Families Deny Rift Over Diana Reports Of Pre-Funeral Fights Called ‘Rag-Bag Speculation’
Buckingham Palace and the mother of the late Princess of Wales on Tuesday strenuously denied reports of an all-out family feud erupting in the days before Diana’s funeral and burial on Saturday.
“There is no division, nor has there been, between their paternal and maternal relations,” said Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, in a handwritten statement to the British Press Association.
“A rag-bag of nonsensical speculation,” a Buckingham Palace spokesman said Tuesday.
Press reports of a feud, which reached a crescendo with a British television broadcast Monday night and in front-page newspaper stories Tuesday morning, described Diana’s ex-husband, Prince Charles, fighting with his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, over funeral arrangements and Diana’s brother, the Earl of Spencer, fighting with the royal family.
The reports said it was only with the intervention of Prime Minister Tony Blair that the bitter pre-funeral negotiations were resolved and Diana was buried with the sweeping public ceremonies her adoring and grieving public demanded. That report, too, was denied, by a Downing Street spokesman.
According to a report by Jon Snow on Monday’s Channel 4 news and also by stories in Tuesday’s Guardian and Times, it was the queen - no fan of her former daughter-in-law - who insisted at first that the 36-year-old Diana be given only a private funeral and burial.
Hours after Diana was killed in a Paris car crash, “the Queen initially demanded Diana’s body should not be placed in any of the royal palaces and should be taken to a private mortuary when it arrived back in Britain. Charles disagreed,” said a Guardian story headlined “Charles and Queen at war over Diana.”
Diana’s body was in fact taken directly to St. James’s Palace, Prince Charles’ residence, where it remained unvisited for days by the royal family while members, including Diana’s two young sons, remained closeted hundreds of miles away in Scotland.
On the Sunday of the crash, Prince Charles, Princes William and Harry, the Queen, her husband and aged mother had attended church as usual at the Crathie Kirk chapel outside Balmoral Castle in Scotland - a televised sight viewed with curious concern by a British public just waking up to the stunning news of Diana’s death.
Even though the family knew by then she was dead, said the story in Tuesday’s Guardian, Diana’s name was not mentioned at the service “because the queen stuck to her order the princess’s name should never be mentioned in front of her.”