Queen's Sister Called Reaction to Diana's Death 'as Hysterical as She Was'

Queen Elizabeth II's sister, Princess Margaret, referred to the public outpouring of grief following the death of Princess Diana as being "as hysterical as she was," and called the mountains of flowers left outside the royal palaces "floral fascism," according to a new biography.

In an advance copy of his new book, Do Let's Have Another Drink! The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, seen by Newsweek, historian Gareth Russell explores the reactions of Elizabeth II's mother and sister to the news of Diana's untimely death at the age of 36 in a 1997 Paris car crash.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the accident which also killed two others, including the princess' boyfriend, Dodi Fayed.

At the time of her death, Diana's relationships with members of the royal family, including the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, were reported to be strained, with Russell writing that Margaret referred to the princess as "the girl who married my nephew."

Diana's divorce from Prince Charles (now King Charles III) was finalized in 1996, four years after their official separation.

"Relations had not improved when Diana was tragically killed in a car accident in Paris a few weeks after the Queen Mother's ninety-seventh birthday," Russell wrote. "The Queen Mother was baffled by the outpouring of grief at the Princess's death, which she thought more effusive than anything she had seen when the city was being pummelled nightly by Nazi bombs during the Blitz."

Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II and royal rebel in her younger days, felt similarly, though showed concern for Diana's young children.

"Princess Margaret felt desperately sorry for Diana's sons," Russell wrote, "especially the youngest, since it is 'terrible to lose your mother at that age, and with little Harry's birthday only a few days away.'"

"However," he continued, "she had no sympathy for the public's mood. She told a friend that the reaction was unhinged, 'rather like Diana herself. When she died, everyone got as hysterical as she was.'"

This reference towards Diana being "unhinged" or "hysterical" comes as Harry's wife, Meghan Markle, recently discussed the labels associated with women and mental health in the latest episode of her hit podcast Archetypes.

The duchess denounced the labels as dismissive of the lived experiences of women, saying:

"Calling someone crazy or hysterical completely dismisses their experience. It minimizes what they're feeling and, you know, it doesn't stop there. It keeps going to the point where anyone who's been labeled it enough times can be gas-lit into thinking that they're actually unwell. Or sometimes worse. To the point where real issues of all kinds get ignored."

In her 1995 interview with BBC's Panorama, Diana herself said that her public disclosure of her experiences with depression gave her critics a "label" to use against her.

"It gave everybody a wonderful new label," she said. "'Diana's unstable' and 'Diana's mentally unbalanced.' And unfortunately, that seems to have stuck on and off over the years."

In the hours and days following the princess' death, the outpouring of public grief manifested in masses of flowers left in tribute outside Kensington and Buckingham Palaces in London, as well as Balmoral Castle in Scotland and other residences associated with her.

This, Russell said, annoyed Princess Margaret, who could smell the rotting flowers in the September heat from her apartment at Kensington Palace that faced the park.

"She complained about the smell of the mountains of decomposing flowers left at the palaces across London, referring to them as 'floral fascism,'" he wrote.

"Later, both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret thought there was no need for a permanent memorial to Diana inside the grounds of Kensington Palace; Margaret acidly suggested, 'It will be quite enough of a memorial to restore the grass in front which all these people trampled the week she died.'"

Both Margaret and the Queen Mother died within weeks of one another in 2002.

Twenty years later, on what would have been her 60th birthday, Princes William and Harry unveiled a permanent statue of Diana on the grounds of Kensington Palace, meters from Margaret's former home of Apartment 1A which is now the London base of William and his family.

Do Let's Have Another Drink! The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother by Gareth Russel is available in the United States on November 1, published by Simon & Schuster.

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