I was in my teens when Charles and Di got married, but even I knew that a royal marriage was not like a normal marriage and that there were expectations and obligations a royal marriage would carry. I canb only assume she entered into that marriage in a state of near-cretinous naivety not to have realised that it was NOT a fairytale wedding.

I find it very very hard to see Diana as a tragic figure and it disgusts me to see her held up as some sort of role model of sweet-natured suffering. She had a very good line in public displays of empathy and a usually well-concealed line in private manipulations. When she wore a plain old puffa jacket and took the two princes to McDonalds in Kensington she complained afterwards that all she had wanted, was to do something normal and ordinary and everyday - to give her sons a taste of what being ordinary citizens was like, but that somehow the press managed to find her and it ws splashed all over the papers. Cue lots of bleating in the papers papers about poor Diana and her desperate attempts to give her sons some sense of normality to contrast with Windsor Mediaevalism. Except that she had personally contacted the paper taht scooppe dteh story to let them know what she was doing.

I think both Charles and Dian are pretty contemptible specimens, but he at least has endeavoured not to use his sons as pawns to garner public and media sympathy. She got a pompous, coinceited and arrogant husband jealous of her publicity instead of a fairytale prince, and he got not the level-headed and acquiescent broodmare that the palace demanded he chose, but a neurotic, self-obsessed halfwit who came to bed smelling of vomit.