The Way We Talk about Royal Women Is the Way We Talk about All Women

Is It Still A Diana Story?

Catherine Mayer, journalist, author and co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party, has spent years investigating one question: who gets to write a woman’s story? In her new book, Divide and Rule, she examines how Diana, Meghan, Kate and the women before them have had their stories written, rewritten and weaponised for centuries. Then last weekend, Kate laced up her boots and wrote her own.

After completing The Three Peaks Challenge, The Princess of Wales broadcast an emotionally charged and unusually personal message on social media, describing how cancer tests every part of a person, "physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually".

Signed simply by C, it's a powerful and profoundly human message with a very different register to the usual carefully managed communications. So, what does this tell us? That Kate is writing her own story, or that the institution is writing it for her? Perhaps, uncomfortably, both are true at once.

In her recently released book Divide and Rule, the journalist, author and activist, Catherine Mayer, traces the tension at the heart of that question: women whose stories are written for them rather than by them, flattened into archetypes and set against one another - it makes their stories easier to control. Anne Boleyn or Catherine of Aragon. Diana or Camilla. Kate or Meghan. The loyal wife versus the disruptive outsider. One woman rises as another falls. She calls it the Infernal Seesaw: a mechanism she finds at work across patriarchal systems, and nowhere more starkly than within British Royalty, which she has another name for - the Patrimonarchy.

"I think if I have an ambition for this book," she says, "besides the fact that people understand the women that I've covered a bit better, it's that people start interrogating their own opinions. We're in an age where everybody feels not only they're entitled to their opinions very loudly, but that their opinions define who they are. I think a little more uncertainty would make for much better debate and much better understanding, so I'm just trying to get people to question themselves."

"First and foremost," she says, "it's about the women, because their stories are amazing." They are the stories we hear, we tell, we inherit. Stories which make us feel we know these women so intimately despite actually knowing so little about them.

“The monarchy isn't a sideshow. These women aren't sideshows. They affect every aspect of life, they're who we get our ideas about women from. So stop treating this like it doesn't matter.”

Writing the book, she found herself constantly reevaluating her own opinions, especially when it came to Diana.

"I'd covered Diana's death, I'd written a 5,000-word cover story ten years later, I'd written Charles's biography. I thought I knew the story." Mayer herself is only a few months older than the late Princess. She watched her tale unfold in real time, reported on its collapse, its tragic ending, and later wrote extensively about its aftermath.

"When she got married," she recalls, "I didn't understand her choice. I suspected it would end in tears - but not for the right reasons."

Like many young feminists of the time, she remembers wearing one of the now infamous "Don't Do It Di" badges. "I wasn't unsympathetic towards her," she says. "I just didn't understand her choices."

But the story she thought she knew became the emotional centre of the book.

"When I came to writing it," she says quietly, "I was literally crying." Not with sadness. "With rage." She pauses before explaining why.

"I was crying with rage for not just what had happened to her. What happens to women somehow just coalesced for me." Mayer is not looking for shortcomings. She is looking at the systems that shape behaviour, the institutions and public appetites that, over time, become almost impossible to resist.

“They didn't kill Paula, they didn't kill Diana, but they contributed vastly to the suffering of very vulnerable women who ended up dead. ”

She recalls watching Diana's 1995 Panorama interview alongside her close friends, Paula Yates, Michael Hutchence and Andy Gill. Paula arrived wearing a tiara in solidarity with Diana. At first, Mayer says, the image feels almost comic. Then comes the awful realisation. Within five years, Diana, Hutchence and Paula would all be dead.

"Writing this chapter, for the first time, I fully connected the kind of cultural and institutional and structural misogyny that I think... they didn't kill Paula, they didn't kill Diana, but they contributed vastly to the suffering of very vulnerable women who ended up dead."

For her, the connection isn't about individual culpability. It's about public narratives. Both women became consumed by stories that bore only a partial resemblance to who they really were. Their private selves gradually disappeared beneath the versions of them the public preferred to believe. In the case of Royal women, she argues, they become vessels onto which the public projects fantasies and fears.

"It's saying the monarchy isn't a sideshow. These women aren't sideshows. They affect every aspect of life because they're the most prominent women. They're who we get our ideas about women from. So this actually really matters a lot... It doesn't mean you have to like anyone. It doesn't mean you have to be a monarchist or republican. It's just: stop treating this like it's a sideshow."

For Mayer, our awareness has become increasingly urgent, because the machinery that produced those stories has become faster, louder and infinitely more powerful.

"This hasn't happened by accident. It's happened through the decline of trust in institutions, the rise of social media algorithms that reward polarisation, and populist movements that are very good at weaponising it."

The "Where is Kate" saga, months of speculation, conspiracy theories and manipulated images that preceded her cancer diagnosis, illustrated something Mayer sees as an existential crisis for the monarchy: an institution whose survival has always depended on being seen, "in an age in which we don't believe the evidence that we are shown."

Few stories have proved more enduring than Kate versus Meghan. "What fascinated me wasn't whether Kate and Meghan liked each other," she says. "It was the expectation that they had to be rivals. How would you have enough distance," she says, "to go, 'I can see that we're both being manipulated by circumstances and structures?'"

“I don't want to ask Diana a question. I want to warn her. And I don't even mean, don't get in that car. I mean...‘This is what's happening!’”

That's something she argues would never have been allowed to happen.

"Planet Windsor is a distorting factor. They had a shared apparatus that couldn't deal with the level of interest in Meghan, which exacerbated tensions. Diana had scared the palace because she came in as what looked like the sort of helpmeet to the heir - and then became a star who eclipsed him. They were very scared of ever having a member of the royal family who was bigger than other members of the royal family. I'm not saying that Meghan would have been, but that initial rush of interest triggered those reflexes. And so there was also an effort to contain her."

The prevailing narrative positions Meghan's departure as a choice: institutional power traded for commercial freedom. Mayer sees it differently.

"She didn't walk away to pursue commercial deals," says Mayer. "She thought she could do a version of what she'd been doing the rest of her life without understanding the transaction until she found herself in the situation…. The commercial life that she has been building since has been of necessity."

Mayer believes Meghan fundamentally misunderstood what becoming a working royal actually meant. Once Harry and Meghan left, however, they remained globally famous while losing the institutional support that had previously surrounded them.

By the end of our conversation, it no longer feels like a question about royalty. It feels like a question about all of us.

I ask Mayer one final question; not about the book but about the woman at the heart of it. If she could go back and speak to Diana today, what would she say?

She doesn't hesitate. "I don't want to ask her a question," she says. "I want to warn her." She pauses.

"And I don't even mean, Don't get in that car. I mean… 'This is what's happening.'"

Divide and Rule by Catherine Mayer is available to buy now, published by Harper Collins