The scene was a memorial service at the Guards’ Chapel, across the road from Buckingham Palace and one of the smartest places for a send-off London has to offer.
But according to Tina Brown, who was there to pay her respects to the debonair Lord Lichfield, fashionable photographer to the demi-monde, glamour was sadly absent.
In its place she sniffed ‘the creak of irrelevance and decay’.
The pews, she noted were filled with ‘Court Circular stalwarts’. There was a ‘dowdy and gruff’ Princess Anne, the Duchess of Cornwall in a ‘dour air stewardess suit’,
Camilla’s ex-husband Andrew Parker Bowles resembling a ‘walking pink gin’ and a ‘decrepit Lord Snowdon’, the Queen’s former brother-in-law, displaying ‘a bad-tempered air’.
Even the younger generation back then in 2006, ‘pale and discontented’, did not escape her forensic gaze.
Every time one rose to speak, the sage at her elbow, the Queen Mother’s former factotum William ‘Backstairs Billy’ Tallon hissed something pejorative.
Only the imperious Princess Michael of Kent offered a frisson of allure.
Brown found herself longing for the ‘tall, blonde glory of Princess Diana to appear in a blaze of paparazzi’.
But Diana was long dead and a deep dullness had settled on the Royal Family, for which they were eternally grateful.
Never again’, was the mantra. ‘We don’t want another Diana’ was the refrain that echoed from the highest reaches of Palace life.
Twenty five years after the princess’s tragic, unexpected death, the formidable Ms Brown, author of the explosive Diana Chronicles, which was an early Naughties sensation, has returned to the fray.
Her new book, The Palace Papers: Inside The House Of Windsor — The Truth And The Turmoil, examines how that quest to ensure the monarchy is not simply a platform for family members to seek public acclaim has turned out.
Even a cursory look at the royal landscape would suggest things have not gone entirely to plan.
Just this week, Harry and Meghan — with Netflix crew dancing attendance — have lobbed another of their televisual truth bombs after the prince declared he wanted to make sure his grandmother was ‘protected’.
With added bombast, he let it slip that he enjoyed a special relationship with her unlike any other, that the two could ‘talk about things she can’t talk about with anybody else’.
Meanwhile, the dust has scarcely settled on the disgraced Duke of York’s £12 million out-of-court agreement of a sex-abuse lawsuit.
And less than a month after escorting his mother to Prince Philip’s thanksgiving service, Andrew, the royal pariah, is said to be angling for a return to public duties, despite the shame of his links to the notorious paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
As ever, the devil is in the delicious detail, from Harry’s mental health struggles and the girl who put him on the path to treatment, to the Queen’s remarkably with-it grasp of cultural niceties.
Asked if it was OK if the heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne could appear at the 2002 Party at the Palace to mark her Golden Jubilee, she replied dryly: ‘As long as he doesn’t bite the head off a bat.’
While no conventional royal historian, Brown tackles her subjects with the same brio she brought to her years as a highly regarded magazine editor, first with Tatler, then with Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.
Her access to those who flit around the royals gives her writing an edgy authenticity.
The book, she says, is the result of two years’ work — and impeccable sources.
‘I talked to more than 120 people, many of whom have been intimately involved with the senior royals and their households during the turbulent years since Diana died,’ she explained.
The result is a tour d’horizon of the recent travails of the Royal Family, which is both critical of and surprisingly sympathetic to the figure at the heart of the story: the 96-year-old Queen, whose head-in-the-sand approach or ‘ostriching’ she often mocks.
Some are bound to be upset at Brown’s frank, almost cruel assessment of Diana in the final months of her life after her Panorama interview.
Following recent revelations about Martin Bashir’s deceit in securing his interview, Brown claims Diana had no regrets about the collaboration.
‘I don’t subscribe to the now pervasive narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette tossed about by malign forces beyond her control,’ she says.
‘I find it offensive to present the canny, resourceful Diana as a woman of no agency, as either a foolish, duped child or the hapless casualty of malevolent muckrakers.’
She quotes cordless phone magnate Gulu Lalvani, who briefly dated the princess in early 1997, saying that Diana told him she had said exactly what she wanted to say in the broadcast.
‘She was pleased about it,’ Lalvani told Brown.
‘She didn’t have a bad word to say about Martin Bashir. She realised it served her purpose.’
I, for one, disagree. Not only did Diana fall out with Bashir, she told me she fervently wished she had not spoken about her betrayed love for Army officer James Hewitt because it had damaged her relationship with William and Harry.
Recalling her own lunch with Diana in New York six weeks before the princess’s death, Brown admits she was ‘bowled over’ by her confidence.
‘Diana was always more beautiful in person than in photographs, the huge, limpid blue eyes, the skin like a freshwater pearl, the supermodel height that was even more imposing in three-inch Manolos.
‘She told us her story of loneliness and hurt at Charles’s hands with an irresistible soulful intimacy . . . then switched to a startlingly sophisticated vision of how she planned to leverage her celebrity for the causes she cared about.’
Her plan, says Brown, ‘sounds very like what Meghan and Harry are attempting with their entertainment deals today, but with one central difference: it was better thought out.’
So what other intriguing nuggets does the book contain?
Frictions between brothers escalated
Brown considers Harry’s departure from royal life to be a huge loss, not just to the nation but also to the one person who needs him the most: his brother William, the future king.
Intriguingly, she says
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