Lilibet Diana – the name may turn out to be more
of a curse than a blessing
By giving their daughter such a name, Harry and Meghan
have ensured there will be heightened interest in her as she grows up
Sean
O'Grady
@_seanogrady
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/lilibet-diana-harry-meghan-baby-b1860908.html
What’s in a
name? Quite a lot, if you’re royal. There’s always plenty of sensitivity and
“meaning” in the chosen names of offspring – nods to history and politics as
much as family affection, and the usual soppy stuff about something sounding
nice or, less often, being trendy.
Harry and
Meghan, who are in the celeb fame game properly now (for good or ill), have
layered another consideration onto the usual ones in naming their daughter.
Little Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor is certainly charming and her name
seems well chosen, both on historical and sentimental grounds, with her famous
gran and great gran memorialised. However, her name will always remind people
who she is. Less trouble booking a table at a fashionable restaurant, getting a
ticket for the must-see musical, or – you never know – a job.
The
downside, of course, as with all celeb stuff, is that giving her such a name
will merely heighten interest in her as she grows up; and, though it seems
unkind to remark on it now, will inevitably attract the kind of media intrusion
with which Lilibet Diana’s wider family are only too familiar. Her name may
turn out to be more of a curse than a blessing, if the poignant experience of
the past is anything to go by. The papers will be doubly interested in who she
resembles as she grows up; whether she inherits Diana’s sense of style or the
Queen’s sense of duty; and, of course, who she’ll be dating.
The public
appetite for the habits and doings of even the most minor member of the royal
family is astonishing, and probably unprecedented. It does leave some of us who
are less obsessed with the Windsors a bit bewildered, however – something best
satirised in a Viz comic quiz titled: “Which Kent Are You?”
We’ve
become so old-fashioned about venerating our royal traditions – abetted by a
government intent on weaponising them in our culture wars – that I’m only
surprised Boris Johnson hasn’t reinstated the convention that the home
secretary attend a royal birth to ensure no imposter is substituted for a
genuine royal child. It would have meant Priti Patel flying to California to
observe Meghan and Harry in the maternity suite, which would have entertained
all concerned. Patel might have taken the opportunity to give Lilibet Diana a
special, points-based UK visa, seeing as she would qualify under
“semi-estranged royal personality”, a category of skilled worker for which
post-Brexit Britain is of course crying out.
You might
argue, for what it’s worth, that “Lilibet” is anyway a confected name – which
is true, but it’s not like they’ve called her “Chardonnay” or “Renault Clio” or
something. It seems to have grown out of the way the Queen, as baby Princess
Elizabeth of York, was unable to quite pronounce her name, and so “Lilibet”
caught on as a family sobriquet. It wasn’t on her birth certificate, or how she
was known publicly, but the same might be said of Prince Henry of Wales, who,
of course, has been universally referred to as Harry since his little red head
popped out at the Lindo Wing in 1984. Once upon a time, the gin-soaked
super-snob Princess Margaret was the sweet Princess Margaret Rose of York,
until somewhere along the line the rose wilted in its acidic soil.
Lilibet is
charming enough, and might itself be contracted to Lili, or she might prefer
Diana, or “Diana the Second”, as she’d no doubt be dubbed by the media if she
ever dared to emulate her paternal granny’s love of fashion. I happen to think
it’s a shame that Doria Loyce and Jeanette, of the maternal line, didn’t get a
look-in, but it’s none of my business.
Maybe, one
day, the royal family will be enlightened enough to see what a tremendous asset
they have in the American branch of the family, and how much Harry, Meghan,
Archie and Lilibet – a new Fab Four – can contribute to the work and duties of
a modernised British monarchy. Society has changed so much in recent decades
that the Windsors have found it difficult to keep up, and they now find themselves
being seen as symbols not so much of the nation and Commonwealth as a whole,
but of tradition and resistance to “woke” values – hence the insane decision by
the government to press on with a new £200m royal yacht, the main point of
which is to wind up the left of the Labour Party and get patriotic voters in
the red wall to vote Tory. There are even signs that William and Kate are being
lined up, in effect, to lead the campaign against Scottish independence. This
politicisation will not end well.
The rift
between Harry and Meghan and the rest of the family has been unhappy and in
nobody’s interests. It’d be nice to think that as Archie and Lilibet Diana grow
up, the divisions can be healed, and that the family might even move back to
Britain, fulfilling the kind of role they proposed before they were pushed into
exile by the media making their lives hellish. You’d doubt it, though.
Like her
namesakes, Lilibet Diana has a challenging life ahead of her, so we should wish
her well.
Lilibet Diana: the baby name that represents a
royal rift – and audacious hope
By combining the names of the Queen and the Princess
of Wales, Harry and Meghan have highlighted two very different approaches to
the monarchy. But which will define the future?
Zoe
Williams
@zoesqwilliams
Wed 9 Jun
2021 06.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/09/lilibet-diana-baby-name-royal-rift-audacious-hope
The joyful
delivery of a baby girl to Prince Harry and Meghan is lovely news. But it has
been lost, ever so slightly, in the couple’s naming choice: Lilibet Diana
Mountbatten-Windsor.
I don’t
think they had any say in the surname, so let’s stick with the forenames.
Lilibet is, of course, the Queen’s nickname; not, as you might suppose, a
contraction of Elizabeth that only posh people use, but rather what she called
herself when she was too young to pronounce her own name. Only George VI, the
Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Prince Philip used it. “Lilibet is my
pride. Margaret is my joy,” the king was quoted as saying, evidently having not
caught up with the parenting manual that says you are really supposed to keep
the identity of your favourite child to yourself. When Prince Philip died, the
nickname died with him.
So, was it
sensitive or insensitive for Harry to revivify it so soon? This is the question
that is occupying the royal watchers, along with: is this an olive branch to
the family, a reminder that underneath all the feuding lie real, human
relationships? Or is it a defiant statement: you can’t evict me from the
family, because it is not a house, or even a collection of gigantic houses; it
is a family. Or is it somehow a combination of the two – and is that even
possible?
But what is
a royal watcher, anyway? Their expertise is the weapons-grade fawning; the
watching, any of us could do. What if they are asking the wrong questions?
Because there are two parts to this name: yes, there is Lilibet, but there is
also Diana. Plainly, the couple have chosen the two most different members of the
family, each embodying a diametrically opposite culture, and named their
daughter after both of them. It could be that they are trying out something
quite inventive, a monarchical third way.
The Queen
is synonymous with a powerful sense of duty. “If you look up the number of
engagements she’s missed, over 70 years, it’s unbelievable. It’s three,” says
Amy Jenkins, one of the writers on The Crown. Duty is an outcome rather than an
input, but it is possible to infer character from it – rigidity, obedience, reticence,
self-effacement, an absolute horror at showing emotion. “It’s that British
thing, isn’t it? ‘I challenge you to feel something,’” Jenkins says. “That’s
like British bullying. We do it properly and we don’t feel things.”
Diana,
Princess of Wales, meanwhile, was emphatically not rule-bound; really, her only
duty as the wife to the heir of the throne was to produce young and stay
married, and she flamed out spectacularly on the second.
What was
much more discomfiting within the royals and to the public, though, was that
she wasn’t emotionless. Even before the Martin Bashir interview – and we will
park for now the question of whether we need to torch the BBC, a 100-year-old
institution of unmatched global importance, for an interview that is a more
than 25 years old and most of us remember only for the eyeliner – you could see
the feelings running riot all over her face, from the beseeching eyes to the
wistfulness. There were glimpses of mirth, sorrow, boredom. Has any royal’s
face ever been so damn legible?
It was
never clear whether these feelings were genuine or part of a complicated PR
long-game – but they certainly weren’t hidden. It caused a lot of rancour,
since she accrued the world’s attention that way – after all, it is much more
interesting to look at a person who is feeling a thing than someone who is not
– and was cast within the family as an attention-seeker. Attention-seekers are
annoying in any family, but they are poison to a family whose operating model
is “we didn’t ask for any of this, we’re just doing our duty”.
But Diana
also called attention to the fragility of the Queen’s way of doing things.
“That reticence wouldn’t hold, and one of the reasons it wouldn’t hold was
because people have feelings,” says Jenkins. “But the royal family don’t
recognise that. Which means they make mistakes all the time, because they’re
reckoning without being human.” Having Diana around, with those great pools of
emotion she called eyes, was an unsettling reminder that people, even under all
that pomp, might still act like people.
In the end,
whatever a royal was thinking or feeling back then, their prospects for
self-expression were heavily circumscribed, limited effectively to the
charities they supported. The Queen’s list of patronages is exactly as you
would expect, although you might raise an eyebrow at how much she likes rugby
(union and league?). It is studiously uncontroversial; her interests centre on
children, animals and august institutions.
Between the
charity work and the tacit demands of her office – that she remain neutral in
the face of every issue, like a BBC journalist without the questions – it is
very hard to say what she actually cares about. Dogs and horses, certainly; she
is passionate about the Commonwealth, although it is unclear what about the
Commonwealth inspires her passion (the memories of dominion? The beaches? The
many cuisines?). People project views and behaviours on to the Queen, sometimes
strategically – recall the Sun claiming her as an ardent Brexiter – and
sometimes just to fill the void. There is no record of the Queen having any
political or intellectual agenda, Jenkins says. “In that sense, The Crown is a
complete and utter fantasy. The idea that she’s subtly manipulating matters of
state behind the scenes, that she’s this wise force of whatever … no.”
Diana,
conversely, was not just overtly political, but also radical in her choice of
causes. Her work with the Halo Trust, the anti-landmine charity, started in
Angola in January 1997, only months before her death. It was a
spur-of-the-moment decision to walk across the minefield – “very characteristic
of her”, says the charity’s CEO, James Cowan. “She knew her personal capacity
to make a difference was extraordinary.”
What sounds
from this distance like an uncontroversial cause – who would oppose a ban on
weapons that continue to kill children years after a conflict has ended? – was
in fact the opposite. “The British at that time were pretty committed to
keeping landmines as part of their military armour,” Cowan says. “She’d been
called a loose cannon by a minister.”
The impact
of that photo was more or less immediate: in the autumn of that year, the
international mine ban treaty came into force and has been signed by hundreds
of countries that previously would have opposed it, not least the UK. It is the
kind of impact that an individual makes only as a maverick, a thorn in the
establishment’s side. If Diana had been swimming with the current, she would
have been one voice in many. So, did it make her a pioneer or a narcissist?
Maybe all pioneers are narcissists.
Yet it was
her work with HIV and Aids patients – which started in 1987 with the photo of
her shaking hands, gloveless, with the patient Ivan Cohen and continued until
her death – that flagged how truly unusual she was.
There is a
semi-satirical Diana fandom from a left perspective. Alex, 26, who runs a
Twitter account called Princess Diana Is in All of Us, says: “My journey is
going from ironic Diana lover to genuinely having a spiritual connection with
her.” For Alex (who is using his first name only because he works in activism
and direct action), Diana’s HIV work was a jumping-off point. “As a gay man, I
found what she did really quite moving,” he says of the Cohen photo. “When she
held the hands of Aids patients, I genuinely believe she was doing a spectacle
of direct action. She was trying to construct a dramatic image that would
advance social change.
The Queen
embodies the values of an age before her own. Diana stood for a complicated
modernity
“She was
conscious of the fact that she was conceptualised as a Christ-like angel, and
she then goes out of her way to hold the hands of people who are considered to
be disgusting and contaminated. I use ‘Christ-like’ intentionally. It was a
direct reference to Christ cleaning the feet of leprosy patients.”
Alex says
her landmine and HIV action “created an image that shakes the foundations of
the discourse” and posed a direct challenge to the values associated with the
royals as personified by the Queen – reticence and stoicism. Peter Hitchens has
highlighted the difference between Winston Churchill’s funeral and Diana’s –
ultimate restraint versus the “outpouring of grief”, a phrase that became the
motto of Diana’s legacy. The Queen seems very much of Churchill’s vintage, yet
plainly she is not. Nonetheless, she embodies the values of an age before her
own. Her daughter-in-law, on the other hand, stood for a complicated modernity,
self-involved but extremely public, the self as a brand to be strategically deployed.
In their
everyday lives – how they parented, the formality of their bearing – Lilibet
and Diana offer contrasts that are a little melancholy. There is a video of the
Queen arriving home from a long trip abroad, in which an absolutely tiny Prince
Charles approaches and shakes her hand; to modern eyes, at least, it conveys
worlds of distance and loneliness. It is understood that she bucked the
aristocratic norm of outsourcing motherhood by the time it came to Prince
Andrew, and that he was her favourite, but it is not possible to point to
real-world evidence of this. Plus, he still went to boarding school. In any
case, it doesn’t seem to have turned out a more rounded human being.
Diana was
what the psychologist John Bowlby might call a much more “attached” mother, but
she was powerfully unhappy even by the time she was pregnant with Prince
William, so there was never any sense that she was living the perfect-family
dream. She rebelled against petty expectations – kicking off her shoes in the
hair salon, wearing red cashmere maternity dresses – but she did not manage to
find an alternative way of being royal that made the business any less
draining.
In the end,
it is impossible to adjudicate on whose way of being makes more sense. We
cannot know what kind of royal would make the institution more durable, more
bearable, more coherent. All you can say is that they were as different as they
could have been, and that this schism has been the gift that keeps on giving, a
pinball of conflict that pings between the rest of the family with perpetual
energy.
The
putative feud between William and Harry, if it is really as bad as people say,
can be read as a rerun of this clash – cold against hot, doing one’s duty
versus questing for fulfilment. The obvious solution is for Harry and Meghan to
become Diana ultras in the US while William stays in Britain and channels the
Queen, but that amounts to the rift lasting for ever.
Maybe the
newest family member’s name is an audacious act of hope – what if someone came
along who was a bit of both? Who was capable of putting herself second to her
role without losing her identity? Who could harness her star power for good?
She might be a bit like Daenerys Targaryen without the dragons. Or maybe she is
just a baby – and that is fine, too.
