Watch our exclusive interview with Tina Brown

WHEN IT COMES TO Diana, Princess of Wales, I’m with Keith Richards. Asked how he felt about her death, the Rolling Stone is said to have replied: “Dunno. I never knew the chick.”

I discovered this in Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain, in which the Princess’s death inevitably featured, coinciding as it did with the election of Tony Blair as Prime Minister. Then again, this year, the tenth anniversary of the Princess’s death, almost everything seems to feature her. I expect McDonald’s to launch the McDiana burger at any moment. No fries, obviously.

So it was with a degree of trepidation that I came to Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles. Visually (and before you think me shallow for judging a book by its cover, remember this is a book about Diana – appearance is everything), it is intriguing. In a move that must seem utterly baffling to every tabloid editor from here to Baltimore, it does not have a picture of the Princess on the cover, nor anywhere else. That’s right: not inside, not on the back, nowhere. A book about the most photographed woman in the world, published amid a sea of other books about her on the tenth anniversary of her death while on the run from a pack of photographers – and it doesn’t contain a single picture of her. Now that is what I call class.

It is also gloriously bright pink. Diana was an expert at sending out silent signals (one thinks of her vigil outside the Taj Mahal, or posing for the paparazzi on the diving board of the Al Fayed yacht) and Brown and her publishers, Century, have taken a leaf out of her book. The lack of pictures lends gravitas to the endeavour. It says this may be a book about a paparazzi princess, but it has brains. As for the pink, that’s partly ironic, partly to highlight the racy side, the juicy delights within.

Stylistically, The Diana Chronicles is a blockbuster: a rollicking, page-turning, fast quipping, gripping romp of a read. In terms of content, however, it is the work of a seasoned, serious journalist who understands that just because a subject has a populist appeal does not mean that it has to get the dumb treatment.

So, what lies beneath? Well, at the heart of this book is the premise that, in life, the Princess was grossly underestimated and, by extension, underappreciated. By everyone: her family, her friends, her lovers, the press – and above all her husband and inlaws. Brown was one of the first to cotton on to this in her perceptive Vanity Fair article of 1985, headlined “The mouse that roared”.

She posited the theory that “the girl who’d been picked to be the Royal Mouse of Windsor had turned into a hellacious ball-breaker”. The story was that, far from being a malleable, blushing brood mare to Charles’s manly prince, Diana was a woman of firm views who, when challenged, displayed alarming prima donna tendencies.

She had been upsetting the staff (and there are few greater sins among the British upper classes), humiliating the Prince of Wales (“His Royal Highness . . . is, it seems, pussy-whipped from here to eternity”) and generally treating the venerable institution into which she had married with a respect similar to that shown by Johnny Rotten to Bill Grundy.

Brown eloquently and thoroughly maps the process by which all this came about; how, in a few years, Diana morphed from an alluring but nonetheless artless ingénue into the goggle-eyed loon of the 1996 Martin Bashir Panoramainterview (please don’t write in; she was truly terrifying).

She shrewdly analyses and explains, both in terms of her relationship with the press and in the wider ambit of the British psyche. She explores how Diana fitted, often unwittingly, into the culture of her time and helps the reader to understand why a woman who on paper seemed so irretrievably flawed was in the flesh so irresistible.

I should say at this point that in the great Camilla versus Diana debate, Brown is firmly in the Diana camp. The Duchess of Cornwall is seen as a throaty, feral temptress (“women who love horses usually love sex . . . Camilla Shand loved horses all right”), whose mature allure constantly undermined Diana’s girlish charms. The implication is that had Camilla not been on the scene, Prince Charles and Diana might have had a chance. Brown’s Camilla is a villainous, Dynasty-style temptress who appears, with a metaphorical thunderclap, whenever Diana’s sugared innocence seems about to prevail.

I would dispute this vigorously, although Brown is entitled to her opinion. Where she is spot-on is in her complete understanding of the nature of the affinity between the Princess and the public. At the time of the Bashir interview, Diana was unquestionably an emotional wrecking-ball, crashing through other people’s feelings and marriages (Julia Carling, for example) with little regard for anyone but herself.

This was Diana’s Oprah moment, her “you go girl” breakthrough. The fact that on the Wednesday after the interview was screened a Daily Mirror poll showed 92 per cent support for the Princess revealed as much about the character of modern Britain as it did about the Princess. In different times, she would have been reviled for her indiscretion; looking back through the prism of Big Brother, Heat magazine and YouTube, she was ahead of the curve. Diana cried us a river – and Britain lapped it up. She epitomised the coming orgy of bare-it-all celebrity confessional.

It is this astonishing fact – that despite all her fallibility, hysteria, infidelities and self-destruc-tive behaviour they still loved her, – that Brown so successfully unpacks throughout the book. I will never identify with the torrent of hysteria that followed the Princess’s sad death; but now at least I feel I understand it.

The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown

Century, £18.99; 481pp

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