‘Storm the Palace’
I’ve never discussed private matters and I don’t think the Queen has either. Very few members of the family have.
Prince Philip (1994)
I sometimes sense that the world is changing almost too fast for its inhabitants, at least for us older ones.
Queen Elizabeth II (1997)
Diana’s power is born out of emotion and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Tony Blair (1998)
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip celebrated their forty-fifth wedding anniversary on Friday, 20 November 1992. They weren’t, however, together to mark what should have been a happy occasion, for he was away on a trip to Argentina, in his capacity as president of the World Wide Fund for Nature. She was therefore alone when she heard the news that a fire had broken out at Windsor Castle.
She arrived from Buckingham Palace some hours after the start of the conflagration, at which point firefighters were still struggling to bring the blaze under control. Hundreds of staff were joined by Army personnel as a priceless collection of paintings, books, carpets and porcelain was removed from the burning building; in their midst, television cameras filmed the Queen, in off-duty headscarf and wellingtons, cutting a distraught and forlorn figure. ‘Her Majesty is utterly devastated,’ Prince Andrew told news reporters, the formality of his words somehow distancing viewers from what was clearly a deep personal disaster.
It was also a potential disaster for the country, whether one accepted the idea that this thousand-year-old building and its contents were held in trust and that the loss was to us all, or whether one merely counted the financial cost of the damage. For Windsor Castle, like the other royal palaces, was not insured – the premiums would have been prohibitive – and the repairs were, announced the national heritage secretary Peter Brooke, to be paid for from the national purse. ‘The heart of the nation went out to the Queen last night,’ he said. ‘I am sure the Queen will want to see her home restored in the way which we all see fit.’
It wasn’t supposed to be a startling revelation, merely a statement of the obvious, but the idea that taxpayers were expected to pick up the estimated tab of £60 million unexpectedly aroused considerable hostility, even while the embers were still glowing. ‘With the greatest respect, Ma’am, you should foot the bill,’ said the Sunday Mirror, and its sister paper ran a telephone poll for readers in which 95 per cent of the 40,000 callers agreed with the proposition that the Queen should contribute to the restoration costs. The Sun also asked its listeners to phone and received 60,000 calls saying she should pay, against just 4,000 disagreeing. It was a response that caused genuine shock. ‘We must have got it wrong,’ lamented one courtier. ‘At the moment of her desolation, this woman, who had done nothing but give service to her country, didn’t even have the solace of her people’s sympathy.’ A public appeal was launched and raised just £25,000.
Attitudes were changing, but those in royal circles seemed not to have noticed. ‘The suggestion that the taxpayer might foot the bill raises the question of why the Queen, in her private capacity, should not be a taxpayer also,’ pointed out Labour MP Alan Williams. This awkward issue had been in the air all year, ever since the publication of Philip Hall’s book Royal Fortune, which examined in great detail the finances of the royal family since 1688, fuelling the argument that the Queen should pay income tax, as had her great-great-grandmother Victoria. The practice had in fact been discontinued only in 1910, when David Lloyd George, as chancellor, had done a deal with Edward VII whereby the monarch was exempt in exchange for bearing the costs of state visits. ‘Pay your taxes, you scum!’ the Queen was heckled in June 1992, at the official opening of a refurbished Leicester Square.
In fact, according to John Major, she had already agreed to do so, but had been waiting for an opportune moment to announce her decision. In the wake of the Windsor Castle fire, the announcement was rushed forward, but even then it was hardly received with unalloyed approval in all quarters. H.M. THE TAX DODGER, mocked the front page of the Daily Mirror, with a sneering article by Alastair Campbell accompanied by a caricature of the Queen doing her sums on a pocket calculator. The following week an opinion poll commissioned by the Daily Telegraph showed that only a quarter of the population agreed with the statement that ‘the monarchy is something to be proud of’.
Something had clearly gone wrong in the relationship between the monarch and her subjects. She noted as much in a speech to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of her accession to the throne: 1992 was, she said, ‘not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.’
Much of the unpleasantness was purely personal, for this was the year that Princess Anne divorced her husband, Mark Phillips, and Prince Andrew and Prince Charles announced their separations from their wives. With her only other child, Prince Edward, yet to marry (‘nature has blessed him with a disinclination towards matrimony’, nudged the novelist A.N. Wilson), this meant that three of her children, as well as her sister, now had failed marriages.
The royal-family brand, so carefully cultivated by George VI as a way of rebuilding the monarchy’s image after the abdication crisis, was looking distinctly fragile. The only stable relationship in the entire family appeared to be the Queen’s own, and even that was called into question in 1992, when Prince Philip was asked directly by the writer Fiammetta Rocco about his much-rumoured marital infidelities. It was a presumptuous question, but he laughed off such suggestions: ‘Have you ever stopped to think that for the last forty years, I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me? So how the hell could I get away with anything like that?’ He was perhaps one of the last people in the country to believe that the presence of a police officer guaranteed moral rectitude. But his patience could also be tested; when he presented an honorary degree that year to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction theory, he was heard to mutter that his own family seemed to be deconstructing.
The official announcements that accompanied each marital breakdown were only a minor part of the problem. Much worse were the media stories documenting every twist and turn of the royal relationships, and the suspicion that some of the participants were fuelling such stories themselves.
In June 1992 a new low seemed to have been reached with the publication of Diana: Her True Story, a book written by journalist Andrew Morton with – it was claimed at the time – the collaboration of ‘some of the Princess of Wales’s closest friends and family’. All the rumours about the misery of her marriage to Charles were here confirmed, with eye-catching details of her repeated, if ineffectual, suicide attempts. There were stories of her throwing herself down a flight of stairs when pregnant, of hurling herself against a glass cabinet, of self-harming in front of Charles, using his penknife. This was sensational stuff, more akin to a show-business exposé than a traditional royal book, and the media and public lapped it up. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind that the stories came directly from Diana herself, a perception Charles apparently shared. ‘I can hear my wife saying those words,’ he was said to have remarked, on reading newspaper extracts.
Diana’s ability to command media attention, at the expense of her husband, had become one of the marvels of the modern age, but Morton’s book took her in a new direction. Previously she had specialised in making her point through pictures rather than words, culminating in her overseas trips the previous year. Back in 1980, Charles had been the first Prince of Wales in six decades to visit India and commented that he would one day like to return, bringing his future wife to see the magnificence of the Taj Mahal. In 1991 the couple did travel to India, but while he was otherwise occupied on official business, Diana visited the Taj Mahal without him, making sure that photographers caught her looking forlorn and beautiful, the shrine to marital devotion forming a perfect backdrop to her abandoned loveliness. A couple of months later she set up a similar shot in front of the Pyramids, raising the possibility that she might yet tour every great monument in the world and press them into service for photo-opportunities.
Diana: Her True Story fleshed out the background to the imagery, telling ‘the story of her transformation from victim to victor’. Although retailers like Tesco and Harrods refused to stock the book, it was an immediate popular hit, selling a million copies worldwide in its first week, the only bar to its success being the publisher’s difficulty in reprinting the book quickly enough. Some politicians and reviewers condemned its very existence, and many attacked the Diana depicted in its pages, but much of the country was unambiguously on her side.
The public relations triumph of Morton’s book was not allowed to stand unchallenged. Two months after its appearance came reports of a taped mobile-phone conversation between Diana and a friend, James Gilbey, a car dealer who was part of the gin-distilling family and one of Morton’s named sources. The origins of the tape were murky, to say the least. The conversation apparently dated from December 1989, but the recording seemed to have been made by an eavesdropper a few days after the event, suggesting that someone had taped the call and then replayed it, possibly with the deliberate intention that it should be overheard.
In any event, the recording finally made its way to the papers in August 1992 and was immediately dubbed the Squidgygate tape, since Gilbey referred to Diana by the pet name of Squidgy. Transcripts were printed, and for those who wished to hear the original (some forty thousand of them on the first day alone), the Sun made it available on a premium-rate phone line at 39p a minute, meaning that for just £11.70 anyone could listen to the Princess of Wales sharing her thoughts on how shabbily she had been treated. ‘Bloody hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘What I’ve done for this fucking family!’ She didn’t emerge with a great deal of credit, seemingly as self-indulgent and in need of continual reassurance as Charles himself appeared to be, and obsessed with what her husband called her ‘Mother Teresa act’. ‘I understand people’s suffering,’ she explained. ‘It’s not only AIDS, it’s anyone who suffers. I can smell them a mile away.’
Amongst the revelations in Diana: Her True Story had been confirmation that, a few years after his wedding, Charles had revived his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, who as Camilla Shand had been an early girlfriend before either of them got married. And in January 1993, a rival to the Squidgygate tapes appeared in the form of another recorded phone conversation dating back to the 1980s, this time between Charles and Camilla. (‘Talking on a mobile phone is a bit like discussing your private life with a gossip columnist,’ warned a character in the television series Bugs.) Again the provenance of the item was unclear, but by now leaking and counter-leaking of material from the rival camps of the warring royal couple – and from other unidentified parties – seemed unstoppable. The most famous section of what was unavoidably dubbed the Camillagate tape was a good-natured exchange about reincarnation, heavily punctuated by mutual laughter:
CAMILLA: I need you all the week, all the time.
CHARLES: Oh God, I’ll just live inside your trousers or something. It would be much easier.
CAMILLA: What are you going to turn into? A pair of knickers? Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.
CHARLES: Or, God forbid, a Tampax, just my luck!
CAMILLA: You’re a complete idiot!
This embarrassing episode brought down much mockery on Charles’s head, but it was actually rather endearing. There was a genuine warmth and humour to the exchange, and it revealed Camilla to be – in contrast to the public perception of Diana – sexy, funny and supportive. (‘Papa doesn’t embarrass me. Mama does,’ said Prince William, according to one of Charles’s more sympathetic chroniclers.)
The transcript was first published in Australia and there was some nervousness about reprinting it in Britain, though the Daily Mirror soon broke ranks, allowing others to follow. But at a time when press intrusion into privacy was being debated, the Sun pronounced itself reluctant to publish: ‘We’re worried that we are being set up. Being given enough rope to hang ourselves. Wouldn’t the Establishment just love that?’ A few days later, the paper’s editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, appeared in front of the House of Commons’ heritage committee and said that the Sun had taken its decision ‘because we are in a curious sort of way cowed in relation to the future of the press’. But he added that he would be perfectly justified in publishing the transcript, since the public had a right to know ‘whether the next Defender of the Faith was going to be someone who cuckolded someone else’s husband’.
The sight of the Sun seeking to occupy the moral high ground was not entirely convincing. More serious was the idea that the media was being used as a battleground in a high-profile marital dispute. ‘I do not want to help either side in all this,’ said Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, explaining why he wasn’t publishing the tape. ‘Would you want to join in the biggest washing of public laundry of the decade?’
Despite Hislop’s reservations, plenty did want to join in, and the two protagonists’ rival camps were eager to encourage them. Just as the Conservative Party had lost any sense of loyalty and privacy, conducting its internal feuds in public, so too did the royals actively seek to let daylight in on the magic. Lord Rothermere, chairman of Associated Newspapers (publishers of the Daily Mail), acknowledged in 1991 that ‘the Prince and Princess of Wales had each recruited national newspapers to carry their own accounts of their marital rifts’, and there was no let-up in the stories, most of them unsourced.
Rumours circulated that Diana, at her lowest point in the 1980s, had taken to phoning Camilla in the middle of the night with threatening messages: ‘I’ve sent someone to kill you. They’re outside in the garden. Look out of the window; can you see them?’ Charles was quoted in the Daily Mail as asking rhetorically: ‘Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?’ And it was reported that Paris Match had acquired nude photos of the Prince. An anonymous employee was impressed: ‘He looks magnifique. You English can be proud of him.’
Eventually the whispers and briefings moved from the dark corners into the full gaze of the television cameras. Charles was first to break cover, cooperating with Jonathan Dimbleby on a 1994 documentary titled Charles: The Private Man, the Public Role, in which he confessed openly for the first time his adultery with Camilla. ‘Did you try to be faithful and honourable to your wife when you took on the vow of marriage?’ asked Dimbleby, and Charles replied: ‘Yes. Until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried.’ Retaliation was inevitable, though it took more than a year to arrive.
Martin Bashir, a reporter on the BBC current affairs show Panorama, began in 1995 to investigate rumours that the security services were involved in the Squidgygate and Camillagate episodes. He approached Diana herself for an interview and, having secured her consent, found the programme turning into a different animal altogether. Broadcast in November that year, the show turned out to be a simple encounter between Bashir and Diana, in which she gave one of the greatest television appearances in the history of the medium, capturing the essence of that Taj Mahal photo-shoot and combining it with a first-person version of the Andrew Morton revelations. With head lowered to emphasise her upturned, kohl-laden eyes, she admitted her own adultery, talked about her self-harming, postnatal depression and eating disorder, and delivered a series of soundbites that were to dominate the media for days and years to come.
‘There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,’ she said, referring to Camilla, and repeated the formulation later in case it had been missed. She identified herself as a fighter for feminism: ‘I think every strong woman in history has had to walk down a similar path, and I think it’s the strength that causes the confusion and the fear. Why is she strong? Where does she get it from? Where is she taking it?’ She talked of how she saw herself in the future: ‘I think the British people need someone in public life to give affection, to make them feel important, to support them, to give them light in their dark tunnels.’ And she wrote the headline for the coverage: ‘I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts.’
The programme attracted the largest audience in Panorama’s history – nearly twenty-three million – and, somewhat surprisingly, more viewers in Britain than had watched Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981. It was seen as an open acknowledgement that a state of war existed between the most famous couple in the country, and the majority of viewers knew whose side they were on. Any doubt was dispelled by the appearance on television later that evening of Nicholas Soames, Tory MP for Crawley and a friend of Charles, whose corpulent appearance had earned him the nickname ‘the Butter Mountain from Crawley’. The sight of him dismissing Diana’s claims as symptomatic of an ‘advanced stage of paranoia’ helped ensure that sympathy swung her way.
‘I’ve never been so overwhelmed in my life,’ said Tony Hall, the BBC’s director of news and current affairs, recalling his first sight of the edited interview. ‘Here was a royal talking like a real human being with all the traumas of a real person’s life.’ That was certainly a large part of the appeal, though there was more. By claiming universality, that she suffered as others suffered, hinting even that she took on their suffering, Diana sought to channel everyone’s pain. In the 1950s, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge had coined the phrase ‘the royal soap opera’, but hitherto the drama had largely been conducted without dialogue from any of the principal characters. Now they were heard to speak and the effect was startling, a combination of the mundane and the extraordinary that captivated the public. There was little at a personal level that was particularly novel about the breakdown of the relationship; the misery and bitterness on display merely reflected the experience of many mismatched couples in the country. But the scale continued to fascinate; few couples announcing their separation had to worry about the division of the family butlers, as did Charles and Diana.
None could question that genuine distress was being paraded. Yet even in this tale there were moments of comic relief, many of them provided by James Hewitt. A cavalry officer who first met Diana before her marriage, Hewitt subsequently had an intermittent, though long-running affair with her that finally ended in 1992. He then gave his first full interview, to Daily Express journalist Anna Pasternak, in which he denied any relationship and suggested that the two hadn’t even met until after the birth of Diana’s second son, Harry. Though that wasn’t true, a rapport had clearly been struck between interviewer and subject, for in 1994 there emerged Princess in Love, Pasternak’s account of the affair, written with Hewitt’s cooperation. Couched in the language of a romance novel, while giving a full account of the Princess of Wales’s adultery, it was a very strange book, full of tremulous prose. ‘He lay flat on his back in his bed,’ ran a typical passage, ‘not noticing the chill of the sheet, his body still warm with the feel of her, the muscles in his arms still carrying the imprint of her, where he had held her so long and so tight.’
It was not well received. ‘A terribly, terribly bad book’, wrote William Rees-Mogg; ‘horse manure’, concluded Melvyn Bragg; while Buckingham Palace affected a lofty disdain. ‘Grubby and worthless’, was the official response; ‘we are not going to waste any more time on this tawdry little book.’ Worse still, the tabloids decided that it was open season on Major Hewitt, who, as an officer and a gentleman, should never have spilt the beans. ‘A revolting creep’, opined the Daily Mirror, while the Sun wondered whether he might be hung, drawn and quartered for treason, and the Star sniffed that he was ‘bad in bed’.
His reputation in shreds, Hewitt found that even his ghost-writer was prepared to turn on him. Asked about whether she too had enjoyed a dalliance with her source, Pasternak professed herself offended. ‘I wouldn’t have an affair with him,’ she retorted. ‘He’s far too thick for me.’ Hewitt became a minor celebrity, though there was little he could do to exploit his fame. The same was not true of others. Roger Moore, a 26-year-old strippogram performer from Bath, adopted the persona of Hewitt, performing a routine at hen parties for £50 a time; during his act he would reportedly ‘strip down to his Union flag boxer shorts to the tune of the national anthem’.
The nation’s amusement at finding such a splendid bounder was not, of course, shared by Diana. ‘Yes, I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him,’ she said of Hewitt on Panorama. ‘But I was very let down.’ She accepted that much of Princess in Love was true, but added: ‘there was a lot of fantasy in that book and it was very distressing for me that a friend of mine, who I had trusted, made money out of me.’ And behind it all, there was the persistent – but consistently denied – rumour that Hewitt, not Charles, was actually the father of Prince Harry.
The response to Hewitt suggested that public sympathy for Diana did not extend to the rest of her entourage, and the same story could be found in the treatment accorded to the Duchess of York. In the 1980s when, as Sarah Ferguson, she first became famous, the Duchess had been a popular figure, credited with bringing a sense of unstuffy fun into the royal soap. But in more recent times she had been recast and vilified by the tabloids as a sponger and a bad mother; in 1991, by which time her marriage to Prince Andrew was clearly falling apart, Drop the Dead Donkey could run a joke about a cat that was named Fergie because ‘It costs a fortune to feed and keeps abandoning its kittens.’ Reporting on gossip from the inner circles of the royals, Woodrow Wyatt noted: ‘The Duchess of York is utterly childish and low level, like a barmaid who has got into some money. She is bereft of education and taste.’
Her contribution to the Queen’s annus horribilis came in August 1992, when in long-lens photographs spread across seven pages of the Daily Mirror, she was shown sitting by a swimming pool on holiday in France, topless and having her toes sucked by an American financial adviser named John Bryan. (The toe-sucking detail was, of course, later reworked into the David Mellor story.) The justification for this breach of privacy was provided by a pretence at moral outrage that she had behaved in such a manner while her daughter, Princess Eugenie, was present.
‘How much shrapnel can this family take?’ wailed Harold Brooks-Baker, the publisher of Burke’s Peerage. ‘This is not just a nail in the coffin, it’s a whole handful of nails.’ But the Mirror had judged its readership perfectly. The pictures were trailed by an advertisement screened during an episode of Coronation Street, and the paper later claimed that it had been obliged to reprint after selling out its entire print run. Nor was much offence caused; the Press Complaints Commission reported that, instead of the deluge of phone calls it had been expecting, it received just one objection. And for those who missed the Mirror, the pictures appeared the next day in Today and the Sun, the latter coming up with the memorable headline: JUST HOW MUCH FINANCIAL ADVICE CAN A GIRL TAKE?
Both Sarah and Bryan sued for damages in a French court, seeking £1.2 million each. They won their case, but not the damages; she received just £60,000 and he £25,000, though her payout did equal the French record for such an award. (The man who took the photos, on the other hand, was said to have made upwards of £1 million.) The money can have been little compensation for the final destruction of her public image. The incident passed into popular folklore, recreated the following year in One Foot in the Algarve (the Christmas edition of One Foot in the Grave), with Peter Cook giving his best impression of a paparazzo photographer. It also prompted a comparison in Drop the Dead Donkey with the state of the country: ‘Both being screwed by their financial advisers.’ The implied adultery confirmed the negative perception that already existed, while the setting fed into the perception that she was not the most active of royals. ‘If she cannot be photographed when she is on holiday,’ wrote Lynne Truss, ‘it leaves precious few days in the year when she is visible. Or are we paying her £249,000 a year to remain out of sight?’
Two years later, Sarah was again in the news, explaining in an interview that she practised safe sex. ‘What has to be, has to be,’ she said, of her use of condoms. ‘But I agree there may be a cut in spontaneity.’ She also said that she had had two HIV tests, which served only to fuel groundless gossip that her estranged husband had AIDS. That rumour became one of the first internet urban myths (‘The story went global after Internet boffins circulated it by computer,’ reported the News of the World), acquiring such wide currency that in 1996 Buckingham Palace felt obliged to issue an official denial that Andrew had contracted AIDS.
Stories of sexual misdemeanours among the royals became commonplace, fuelled by a spate of gossipy books published in 1993 by the likes of Nigel Dempster (‘the girls’ talk was that he wasn’t a great lover, not even a very good one’, he reported of Charles), James Whitaker (Charles and Diana ‘never slept together again’ after a 1986 holiday) and Lady Colin Campbell (the Queen’s own marriage was a loveless façade). The gossip was unrelenting, with even the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland, who was also Diana’s step-grandmother, keen to explain to anyone who would listen what the problem was in that relationship: ‘She wouldn’t do oral sex, she just wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that.’
Equally unrelenting were the jokes, with comedians taking aim at all parties in the various disputes. Armando Iannucci reworked the Conservatives’ election slogan (‘Charles is booming – don’t let Camilla blow him’), while Kevin Day reflected cynically on the revelations in Andrew Morton’s book: ‘Princess Diana threw herself at a glass cabinet. Presumably in an effort to display herself to death.’ Even the children’s television series Maid Marian and Her Merry Men slipped in a few gags; having taken all the peasants’ food to give to King John, the Sheriff of Nottingham explains why they should be pleased to contribute: ‘The royal family is a wonderful institution, right? They give us hours of pleasure, reading about Princess Marjorie’s weight problems and little Prince Herbert’s hilarious adventures at nursery school.’ In response to which, Robin Hood can only tut: ‘Honestly! The royals can be so middle class!’ Tony Clark in Between the Lines was more vituperative: ‘A family of below average intelligence and unbelievable wealth whose powers belong in the middle ages.’
None of this might have mattered quite so much had it not come at a time when the people’s affection for royalty was already at a low ebb. For many years the publisher Letts had produced a royal diary on an annual basis; in 1991 it announced that it would not be doing so any more, since demand had fallen so heavily. ‘It has turned into a disaster,’ commented a company spokesperson. ‘People would now rather have diaries with beauty tips than information on the royal family.’ The Queen’s Christmas broadcast that year attracted just ten million viewers, a healthy audience, but substantially down from the seventeen million it was getting just a few years earlier. Even those who traded on royal associations were becoming reluctant to promote the fact: the Royal Automobile Club redesigned its logo in 1997, dropping the image of the crown after ninety years. ‘The most serious threat to the Monarchy’s future,’ according to a Daily Telegraph editorial in 1991, ‘stems not from the few who are directly hostile to it, but from the growing number who are indifferent.’
Respect for the royals was in decline, and the endless stream of personal revelations and rumours simply strengthened that trend. ‘Before they came along,’ a senior courtier observed of Diana and Sarah, ‘the monarchy was in a healthy condition and looked to have a long and stable future. Now look how things have changed.’
In the years since the Second World War, the monarchy had effectively been off-limits for writers and artists, to the extent that the Sex Pistols not only had their 1977 single ‘God Save the Queen’ banned by the mass media, but also faced physical assault in the streets for having released such an abomination. Now the institution was seen as a prism through which the reality of modern Britain might be revealed.
Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I (1992) was premised on the election of a republican government, leading the royal family to be rehoused on a rundown council estate where some fare better than others. The Queen and Princess Anne adapt reasonably well to their changed circumstances, but Prince Philip goes into terminal decline, morally, mentally and physically: ‘How squalid he looks, thought the Queen, and she had a glimmer of understanding of how easy it was to slide into such a state and how difficult it must be to get out of it.’
Despite the familiar characters, the book is essentially a depiction of the grinding material and spiritual poverty of much of Britain. Here public services are so chronically underfunded that hospital wards are being closed down and the local school has a rain alarm to signal to the bucket-monitors that it’s time to put containers under the myriad leaks in the roof. And, as Prince Charles discovers, the benefits system that is supposed to alleviate the hardships is almost impossible to navigate: ‘What he did work out is that they could not claim Housing Benefit until their Income Support was known; and they could not claim Income Support until their Housing Benefit was assessed. And then there was Family Credit, which they were yet to benefit from, but which seemed to be included in the total sum.’
It was hard, too, not to see The Madness of King George, the successful 1994 film of an Alan Bennett stage play, as at least in part a commentary on current affairs. ‘To be Prince of Wales is not a position,’ despairs Rupert Everett, playing the role of the 1788 occupant of the office. ‘It is a predicament.’ He’s shown having an affair with Mrs Fitzherbert, while he plots to take over as king. Elsewhere the politicians are arguing about the role of monarchy. ‘The king will do as he’s told,’ insists William Pitt the Younger, to which Charles Fox retorts: ‘Then why not be rid of him? If a few ramshackle colonists in America can send him packing, why can’t we?’
Such a sentiment was heard increasingly often. In the 1970s the Labour MP Willie Hamilton had found that expressing anti-monarchical opinions was enough to guarantee him a public profile, but now he would have struggled to be heard amidst the clamour. ‘There is no republican movement in this country,’ declared Julian Critchley in 1992, and he was correct in that no major party campaigned for the abolition of the monarchy. The cause of republicanism was, however, gaining a great deal of ground. Alongside the books of gossip, there emerged also from 1993 onwards some serious volumes that called into question the entire institution. In a sign of the times, a book by the academic Stephen Haseler was given the provocative title The End of the House of Windsor and adorned with a photograph of Diana on the front and an endorsement from Andrew Morton on the back; a thoughtful study of British social structures was being sold as a piece of populism. The same year came A.N. Wilson’s The Fall of the House of Windsor (a title previously used for a book by Nigel Blundell and Susan Blackhall).
There was also, for the first time since the war, a political expression of the tendency. A poll published in the Sunday Telegraph in January 1993 suggested that a quarter of Labour MPs now favoured republicanism, not all of them on the left. In a speech that month, Jack Straw talked about the need to reform ‘eighteenth-century institutions like the House of Lords, the judiciary and the honours system’. He went on to say: ‘What I think is increasingly clear is that the current royal system, with its large number of participants and its emphasis on show business, has little serious future.’ He didn’t quite call for the removal of the royal family – most of the talk in political circles was of following the scaled-down Dutch or Scandinavian model, the so-called ‘cycling royals’ – but the fact that a senior member of the shadow cabinet was going even so far was a shock to the system. And that linking of the theme with other areas of reform was characteristic of the period. Campaigners for constitutional reform, the idea of which had been gathering momentum since the mid-1980s, were keen to associate Britain’s decline as an economic power in the world with its ‘outdated’ institutions. Even Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said that ‘Britain could never make progress until it abolished the monarchy.’
Tony Blair had long regarded Jack Straw as one of the modernisers in the Labour Party, someone on whom he could call for support, and Straw’s comments were an early indication that for some on the Blairite wing of the party, the monarchy was potentially an anachronism in the much-touted ‘New Britain’. Certainly that was the view of Mo Mowlam, who made news in 1994 when she suggested that the royal family ought to move out of Buckingham Palace. Asked later about these comments, in a 1997 interview in the Irish rock magazine Hot Press, she made the connection explicit, saying that she hoped when Charles became king, ‘he does begin to adapt to what Blair represents as part of our culture’.
Charles was believed by many to be something of a problem, and not simply because of the personal unpopularity he experienced as a result of Diana’s high-profile feud. He was now in his mid-forties and there seemed little immediate prospect of him ascending the throne; his grandmother was still alive, and looked likely to remain so for some time, let alone his mother. At the start of the decade there had been speculation that the Queen might consider abdicating in his favour, but she used her Christmas broadcast in 1991 to make clear that she had no intention of stepping down, now or ever. ‘I feel the same obligation to you that I felt in 1952,’ she said, pointedly. ‘With your prayers and your help, and with the love and support of my family, I shall try to serve you in the years to come.’
By 1993 whispers of abdication had given way to much more preposterous ideas, including the suggestion by Simon Courtauld, deputy editor of the Spectator, that after the Queen’s death, the crown should pass to the Duke of Buccleuch, descended from the Duke of Monmouth, son of Charles II. A.N. Wilson, meanwhile, nominated Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a grandson of George V whose mother was another Buccleuch. Only slightly more plausible was the proposition that the crown might skip a generation, missing out Charles and passing directly to William.
It was never going to happen, but if an announcement had been made to this effect, it would have pleased a great many people on both sides of the political divide. The left objected to the institution of monarchy itself; the right to Charles as an individual. That latter distrust was expressed in the second of Michael Dobbs’s Francis Urquhart trilogy, To Play the King, published in 1992 and adapted for television the following year. This depicted a Conservative prime minister coming into constitutional conflict with a new king, clearly based on Charles, who insists on meddling in politics. ‘I happen to believe that if there was a bust-up between the government and monarchy, it would be much more likely with a Conservative government,’ Dobbs explained at the time of publication. He had formerly been an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, who had never been entirely enamoured of Charles’s patrician liberalism.
There were, too, those on the left who disapproved specifically of Charles. Ron Davies, the shadow Welsh secretary, took the opportunity of St David’s Day in 1996 to share his thoughts on the Prince of Wales with a television audience. ‘He spends his time talking to trees and flowers, yet encourages his sons to go out to kill wild animals,’ he ruminated. ‘You must ask the question, is this person fit to continue the tradition of the monarchy, and come to the conclusion: No, he isn’t.’ Davies was immediately sat upon by his New Labour masters and obliged to retract his remarks – ‘My comments on the effect on the monarchy of the troubles faced by the Prince and the Princess of Wales were wrong and I will be writing to Prince Charles to apologise’ – though he was presumably satisfied, as an avowed republican, to have at least raised the issue.
Davies’s original conclusion was, for different reasons, shared by others. ‘I have to wonder if Charles is fit to be king,’ said Richard Parker Bowles, younger brother of the man cuckolded by the Prince. ‘He made a fool of my family. We had no right of reply.’ Elsewhere, the highlight of the 1994 British Comedy Awards was the presentation of a lifetime achievement award to Spike Milligan, during which Jonathan Ross read a letter from Charles enthusing about the former Goon’s work but was continually interrupted by Milligan himself, calling the Prince a ‘grovelling little bastard’, much to the amusement of the crowd and the television audience.
Republicanism was still a minority cause, but it received a boost in 1994 when the Independent on Sunday became the first mainstream paper to declare itself in favour. If there were to be an elected president, it asked its readers, who should it be; the leading candidates were, in descending order, Tony Benn, Betty Boothroyd, Jarvis Cocker and Helena Kennedy, the lawyer who was also chair of the constitutional reform group Charter 88. The highest ranked royal was Princess Anne in eighth place, just behind Richard Branson. (Boothroyd had, coincidentally, been the nomination of Alastair Campbell, back when he was writing for the Daily Mirror and denouncing the royal family as ‘the apex of a class system that exposes John Major’s “classless society” for the slogan that it is’. As Campbell put it: ‘Queen Betty has a rather truer ring than Queen Diana.’)
There was another potential candidate, however. In his 1996 book Faces of Labour, Andy McSmith suggested that, in the event that the monarchy collapsed, Tony Blair might have a claim as a potential ‘President of the Republic of Great Britain who will stand above the sordid routine of party politics and speak for the nation’.
It was a dangerously intoxicating idea at a time when Blair harboured the delusion that his party was ‘the political arm of none other than the British people’, and there were signs early on in his premiership that he might be tempted to think along the same lines. At the state opening of Parliament in 1997, the Blairs breached protocol by walking from Downing Street to the Houses of Parliament, waving at the crowds and upstaging the procession of the Queen from Buckingham Palace, a move that captured the attention of Fleet Street and, in the words of one report, ‘effortlessly relegated the sovereign to a minor role on what used to be one of her biggest days’. Although the prime minister’s office insisted that it was nothing more than a spontaneous display of informality, it outraged constitutionalists and, reportedly, earned a rebuke from the Queen herself.
In the places where it counted, however, it was welcomed enthusiastically. Blair was, said the Sun, ‘the leader of the party of the people, in touch with his people’. The paper also quoted an anonymous minister as saying: ‘Tony wants to show he is the people’s premier.’ That choice of phrasing would come to look rather prescient. Soon afterwards, Bill Clinton visited Britain to stage a joint press conference with Blair, but didn’t see the head of state. Buckingham Palace was allegedly furious: ‘They think Tony Blair is getting too grand,’ a courtier told the Mail on Sunday, ‘and that prime ministers should play second fiddle to monarchs.’
The relationship between the newly elected Labour government and the royal family was always going to be a slightly awkward one. Blair had no intention of reforming the monarchy, but the words of Jack Straw, Mo Mowlam and Alastair Campbell indicated that such thinking was not unknown in New Labour circles, where the only royal who met with complete approval was Diana.
‘In temperament and time, in the mood she engendered and which we represented, there was a perfect fit,’ Blair was later to write, and even Campbell was swept up in what Peter Mandelson called a ‘near-teenage infatuation’ when he actually met her. ‘She had perfect skin and her whole face lit up when she spoke and there were moments when I had to fight to hear the words because I’m just lost in the beauty,’ Campbell gushed. ‘And I’m thinking how could I have written all those vile things about her.’ In return, Diana appeared also to have found common ground, according to Hugo Young. ‘She thinks Tony Blair is a nice chap,’ he noted, after her visit in 1996 to the Guardian offices; ‘you could almost tell she sort of fancies him, unlike Major.’
By now Diana had scaled back heavily her involvement in charitable and other public works. That didn’t mean, however, that she was any less visible, and she continued to campaign in a handful of specific areas, most notably against the use of landmines. And she was still capable of generating huge media attention when she chose. Holidaying in the Mediterranean with her new partner, Dodi Al-Fayed – son of Harrods owner Mohammed – in the summer of 1997, she celebrated the fiftieth birthday of Camilla Parker Bowles by diving off Al-Fayed’s yacht in a suitably revealing swimsuit, thus ensuring that it was she rather than her ex-husband’s mistress who dominated the newspapers.
She also gave an interview to the French newspaper Le Monde, in which she demonstrated that it was not only Charles who could meddle in politics. Describing the former Conservative government as ‘hopeless’ on the issue of landmines, she expressed her belief that Labour would do ‘great work’. (The Blair government had already announced a moratorium on the ‘operational use’ of landmines, though the right was reserved to use them in circumstances where they were considered necessary for the security of British forces.)
Her relationship with Al-Fayed had already occasioned some concern. ‘Many will question the wisdom of our future king mixing so closely with a man who sees nothing wrong in buying power and who played a large part in the downfall of the last government,’ pronounced Rupert Murdoch’s Sun. Now, Diana’s comments on John Major’s government were seen as a step too far.
‘It’s a pity Gucci don’t make designer face zips,’ suggested Carol Malone in the News of the World; ‘then when Princess Diana was on the verge of opening her ill-informed mouth and causing an international incident (an increasingly frequent occurrence these days) she could just zip her trap shut.’ Barbara Gunnell in the Independent on Sunday mocked ‘the inane Sloane-ish inarticulacy of a woman with fundamentally nothing to say about anything’, while the Observer, in a column titled ‘Mrs Blair’s Diary’, described Diana as ‘a woman who, if her IQ were five points lower, would have to be watered daily’. Petronella Wyatt in the Sunday Express was not much more supportive: ‘She seems to relish her role as a martyr. God help her if she ever finds happiness – it would make her miserable.’ In the same paper, Bernard Ingham dismissed her and her new partner – ‘I’m told she and Dodi are made for each other, both having more brass than brains’ – and in the Sunday Mirror Chris Hutchins drooled at the possible emergence of another taped conversation with James Gilbey: ‘this one is hot, hot, hot!’
It was, of course, unfortunate for all these writers that their words had already gone to press by the time the news came out from Paris in the early hours of Sunday, 31 August 1997 that Diana and Dodi had been killed in a car crash.
The news of Diana’s death at the age of thirty-six was deeply shocking and yet somehow not entirely surprising. The image of her as a middle-aged, let alone elderly, woman had never been easy to conjure up, and the manner of her passing, pursued through the Parisian night by a pack of paparazzi photographers, seemed almost immediately to make sense, an appropriate end to a life that had long since lost any semblance of reality. It felt fated.
Still it caught the country and the country’s media unawares. None had anticipated that hers would be the next royal death. Instead there had for many years been plans in place at both Buckingham Palace and the BBC to cover the death of the Queen Mother: eight days of mourning including three days of lying in state in Westminster before the actual funeral. In fact that event had been planned for nearly half a century; as far back as 1952, mere months after the death of George VI, the BBC had nominated Macdonald Hobley – the actor best known as the host of Come Dancing – to deliver the official announcement of the Queen Mother’s death. No such forward thinking had taken place for Diana.
The confusion of the early reports added to the immediate difficulties of coverage. BBC Two broke the news of the car crash at 1 a.m., followed within the hour by ITV, but it was still understood at this point that Diana had suffered only minor injuries. ITV closed down its rolling news programme around 4.20 a.m., believing that the story was finished, only to have to return to the screens twenty minutes later to announce her death. Thereafter black ties were compulsory, even for weather forecasters. All scheduled programmes on BBC One were dropped in favour of a rolling news show, Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live trod the same ground with a joint broadcast, while Radio 3 played only slow movements from popular works of classical music and Radio 1 only slow pop songs – for the first time in the latter station’s existence, it did not broadcast the chart show. ITV made the commercially painful decision to abandon all advertising, at least until the evening. Tributes were relayed from other revered figures – Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher – and interviews were given by the likes of David Mellor, demanding action against an intrusive press, while Jeffrey Archer and David Starkey drew comparisons respectively with the murder of John Kennedy in 1963 and the death of James Dean in 1955. The state of the nation was captured best on GMTV: ‘You might not believe this,’ said newsreader Anne Davies, sounding as though she couldn’t quite accept it herself, ‘but I’m afraid it is true.’
The continuous media coverage was more than matched by the public’s response. Radio stations reported the greatest number of phone calls ever received, their switchboards jammed with people who felt the need to talk about the event, even if there was nothing in particular to say. The same phenomenon could be observed across the country. There was just one topic of conversation and one overriding emotion: stunned disbelief. For want of words to express something largely inexpressible, crowds began to gather outside Buckingham Palace and, particularly, outside Diana’s own home of Kensington Palace, where they laid flowers. By the end of the week, it was estimated that £50 million had been spent on these floral tributes.
Some details emerged over the next few days, establishing that Diana hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, that her driver was well over the legal alcohol limit and had been speeding, but beyond that, there was nothing new to say, and hours and hours to be filled saying it. The newspapers followed the lead of the broadcast media, though some had first to scramble to claw back lost ground, none more so than the American magazine the National Enquirer: ‘We apologise for the Princess Diana page one headline DI GOES SEX MAD, which is still on the stands at some locations. It is currently being replaced with a special 72-page tribute issue: A FAREWELL TO THE PRINCESS WE ALL LOVED.’
It was later calculated that Diana’s death generated more newspaper and magazine coverage than any other single event in the history of humanity, appropriately enough for the most photographed woman in the world. In life, she had been a banker for any publication wishing to increase sales, and in death she continued to work her magic: the Sun sold an extra million copies that Monday.
As the week wore on, the response of some was to question how genuine any of this public passion was, so perfect a media story did it seem. Adrian Mole’s fifteen-year-old sister chose not to go to Kensington Palace to lay flowers: ‘Rosie preferred to watch the Diana-mourning on television. She said it was “more real”.’ Tony Benn shared the same sense of unreality from another perspective: ‘I hope by this time next week we will be able to re-enter the real world again, because there is something slightly sick about this,’ he observed. ‘It was also,’ noted Giles Radice, ‘a generational thing – it was the twenty- and thirty-year-olds, especially women, who felt Diana’s death most. It was my daughters and stepdaughters who were most touched.’
The response of those at a more elevated social level was to look to their own position. ‘They’re all going to blame me, aren’t they?’ fretted Charles, while Blair saw opportunities as well as challenges: ‘I also knew that this was going to be a major national, in fact global event like no other. How Britain emerged was important for the country internally and externally.’ Blair it was who seized control of the moment. Having decided that he ought to speak to the media on his way back from church that Sunday morning (‘Anything before that would look tacky,’ he agreed with Alastair Campbell), he delivered perhaps his most enduring soundbite: ‘She was the people’s princess. And that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and memories – for ever.’
It wasn’t an entirely new phrase. The title ‘the people’s princess’ had already been used of the Duchess of York, of Princess Anne (most recently in 1996) and of Diana herself, the title being bestowed upon her by Julie Burchill in 1991 and by James Whitaker in 1992. In November 1993 the Daily Mirror had published photographs of Diana taken by a hidden camera above a machine in an LA Fitness gym in West London; although Diana sued for this invasion of her privacy (the paper settled out of court for £200,000 damages and around £1 million in legal fees), the article was largely sympathetic and was headlined THE PEOPLE’S PRINCESS. Never, though, had the epithet struck such a chord. It was clearly a terrible cliché, yet at the same time it sounded like an entirely original thought, and in that contradiction it encapsulated the public mood. It also, of course, implied that the other royals didn’t belong to, and weren’t part of, the people.
In a trembling voice, Blair described himself as being ‘utterly devastated’, and summed up the mood of the country: ‘We are today a nation in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us.’ That came dangerously close to using the royal ‘we’, but it was no accident, as Jonathan Powell wrote in his diary: ‘he obviously feels real grief but also feels he needs to express it for the nation.’ Later that day, as he waited at RAF Northolt for the plane carrying Diana’s corpse to arrive from Paris, Blair reflected ‘that this was a moment for the country to unite. There had to be love for Diana; respect for the Queen; a celebration of what a great country this was.’
He had been prime minister for just four months. Still riding his own wave of acclaim and popularity, he was confronting a situation for which no one was even vaguely prepared. Had Diana still been married, there would have been some precedent, some protocol upon which to draw, but there was no known procedure for the sudden death of a divorced Princess of Wales who had, just a year before, been stripped of her right to be called Her Royal Highness. In the absence of any comment from the royal family themselves, Blair stepped in to speak for the country and did so convincingly. He was quite correct in assuming that there were points of comparison to be made between Diana’s emotional appeal and the nebulous values of New Labour, but he resisted the temptation to make this a time for scoring political points and he was cautious about stepping too far into the limelight. ‘We have to be careful,’ noted Alastair Campbell the next day, ‘that it doesn’t look like we are writing our script, rather than hers.’
There were plenty of others who did wish to write her script. ‘You cannot be a sentient human being and not feel grief and horror,’ judged the historian Ben Pimlott, but he found himself topped in his garment-rending by other highbrow journalists. The novelist Piers Paul Read said that a ‘comparison could be made with the Virgin Mary’, a sentiment with which Paul Johnson could only concur: ‘I am reminded of the Blessed Virgin.’ Norman St John Stevas believed she had ‘a real and charismatic gift for healing’, and David Aaronovitch wrote: ‘We therefore crucified her, with our strange appetite for celebrity. And however much we attempt to read paparazzi for Pharisee we know that it is really our fault that she died.’ This angle, hovering between the beatified and the messianic, had already been covered in her lifetime by Adrian Mole: ‘Princess Diana’s cleaning bill must be enormous. She is always wearing white clothes lately, giving her the appearance of a virgin or a saint.’
As the initial disbelief turned to shock, a new narrative began to emerge. Apart from the grief, there was also anger at the actions of the paparazzi, chasing after the photographs that the British people had so often enjoyed seeing in their newspapers. This was not, for obvious reasons, an angle that the press wished to pursue in any great detail, and instead a new target was sought onto which the public rage could safely be deflected. It was found in the form of the royal family.
A few months earlier, Armando Iannucci had written: ‘In time of national crisis or tragedy, the royal family doesn’t share grief through the expression of recognisable emotion. They express it through staring at flags and inspecting rubble.’ The Queen, Charles and Diana’s sons were at the time in Balmoral, far from the rising tide of flowers in West London, and the absence of ‘recognisable emotion’, of any direct response at all, was seized upon by the newspapers, anxious to deflect attention from themselves.
Media scorn focused initially on Charles, plumbing new depths on the Tuesday, when the Daily Mail ran a months-old photograph of him under the headline CHARLES WEEPS BITTER TEARS OF GUILT. And then it was turned on the Queen herself. ‘There has been no expression of sorrow from the Queen on behalf of the nation,’ regretted the Sun on Wednesday; ‘not one tear has been shed in public from a royal eye. It is as if no one in the Royal Family has a soul.’ On the same day, Blair spoke to the media in Downing Street, asking that people respect the royal family’s right to grieve in private, but even he was unable to halt the growing atmosphere of recrimination. ‘The mood was really turning against the royals and everyone seemed helpless in the face of it,’ wrote Campbell on Thursday. ‘The press were now fuelling a general feeling that the royals were not responding or even caring. The ugliness of the mood was growing.’
Bizarrely, though in keeping with the Cool Britannia era, the dispute over the royal response to the tragedy homed in on the symbol of a flag. Convention had it that the Royal Standard flew over Buckingham Palace when the Queen was in residence, and no flag at all when she was not; since she was in Scotland, there was therefore no flag available to be flown at half-mast. For reasons that defied explanation, this became a major point of issue. WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? WHERE IS HER FLAG? demanded the Sun on Thursday. Meanwhile, it was reported in outrage, the Royal Standard continued to fly at full-mast over Balmoral; the explanation, that this was the symbol of the monarchy itself and was never lowered to half-mast even when the monarch died, fell on deaf ears.
By now the contrast was being made between the stuffy old uncaring royals and the emotionally literate public. ‘What upset people,’ wrote Tony Parsons the following week, ‘was that the royal family seemed blind to the country’s sadness.’ He was right that there was a chasm between, on the one side, the public outpouring of anguish for someone known only through the media, and on the other, the private response of those who might reasonably be considered to have the best interests of Diana’s children at heart, but how this alleged neglect of the nation could be resolved by the display of a flag was far from obvious. Nonetheless the tabloids’ twin demands – that the royal family should parade their grief in public, and that a break with protocol should be made – were echoed elsewhere. As a leader in The Times put it, ‘The mere presence of the Sovereign at Buckingham Palace would mean much to many mourners. So would a little flexibility in the purely symbolic matter of flags flown at royal palaces.’
The campaign worked. Behind the scenes, Blair and Campbell had been advising the royals and persuaded them that action was needed. On Thursday, the young princes – William was fifteen, Harry twelve – were sent in front of the cameras at Balmoral, a Union flag was installed at half-mast on Buckingham Palace, and it was announced that the Queen would broadcast a message on television. THE QUEEN BOWS TO HER SUBJECTS was the headline in the Independent, though the best response by far came from the unlikely source of the Sport, a publication so downmarket and reliant on advertising by premium-rate sex lines that it barely qualified as a newspaper. Under a witheringly sarcastic headline – ARE WE HAPPY NOW? – the paper declared this to be ‘The day Britain should have died of SHAME’, and followed it with a denunciation of Fleet Street and of the crowds at the Palace gates. ‘The unstoppable, irrational and hysterical wave of mourning which has swept through Britain has been allowed to swamp the very two people we are supposed to be protecting,’ wrote the editor, Tony Livesey. ‘What the f*** do you want William and Harry to do next? Bottle their tears and sell them on Saturday on The Mall?’ Livesey himself had lost his mother when he was thirteen and knew where his sympathies lay: ‘I didn’t want to speak to strangers. I didn’t feel the need to prove my love for my mum.’
And all the time, the crowds continued to gather, the cellophane sea of flowers continued to rise, and intolerance for dissent became ever more vocal. The issue of Private Eye published that week bore a cover mocking the double standards of the press and the public, while an apology inside regretted that the magazine, ‘in common with all other newspapers, may have inadvertently conveyed the impression that the late Princess of Wales was in some way a neurotic, irresponsible and manipulative troublemaker who had repeatedly meddled in political matters that did not concern her’. It added: ‘We would like to express our sincere and deepest hypocrisy to all our readers on this tragic day and hope and pray that they will carry on buying our paper notwithstanding.’ The humour was lost on many and the magazine promptly found itself banned by several leading retailers; a third of sales were lost, though postal subscriptions increased as a response.
Out on the streets, two elderly Czech ladies were caught removing teddy-bears from the piles of tributes and were sentenced to a month in jail, though this was reduced on appeal after two nights behind bars. A Sardinian tourist was also spotted taking a teddy-bear and was arrested after members of the public gave chase; he was given a seven-day sentence, later reduced to a £100 fine, and on his way out of court was punched in the face by a 43-year-old man who later explained: ‘I did it for Britain.’
It wasn’t just teddy-bears that were to be found nestling amongst the flowers, cards and poems. A friend of the comedian Stewart Lee told him about seeing a model of E.T. lying in the piles, from which Lee developed a celebrated routine in which he tried to picture what could possibly have been in the minds of those who thought this was an appropriate gesture for mourning. The reality was even stranger. Upon the death of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which also occurred that week, some enterprising street traders saw an opportunity to offload unsold stocks of E.T. dolls; newly wrapped in miniature blue-and-white saris, they were offered as alleged effigies of the famous Catholic nun. Truly, it was an extraordinary, surreal week.
When the Queen did broadcast her message, it was not quite the unifying event that was hoped for. In what the Daily Telegraph called ‘the most remarkable and personal message of her reign’, she spoke of herself in the first person singular (rather than using her customary ‘one’), described Diana as an ‘exceptional and gifted human being’ and, at Campbell’s suggestion, said she was speaking ‘as a grandmother’. Blair’s evaluation was that her tone had been ‘near perfect. She managed to be a queen and a grandmother at one and the same time.’ But others, primarily those who placed themselves in Diana’s camp, were less receptive. The Queen was ‘clipped, formal, utterly without warmth and affection’, wrote Alan Clark. Those who steadfastly remained aloof from the entire event could only marvel at the state to which the monarch had been reduced. ‘She looked like a battered hostage paraded in front of the cameras to explain how well she was being treated,’ observed Linda Smith.
Then, on the Saturday, came the funeral itself, which – despite the rival claim of Ronnie Kray – really was the biggest such event since the death of Winston Churchill in 1965. And Britain’s long-asserted status as the world leader in ceremonial was triumphantly vindicated. In the space of six days, an entirely new format had been created, a blend of ritual and informality that was a breathtaking piece of theatre. To the sound of a single tolling bell, and of weeping crowds, the coffin was drawn through the streets from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey on a gun carriage, followed by five men in dark suits and black ties: Philip, Charles, William, Harry and Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer. The coffin was draped in the Royal Standard and flanked by members of the King’s Troop, but the civilian simplicity of that small group, the absence of the usual military trappings of a state occasion, was enormously affecting.
Inside the Abbey, the service included the hymn ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’, the patriotic song ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’ and Elton John’s reworking of his old tribute to Marilyn Monroe, ‘Candle in the Wind’, while Tony Blair read the lesson, the first prime minister to do so at a royal funeral (convention suggested that it should have been the Speaker of the House of Commons).
The headlines were stolen, however, by Earl Spencer, whose eulogy paid due tribute to his sister’s life and work, but also found room to attack the paparazzi and the press for making her ‘the most hunted person of the modern age’. He took a sideswipe at the way Diana’s royal title had been stripped from her on her divorce and, in a thinly veiled passage of criticism, addressed his dead sister on the subject of her two sons: ‘I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.’ As he finished speaking, applause broke out amongst the massive crowds outside, to whom the service was being relayed, and spread, hesitantly at first and then in an unprecedented wave, into the Abbey itself.
This really was informality, breaching every known convention of British funerals. ‘Protocol changed forever during that ovation,’ wrote Tony Parsons, who was a member of the congregation. ‘It was the final reminder that Diana’s death has shown us that we need to invent protocol and traditions that reflect the needs of our own age.’ Even Tony Benn, who had no more time for the English aristocracy than he had for the monarchy, couldn’t help but be impressed: ‘that speech is worth really thinking about.’ After the service, there was a further break with tradition. Hundreds of thousands lined the roads along which the hearse drove, carrying the coffin to the Spencers’ ancestral home at Althorp in Northamptonshire, and as the procession passed, flowers were thrown in the path of the car.
Not everyone approved of the unconventional nature of the occasion. Amongst those in the crowds were members of the Edwardian Drape Society, a purist organisation of Teddy boys. When interviewed by the media, the Society’s founder Ritchie Gee explained their position: ‘Everyone here had come to pay their respect at a funeral wearing trainers and zip-up anoraks. Nobody’s got any respect anymore. Why aren’t they wearing a suit?’ Nor was Gordon Brown best pleased to discover that he wasn’t being invited to the funeral, though space was found for deputy prime minister John Prescott, and Robin Cook, the foreign secretary with whom Diana had worked on the landmines issue.
William Hague was also invited, despite having signally failed to impress over the last few days. Formal and restrained in his response, he had – on the recommendation of his young adviser, George Osborne – suggested that Heathrow Airport be renamed in Diana’s honour, a proposal so irrelevant that it was scarcely noticed. The Conservatives had convinced themselves that they were starting to make up some ground on Labour, but the death of Diana halted any such advance: ‘That single event stopped our recovery in its tracks,’ commented one shadow minister. Instead they looked entirely lost in this new Britain, where public displays of emotion (‘Latin American peasant hagiolatry’, in the words of Boris Johnson) were not only acceptable but almost compulsory. A former cabinet minister expressed the confusion that had descended on the Tories: ‘I walked through the crowds in St James’s and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.’
Tony Blair, on the other hand, was universally judged to have played a blinder, and an opinion poll a month later showed him achieving record levels of approval. In terms of popular acclaim, this was the high point of his premiership.
It was also the start of the restoration of the monarchy’s fortunes. A Gallup poll published in the Daily Telegraph the following week showed that half the country felt that Diana’s death and funeral had damaged the public standing of the Queen and the royal family, and 71 per cent thought that the monarchy should move towards the much-vaunted Dutch model. But these were instant responses that faded rapidly, and were in any case balanced by the 51 per cent who believed that William, not Charles, should be the next king. For the image of the two young princes accompanying their mother’s coffin was more potent even than the naked flagpole on Buckingham Palace. ‘Their dignity and bravery in the face of such overwhelming grief wrenched the heart of a nation,’ wrote Tony Parsons. ‘How could anyone talk about getting rid of the royal family when these two boys are its future?’
The crowds on the streets, and the tens of millions watching on television, were expressing not republican sympathies but, at most, an annoyance with the royal establishment for failing to recognise that Diana was the kind of royal the country now wanted; aristocratic and privileged still, but glamorous, impulsive and emotional as well – heritage, celebrity and the common touch all rolled into one. Traditional values in a modern setting, as John Prescott liked to say of the Labour Party.
In Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, even the Queen was to be found admiring the Republican prime minister, Jack Barker, and ‘his obvious flair for public relations. If only she had been able to call on the skills of somebody like Jack in the Buckingham Palace Press Office!’ Now, in real life, she had been able to see the workings of Alastair Campbell and his team close up, as they coordinated the funeral arrangements and choreographed the royals’ public response. From here on, the publicity was to be handled a little more deftly than it had been in the past. Prince Charles was photographed with the Spice Girls, and found that his official overseas trips attracted considerably more media attention than they had in the past. The Queen was photographed in a pub, and in her husband’s privately owned black cab, which had been converted to run on natural gas, though it was still driven by a liveried chauffeur – an environmentally friendly mix of deference and democracy.
Underneath, however, nothing fundamental had changed. Tony Blair had captured the public mood perfectly in that week, demonstrating, in Andrew Rawnsley’s words, ‘that his own instincts were often his most reliable focus group. He defined public sentiment and by doing so surfed and channelled the emotion that was washing across much of Britain.’ But then Blair seemed to get cold feet, unsure what to do with this popular mandate. The logic of his politics demanded the reform of the monarchy, but no attempt was made to implement any transformation. Perhaps he recognised that any serious changes to the constitution would impact less upon the monarchy than upon the enormous powers enjoyed by the prime minister by virtue of exercising the royal prerogative.
Or perhaps it was simple confusion about what that week really meant. ‘I couldn’t work out if it was all about her, or all about them, or all about a desire for a new way of doing things,’ puzzled Alastair Campbell of the floral tributes, and he was not alone in his bewilderment. In retrospect, it seemed clearer that it was all of those things. There was genuine shock at the loss of Diana, the closest that Britain had ever come to the death of John F. Kennedy, but there was also a collective wallowing, followed by a slightly guilty sensation that the indulgence might have been a little more pleasurable than decorum demanded. ‘Those weeping crowds and daytime telly presenters may feel something but it’s not grief,’ observed Linda Smith. ‘It’s New Grief, Virtual Grief, grief with most of the pain taken out. It’s the feeling you get from a sad film.’
That was true up to a point, but it missed the communality of the experience. Chris Smith, the culture secretary, talked of ‘a real feeling that we are coming together as a nation, in shared grief but in shared purpose too’, and if that perception soon came to seem trite at best, it nonetheless reflected the deluded mood of the moment. The fact that almost everyone, certainly everyone whose voice was heard in public, was expressing the same thing was a source of great reassurance. It seemed as though there was such a thing as society, after all. There was even a suspicion that it might be classless, since the masses felt such a personal connection with their chosen representative, the daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer.
Diana had set new standards for royalty, embracing the media age in a way that none had attempted before, and her actions and her persona over the last few years had constituted an implied rebuke to tradition. She represented a leap into the unknown for a monarchy that was still largely transfixed by the memory of how it had behaved during the war, pursuing her own happiness at the same time as doing her duty. And that ‘new way of doing things’, identified by Campbell, had a wider resonance. ‘Taking on the establishment was applauded, but few people thought it could succeed,’ reflected Mark Steel, ‘so it felt as if many people wanted someone else to rebel on their behalf. Part of the Diana phenomenon was a curious manifestation of this mood.’
Steel also, however, discovered that the mood of the moment was less than friendly towards those who weren’t swept up in the fervour. Appearing on a television show, he tried out a joke about how we would be able to remember the marriages of the current royal family more easily than those of Henry VIII: ‘Divorced, divorced, divorced. Divorced, divorced, crashed.’ He reported: ‘There was a collective yelp, and I wasn’t asked back.’ In due course, jokes about Diana did gradually emerge, so that in 1998 Angus Deayton could talk on Have I Got News for You about growing calls for a bank holiday to be instituted in memory of Diana: ‘It’s felt that the best way to commemorate her death would be for everyone to get in their cars and drive out of the cities as fast as they can.’
But the veneration in the press continued. When, at the end of 1998, the News of the World drew up a list of the hundred greatest Britons of the last millennium, it put Diana at number one, beating Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin and William Shakespeare.
Diana’s death had some curious consequences. There were marketing opportunities: Pizza Express added leeks to their vegetarian pizza and rebranded it the Pizza Diana (with 25p of the £5.80 price going to the Princess Diana Memorial Fund), while Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind 1997’ sold 33 million copies worldwide, reaching the top of the charts in twenty countries and spending forty-six weeks at number one in Canada. Hardly more elevated was the Spencer family’s announcement that tickets would be made available for those who wanted to visit the grave, at just £9.50 a head; the ticketing switchboard was reported to have received eight million phone calls on the first day.
Predictably the Press Complaints Commission issued a new code of conduct in response to the death, stating explicitly: ‘Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence.’ It also said that ‘the use of long-lens photography to take pictures of people in private places without their consent is unacceptable’. No one really expected this code to make any difference, and indeed it didn’t. Nonetheless, Rupert Murdoch was said to have expressed some satisfaction that his papers would no longer have to pay inflated sums for paparazzi photos of Diana.
There were also odd casualties. In December 1997 Channel 4 aired a documentary, Looking Like Diana, in which three Diana lookalikes explained that the bottom had dropped out of the market since her death; after a decade of living off their looks, they’d all moved on to other jobs. The Swedish indie pop band the Wannadies found airplay hard to come by, given their name, and Kylie Minogue’s record company felt obliged to delay the release of her new album and to retitle it from its original Impossible Princess. Most regrettable of all, in terms of music, was the case of Britpop founders Denim, who, after five years of failing to sell records, finally seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. They had signed to a major record label, EMI, and their new release was Radio 1’s single of the week. Unfortunately it was due for release on the day after Diana died, and it was pulled from the schedules, its title – ‘Summer Smash’ – being deemed inappropriate in the circumstances.
In fact, the non-appearance of that Denim single was symbolic of the times. For Britpop and Cool Britannia did not long survive Diana. Her death seemed to mark the end of the brief period in which control of popular culture had lain in the hands of the anti-Thatcher generation, for that strange week allowed no space for the ironic detachment that had been characteristic of so much of the early 1990s.
It was a theme explored in David Baddiel’s second novel, Whatever Love Means (2000), which opened with the death of Diana and depicted its far-ranging effects on a small group of friends. Joe knows that, for those who appear consumed by grief, ‘it wasn’t her they connected with, but hysteria – the clamour of it, chiming with their own needs, saying to them what they most wanted to hear, come, here is identity’. Unfortunately his partner, Emma, is one of those people, devastated by Diana’s death, who find their world shattered. Dissatisfied by Joe’s unfeeling response, she goes to see their friend Vic, who’s actually even more unfeeling, though in his case the lack of concern is concealed by an attack of hay fever that makes it look as though he too has been crying. In pursuit of mutual comfort and reassurance – she genuinely, he cynically – they rapidly find themselves having sex on the sofa, while in the background Richard and Judy continues to broadcast the same archive footage of Diana that has been a constant television presence all week.
The day after the funeral, Vic’s partner, Tess, is on a Eurostar train back from France, where she has been shielded from the reaction at home. Finding a copy of the Star, she makes a joke about its front page (a picture of a cloud in the shape of Diana’s face, headlined DI IN THE SKY). In reply, the woman sitting opposite her bursts into tears, and the rest of the carriage is so appalled that ‘H.M. Bateman would’ve turned in his grave to think he’d missed the chance of caricaturing it’. She’d assumed that ‘she would find, away from the predictable outpouring of plebeian grief, that most people thought like her, and that she could easily chime with her own kind by being funny about it all’. But she is wrong, and her mistaken perception of the national mood reflects the confusion of a generation that found its sense of irony had become out of date overnight.