THE INSIDE STORY

Tina Brown, who wrote The Diana Chronicles, is back with an eye-poppingly revealing new book on the House of Windsor – and shares with Allison Pearson fascinating insights into the lives of Harry and Meghan who, she says, are ‘addicted to drama’

- Allison Pearson

FOLLOWING the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, a badly shaken royal family embraced dullness like a spouse returning gratefully to the marital bed after an affair with a gorgeous but unstable lover.

Tina says the queen made it crystal clear it could never happen again.

“The it being Diana’s explosive celebrity, the problem of the monarchy being upstaged, outshone by anyone other than the queen or the heir to the throne. The refrain most repeated at the palace was, ‘We don’t want another Diana’. Never again!”

So how did “never again” work out? That’s what I begin by asking Tina who, a quarter of a century after Diana’s death, has returned to the subject of the monarchy in her new book, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil.

It’s the result of two years’ work, speaking to 120 people intimately involved with senior royals and their households.

Tina observes drily that it’s been a somewhat challenging year for the royals. You could say that.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently returned from a tour of the Caribbean, which was supposed to shore up the popularity of the monarchy but ended in allegations of imperial condescension and tone-deafness.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have effectively established a rival court in California, with Diana’s younger son helpfully set to publish an “intimate and heartfelt” memoir later this year, which one gathers may not be poor Granny’s preferred bedtime reading.