Is this Newsweek cover offensive? At first glance, I was all “WTF?” but as I keep glancing at through the morning, I don’t find it offensive so much as I find it cheesy. The whole idea behind it – “Diana at 50: What would she be like if she had lived?” is interesting, if macabre. Newsweek also Photoshopped an image of Princess Diana to look like she’s holding an iPhone, so it’s basically like Newsweek is just trying to cause controversy and be dumb about it. Beyond that, I think a lot of us do wonder: What would Diana have thought about Kate Middleton? Would Kate even have gotten this far if Diana was still alive? Would Diana love her daughter-in-law?

The Newsweek piece is written by Tina Brown, now of The Daily Beast, but she used to be major in the British press, and she actually knew (and covered extensively) Princess Diana. Tina Brown was also the editor-in-chief for Vanity Fair for those now iconic Mario Testino photos in 1997, which were Diana’s last formal portraits. Incidentally, Tina Brown also wrote one of the better Diana books, in my opinion: The Diana Chronicles, which is a totally decent weekend read if you ever feel like it. You can read the Newsweek piece here, and here are some highlights from Tina Brown imagining what Diana would be like today:

Diana’s style: Diana would have been 50 this month. What would she have been like? Still great-looking: that’s a given. Her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, with her cornflower-blue eyes and striding sexuality, was a handsome woman to the very end. Fashionwise, Diana would have gone the J.Crew and Galliano route à la Michelle Obama, always knowing how to mix the casual with the glam. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym.

Remarriage? At least two, I suspect, on both sides of the Atlantic. 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.) Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative would have become her new post-palace power circles. She would perhaps have caused a press sensation with an unplanned pledge from the CGI stage to raise $50 million to help educate women in South Sudan.

Politics: Politically, Diana would have been very much at home with David Cameron and all the old Etonians who now run Britain. She would, much earlier, have parted company with Tony Blair, stung by his failure to use her for big peacemaking missions overseas. He would have tried to woo her back each election cycle, but Diana was shrewd when it came to the conducting of feuds.

Prince Charles & Camilla: I believe her best male friend in later years would have been, poignantly, her reviled first husband. As the financier Sir James Goldsmith once put it, “When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy,” and Charles, having married Camilla, would suddenly have found the company of his ex strangely comforting. Diana, with time, would no longer have found Charles’s causes tiresome. Rather, she would have empathized, and asked his advice about hers. After so many loves and losses, she would finally have let go of her rancor toward Camilla. The duchess’s galleon-size Lady Bracknell hat at William’s wedding would have offered satisfaction enough.

Petty girl stuff: Among her global girlfriend set, she might view Queen Rania’s beauty, youth, and social conscience as a triple threat that should be watched. After some initial competitiveness with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, she’d have probably bonded with her at the G20 dinner over ways to dodge Berlusconi.

On Kate Middleton: And Kate, the newly minted Duchess of Cambridge? How would Diana have handled her son’s steadfast affection for a woman other than herself? 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.

On charity: In the world disasters of the last few years—9/11, the tsunamis, the Pakistan earthquake, Hurricane Katrina—you know Diana would have been first at the scene in a hard hat with a camera crew (and, by now, 10 million followers on Twitter). She would have kept her spotlight trained on individual sufferers whom she’d continued to visit and care for and touch. At a time when the world has disaster fatigue, I miss the generosity of her star power and what it could accomplish.

[From Newsweek]

Eh. I think Tina is right on about some things – Diana’s charity work would likely have continued and grown, and she would be the leading humanitarian in the world, I think. And I do think Diana and Charles would have buried the hatchet – they had already begun to when she died. But the rest of it… I don’t know. I don’t see Diana marrying and divorcing some American hedge fund guy. I’m not sure she would have ever remarried. And as for what she would have thought of the Kate Middleton… God, I don’t even know if William would have even stayed with Kate for so many years if he weren’t still so damaged by his mother’s death. He sought out Kate’s stability, you know? And if Diana was still alive, perhaps he wouldn’t have needed what Kate gives him. That’s just my theory.

Photos courtesy of WENN.