Newsweek Brings Princess Diana Back to Life for One Last Cover

Considering that Prince William and (the former) Kate Middleton’s wedding was one of the biggest media events in recent memory, how do you take advantage of lingering royal interest? If you’re Newsweek, you raise the dead – in this case, Princess Diana, mother of the groom.

Supposedly in commemoration of what would be her 50th birthday, Tina Brown pens a royal fan fiction piece in the current issue of Newsweek that imagines relationships with everyone from Dominique Strauss Kahn to a Pakistani military general.

“Always so professional herself, she would have soon grown exasperated with Dodi Al-Fayed’s hopeless unreliability. After the breakup I see her moving to her favorite city, New York, spending a few cocooned years safely married to a super-rich hedge-fund guy who could provide her with what she called “all the toys”: the plane, the private island, the security detail. Gliding sleekly into her 40s, her romantic taste would have moved to men of power over boys of play. She’d have tired of the hedge-fund guy and drifted into undercover trysts with someone more exciting—a high-mindedly horny late-night talk-show host, or a globe-trotting French finance wizard destined for the Élysée Palace. I suspect she would have retained a weakness for men in uniform, and a yen for dashing Muslim men. (A two-year fling with a Pakistani general, rumored to have links to the ISI, would have been a particular headache to the Foreign Office and the State Department.)” {Newsweek}

Well then, with her love life settled, how would Diana have received Duchess Catherine?

“The rising public adoration of Kate would have afforded Diana some tricky moments. Pleased, yes. But, like Frances Shand Kydd—who, days before Diana’s wedding, suddenly burst out, “I have good long legs, like my daughter”—Diana would have had to adjust to a broadening of the limelight. Her edge over Kate, of course, was her own epic of princessly suffering, which would always make Diana’s story more interesting. (“Happily ever after” will never have the same allure to the press as “It all went horribly wrong.”) Diana, rejoicing in her flawless Spencer pedigree, would have positioned herself as a firm defender of the Middletons against the palace snobs and ostentatiously made Carole Middleton, Kate’s dynamic mother, her new BFF.”

While “what would have Diana thought” was a common question around the time of the royal marriage, detailing her hypothetical love life and besties, and raising her from the dead (Photoshop is getting really advanced these days) for the cover of a magazine is a bit… uncomfortable, considering the circumstances surrounding the reason Princess Diana isn’t around for magazine covers or interviews.