LOSE YOURSELF IN 1993
A RIGHT ROYALÉ
Things still weren’t going well for the Royal family a few months after the Queen’s famous ‘annus horribilis’ speech. Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales, had announced their separation in 1992, but in January of this year, reports started circulating in the press that Diana wanted a divorce from Charles, despite a previous assertion that there were no such plans. The actual divorce announcement didn’t come until 1996, however. Later in the year, Diana disclosed that she was intending to withdraw from public life altogether.
In response to such problems surrounding the most popular member of the Royals, bookmakers cut the odds on the monarchy being abolished by 2000 from 100:1 to 50:1.
Still, the Queen did win back some popularity by announcing that Buckingham Palace would open to the public in order to raise funds towards rebuilding Windsor Castle after its devastating fire. More than 600,000 people have since visited.
LESS SECRET SECURITY
Britain’s intelligence services had traditionally kept their activities rather under wraps, but that changed this year, at least for one of the main players. MI5 published a 36-page booklet, The Security Service, in July that, for the first time, detailed what it actually does. It also revealed the identity and photographs of its chief, Stella Rimington, following previous determined efforts by the British press to unveil her identity. This new spirit of openness, as a PR exercise, was agreed to – reluctantly – by the British government.
One unexpected outcome of the disclosure that the boss of MI5 was female was that, when the James Bond films returned in 1995 after a six-year hiatus, MI6’s new M was also female, portrayed by Dame Judi Dench in GoldenEye. The character was directly based on Rimington, whose custodianship of MI5 ran from 1992 until 1996.