Diana’s mystique endures

Associated Press

LONDON

Princess Diana would have been 50 years old today, perhaps the only certainty about the course of what might have been in a life cut short in a 1997 car crash, two months past her 36th birthday.

Officially, there are no plans for marking the birth anniversary. But the “what if?” questions abound as the world looks back on her life and legacy.

Diana’s former secretary Patrick Jephson says the speculation is “entertaining perhaps, but hardly useful.”

“The first Mrs. Wales might by now be solving conflicts, banishing poverty, feeding the world’s hungry or even breeding spaniels in happy rural obscurity,” Jephson said. “Alas, we will never know. Instead we have an even greater enigma. Why is it that 14 years after her death she continues to figure so large in popular imagination?”