From the archive: Life without Diana

October 1997: How will we remember her?

Photo by Hulton Arcive / Getty Images

A month after Princess Diana’s death on 31 August 1997, the journalist and former New Statesman editor John Lloyd asked whether the experience of losing the “people’s princess” would change the British public’s self-conception – and its relationship with the monarchy – for good.

Will Diana, Princess of Wales, drop out of our public life leaving little but a memory – fond, sentimental, disgusted – of her good and bad works, the compelling tales she allowed to be told about her and the huge scenes of hysteria that greeted her death? Many, wearied or embarrassed, would like it to be so; and, indeed, life and the agenda of public affairs has moved on. But it is more likely that something important has happened; though not what we have been told – and are still being told.

It is clear that the monarchy is not threatened. Tony Blair made his point that the royals should modernise: he irritated the Palace by dubbing her the People’s Princess and decreeing a People’s funeral. But since then he has rowed back sharply, publicly and privately supporting the Prince of Wales and boosting his chances of succession.

In fact Diana may have thrown the crown prince a life-line: he is now being celebrated as a convert to the let-it-all-emote art his former wife perfected. In Manchester last week he told a crowd “how particularly moved and enormously comforted my children and I were – indeed still are – by the public’s response to Diana’s death… I am unbelievably proud of the children.”

For this speech, with its mix of his own formality (“particularly moved”) and Diana-speak (“unbelievably proud”), he was hugged and kissed. An unnamed acquaintance was helpfully quoted as saying: “How can we not open our arms to Charles as a widower and single parent who must raise his boys under such tragic circumstances?” Charles has an opening, which he appears able to take, to reinvent himself as a modern father.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have no such opening, and may decline in esteem as their son moves up. Diana always saw them as hostile; she saw the Queen Mother as baleful, and the Queen under her mother’s influence still, both women believing in a royal destiny which cannot be diluted with touchy-feely populism. If the public shift to Charles proves permanent, the succession is more secure than it has been since the separation.

The first book to be rushed out – Diana, a Tribute by the photographer Tim Graham – went up to the top spot in the best-sellers’ list on its first full week of sales a week ago and is expected by its publisher, Weidenfeld, to exceed a take of £1 million; not bad for a collection of old pictures and some soppy text put together in bouts of all-night working. But a number of big publishers, including Penguin and Hodder, have turned away all offers of books so far. “We decided early on we didn’t want to get involved in any scissors-and-paste jobs,” says Martin Neild, Hodder’s managing director.

Some in the book trade go further. Michael Sissons, head of the big literary agency AD Peters, says his company also decided against handling any Diana books. “I was offered the chance to represent someone who came in with a big proposal. I decided not. What more is there to say?”

The Princess Diana Fund had collected, earlier this week, £8 million, a respectable but not a vast amount. It is likely, however, to grow hugely to an estimated £100 million by the end of the year – as the proceeds from books, tapes, CDs and other ventures flood into it, leaving the charity world, which Diana bestraddled like a colossus, wondering how it will be spent by fund trustees who have no experience of the non-profit world. The charities dealing with areas that were Diana’s particular concern – Aids, leprosy and ballet among them – are small and could be unbalanced by sudden infusions of cash; the criteria under which other charities might benefit have not been announced, and will be hard to frame.

Diana’s last years and her death illuminated a world in which she partly lived, a world that has grown enormously in importance in the nineties. It is the world of the supersonic rich, dominated by the 150 US billionaires, whose charitable giving is apotheosised by the gift last month of $1 billion to the UN by Ted Turner, the creator of CNN. He and his wife, Jane Fonda, have become avid environmentalists; he told his station’s ace interviewer Larry King that “The polar icecaps are melting! I got an island and I know that the ocean is rising because I watched my beach getting washed away!” (Truly, all politics are local.)

At the same time, the Turners have 15 homes and Fonda is reported to have a flat of her own beneath the couple’s apartment in Atlanta occupied solely by her dresses.

Great wealth is locking itself into great giving; it is one of the currencies of the life and position of the extraordinarily rich. The postwar presumption that very big capitalists were not moral people is being replaced, bit by bit, by the opposite assumption. As richer nations seek to diminish their support for their own and the developing world’s poor, billionaires such as Turner, Bill Gates of Microsoft and the financier George Soros step in, to remould the world according to their notions.

In an interview in the current issue of Hello! Gulu Lalvani, an industrialist and friend of Diana’s, revealed that the princess “seriously felt she could have helped with the Northern Ireland situation”. For those of supersonic wealth no project seems impervious to the power of money or fame or charm. Diana lit this world and obscured it: the sheer power of the publicity mobilised about her hid the calculations, growth and importance of a world in which figures such as Mother Teresa of Calcutta could – with Diana – be granted an instant sainthood.

Diana was both patron and saint of this world, and if it is genuinely bereaved by her passing its mega-giving will tend to grow. It is a world that, as she developed in self-confidence, offered her a more cosmopolitan, richer and more mobile home than the British royal family ever could. Its main actors – Turner, Soros, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Branson – like to see themselves, without any discernible irony, as “outsiders”. In turn, they adopted the “outsider” Diana as their mascot. This is the new establishment, formed by dis-establishing the old. The royal family is easily demonised as “out of touch”, “cold”, “arrogant”. The fact that it is upper-class English and the new Dis-establishment is largely made up of Americans who believe the Hollywood stereotype that insists every villain speaks with an upper-class English accent, completes the plot. Diana – who said towards the end of her life that she would have preferred to live in America – fed the designer Anglophobia of this circle by being their kind of English rose.

The tabloid newspapers have revealed themselves as craven in their posthumous embrace of the sainthood myth. More charitably, their editors and writers were probably the most genuinely bereaved people in the country. One senior tabloid executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the Diana cult within his newspaper: “We were completely obsessed by her. We would sit around all the time talking about what was right for her, what she should be doing, if she was happy. People here really did love her.

When Mother Teresa died, I caught myself thinking, if Diana had not died before her, we would have covered her death through Diana: we would have been running pics of Teresa with Diana. Those who argued against overdoing it on Diana while she was alive always came back to the hard fact: when you had a front page on her, the sales went up. It was always the clincher.”

The clincher has not changed. Momentarily cowed by what might have been a public backlash against their “intrusiveness”, tabloids and broadsheets are scrapping viciously once more over the reprinting on Monday in the Times and Sun of excerpts from Andrew Morton’s book Diana, Her True Story – In Her Own Words. The book is an update of Morton’s Diana, Her True Story, which made him £4 million after its publication five years ago; the newness of it is the revelation that Diana provided nearly all of the material for the book through interviews with Morton conducted via an intermediary so that she could deny meeting him.

Nauseating though the prose and the pose both are, Morton is right to make clear what had previously been known to only a few. The rival papers naturally sought sales on Tuesday by running pages of equally awful stuff condemning the project and pleading (in the Daily Express‘s case, on pages 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11) for the memory to be undisturbed. Any belief that press morals had fundamentally changed was killed; the principle that Diana is good for business stills all debate. “Intrusive” shots of the rich and powerful and beautiful, especially of their soon-to-be-rich-and-powerful children, will be somewhat curbed for a while under rules drawn up by Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission; but the real intrusion continues. That is an intrusion into us, at least as much as an intrusion into the living or dead royals, a manipulation of our emotions by men and women who weave fictions round a figure whose sexual allure, royalty, professed boundless charity, wealth and victimhood communicated with the shallowest of our desires and the deepest of our longings and resentments.

That she had this connection with our psyches is not now in doubt. Doctors and therapists up and down the country testify to a rash of psychic and physical complaints relating to Diana.

Carol Cooper, a general practitioner, said: “The day after she died people began appearing in the surgery in emotional distress. They often didn’t say at first what was causing it, but then it would come out – Diana.”

Andre Tylee, also a GP and director of the Royal College of General Practitioners’ mental health unit went further, claiming that “The country is experiencing mourning and grief on a global scale.” A young ambulanceman reported that he and his colleagues in a London depot receive three or four calls a week from patients who explain their emergency call by saying “I just haven’t felt right since the day Diana died.”

The Jungian psychotherapist Jane Haynes, in a paper written on the testimony of a number of her analysands in sessions just after the death of the princess, wrote: “During the week after the princess’s death I came to terms with the fact that for approximately 35 hours a week my consulting room was filled with a unique outpouring of affects and responses to a tragedy which superseded almost every other personal preoccupation.” She concluded: “Diana was different. Diana, stripped of her royal title, became ‘Princess of Hearts and of the People’. She was collectively perceived as moving among the ‘constituency of the rejected’… she bared her wounds to public scrutiny. I would designate her the Princess of Narcissism. She sought for one of her many reflections amongst the rejected and the dying. One who literally wore her heart on her sleeve.”

It is early yet to understand what the image of Diana, pumped through the veins of our society as none other has ever been, has done to us. It is, to be sure, a new phenomenon; those of us who felt a deepening distaste for the show have had to come to terms with its power. The goo, however, is now wearing off and we confront the fact of what the US columnist George Will has called (in Newsweek, itself was a considerable goo machine) “a spontaneous act of mass parasitism… the catharsis of emotional exhibitionism”.

As Haynes puts it: “It remains to be seen whether she will have permanently shifted the emotional complexion of a national identity.”

It is that which has yet to be understood; the task is clearly a large one.

[Further reading: From the archive: The King’s decision]