinding-down of the passage of time, she remains suspended in the amber of our memories -- forever young, forever beautiful, forever touched by the misfortunes that she wore as tragedies, and by the ultimate tragedy of her violent death. The abrupt curtailing of her life is what has allowed her to remain so significant a figure, and although the world has moved and changed in significant ways since that night of August 31, 1997, Diana's ghost stays the same.

There has been remarkably little revisionism of Diana's life since her death. All her inconsistencies, failures, scandals and personality flash-points were known before she died. The picture we had then -- of a sometimes flawed, often selfish but affectionate, emotional, attractively spontaneous woman -- is virtually the same picture we have now, 14 years later.

There were no major skeletons to come tumbling out of the posthumus closet, largely because Diana was quite definably herself all along. She made peace with her frailties and allowed them to form part of her persona, cleverly understanding that this would only endear her to a public determined to see her as wronged.

But what would she really have been like on her 50th birthday? Chances are, unrecognisable. It is inevitable that time would have changed Diana as memory can't; that her place within the wider world, and within her own domestic one, as the mother of William and Harry, ex-wife to Charles and ex-princess of the House of Windsor, would by now be something quite other.

First, what might she have looked like? Diana died before Botox, fillers and other cosmetic procedures became lunchtime normalities. For a woman with a history of bulimia, who was both vain and insecure about her looks, with an addictive personality and who was so relentlessly scrutinised, it seems likely that Diana would have rejected the inexorable ravages of age. Growing old is always hard, it's harder still for women, and hardest of all for women who have been beautiful. No wonder so many succumb to the window of panic that sets in around 40 and start to tinker with the imperfections -- eliminating crows' feet, tightening a sagging jawline, filling the grooves that set in at this age, until they join the growing ranks of increasingly generic, ageless, almost featureless prototypes.

What these women can't see is the quite extraordinary new phase of beauty that can set in as age advances, the way a 60 or 70-year-old woman can be mesmerising, because of and not despite the wrinkles, in the full glory of her passing years and experience. A woman who looks her age and like herself, with wisdom, humour and confidence etched into her lines.

Diana would undoubtedly have been attracted to the false promise of holding back time, might even have relished the growing gap between herself and Charles' new wife, Camilla. Always far more beautiful than Camilla, the discrepancy between them could only have widened, as Camilla allowed age and time to do their work unchecked, while Diana resorted to artifice. Eventually, she would have come to be physically as anomalous with the royal family -- who have good genes but no desire to tinker with what nature intends -- as she was emotionally. She might well have ended up looking like the army of blonde, bland, TV presenters, models and Hollywood stars who seem to favour the same procedures, perhaps even the same doctors -- Meg Ryan, Ulrika Jonsson, Leslie Ash. It's easy to imagine a Diana with a thoroughly "modern" face, the planes and angles of her face plumped and filled, that rather thin, aristocratic mouth distorted into an artificial pout, and all the wit and charm erased from her expression.

With the new look may have come a series of new men. Diana's roll-call of boyfriends shows above all else her search for someone to love her, someone who could absorb all her demanding, neurotic insecurity and impossible fame, and love her in spite of it all. That yearning to be adored was constantly with her; it's the type of yearning that, if children don't fill it -- and for her they didn't -- then men must. But a man strong enough to be partner and buffer is hard to come by. Despite the efforts of Mohamed Al-Fayed to make the world believe that she had found that person with Dodi, it seems very unlikely. At the time of the crash, they had been together no more than a month, and already the clock seemed to be ticking, a countdown to the inevitability of separation.

Dodi was an international playboy, unreasoned, indulged and as famed for his love of romantic gestures as he was for his pursuit of the unattainable. Easily beguiled and just as easily bored, he may have had the money her wildly extravagant lifestyle demanded (more than £100,000 a year on clothes alone), but was hardly the stern material Diana needed.

His first marriage, to model and Diana-lookalike Suzanne Gregard, lasted just eight months and he had previously dated a whole string of high-maintenance, trophy women, including Brooke Shields, Britt Ekland and Winona Ryder.

One girlfriend, Kelly Fisher, a former Calvin Klein model, insists that she was engaged to Dodi right up to the moment he went public with Di, and that he continued to see her by night, for sex, while chasing Diana during the day, for prestige.

She accused Dodi of having his head turned by Diana's celebrity, and certainly, unlike other boyfriends, Dodi had no desire to date the Princess of Wales in secret. In fact, media attention seemed a plus for him. He quickly confirmed the romance, liked to be seen in public with her, and delighted in making showy gestures, such as buying her an £11,600 engagement ring without her knowledge.

The notion that Dodi could play Onassis to Diana's Jackie Kennedy was definitely there -- his vast wealth could have gone some way towards insuring her against the constant media attention. But then, Diana had a far more complicated relationship with the press than Jackie's chilly desire for distance. And of course, what started as seductively protective for Jackie quickly became stifling, as two characters without much in common beyond a physical attraction grew beyond that initial spark. That Dodi and Diana would have gone a similar route seems likely.

In fact, close friends have always maintained that the real love of Diana's life was Hasnat Kahn, a Pakistani heart surgeon, with whom she had a two-year affair that ended just a month before she began seeing Dodi. Kahn -- unlike Dodi who was raised to be a more secular Muslim, with plenty of Western values -- was from a traditional Muslim family, one that expected him to marry into the same faith, and it was the irreconcilable differences of religion and lifestyle that seemingly drove him and Diana apart. If so, she was clearly on the rebound for at least the beginning of her affair with Dodi, while his track record of pursuit followed by indifference was ingrained enough to suggest that for both, this was destined to burn brightly but briefly. Would Diana have become a bolter? Moving restlessly from one man to the next, forever in search of an unattainable ideal? Possibly, yes. In which case she would also have become gradually declasse and even ridiculous; a hardened veteran of too many love stories.

Part of Dodi's attraction may well have been mischievous delight at the anticipated horror of the royal family, who would naturally have reacted to the notion of a Muslim stepfather for the heir to the throne far more than to the idea of simply another boyfriend. And who can blame Diana for wanting to tease them, given the by-then very fraught relations all round. In fact, at the time of her death, Diana was all but estranged from her former in-laws, certainly from her one-time father-in-law, Prince Philip, who was known to find her utterly tiresome. And yet her death changed even that, because it was Philip who stepped in when William, still reeling in shock and furious at the media for their part in his mother's death, declined to walk behind the gun-carriage carrying Diana's coffin. It was Philip who gently insisted that he might regret his decision, and offered to walk with him, so that in the end, Diana's personal guard of honour was composed of her beloved sons, her ex-husband, and Philip, a man with whom she feuded in life but who was to do her this signal favour in death. It was an early move in the recent, most unlikely of transmutations -- the rehabilitation of Prince Philip, royal racist and goon turned 90-year-old icon.

Diana's relationship with the press could only have become more fraught, as the media monster she was so instrumental in creating grew increasingly out of hand. During the span of her life, and thanks in part to her rather teasing relationship with journalists, the old honour system of respecting privacy and "knowing but not saying", was replaced with the current style of voracious, rampant invasiveness. By the time she died, the paparazzi followed her constantly, and she ignored or engaged, depending on her mood. During the fateful trip to the south of France with the Al-Fayeds, she at one point raced a speedboat up to members of the press dogging them, and appealed for privacy, but then declared: "You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do." It was this hot-cold relationship she had with them that caused so much trouble, particularly as her capacity to control the off switch diminished. The new breed of reporters were disinclined to allow her to dip in and out at will, determined to follow through regardless of her changes of heart. Even a relationship with a modern-day Onassis may not have been enough to hold them at bay, in which case Diana's life would scarcely have been her own, her privacy virtually worthless.

The charities that captured Diana's imagination were the big losers after death. An unhappy child herself, what moved her most were issues relating to children, their illness and adversity. She showed herself to be unusual in seeking out stories and organisations not traditionally favoured by royalty; she did her own work in this regard, finding charities that spoke to her personally rather than accepting the recommendations of royal aides. Aids, leprosy, landmines, homelessness, drug addiction and terminal illness all caught her attention and received huge boosts from her involvement. That Diana had genuine, impulsive sympathy for the misfortunes of others is undoubted. Her reaction to people, especially children, in trouble, was spontaneous and warm, a million miles from the general run of distant royal patronage. Her work for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was posthumously rewarded when the campaign won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997; it's a prize Diana herself could conceivably have won had time allowed her to fully mature into the force for good she so clearly was capable of being.

And finally, the most important question -- what of her sons? How would the lives of William and Harry have been shaped by the continuing presence of their mother? The motherless boys for whom we all feared have grown up well; William demonstrably, Harry, despite the odd lapse, equally. Of course they would be different if she had survived, but the tenor of that difference would have been up to her. No one can actually live for their children, despite what they may wish, and Diana was more selfish than many. It is within the realms of the possible that her behaviour could have become an embarrassment to them, that instead of the fun-loving, adoring young mother, she would have become clinging and emotionally dependent, unable to let her boys lead their own lives.

Throughout the build-up to and playing out of the recent royal wedding, the cipher of Diana was present. What would she have thought of it all? Of the bride, the dress, the ring, the Windsor family reaction? Would William even have been marrying Kate Middleton if Diana hadn't died when he was just 15? Probably not.

William was Diana's DDG (Drop Dead Gorgeous), and her relationship with him was a little proprietorial, because whatever else happened in her life, whatever upheavals and joltings, the one certainty was that she was mother to the heir to the throne. That was her ticket to inclusion within the establishment, to whatever extent she wanted it. It was a bond she needed, and one she depended on.

Had she lived, William would probably have married someone with a much showier pedigree, and with whom he had far less of a bond. After all, without the ache caused by missing his mother, he would not have needed the calm good sense and discreet loyalty of Kate Middleton quite so much.

Harry is harder to read than William; he lacks the same, painfully apparent, determination to do his duty well, and instead enjoys all the advantages of being the younger son. His life, had Diana survived, is less traceable, but it seems certain she would have prevented some of his more appalling gaffes -- the Nazi uniform for one, Chelsy Davy for another.

Diana died before 9/11, before the world changed utterly. She missed the war on terror, the social networking revolution (would Diana have tweeted? It seems possible), the devastating crash in the world's finances. In retrospect, she is so clearly a creature of her time and of the world that was then. But Diana was also a survivor. She weathered a bleak childhood followed by an unhappy marriage, and emerged with her spirit intact. She looked, at the point of her death, to be ready to launch herself at last, fully, as her own person. She was loved, and she knew it. She was inspired to use that love for good ends, and her instincts would surely have guided her right. Diana would have made her own place on the world stage, to the benefit of the unfortunate people she championed. She would have adored Obama, mistrusted Cameron, giggled at Sarkozy. She would, simply through her own mischievous charm, have shed a ray of light onto the dreariness of international politics and endless bad news days.

- Emily Hourican

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