Diana, 20 years on

Millions upon millions of words were written about Diana, Princess of Wales, while she lived. Multiple millions more words were written when she died so shockingly in 1997. Now, 20 years on from Diana’s death, further millions are again being added.

Diana’s legacy is tricky to pin down precisely, but impossible to deny absolutely. After she died, there was much talk about ‘‘post-Diana Britain’’. The nation of the stiff upper lip and of keeping calm found itself wobbling and weeping in public – and felt comfortable with it. Perhaps the most important thing Diana did, never more than in the 1995 Panorama interview, was to help grant millions of people a degree of permission to express their feelings more publicly than the Britain of two world wars, in whose shadow she grew up, had ever allowed.

The most striking thing about the anniversary is its relentless personalisation and its no less relentless avoidance of serious debate about anything that genuinely matters. Questions such as whether Charles or William should succeed Elizabeth or whether Camilla should be queen treat the monarchy as a reality TV show for a nation of voyeurs, not active citizens. This could have been a moment in which we tried to consider, as a people, what kind of a monarchy is appropriate to 21st century, post-Diana, post-Brexit, digital-era Britain. If we remembered our constitutional history better, more of us would recognise that this is, and ought to be, a question for parliament and the public, not for the Windsors.

But that moment is being missed, to our shared loss.