Diana: Story of a Princess

by Tim Clayton

  * * *

  Tony Blair’s public sorrow began a week of confessional distress. The handful of people who came to Buckingham, Kensington and St James’s Palaces early on Sunday morning with wreaths and bunches of flowers soon swelled into an army bearing cellophane. Acres of park and gravel driveway were quickly swamped with flowers, cards and teddy bears. One image dominated: the Queen of Hearts, lifted from packs of playing cards, drawn in crayon on hand-made posters. People wept on the steps of the Victoria Monument, their friends consoling them.

  At St James’s Palace a book of condolences was opened and soon queues four hundred yards long stretched down the Mall. The number of books was multiplied to ease the congestion, but the queues grew longer still. People waited for twelve hours to sign their names. As they did, they talked to strangers, a phenomenon considered so un-English that it generated great comment. They talked of their own lives and sadnesses and made, they said, new friends.

  Many of the people carrying the flowers and the gifts would have agreed with the previous week’s newspaper criticism of Diana. But not now. Now she was a saint – no, a martyr. A martyr to love, to compassion, to everything that was good. And so, of necessity, killed by everything that was not good: by the press, by the royals, by ‘them’. Journalists were drawn to these scenes, but their presence was not always welcome. Scuffles broke out as mourners jostled, spat at and abused photographers.

  The television crews decided that this was the place to interview their pundits, and so Anthony Holden found himself with an American TV crew on a platform outside Buckingham Palace. Soon he was:

  live on a breakfast show at noon London time trying to explain to an American audience why there was no flag at half-mast on the Buckingham Palace flagpole. The camera panned around and every other public building in Whitehall and Westminster had a flag at half-mast, and I was trying to explain that the flag never flies at half-mast, that the monarch never dies, and anyway they don’t have a regular flag, they have the Royal Standard. It shows whether the monarch’s in residence or not, and she’s not because she’s at Balmoral.

  Before long television pictures of the Royal Standard flying high at Balmoral illustrated his point, and irritated the crowd some more. Why was it not at half-mast? As Holden dispensed royal lore to North America, voices from the crowd urged him to speak out on their behalf. He turned to thank them:

  and I got this voice in my ear from New York saying, ‘This is great, do it, do it.’

  The Queen should have been leaping into action because a national icon was dead in tragic circumstances, regardless of whether it was her daughter-in-law and regardless of what she thought of her and all the trouble she’d caused the monarchy.

  It made it clear to me that although Diana had begun life as a very establishment figure, the daughter of an earl who married a future king, by the end of her life she was anti-establishment. She had come to represent all sorts of minority groups, the people who turned up, people who would never otherwise have dreamed of turning up to any kind of royal event.

  Who were these people? Early television coverage had focused on those who claimed Diana as their anti-establishment Princess. But by mid-week the mourning had swept through Britain’s suburbs and shires and brought their representatives to SW1 in tens of thousands. The trains of south-east England were filled with women carrying flowers, as florists scoured Europe for fresh supplies. The Observer undertook its own analysis for the following Sunday’s issue: outside the gates 80 per cent were women, and most were aged between twenty-five and forty, claimed to be middle class and read the Daily Mail or the Sun. The mothers of Middle England were camped in front of the Palace, behaving most strangely with little shrines and pictures of Diana. The knick-knack makers ran off T-shirts with slogans such as ‘In Loving Memory of Princess Diana: Born a Princess, Died a Saint’. Another bore the legend ‘Fuck off Paparazzi’. The pilgrims who bought such souvenirs were not natural republicans: 72 per cent thought William should succeed to the throne. But they were distinctly unimpressed with Prince Charles and, with every passing day she spent in Balmoral, with the Queen as well.

  * * *

  ANTHONY HOLDEN: I certainly thought that if they didn’t respond to this public mood it was going to be some sort of bloodless revolution. What was interesting was that the royal machine for once clearly was at a complete loss as to how to handle this. I called Christopher Hitchens and said this was the most extraordinary manifestation of some sort of public feeling that had happened in our lifetimes and that he should get his ass over to take a look.

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Anthony rang me insistently and said, ‘If you don’t come over here now and see this, you’ll be really sorry, you won’t believe it if you don’t see it, what’s happening to public opinion, I almost think the Royal Family could be swept away this week.’

  ANTHONY HOLDEN: The crowd who I moved among every day were saying to me that they thought unless something happened the Queen would get booed at the funeral on the Saturday and that Charles, if he wandered more than six feet from his sons, would get pelted with rotten tomatoes. And the atmosphere was such that I believed it.

  CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I doubted he was right, and I differ with him. I wish he hadn’t ventriloquised that crowd, in fact, because it became a sort of sentimental surrogate royalism, the ‘show us you care, ma’am’ royalism.

  Mass hysteria is never attractive. I couldn’t see what Tony claimed to see, which was the embryonic development of a grown-up republican and democratic political style. I can tell you I’ve been a soapbox artist myself, and if you can get a crowd worked up there’s no feeling exactly like it, but if you don’t distrust yourself when you’re doing it a little bit, even if you’re sure you’re in the right, then you ought to.

  Derek Draper had been political adviser to Cabinet minister Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair’s chief strategist. Draper was well aware of the currents of opinion flowing through the government machine that week:

  Alastair Campbell [Blair’s spokesman] and Angie Hunter [Campbell’s deputy] had to go from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace to have all these meetings about the funeral. They were going through the crowds and Alastair reported back to Blair that it was like when you come out of a football match and a team has lost and there is something in the air, there’s a crackle in the air.

  ITN’s royal reporter, Nicholas Owen, felt the crackle too.

  About the Tuesday, I think it was. I went to the Mall and a woman came up to me and said, ‘Oh, you’re that chap from the telly, can I just ask you this: why isn’t the Queen here? That’s what I want to know, why isn’t the Queen here?’ The woman was really angry, and she wasn’t one of those nutty people who turn up at royal events. She was a straightforward sort of lady, but she was jolly cross. And I went back to the studio and told my bosses about all this, and their reaction was exactly the same as I know newspaper editors reaction was. ‘This is dangerous stuff.’

  Police reports confirmed both views, and made their way, via the Home Office, to Downing Street and Balmoral. Nicholas Owen heard the result.

  A very good source told me that there was a meeting to discuss the funeral, at which senior police officers and royal officials and Special Branch were involved. A senior police officer at that meeting, I am told, expressed the view that the Prince of Wales would be booed or worse if he was to turn up in London at such a sensitive time.

  The Queen and Prince Philip appeared paralysed in the face of this advice. Tony Blair considered his own position. Those close to him say that he wasn’t immediately attracted to the idea of helping the Windsors. He had once expressed republican views and many in his party still did, including, it was said, at least half the Cabinet. But as the crowds grew larger, and the headlines nastier, the mood in No. 10 hardened. Blair, Mandelson and Campbell all came to believe that a constitutional crisis was not what their new administration needed.

  * * *

  A friend who phoned Lord Palumbo from Arg
entina told him that labourers were crying in the fields. In New York Ed Mathews thought that it brought ‘the greatest outpouring of common grief for someone other than John Kennedy’.

  In a jaded world you’re always looking for somebody that’s just trying to go out and make a difference. We decided to put a book of condolences in our lobby on Twenty-Third Street here in our main building in Manhattan. And we received an endless stream of visitors. The police had to cordon off the block to deal with the line of people.

  I think that there are cases where the media make the story larger than it is. In this particular case they simply reported the story. Throughout the city and throughout the United States people were trying to find some public way to say that they were sorry that this happened. To say to her children, I guess, or maybe to themselves, that they were sorry that this happened, that this was one person that had touched them.

  There were some who thought that the blanket coverage was overblown and that sentimentality was stifling good judgment. Predictably, Hitchens was one, so he was repeatedly invited to be the token bolshy pundit on American television.

  We were not told by objective reporters, ‘There are masses of people mourning her death in very intense ways’; we were told, ‘We are all mourning her death’ – which I object to because I wasn’t, and nor was anybody I knew.

  Few indeed dared remind the public that Diana had had faults. After her funeral A.N. Wilson pointed out that she had recently abandoned most of the charities represented there, and that, rich throughout her life, ‘in latter years she was extravagant on a scale that would have made Marie Antoinette blush’. His explanation for this public forgetfulness was that people were in love with Diana – men for obvious reasons, women ‘because she went public with many of their concerns’.

  Martin Amis wrote of ‘a bereavement uniquely contaminated by the market forces of fame’. Diana was beautiful, had a gift for love and believed she could heal. But she was ‘a phenomenon of pure stardom’ and ‘if power corrupts the self, then absolute fame must surely distort it’. In the end, Amis concluded, ‘Diana was a mirror, not a lamp.’

  It was an apt description. Throughout this story of magic and manipulation, Diana had reflected back different facets of the millions who had gazed fascinated upon her. Kindness and compassion had sometimes shone, at their brilliant best, and courage too. But, at other times, she had mirrored her onlookers’ weakness for gossip and for feuding. She was the people’s princess after all: the people who run the shelters and the hostels, the people who buy those sleazy newspapers when the pubs are shut.

  * * *

  By Wednesday evening, Anthony Holden had been joined by other television and press reporters in wondering aloud what the Queen and her family were doing at Balmoral. Apart from a terse statement on Sunday morning, nothing had yet been said by Britain’s head of state about the death of her daughter-in-law, the mother of a future King. Protocol about flags at Buckingham Palace sounded more ridiculous each time it was repeated. Clearly something needed to be done differently, even if it was only to find a second flagpole. Jon Snow’s sources kept him informed about discussions within the Palace and within the Cabinet:

  There were real worries, according to my ministerial source, about what kind of reception the Queen was going to get if she should set her face out publicly in the Mall. The worry was things would be thrown, that people would jeer or shout, or abuse her.

  On Thursday the royals returned. Diana’s brothers-in-law were the first to emerge among the crowds. It was not an accident, as Derek Draper well knew. It was a testing of the water.

  When they agreed to the walkabouts what they agreed was that Andrew and Edward would go out first and see what happened. Blair and Campbell and the Queen were watching that to see what happened. Would they be jostled, spat at? I mean, people had been calling Buckingham Palace and swearing at whoever answered the phone. Now, as it happened, the deference of the great British people took over and everyone sort of immediately doffed their cap and said, ‘Oh, now they’re here we’re going to treat them like the royalty they are,’ and so it was diffused.

  And of course they always had the ace up their sleeve of the two boys, because they weren’t seen as part of the House of Windsor. They were seen as her kids. Ironic, because of course they literally are the future of the House of Windsor.

  The coast was clear. Next it was the Queen’s turn to brave the crowds. Jon Snow’s contact in the Palace told him about the continued royal anxiety.

  The decision was taken that they should do it as near the gates of Buckingham Palace as possible, so that an escape route existed if anything went wrong. But my royal source says that even the Queen was worried about what kind of a reception she was going to get: eggs, rotten tomatoes, abuse. There was a real fear, fear perhaps that she’d never previously experienced in her reign. As it happened, despite the fact that they did it right at the very tip of the Mall and as near Buckingham Palace as they could do it, it went like a charm.

  And so Charles, William and Harry walked out among the mourners too and marvelled at the carpet of flowers. Many messages expressed sympathy for the boys, but few for Charles. The one that said ‘Diana may you rest in peace. Charles may you never rest in peace’ was not exceptional. In a most unroyal moment, Charles held Harry’s hand.

  On Friday evening the Queen spoke to her people, her image projected on screens specially erected so that the crowds could watch television images of the funeral the next day. She did not indulge the nation’s grief as Tony Blair had done, but her upper lip quivered more than it had ever been seen to quiver before. She spoke, she said, to her people from her heart, and ‘as a grandmother’. Derek Draper knew the story behind the words on the royal autocue.

  When the Palace officials finally agreed to facilitate that, they said, ‘She’s going to do it at four o’clock,’ and Alastair Campbell said, ‘Well, that’s no good, she needs to do it live into the teatime news,’ and one of them turned round and said, ‘The Queen does not do live.’

  But she did, speaking words finessed in Downing Street.

  The draft of her speech came into Downing Street and there was no emotion in it at all, but Alastair, being very smart, managed to get phrases like ‘as a grandmother’, blah, blah, blah, and all those kinds of things into the speech.

  * * *

  There had been immediate disagreements about the funeral. The Queen’s office argued for a private family ceremony, feasible to arrange and in keeping with Diana’s recent status as a private individual. Prince Charles’s office and the Prime Minister were both in favour of the large-scale national event that seemed to be what the people wanted. They felt that this would help to unify the country and provide catharsis for the turbulent emotions aroused by Diana’s sudden death. Lord Airlie chaired a funeral committee that was not always harmonious, but which produced a stunningly effective event. Time was only one of the problems they had to cope with, as Vivienne Parry explains:

  In many ways the funeral was a nightmare to organise. The people who were running her [Diana’s] office at the time had only been there for a matter of months. So there was no sense of past history, of who she’d been involved with previously. Also Diana lived her life in compartments and there were people that actually nobody knew about at all who were friends.

  In the end a number of her former staff were approached and they went through some of the events and organisations and people that she had been involved with in their time, and so a list was compiled in that way.

  On the evening before the ceremony, Victor Adebowale, invitation in pocket, wandered through London’s candlelit parks.

  The evening before the funeral, thousands of people had come down to London just to be able to be together. It was a very odd event. I remember picking my way through these crowds to get to the studio to do an interview, and just bumped into this friend of mine who I’d not seen for a good few months. I’d always thought he was a bit of an anti-royalist rea
lly, and there he was with his mother, with a tent on the pavement, kipping out.

  I’m like, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he just said he had to come. I was just like, ‘Wow!’ This was not somebody I was expecting to be there at all, he was taking meaning out of this event that I didn’t expect him to take, and there he was with his mother of all people, who was incredibly emotional about it. . . . I remember sitting on the top of Westminster Hall looking down on a crowd of a couple of hundred thousand people camped out; and talking to people and seeing people absolutely gobsmacked.

  By the next morning more than a million extra people had moved into the city. People in sleeping bags, sitting around, surrounded by flickering candles, and around and above them the technology of the world’s media with arc and floodlights and cameras on giant cranes. No other event in the history of television received such intense coverage. It bettered even the wedding. The BBC broadcast pictures to 187 countries, ITN to 45, CNN to 210. The American networks flew over their most famous names with hundreds of support staff. A hundred camera positions commanded the procession route. Helicopters were ready to escort the coffin to Northamptonshire. In Tokyo, coverage was displayed on giant video screens in main shopping centres. In America, millions rose before dawn to watch.