When Britain lost its grip: A Millennial remembers Diana

Eating dinner with a friend the other day the unavoidable subject of Princess Diana came up. I asked him what he remembered of her death:

‘I remember feeling very annoyed that my morning cartoons had been cancelled. And when I went upstairs to tell my parents that she’d died, I was told it was just a bad dream’.

My friend was seven at the time, myself a mere six years of age. What I do remember therefore is hazy. William and Harry standing forlornly with their mother’s coffin trailing past is the only definitive image I can recall. But I also remember Diana’s name lingering in the air for some years afterwards, like a persistent echo. Her presence seemed to hang in the atmosphere, haunting a world unable and unwilling to release her.

But looking back in retrospect two decades later and with a dash of maturity on my side is like recalling a bad dream. August 1997 feels like an alternate universe, one where mass hysteria and seething emotion boiled over unhindered. Where a tyranny of overwrought anguish spurred on the public’s competitive grief. A place where Elton John could rerelease Candle in the Wind as one of history’s highest selling singles, the original’s tragic subtlety replaced by cringeworthy gushiness and shameless sensationalism. I needed a good wash after hearing ‘goodbye England’s rose’ for the first time recently.

Of course Elton was merely giving the public what it wanted, a grand finale to the spectacle that constituted much of Diana’s life. In the aftermath of her death everyone was expected to join the frenzied circus act or risk its displeasure. The Queen, who refused initially to dance for the crowd, suffered its wrath. But how many at the time considered that Her Majesty’s duties were to her grandsons first. And grieving the loss of their mother it seems horrifying that they were thrown to the wolves. Sorry, I mean the British public. People who despite never having even met the woman decided to out-wail her own blood and kin, convinced that their grief was equal to that of her sons. How dismal the sight of the princes forced to survey the wasteland of cheap, mass-produced rubbish hurled before Kensington Palace like a Disneyfied bin night. Understandably William was baffled at having to compete with the general public in grief.

It seems hard to accept that these people could have genuinely felt such grief or have honestly felt much concern for Diana’s sons. I can’t help but suspect that for many it was a bit of cathartic fun, like rewatching the films guaranteed to make you cry. As Jonathan Freedland suggested, ‘for many millions what they had lost was not so much a real person as a beloved character in a story. They grieved but then they moved on - to new soaps, new celebrities, new heroines’.

The Queen, released almost a decade later and starring Helen Mirren, did much to vindicate Her Majesty’s actions in the wake of Diana’s death. Rather than the ice-queen, locked away within her remote frozen fortress, we saw her acting as a grandmother. Those who in 1997 threw a tantrum over the Royal Family’s silence obviously forgot that the Queen’s priorities lay first with her family and not with random members of the public. Having said that, her address to the nation was necessary. Like a mother comforting her upset children, the Queen helped the nation get a bloody grip on things.

So at the twentieth anniversary I feel ambivalent. Sad of course at the death of a compassionate young woman. But also bewilderment at the country’s reaction to it, treating the occasion like a heart-rending episode of Emmerdale. Instead of focussing on her as the People’s Princess, the public needed to remember that she was the princes’ mother first.