HOW DIANA UNBUTTONED BRITAIN
“By her own account, Diana was not clever,” said Hilary Mantel in The Guardian. “Nor was she especially good.” Quixotic, manipulative and “given to infatuation”, the late Princess of Wales was a “woman of scant personal resources”. Yet she turned herself into a phenomenon “bigger than all of us”, so that, 20 years after her death, we still “gossip about her as if she had just left the room”. In part, the Diana myth came about through a quirk of timing. “She arrived on the scene in an era of gross self-interest, to distract the nation from the hardness of its own character.” Compared with Britain’s other matriarchs – the distant monarch and the Iron Lady – this “soft-eyed, fertile blonde” represented “conjugal and maternal love”. As she herself rightly surmised: “The British people needed someone to give affection.” When her marriage (like so many fairytales) turned bad, she found affinity with the rejected and vulnerable. She used her compassion as a kind of superpower. “She visited the sick, and stopped just short of claiming the healing touch that custom bestows on the divinely anointed.” She walked through fields of landmines, wearing a vest inscribed: “The HALO Trust”. “Like Joan of Arc, protected by her own magic, she walked unscathed.”
And when she died, said Harry Mount in The Sunday Telegraph, the public reaction was like nothing else in living memory. The princess – by then the most famous woman in the world – was killed in a car crash while fleeing the paparazzi whose attentions she had both courted and resented. The previously buttoned-up British people astonished everyone, including ourselves, with our “collective howl of pain”. A sea of floral tributes and candlelit shrines engulfed the palaces, and hundreds of thousands of people queued outside town halls to sign books of condolence (a first for any Royal). At St James’s Palace, newspaper sellers walked up and down queues of mourners distributing their latest editions, with new versions printed every few hours to meet demand.
The day of her funeral was stranger still, said Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times. More than a million people lined the streets to bid Diana farewell, and 32.1 million watched the ceremony on television. I was one of the reporters grudgingly allowed inside Westminster Abbey (journalists were “about as popular as gout” that day). What I remember most is a “strange and poetic” sound that came from outside the Abbey: the sound of rising insurrection. As Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, made his “shocking” speech excoriating the press and the Windsors, and warning them to take better care of Diana’s sons, a “breathless” silence fell. And then, in the distance, I heard “a susurration”. It swept “like rain across Hyde Park, across St James’s Park and into Westminster Abbey”. It wasn’t rain, but clapping. People across London were applauding Spencer, and in doing so unleashing an “arrowshower” upon the Establishment, the Royals, “the whole cold, cockeyed edifice of deference and cruelty”.
It was a perilous moment for the monarchy, said Simon Heffer in The Sunday Telegraph. Until then, criticism of the Queen had been rare. In 1957, when Lord Altrincham accused her of sounding like “a priggish schoolgirl”, a man punched him: the judge who sentenced the assailant said he had “struck a blow every man in England would have wished to have aimed”. But in the days after Diana’s death, the Queen became a “scapegoat” for Britain’s anger and grief. She was attacked for staying at Balmoral with Princes William and Harry instead of coming to London to speak to the nation; for not flying the Royal Standard at halfmast over Buckingham Palace (a constitutional no-no, since the country always has a living monarch); and for “making” the princes walk behind their mother’s coffin (although by most accounts, this idea came from Tony Blair’s office). At the time it seemed the monarchy “would never be the same again”, said Mary Dejevsky in The Independent. But apart from a few tweaks – doing away with male primogeniture, allowing William to choose a “commoner” bride – amazingly little has changed. The ship has steadied, and the monarchy (or at any rate, Elizabeth II) is as popular as ever.
Diana’s real legacy, said Dan Stewart in Time, can be seen in the British character. In the years since her death, “the currents of our feelings have run nearer the surface. We are quicker to weep, quicker to rage, quicker to rise up.” Deference towards elites has almost completely disappeared, as the vote for Brexit showed. There are other, bigger reasons for these changes, including social media, globalisation and the economic crash. But Diana’s rebellion of feeling came just as we were “learning to be a different kind of country”, and left an indelible mark.
“As she herself rightly surmised: the British people needed someone to give them affection”