IN GOOD TIMES: Frances Shand Kydd and Princess Diana

It’s a pity ‘my daughter Diana’s a whore’

What made the mother of Princess Diana, Frances Shand Kydd, call her own daughter a “whore”?

Mrs Shand Kydd occupied the high moral ground when she discovered that the princess, having broken off with the Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, had taken up with Dodi Fayed, son of Mohammed al Fayed, the Egyptian owner of Harrods.

In a telephone conversation with Diana early in June, 1997, Mrs Shand Kydd expressed herself in rather intemperate language. Unfortunately for her, Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, was listening in — and made the exchanges public at the High Court in London last week.

Under pressure from the coroner, conducting an inquest into Diana’s death, Burrell revealed Mrs Shand Kydd’s outrageous outburst.

“Well, she called the princess a whore and she said that she was messing around with f****** Muslim men and she (Diana’s mother) was disgraceful and said some very nasty things,” recounted Burrell.

The diatribe caused Diana to sever relations with her mother, return subsequent letters unopened and go to her grave without achieving a reconciliation.

But of all people, was Mrs Shand Kydd, who had a colourful past herself, justified in adopting such a morally superior position?

She was born Frances Ruth Burke Roche in 1936, the younger daughter of the 4th Baron Fermoy and his wife Ruth, a friend of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Having been born into aristocracy, she was not troubled by too much of an education.

Frances was 18 when she married Viscount Althorp, aged 30, heir to the Spencer earldom and a confidant of George VI.

The couple had three daughters, Diana being the youngest, and a son, Charles. The last years of the marriage were unhappy and Frances swapped her husband for Peter Shand Kydd, heir to a wallpaper business.

The press called Frances a marriage-breaker, an adulteress and a “bolter”. She lost custody of the children and during the divorce proceedings, even her mother, Lady Fermoy, testified against her. That rift with her mother was never healed. Frances became Mrs Shand Kydd after marrying the businessman, converted to Catholicism and settled on a remote Scottish island.

The second marriage foundered, too, for Shand Kydd exchanged Frances for a younger woman in 1988.

Mrs Shand Kydd blamed the media: “I think the pressure of it all was overwhelming and finally impossible for Peter. They didn’t want him; they wanted me. I became ‘Diana’s Mum’, and not his wife.”

Mohamed Al Fayed accused her of being “a bad mother, a snob, and behaving like the Queen of Sheba”.

Did Mrs Shand Kidd die a lonely and bitter woman on June 3, 2004, aged 68?

That’s one for psychiatrists to answer.

Evolving Matilda?

The case of Dr Mohamed Haneef followed by the Harbhajan race row must have damaged India’s relations with Australia to some extent. But viewed from London, it seems Australia is a colonised society still struggling to find a new multicultural identity.

A long time ago it was the back of beyond to which Britain banished its worst criminals. Today, it is the preferred destination for British emigrants and holidaymakers seeking a more carefree life filled with sun and sea. The British media still want the Queen to remain Australia’s head of state and disapprove of any move to turn it into a republic.

Although Test matches between England and Australia are seldom free of sledging, the relationship between the players appears qualitatively different from that between, say, Australians and Sri Lankans. Although victorious Australian teams do make fun of the “whinging poms”, at heart most Australians continue to consider Britain affectionately as the Mother country.

In the 1950s and 1960s, ambitious Australians left Australia for Britain if they wanted to make a name for themselves. The group included the critic Robert Hughes, the comedian Barry Humphries, and feminist writer Germaine Greer and author and TV presenter Clive James.

“Correctly or not, but mostly correctly, we thought Australia was a backwater in the early ‘60s,” James has said in one interview. “If you did our sort of thing, the arts and the media, you thought that the action was elsewhere. Things subsequently changed, and Australia began to have everything, and the necessity to leave was no longer thought to be an imperative. But in our day, we thought that the action was somewhere else.”

James added, however: “What we were wrong about was that the culture was already shifting, because European immigrants after World War II were already changing Australia from the bottom up, so there were more interesting things to eat, to drink — it was more interesting in every way.”

Australia comes across today as a much more culturally liberal and civilised place but like an Indian son who is too much of a mummy’s boy, it cannot be truly independent so long as it remains emotionally tied to Britain.

As for Indian behaviour, I am probably in a minority of one in detecting a relatively new trend — the phenomenon of the ugly Indian. Heady with economic success and flattery about the country’s superpower status, top Indians are starting to behave arrogantly, even badly, more and more often. But then I may have got it all wrong.

Green drive: Rickshaws in London (Top) and Calcutta

Old’s gold

Perhaps Calcutta should pause before phasing out rickshaws in the name of progress. In London, where rickshaws are considered environment-friendly, they are proliferating, especially in the West End.

In Calcutta last week, I noticed a rickshawallah in a woolly hat assessing the display in our local sweet shop, possibly because the fare from the Milk Colony to Belgachia Metro has been unilaterally hiked from Rs 6 to Rs 7. Still, I mustn’t be mean for a similar journey in London would cost not less than £10 (Rs 770).

The significant point is that the air in Calcutta would be a lot cleaner if rickshaws were given an extended lease of life. Judging by London’s example, people in Calcutta would be much healthier if, wherever possible, they cycled to work. As Dr Alison Richard, the vice-chancellor of Cambridge, revealed at the Bengal Club, she cycles to work every day.

Is India safe?

India may soon come to be known as the land where foreign women are not safe, judging by a report (“Sexual assaults on foreigners threaten Indian tourism”) in the Times: “India’s reputation as a safe and easygoing tourist destination has been dented by a string of alleged rapes and sexual assaults on foreigners, including at least four British women, in the past week.”

Tittle tattle

JUST TALK: Manmohan Singh and Gordon Brown

After visiting China, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, will be in Delhi tomorrow for talks with Manmohan Singh. Since the Indian Prime Minister (who last met Brown in Kampala in November during the Commonwealth heads of government summit) has just returned from China, they should have plenty to discuss — and hopefully without distractions this time.

When Brown was in India in January, 2007, as chancellor of the exchequer, his whole trip was messed up — British officials use a stronger expression — by having to answer questions almost exclusively on Jade Goody’s allegedly racist behaviour towards Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.