Lady Diana: a cool lady for a prince

Press, 25 November 1980, Page 24

Lady Diana: a cool lady for a prince

By KEN COATES in London The girl romantically linked with Prince Charles, Lady Diana Spencer. aged 19, has come through the last few weeks of intense personal publicity as cool as a cucumber. Few girls of that age, of whatever background, could, or would have withstood the constant barrage of reporters, photographers, television crews, and endless telephone calls. The Prince’s comment on his thirty-second birthday that- “I can promise you that you will all be told soon enough,” is bound to increase the pressure on this rather quiet and thoroughly nice girl. As the popular press constantly repeats, the Prince didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no. Even the serious newspapers have taken to examining the case of ‘‘The Prince, the press, arid Lady Diana.”

Perhaps it is pure escapism, speculates one. Almost nothing escapes the cynicism of the 1980 s, with the battling exception of "that greatest of all British anachronisms, the Royal Family.” Until the photographs of Lady Diana with her kindergarten pupils, taken in the autumn sunshine, were published, she was referred to merely as “the younger sister of one of Prince Charles's favourite firl-friends — Lady Sarah pencer" (Lady Diana’s elder sister). It was only after she had left school this summer and the Prince’s alleged romance with Anna Wallace was said to be over, that Lady Diana began to appear, in her own right, as it were, after a Royal week-end at Balmoral. But little is known about her. and one suspects there is little to tell. Every day she turns up to teach at the private kindergarten, near the Pimlico tube station. It is run in a very modest church hall and is patriotically named “Young England.” and is attended by among others, Mr Har-

old Macmillan’s greatgrandson. and the son of the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Peter Walker. Across the road is the graffiti-covered Pimlico comprehensive school where hundreds of pupils come and go each day, passing the nannies and the chauffeur-driven cars delivering kindergarten charges.

The headmistress says Lady Diana is a very good assistant, that so far she has not given notice, and will be staying — unless she is hustled out, that is.

Lady Diana is on record as having said she loves children, and she genuinely seems to, a fact which has pleased everyone.

All the commentators have pointed out that on paper she is the “ideal girl.” Both sides of her family are highly aristocratic, including four direct links to King Charles II and one to King James IL

Her father, the eighth Earl Spencer, is directly related to the Churchill family. After 15 years, the Spencer marriage broke up. Lady Spencer became Mrs Peter Shand Kydd. by marrying the half-brother

of the missing ' Lord Lucan’s brother-in-law.

In 1976, Lord Spencer married Raine, the former wife of the Earl of Dartmouth, and daughter of the romantic novelist, Barbara Cartland, by the first of her two marriages. Lady Diana is universally described as appearing to be just another quiet, rather unsophisticated upper-class girl with pretty eyes, not a great conversationalist, but with a propensity for laughter. As the down-to-earth “Daily Mirror" said: “She is quietly spoken, not particularly posh even. It is a pleasant, even classless accent, and certainly not in the Princess Anne league.”

She is. of course, privileged. Few girls of her age have a father to buy them a §250,000 flat in Kensington, although the three girls who share it with her have to pay rent. Whether Lady Diana Spencer is Prince Charles's choice for a bride, the consensus is that she has emerged as a thoroughly nice, nonsnooty young girl who can withstand the considerable pressures of personal publicity without making as fool of herself.