There is a video going round of Earl Spencer rowing across the lake at Althorp to his sister's grave. On the bank, a reporter and a photographer from
@people magazine. Watching. Filming. It was part of the publicity for his book.
Sit with that for a moment, because the island exists for one reason.
In September 1997, with the whole country in the grip of something close to hysteria, the Earl chose not to bury Diana in a churchyard where people could reach her. He put her on an island in the middle of a lake, reachable only by boat, closed to the public forever, and he explained why in a statement: so that her grave could be looked after by her family and visited in privacy by her sons. Elton John thought it was sad, as if she were all alone again. The Earl said privacy mattered more.
Twenty-nine years later the man who built that privacy rowed across it with the cameras rolling, so that the pictures would help sell a book in which her ex-husband is a lottery winner and her darkest moments are printed for the first time.
He says he visits her almost every day, and takes flowers on her birthday and Mother's Day. Nobody doubts it. That is exactly the point. The difference between those visits and this one is not the boat, or the flowers, or the grief. It is the photographer. A brother goes to a grave alone. A publicist brings a crew.
Her sons planted trees on that bank. William has never taken a camera down there. Harry however has taken his own personal paparazzi (Meghan Markle) down there. But the only person in that family who has ever turned the island into a for-public picture is the one who promised it would never be one.
On the same day the footage circulated, the Earl went on daytime television to say the criticism hadn't rattled him at all. I believe him. That's the problem. A man who can row to his sister's grave for a photoshoot and feel nothing when people object is not a man wrestling with grief. He is a man running a campaign for clout and money, and the campaign is going well.
She was put on an island so that no one could get to her. It turns out the only person who ever needed keeping off it was the one holding the oars.