As unpopular as she may have been with the royal institution during her life, she remains one of the most important figures in more recent royal history. Indeed, with an inborn ‘sense of destiny’ and natural star power, Princess Diana profoundly changed the public perception of the House of Windsor, explains royal biographer Simon Vigar.
Reflecting on Diana’s legacy, he said that her experience in the royal periphery long before joining royal circles gave her something special.
An aristocratic insider unlike other modern royals – Queen Camilla, Catherine Princess of Wales or Meghan The Duchess of Sussex – Diana herself had come from the aristocracy.
Living on Sandringham estate, with her childhood home, Park House, also being on royal land, she grew up familiar with the royals. Before her own romance with the then Prince Charles began, one of her older sisters Lady Sarah Spencer dated him briefly.
“Diana had a sense of destiny about her and she knew a lot about [high society] having been the only aristocratic of the four ladies; she grew up on the Sandringham estate and knew the royals”. But the future Princess of Wales would not be deterred by strict traditions; she broke them – whether she was visiting Tower Records in Kensington High Street or engaging in direct public engagement.
From the moment she first entered public consciousness she grounded the monarchy in a way no one before her or since had achieved.
With a level of celebrity that the institution itself found it hard to handle, this made her immensely popular across the globe. “Subjectively, Diana brought star power”, says Vigar.
“The royal establishment as a body didn’t really know what they had at the time but she ended up outshone them” – though by then it was, for Diana, a little too late.
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More than a quarter of a century since her death in Paris in 1997, a sense of that undeniable appeal and influence persists, continuing to shape how the younger generation of royals connect with the public.