The Princess, the Fairytale, and the Blood Sacrifice

29 July 1981; London was as deserted as if a neutron bomb had hit it. My wife and I (also newly married that year) cycled up to her aunt’s house in Highgate to the Royal Wedding party she had organised for her show-biz pals; we had the normally traffic-thronged streets to ourselves.

We all laughed, drank and ate extravagantly, sunning ourselves in her huge and luxuriant garden. Show-business seemed the best way of framing this event, which a normally sceptical and hard-to-move British public had become more engaged with than anything, by all accounts, since the Queen’s Coronation nearly 30 years previously.

So what was it the captivated so many of us about the Royal Wedding? It certainly wasn’t the groom – the heir to the throne has never been enormously popular. It was of course Diana who did it, a myth in the making when the media referred to her as “Lady Di”, before she even became Princess of Wales. Shy, elegant, beautiful, innocent and unassuming in her manner despite her impeccable pedigree (her mother was a personal friend of the Queen’s), she was a better fit for the role of fairytale princess than anyone Hollywood could have come up with – the charismatic unknown who rescues a tottering movie.

I hardly need to recap the story of possibly the most written- and speculated-about person on the planet for the rest of her short life. The point of bringing her up is to focus on the symbolic dimension of her life and death, as the sacrificed princess who dies in order to perpetuate the dynasty. In the royal houses of pre-Roman Britain a son could only inherit the kingdom from his father if his mother had been a ‘throne-princess’ – a virgin descendant of the same royal house; in other cultures the virgin princess is literally sacrificed – it’s her blood which guarantees the longevity and survival of the kingdom.

When Diana died in 1997 the conspiracy theories abounded; many friends of mine were convinced that she’d been murdered by the British Secret Services because she was about to marry a Muslim (the Egyptian playboy Dodi Al-Fayed). Others locate the ‘blood conspiracy’ on a more occult and symbolic level; for a detailed account of these see this link .

Whether one believes any of this or not isn’t the point: what clearly happened to Diana was that she was the recipient of a huge volume of projections, acting out the unlived, unexplored and disowned areas of people’s psyches in the same way that movie and music stars do – and that this was also her downfall. Young and inexperienced herself, and lacking effective support and guidance from her stuffy new ‘family’, she was overwhelmed by the vortex of incoherent but powerful emotions that swam around her.

And today, of course, another Crown Princess is to be installed, when Kate Middleton marries Diana’s elder son. But the circumstances are very different from those of William’s parents: they’re the same age, and have been lovers for eight or nine years. The excitement of the public seems to me much less; William and Kate seem more like a typical “we might as well get married” 2011 couple than the stuff of fairytales. Mindful of his mother’s fate, William has asked that they be allowed to live ‘a normal life’ – a strange request from a man who will one day wear the crown of England. But we can take this too on a symbolic level – he and Kate are refusing as far as they can the projections which destroyed his mother, to ‘desacralise’ the monarchy in a sense.

A columnist in the London Guardian suggested as much: that what William had in mind was to bring the British monarchy closer to the Scandinavian model: the Kings and Queens of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – which are among the most open and egalitarian societies on the planet – minimise protocol and in some cases even have normal jobs.

However, as Timothy Garton Ash went on to point out, he has plenty of time to think about it; his grandmother is likely to rule for another 5-10 years, after which his father will take over. Though Charles will be an old man by then, the Windsors are long-lived, and we’re likely to have to wait till 2035 or 2040 before we see King William V (aged nearly 60 by then). Who knows what, if anything, will be expected from him at that point?

Personally, I wish them well. Refusing other people’s projections is a good way to embark on any of life’s adventures, marriage very much included. May the tragedy of his mother’s short life not be visited upon William or upon his family.

Tripoli, 1973

It was Friday, so we were going to the beach as usual. As in most Muslim countries, the weekend was Friday and Saturday – and we were none of us so devout that we objected to working on Sunday. But Friday of course was the big one, the Muslim holy day.

One was very conscious of Friday in Libya; the place I lived was called Suq-al-Juma’a – Friday Market. Once a sleepy little village with a large square where camels and goats were traded, it was gradually being absorbed into the city: white concrete villas like mine springing up among the prickly-pears and the old mud-brick courtyard houses. Next to our house was a small mosque; the call to prayer went out five times a day, every day, starting at 6:00 am in the summer – though it was on tape. The elderly Hajji who owned the dusty little store opposite our house and doubled as the imam was no longer expected to drag his old bones up those steep, narrow stairs.

Anyway, back to the beach. I and the two other young unmarried male teachers (we had little else in common, but Libya had thrown us together) had planned to meet at the school as usual with our swimming and snorkelling gear and pile into my yellow Renault for a day at the ‘40 km beach’. I never did find out what the locals called it, but it was a popular spot; a long bar of sand with a grassy bluff a couple of hundred metres back from the sea, on which stood a small shrine to a local wali (saint), a low white structure made of whitewashed daub with a dome and crescent on top, like a miniature mosque.

But I don’t recall seeing many of the numerous Libyan families who flocked to the ‘40 km beach’ on Fridays and Saturdays paying their devotions to the wali. Instead they would all gather on the beach, the men in their bathing trunks and the women in their thick blanket-like barrakans that covered every part of their bodies, leaving only a Cyclops-like hole around the bridge of the nose to squint through. While the women took care of the young children, the men and older boys would barbecue immense quantities of lamb in between dips in the sea, before finally piling into their Datsuns or Toyotas to drive back to the city.

On the way to the beach we stopped, as we often did, at a small café-cum-gas station to get a coffee and to buy some Fanta. On the television – there was of course only one channel, and it was in black and white – the country’s new young leader Colonel Gaddafi was holding forth in his usual elaborate, ritualised, impassioned and rhetorical style. The few customers in the bar were watching, respectful and slightly baffled.

My Arabic wasn’t good enough to understand most of what he was saying, but I guessed that, like most of his speeches, it was about the unequal relation of the Arab world with the Western powers, especially the British and the Americans: Palestine, oil, Saudi Arabia etc. Plus, of course, the history of Libya itself, a backwater Italian colony up till World War II, and an Anglo-American protectorate from then till 1969. The Italians never found the oil, but the Brits did in, back in the 1950s: with its pro-Western puppet monarch Libya had been a safe haven for BP, Shell, Esso and the rest – and the Americans even had a huge air force base right on Tripoli’s corniche, a mere 8 km from the city centre. The West had taken the place for granted, and it was almost undefended when that unknown 27-year old junior officer staged his military coup. Almost the first thing he did, of course, was to kick out the Americans.

We drank up our coffee and left fairly hurriedly – the atmosphere was never too friendly during Gaddafi’s speeches, and spent a pleasant day frolicking on the beach. On the way back I stopped for gas, and when I went in to pay he was still speaking – which made six or more hours non-stop, outdoing even his great hero Nasser. (The Egyptian revolutionary leader nationalised the Suez canal, provoking the disastrous Anglo-French invasion of 1956; his many-hour-long speeches were broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers all over the Arab world, causing grown men to stop in the streets and burst into tears of pride and passion.)

Over the year and a half or so that I was there, Libya gradually became less and less hospitable to Westerners, as the populace got to know more of the history that they’d never learned in school (those who’d even gone to school). There was a huge amount of natural grandeur and beauty to the place: incredible Roman and Greek ruins, awe-inspiring desert landscapes, and of course those astonishing, endless, largely deserted, sandy beaches, but I was glad enough to leave all the same. This wasn’t primarily because of the politics but the enforced celibacy and the lack of alcohol and merry-making – the lack of pretty much anything, in fact, in this vast country three times the size of France, with a population then of less than 3 million. I had my life to get on with, and I went back to London to get on with it.

That was more than half a lifetime ago: then I was a young man in his early 20s, and now I’m an old geezer heading for retirement age. And Gaddafi is still there, madder, crueller and more despotic than ever. Who else was in power in 1973, and is still there now? Not even Robert Mugabe, or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni; in 1973 the unshiftable Silvio Berlusconi was still crooning ballads on cruise ships.

But come to think of it, there is one head of state who’s lasted even longer. When I came back to London Queen Elisabeth II’s face had already adorned Britain’s coins and banknotes for 22 years – and, like Gaddafi, she’s still there now. I wonder, if the Brits tried to overthrow the Queen, and she was hunkered down in Buckingham Palace surrounded by tank traps and anti-aircraft guns, would Gaddafi send his air force to support the Republican cause?

An idle fantasy – next year (let’s hope) Gaddafi will be gone, but the Brits will be throwing garden parties to celebrate the Queen’s 60 years on the throne; little paper flags will be waved all over the country, and hardly a protest will be heard.