What would Diana have thought of middle-class Kate?

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10 April 2012

Being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be." So said Princess Diana.

Although she has been made a Duchess Kate Middleton would do well to heed these words, as few could fail to remember that Diana was dropped into the deep end of royal life. Or that she was then "left alone to sink or swim and grew to resent the very apparatus that had left her there", as royal biographer Christopher Wilson tells me.

So were she alive today, the princess would be even more weary of the royal family - and, as Wilson puts it, "her role in her son's wedding would reflect just that".

Before the cameras, of course, this would not be immediately noticeable. "Diana would have been absolutely thrilled about her son's wedding," says Clemmie Hambro, the society garden designer who was the youngest of Princess Diana's five bridesmaids at her 1981 wedding. Impeccably connected Hambro, the great-granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill, speaks for most of the princess's friends when she adds, "she would also have been thrilled about her son's choice of partner".

Undoubtedly, for Diana was a great "romantic", according to stylist Anna Harvey, who helped dress her for 16 years. Her own smashed marriage still raw in her mind, she would have been pleased by the way her son's slow-burn friendship-turned-romance developed. "She would be delighted that William has found someone he clearly loves," explains Mike Whitlam, another of Diana's confidants.

Whitlam, ex-director general of the Red Cross, who travelled with Princess Diana on her famous landmine-clearing campaigns, tells me: "This affection and love would have been what mattered to her; not the arrangements for the wedding."

But were Diana here, we would also be watching unfold a deeply different wedding.

"For one, she'd have upstaged them all," says Wilson. "Every wedding has its fearsome dragon and that role would undoubtedly have belonged to Diana," he says.

Take her part in the Duchess of York's wedding in 1986. In the family photo, the bride paled in comparison with Diana who, though half obscured by a young Prince Harry (clutched to her bosom), still dazzled in her modest cerulean polka-dot wrap dress.

"She tried desperately not to upstage the bride but she was incapable of not doing so," says Jilly Cooper, a close friend of the royal family. "I suspect she would have dressed down for her son's wedding but she was still the most beautiful hit of sunshine and joy."

Well-mannered as Princess Diana would undoubtedly have been in public, Wilson is also adamant that there would have been a "discernible gulf" between the aristocratic Spencer dynasty and the self-made middle-class Middletons. One more spiteful source even nicknamed them "The Nouveaus".

"The truth is, she has very little in common with Mrs Middleton," observes Wilson. "The Spencers are a very, very grand family and Mrs Middleton is certainly not."

A leafy £1 million Berkshire house aside, Carole Middleton is, after all, a builder's daughter and descended from Durham coal miners, while the Spencers' lineage is peppered with earls and dukes.

"I wonder if Diana would think that Kate's lineage is not quite up to snuff," ponders Wilson. Brave words indeed, for most of Diana's other friends and acquaintances would rather sensibly err on the side of flattery.

Among these is alternative therapist Simone Simmons. She is adamant that Diana, a former client and close friend, would have admired the two qualities the Middleton clan are best known for - their steely, solid approach to family life (which they share with the royal family or "The Firm") and the hard-working, self-made credentials of their jelly'n'cake mail order Party Pieces business.

Simmons can imagine Kate spending Saturdays with Diana, shopping. "Kate's not a good-time girl and not a gold-digger. One thing that Diana said over and over again is that William should marry for love as well as friendship," Simmons tells me. "She didn't worry at all about him. Even at the age of 14, he had the wisdom of an 84-year-old. All she wanted was for him to find someone who was also his best friend as well as his lover. He's listened to her advice as that's exactly what he's done. She is delighted. She approves," says Simmons, who claims she still has a spiritual "line" open with the princess. She also reveals that Prince William visits a medium to stay close to his mother.

"Don't be fooled," she warns me. "Diana has a big part to play in the wedding and she plays it well."

First, there's the 18-carat sapphire ring. Some call it a bad omen; Hambro is adamant that it's a "wonderful tribute'; while Wilson calls it a defence mechanism, "a 'keep away from my woman' sort of thing".

"So many people think it's a bad omen but what they don't realise it that it's been cleansed and the negative energy has been banished," Simmons says.

To do this, Simmons says she and Diana performed a special ritual in a bedroom at Kensington Palace in 1996. First she placed the engagement ring, set with 14 small diamonds, in a plant pot. Then Diana transferred it into a teacup, soaked it in saltwater, then left it on the window sill of the bedroom for a month. "After that, she kept it in one of the cubby-holes in the palace. That ring is now a symbol of good energy," says Simmons.

Good energy aside, Kate Middleton still relies heavily on advice. So far, she has been guided by Prince William, Prince Charles, the Queen, specially hired royal etiquette instructors and even British historian Andrew Roberts, who is said to be tutoring her in the history of the House of Windsor.

Meanwhile, the Duchess of Cornwall has, if the stories are to be believed, advised Kate on the merits of a tiara and hair up versus hair down on her wedding day. Such advice pales beside that she might have had from Princess Diana, the woman even Jackie Kennedy called "very stylish".

"Right from the start, she knew exactly what was right for her," said Anna Harvey in Vogue. "Kate will need someone who understands the life she leads ... It was so important with Diana - no unseemly bulges or too much cleavage."

"They have been quite different from the get-go," chipped in Bruce Oldfield, one of the first designers to dress the princess. "Diana embraced being a fashion icon ... Kate would look silly in a neon dress slit to the thigh."

Jilly Cooper says Diana's advice would have been more all-encompassing. "I suspect she would have told her never to read the papers," says Cooper. "Also, to always wear dark glasses."

Wilson, too, is certain that Diana would have "great rafts of advice" for the future Princess of Wales. "Her advice would have been so prejudiced," he warns. "It would have done Kate no good at all, especially since she has had a gradual introduction to royal life and has been au fait with the way of things long before her marriage to William."

Whatever advice the princess might or might not have bestowed, two things are certain. One: "She would have wanted the importance of the wedding to be recognised but their love for each other would have been what mattered to her," says Whitlam. The other certainty, as Cooper puts it, is that: "All a mother wants for her son is a wonderful daughter-in-law. I've no doubt that she would have welcomed Kate into the family with a blaze of happiness."

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