Little Helena died soon afterward. "The last thing she saw," reflected Lamb, was this "beautiful lady that she thought was an angel."
Diana had no celestial qualities in the eyes of various Tory M.P.'s and ministers in the government in London. She was "ill-advised," a "loose cannon," according to Lord Howe, a junior defense minister. Howe was offended that Diana's support for a ban on land mines was out of line with Tory policy, which was to oppose a unilateral ban while working for a worldwide ban that would exempt "smart mines," which are effective only for a short time. Peter Viggers, a Tory member of the Commons Defense Select Committee, popped a vein. Why, she was just like Brigitte Bardot banging on about saving cats! The Princess, he said, was "very ill-informed.… This is an important sophisticated argument. It doesn't help to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is."
Actually, it did help. It helped enormously. The "very ill-informed" Princess was backed by Tony Blair's Labour opposition, by the Liberal Democrats, by Lord Deedes, and by military figures no less imposing than two Gulf War generals, Norman Schwarzkopf and Sir Peter de la Billière. She had landed herself in the middle of exactly the kind of controversy Henry Kissinger had warned her to avoid. Well, too bad. Angola was a snapshot of the woman Diana was about to be. "I never saw someone as much a project under construction as Diana," said one of her friends from this period. "We usually do that stuff in the wings of our personalities, but with Diana you could almost see the plumbing and the wires as she was changing in front of you."
Diana's land-mine commitment was not, to use one of the Queen's favorite pejoratives, a "stunt." It drew forth everything that was best about her in the service of a cause that was heartrending, underpublicized, and controversial. Chased in Angola by the press the day after the Tory smoke bombs went off in London, Diana did not engage in argument. "It's an unnecessary distraction.… It's sad.… I'm a humanitarian, not a politician."