UK Edition
What has become of Princess Diana's Britain?
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales undoubtedly shook the British in a way no other royal event in modern times has done. Equally certainly, she was the first genuine royal celebrity. Her divorce and then her violent death were among the worst events the House of Windsor has ever faced. So, 20 years on, what does she mean to us?
Diana’s Britain already seems a lost, different country. At the time of her death, in August 1997, Tony Blair was only a few months into his first term in office – young, brightly smiling, charismatic and relatively untarnished. The country was getting used to unfamiliar politicians such as Gordon Brown and David Blunkett. Enthusiasm for the EU was widespread across much of the political spectrum; New Labour cabinet ministers would tell anyone prepared to listen that Britain would shortly join the euro.
Victoria Adams, already a household name as ‘Posh Spice’, would not marry a certain well-known footballer for another two years. Two Californian geeks had yet to register a strange name for their proposed search engine, Google. Internet use was still relatively uncommon in Britain – just 7.5 per cent of people were merrily clicking away, compared to more than 90 per cent now. The first iPhone was still a decade in the future.
Twenty years on, we are such different people. The shock of Diana’s death was so sharp because so many of us had lived our lives by proxy through her. We had talked about class and Peter York’s ‘Sloane Rangers’ because of that demure, embarrassed, gawky young aristo first pursued by snappers through west London.
Royalists celebrated Diana’s marriage as a great moment of rejuvenation for the Windsors, while its ups and downs, its miseries and triumphs, were discussed and refracted back in our own relationships. We learned about bulimia because of her. We sat at home transfixed by the Panorama interview and for days talked about nothing else. We debated the propriety or otherwise of her later boyfriends and we divided across dinner tables about Prince Charles’s behaviour.
So by the time she died, Diana had become truly nestled inside the imaginations of most of us. We felt she represented something we British were becoming in general – more open about our emotions, more liberal, perhaps even kinder. She hugged and kissed her sons in public. She took up righteous if unpopular causes, from Aids to landmines, an unapologetically political (small-p) campaigner we hadn’t seen in royal circles before.
Her death was felt not just as the shocking death of a young mother in a motor accident, but as a punch to the solar plexus of tens of millions of people she had never met – something meaningful in the national story.
Back in the present, it seems so long ago, and so hysterical. Because of the royal connection and her own high-wattage charisma, Diana came to mean something to millions of people that was – to be blunt – silly and unreasonable. No fallible human being should ever have been the glossy receptacle of so much panting expectation.
Some of what happened was the fault of the public. We treated her as a Botticelli heroine, as a painted representative of ideal womanhood – mocked, rejected, damaged and yet rising from the waves to forgive us. Or even, perhaps, like a secular Virgin Mary, eternally loving and innocent, walking through the evil and corruption of everyday life.
The midsummer hysteria of 1997 had very little to do with the woman who loved and lost, who became a cunning user of others, who learned to be an excellent mother, and who was then killed in a random, meaningless accident in a Paris underpass. We had projected onto her our hopes and our anger, so that when she died we felt properly bereaved. How childish we were.
For the royal family, her death was a crisis, yes – but they got through it quickly and relatively easily in contrast to the public. After making her public acknowledgement of Diana’s power, the Queen herself became more popular than ever.
So far as the royal establishment is concerned, individuals learned to be Diana-like – to express their emotions and to smile more – but beyond that, nothing really changed. In fact, soon that sunlit, naively enthusiastically pro-European and Leftish Britain of 1997 would be buried itself – by the Iraq War, by the 2008 financial crash, and because of its own ageing and exhaustion.
After Diana’s death, memorialists came up with books as well as walks, fountains, playgrounds, statues and innumerable domestic objects. The clever, damaged, haunted young woman behind the photographs emerged and became truly immortalised in the people’s hearts.
Yet her most potent and impressive memorial is the behaviour of her two sons, then the teenagers Wills and Harry, now the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Henry of Wales. When we saw them, aged 15 and 12, walking white-faced and shocked behind their mother’s coffin, they looked like ultimate victims. How could they possibly grow up to be happy and useful people?
But they did. Both sons, growing up, put the occasional foot wrong and fell foul of censorious newspaper editors. But each of them seemed to emerge as emotionally mature, serious-minded and attractive men in whose hands the Windsor dynasty seems, for the moment, pretty safe.
Much of the credit must go to the warm way that Diana brought them up, but much must also go to the much less popular figure of Prince Charles. He was seen in the aftermath of his divorce as chilly to the point of cruelty. Having been sent unhappily away to school himself, detesting much of his own upbringing, how could he learn the modern empathetic parenting skills we are taught to admire?
Well, his evident success as a parent suggests that the public view of him was wide of the mark; for he is a father adored by his children – and there can be no greater happiness than that.
Perhaps the legacy that Diana has given us is that we as a nation have become, since her life and death, a little less hysterical. When Kate Middleton married Diana’s older son, there seemed a danger that she would suffer just the same intolerable burden of projection. Indeed, she’s popular. People talk about what she wears, and seem to like pictures of her toddlers, too. She takes her charity work admirably seriously.
Yet she isn’t Diana. Partly, of course, she isn’t tortured by the experience of becoming a leading member of the royal household, as Diana was. She is calmer and more level-headed. Could it be that, back in the strange summer of 1997, we exhausted some of our frantic over-enthusiasm and projected emotion? That we, as it were, were bled out?
If so, then the legacy of that extraordinary year is unexpectedly positive: the royal family survived and became more popular. And the rest of us? Well, we grew up.
Extract taken from a new foreword to The Diana Chronicles, by Tina Brown, which is being reissued by Arrow on June 1. To order your copy for £8.99 plus p&p, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514. Introduction copyright © Andrew Marr 2017