Princess Diana’s Mills & Boon Special
“LADY Diana Spencer, tall and blonde, curvy (as she then was) with clear, English-rose complexion, very young, impeccably born and with no scandal attached to her name, perfectly fitted all the criteria for a royal bride.”
And so begins the Mail’s review of Diana by Sarah Bradford. It’s not often reviews are written in so strict a style. It’s ingenious indeed of the writer, one Virginia Blackburn, to write her review in the style of a Mills & Boon staple.
How jealous Paul Burrell must be. While Bradford’s Diana book earns praise and a didactic romantic style, Burrell’s The Way We Were gets the headline: “Traitor Burrell in despair after Diana book flop.”
The Express, which produces that headline, says just 6,000 copies of the butler’s latest Diana book have been sold.
This is not very many, especially when compared to the 274,000 copies of Burrell’s previous Diana tome, A Royal Duty.
Burrell needs some luck if he’s going to shift more copies. And he’s not being helped by one Simone Simmons, Diana’s former “friend and therapist”.
This is the Simmons of whom Burrell wrote in the Mirror in June 2005: “There was a time when people like Simone Simmons were hurled into the water, trussed up and weighed down with stone.
“Witches would bob back to the surface and the innocent would drown. I suspect that Simone would, like the curdled bits in off-milk, float to the top. A witch and soured with time in equal measure.”
The Simmons who wrote the impossible, and some would say hopefully, entitled: Diana: The Last Word.
Well, she says that Paul’s book is not a document of historical fact. “I can remember Paul telling me that he applied for a job working for Mel Gibson because he was fed up to the back teeth with Diana. He said he hated her guts,” says Simmons.
If true, we wonder how things would have developed had Burrell been Mel’s rock. (What would have happened to Mel as he drove over the limit along a Malibu highway?)
And we also wonder what we should do with Burrell’s book? Perhaps it needs a new review. Something scatological. In toad skin…
Posted: 24th, September 2006 | In: Royal Family Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
