Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Morton

“Meat and drink” is a deliberately blunt phrase for something the British press often dresses up as public interest. Andrew Morton, who helped midwife the modern Diana industry with his biography, is naming the commodity underneath the romance: attention harvested through routine appetite. The wording matters. It’s not “news,” not “coverage,” not even “gossip.” It’s sustenance. The machine eats, and it must be fed.

Morton’s intent is partly confessional and partly accusatory. He’s describing the ecosystem that made Diana both icon and inventory: her clothes as a daily scoreboard, her marriage as an ongoing serial. “Fashions” and “possible rows” are telling pairings. One is surface, one is conflict, and both are endlessly renewable. Style becomes a proxy for mood, “rows” become a proxy for truth. You don’t need verified facts when you have plausible tension; speculation itself is the product.

The subtext is that Diana’s humanity was flattened into consumable episodes, with the palace and the tabloids locked in a mutually sustaining dance. The public gets intimacy without responsibility; journalists get narrative without closure. Morton’s own role complicates the line: he isn’t an innocent observer but a chronicler who benefited from the same hunger he’s diagnosing.

Context sharpens the cynicism. In the late 80s and early 90s, the monarchy’s authority was wobbling, celebrity culture was accelerating, and Diana’s image offered the perfect bridge: aristocracy with tabloid velocity. “Meat and drink” captures how quickly a marriage became a content pipeline.