Celebrity Life, Celebrity Death
Tony Blair arrived in power in 1997 in a country spangled and sugar-coated by a revived fashion for celebrity. It offered a few politicians new opportunities but at a high cost. The glamour industry had always been with us, under different names, but had become super-charged during the sixties when rock stars, Hollywood actors and television performers were feted by the tabloid press and a new generation of women’s and urban magazines. Such interviews and profiles spread more widely during the seventies and eighties but it was not until 1988 that the shape of the modern celebrity culture became fully apparent. That year saw the first of the true modern celebrity glossies in Britain when Hello! magazine was launched on 17 May. It was the English-language version of the Spanish magazine Hola! which had already made its owner Eduardo Sanchez Junco a multi-millionaire. Its success is often credited to the exotic Marquesa de Varela, who allegedly owns 200 dogs and has four luxury homes in Uruguay, as well as New York and London. The Hello! formula be would copied by OK! from 1993 and many other magazines, to the point where yards of coloured mimicry occupied newsagents’ shelves in every town and village in the country. It sheds a sidelight on Britain’s changing public culture.
The essence of its sweetheart deal was that celebrities would be paid handsomely to be interviewed and photographed, in return for coverage that was generally fawning and never hostile. Hello! allowed the flawed-famous to shun the mean-minded sniping of the regular press, while it scooped up access to the most famous names, time after time. The sunny, good-time, upbeat, airbrushed world of Hello! was much mocked. In the real world the relentless optimism of its coverage of grinning couples and their lovely homes was inevitably followed by divorces, drunken rows, accidents and ordinary scandals. But it was hugely successful. People seemed happy to read good news about the famous and beautiful even if they knew in their hearts there was more to it than that. In the same year as Hello! arrived, 1988, the BBC put the Australian soap opera Neighbours into a prime teatime slot. At its height this show, which had been a failure on its home patch, was attracting 15 million British viewers. It too portrayed a youthful, sunny alternative to grey Britain and its early stars, notably Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, went on to become celebrities themselves. In the same year as Hello! and Neighbours, ITV launched the most successful of the daytime television shows, This Morning, hosted from Liverpool by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, a live magazine programme of frothy features and celebrity interviews. Daytime television had existed since 1983 when BBC One’s breakfast show with Frank Bough and Selina Scott arrived alongside the independent TVam. These, though, were high-minded and mainstream compared to the more popular This Morning show, television’s celebrity breakthrough moment.
What did this celebrity fantasy world, which continued to open up in all directions in the media through the nineties, have to do with anything else? For one thing it re-emphasized to alert politicians, broadcasting executives and advertisers the considerable if recently unfashionable power of optimism. Mainstream news in the nineties might be giving the British an unending stream of bleakness, burning cattle carcasses, awful murders and disasters on railway lines; millions turned all the more urgently to celebrity. They did not think that celebrities had universally happy lives, or always behaved well, or did not age.
But in celebrity-land, everyone meant well, everyone could forgive themselves and be forgiven, and there was always a new dawn breaking over the swimming pool. The celebrity who emoted, who was prepared to expose inner pain, enjoyed a land of power. And in eighties and nineties Britain, no celebrity gleamed more brightly than the beautiful, troubled Princess Diana. For fifteen years she was an ever-present presence. As an aristocratic girl, no intellectual, whose childhood had been blighted by a bad divorce, her fairytale marriage in 1981 found her pledging her life to an older man who shared few of her interests and did not seem to be in love with her.
The slow disintegration of this marriage transfixed Britain, as Diana moved from china-doll, whispery-voiced debutante, to painfully thin young mother, to increasingly charismatic and confident public figure, working crowds and seducing cameras like a new Marilyn Monroe. As eighties fashions grew more exuberant and glossy, so did she. Her eating disorder, bulimia, was one suffered by growing numbers of girls. When she admitted later to acts of self-harm, she sounded like teenagers and young women in many less privileged homes. When plagues and cruelties of the age were in the news, she appeared as visual commentator, hugging AIDS victims to show that it was safe, or campaigning against land-mines. Rumours spread of her affairs. Britain was now a divorce-prone country, in which ‘what’s best for the kids’ and ‘I deserve to be happy’ were batted across kitchen tables. So Diana was not simply a pretty woman married to a king-in-waiting, but became a kind of Barbie of the emotions, who could be dressed up in the private pain of millions. People felt, possibly wrongly, that she would understand them. Her glance was as potent as the monarch’s touch had once been for scrofula. A feverish, obsessive quality attached to her admirers, something not seen before by the Royal Family, who found all this uncomfortable and alarming. They were living symbols. She was a living icon.
After the birth of her second son Harry in 1987 Diana’s marriage was visibly failing. In 1992 the journalist Andrew Morton, to general huffing, claimed to tell Diana – the True Story in a book which described suicide attempts, blazing rows, her bulimia and her growing certainty that Prince Charles had resumed an affair with his old love, Camilla Parker Bowles, something he later confirmed in a television interview with Jonathan Dimbleby. In the December after Morton’s publication John Major announced that Charles and Diana were to separate. A wily manipulator of the media, Diana became simultaneously a huntress in the media jungle, pursuing stories that flattered her, and the hunted, both haunted and haunting. Then came her revelatory 1995 interview on Panorama. Breaking every taboo left in royal circles, she freely discussed the breakup of her marriage (‘there were three of us’), attacked the Windsors for their cruelty and promised to be ‘a queen in people’s hearts’. Finally divorced in 1996, she continued her charity work around the world and began a relationship with Dodi al-Fayed, son of the owner of Harrods. To many she was a selfish and unhinged woman endangering the monarchy. To millions her painful life-story and her fashionable readiness to share that pain, made her more valuable than formal monarchy. She was followed with close attention all round the world, her face and name a sure seller of papers and magazines. By the summer of 1997 Britain had two super-celebrities. One was Tony Blair and the other was Princess Diana.
It is therefore grimly fitting that Tony Blair’s most resonant words as Prime Minister and the moment when he reached the very height of his popularity came on the morning when Diana was killed with Dodi in a Paris underpass after their car crashed. Blair had been woken from a deep sleep at his Trimdon constituency home, first to be warned about the accident, and then to be told that Diana was dead. He was deeply shocked, and worried about what his proper role should be. After pacing round in his pyjamas and having expletive-ridden conversations with Campbell, Blair spoke to the Queen, who said that neither she nor any other senior would make a statement. He decided he had to say something. Later that morning, standing in front of his local church, looking shattered, and transmitted live around the world, he spoke for Britain. ‘I feel, like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated. Our thoughts and prayers are with Princess Diana’s family – in particular her two sons, her two boys – our hearts go out to them. We are today a nation in a state of shock…’ As he continued, his hands clenched, his voice broke and he showed he understood why she achieved her special status: ‘Her own life was often sadly touched by tragedy. She touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world with joy and with comfort. How many times shall we remember her in how many different ways, with the sick, the dying, with children, with the needy? With just a look or a gesture that spoke so much more than words, she would reveal to all of us the depth of her compassion and her humanity.’
Looking back at the words many years on, they seem strangely close to what might be said of a religious figure, someone about to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church a holy figure whose glance or touch could heal. At the time, though, they were much welcomed and assented to. Blair went on: ‘People everywhere, not just here in Britain, kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was – the People’s Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories for ever.’ These are the sentiments of one natural charismatic paying tribute to another. Blair regarded himself as the people’s Prime Minister, leading the people’s party, beyond left and right, beyond faction or ideology, a political miracle-worker with a direct line to the people’s instincts. And in the country after his impromptu eulogy to Diana, astonishingly, his approval rating rose to over 90 per cent, a figure we do not normally witness in democracies.
Blair and Campbell then paid their greatest service to an institution which represented Old Britain, or the forces of conservatism, the monarchy itself. The Queen, still angry and upset about Diana’s behaviour, wanted a quiet private funeral and wanted, also, to remain away from the scenes of public mourning in London. She stayed at Balmoral, looking after her devastated grandsons. This may well have been the grandmotherly thing to do, and the best thing for them but it could have been disastrous for her public image. There was a strange mood in the country, a frantic edge to the mourning which Blair had predicted from the first. The lack of publicly mourning Windsors, the lack of a flag at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, any suggestion of a quiet funeral, all seemed to confirm all Diana’s most bitter thoughts about a cold and unfeeling Royal Family. With Prince Charles’s full agreement Blair and his aides cajoled the Palace first into accepting that this would have to be a huge public funeral so the country’s grief could be expressed, and second that the Queen should return to London. She did, just in time to quieten a growing mood of anger about her behaviour.
This was a generational problem as well as a class one. The Queen had been brought up in a land of buttoned lips, stoicism and private grieving. She now reigned over a country which expected and almost required exhibitionism. To let it all loll out had become a guarantee of authenticity. For some years in Britain the deaths of children, or the scenes of fatal accidents, had been marked by little shrines of cellophane-wrapped flowers, cards and soft toys. In the run-up to Diana’s funeral parts of central London seemed Mediterranean in their public grieving. There were vast mounds of flowers, people sleeping out, holding placards, weeping in the streets. Strangers hugged strangers. If Blair’s words in Trimdon suggested Diana was a living saint, a sub-religious hysteria responded to the thought. People queuing to sign a book of condolence at St James’s Palace reported that her image was appearing, supernaturally, in the background of an oil painting.
The funeral itself was like no other before, and will never be mimicked. The capital was at a standstill. Among the lucky ones invited to Westminster Abbey, gay men in matching sado-masochistic leather outfits queued up with members of the Household Cavalry, in long leather boots and jangling spurs. Campaigners stood with earls, entertainers shared programmes with elderly politicians as the worlds of rock music and aristocracy, charity work and politics, jostled together. Elton John performed a hastily rewritten version of ‘Candle in the Wind’, his lament for Marilyn Monroe, and Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer made an angrily half-coded attack from the pulpit on the Windsors’ treatment of his sister. This was applauded when it was relayed outside, and then disloyal clapping was heard in the Abbey itself. Diana’s body was driven to her last resting place and showered with flowers all the way.
In another echo of Marilyn Monroe, Diana’s death would begin a worldwide rumour that she had been murdered, either because she was pregnant by Dodi or because she was about to marry a Muslim. Wild theories about British secret service agents would ripple through cyberspace, reappearing regularly in newspapers. Those same papers, implicated in the hounding of Diana by paparazzi photographers whose work they bought eagerly, were more obvious to blame. Less was said about that. Nearly a decade later an inquiry headed by a former Metropolitan Police commissioner concluded that she had died because her driver was drunk and trying to throw off pursuing photographers; this was greeted by the conspiracy theorists as another Establishment cover-up. The Queen recovered her standing after making a grim live broadcast about her wayward former daughter-in-law. She would later rise again in public esteem to be seen as one of the most successful as well as longest-serving sovereigns for centuries. A popular film about these events sealed the verdict. Blair never again quite captured the mood of the country as he did that late summer. It may be that his advice and help to the Queen in 1997 was vital to her, as well as being, in the view of some officials, thoroughly impertinent.
What did Tony Blair take from the force of the Diana cult, and of charismatic celebrity generally? His instinct for popular culture when he arrived in power was uncanny. He too would soon launch himself onto daytime television programmes, spinning an engaging and chirpy story about his life and interests, not always accurate in every detail. The New Age spiritualism which came out into the open when Diana died, with its shrines and its charms, its wide-eyed-ness, was echoed by the influence of people such as Carole Caplin in Blair’s Downing Street circle. But it went further. What other politicians failed to grasp, and he did grasp, was the power of optimism expressed by the glossy world of celebrity, and people’s readiness to forgive their favourites not just once, but again and again. In celebrity-land, if you had charisma and you apologized, or better still, bared a little of your soul, you could get away with most things short of murder. Interesting. But the world of politics would prove to be a little tougher.