The Princess and Her Pea-Sized LegacyDiana didn't change Britain.
Posted Monday, Sept. 3, 2007, at 8:07 PM ET"She was the people's princess. And that's how she will … remain." I marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the princess of Wales by watching Tony Blair's sob-choked 1997 tribute to Lady Diana on YouTube. Like some 89 percent of Britons, I can, of course, remember where I was when the BBC announced her death in a car crash in Paris, where I was when I saw Blair's tribute the first time around, and where I was when Elton John sang "Goodbye England's Rose" at her funeral in Westminster Abbey. Though outside the country for the first two events, I flew back to London (where I then lived) in time for the third and arrived in a country where everyone had apparently gone insane.
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StumbleUponFamously, there were mountains of flowers everywhere, not only in front of Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace but in front of the various gyms and restaurants Diana was so often photographed entering and leaving. Something like hysteria reigned in newsrooms too. An editor of my acquaintance told me afterward that she had felt like a parody of an editor in a movie: "I kept shouting, 'Gush! Gush! Gush!' " So weird were the mob emotions, in particular the crowds baying for the queen, that Hollywood inexplicably made an excellent film about the whole affair.
Yet there was also a good deal of quiet grumbling. "Wasn't it ghastly," someone said to me a few days later: He meant the funeral, not the accident. Someone else calculated that the 1 million people who lined the route of the funeral procession represented at most 2 percent of the population: As many as 98 percent of Britons could thus have been utterly indifferent, and this week a few of them said so. "Diana just another dead glamorous celebrity," read the headline of a Daily Telegraph article that compared the 10th anniversary events to the annual rituals at Graceland and called the late princess the "patron saint" of the "completely self-obsessed."
In fairness, I should note that the grumblers don't deny the tragedy of the princess's death—of course it's sad when a young mother dies suddenly. But they do rightly cast skepticism on the notion, prevalent outside Britain, that Diana's death somehow "changed" the country forever. Though this latter idea is often repeated—among other places on the cover of Time International last week—as time goes on, it looks ever more absurd.
In fact, the genuinely bizarre aspect of the all-consuming Dianamania that gripped Britain a decade ago this week is how slight a trace it has left behind. Actually, the royal family is pretty much the same, only quieter. From Diana, they learned that there is such a thing as too much publicity. Prince Charles and his children are more rarely seen in public; the prince's current consort, Camilla Parker Bowles, is admired for holding her tongue. When the queen mother died in 2002—at age 101, the quintessence of old-style British manners—more people showed up to mourn than had appeared for the funeral of the people's princess.
Nor have there been political repercussions. It didn't take long for Britons to tire of Blair's Diana-like emotionalism (some would say his Diana-like manipulativeness). His sober replacement, Gordon Brown—a man whose name rarely appears in print without the adjective dour—is already more popular. His government is dominated by technocratic types with furrowed eyebrows and sensible centrists like his home secretary, Jacqui Smith. No sign of touchy-feelyness there.
One could argue that Diana's truest legacy is the screaming emotionalism of the British tabloids—except that it long pre-dates Diana, and in fact helped create her in the first place. It is true that if the Sun, the Mail, and the Daily Express all throw their best headline-writers onto a story, it is possible to get Britons to tie yellow ribbons round an old oak tree or hound some pathetic adulterer out of office. But then it always was. This is, after all, the country that created Beatlemania. Howling mobs—Cromwell's army, Luddites, football hooligans—have always been the flip side of the stiff upper lip.
Ironically, nowhere does Dianamania seem more irrelevant than in the place that was meant to be its shrine. Last summer I happened to find myself at the Diana Memorial at Althorp, her family's estate (you can rent it for weddings; two gay friends of mine did so) and had a look around. There were dresses, childhood photographs, condolence books. There was the original, handwritten version of the speech her brother Charles made at her funeral—framed behind glass and lit as if it were the Magna Carta.
Visitor numbers are way down from 1997, and no wonder: The whole thing feels rather irrelevant. Human beings naturally try to give deeper meaning to pointless tragedies—even where no meaning is to be found.
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Remarks from the Fray:
When Diana died, a curmudgeonly friend who was about 65 at the time commented on the mourning crowds, "It's like watching the Romans turn into Italians."
Her public career, and the reaction to her death, demonstrated that the English national character had changed deeply in the 60 years since the end of World War II. The old structure of deference hadn't just collapsed politically; it had collapsed psychologically. The upper and middle class principle of "stiff upper lip," and its working class counterpart "mustn't grumble," had been replaced by a popular culture of open emotionalism and what one might call entitlement to happiness. Diana didn't create it, but she shared it with the people who mourned her. Her conspicious sharing of their feelings (hardly thoughts) and desires is why they mourned her.
Of course, such a culture is neither willing nor able to dominate anyone. It is the negation of the old English culture symbolized by Diana's ex-in laws, that successfully predatory alliance between landowning aristocracy and businessmen that grabbed the Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and defended it one last time in the 20th. The old English governing class lost its political, cultural and moral authority once the Empire collapsed in exhaustion and bankruptcy after World War II. It took about two generations for the process to be completed.
Somewhere between the arrival of Lend Lease in 1941 and the fiasco of Suez in 1956, the English learnt not only to believe in but to embrace their own fecklessness and incapacity. I think I'm All Right Jack is a good marker for the beginning of the trend. They have consoled themselves that they were much nicer people than the appallingly energetic and aggressive Americans who supplanted them. See Four Weddings, Sliding Doors, Love Actually and Bridget Jones I for commercially successful movies based on this English self-image of amiable passivity faced with American energy. Tony Blair was popular when he played to it; he fell from grace when he decided, anachronistically, that the UK ought to impose its will on someone by armed force.
That was the other thing my old friend the curmudgeon said about Diana's funeral: "Hitler would have gone through these people like crap through a goose."
--jack_cerf
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Sorry, but you seem to have missed the point when you dismiss Britons for being overly emotive on Diana's death. Where were you the night Diana took Britain and the world on a walking tour of a field of landmines? Who else in the world had the power to reverse their out-of-control use?
The supposedly shockingly unfamiliar outpouring of emotion that engulfed Britain when Diana died, wasn't as much to do with Diana the mother, princess, myth; it was all about the promising future Britain saw disappear right in front of their eyes, the night she died.
Diana and her entourage of tabloids, broadsheets, broadcasters, mine sweepers, & AIDS charities, were taking the country by storm into new and unfamiliar - but exceedingly compelling - terrain.
Two nights of television in Britain are forever etched in my memory (I lived there from 1985-2001). First came her interview with Martin Bashir in which she put closure on her marriage. Seeing her composure, her careful restructuring of her public persona, succeeded in improving her standing. She got high marks that night. Months later, we watched, gobsmacked, as she took her team of journalists through minefields in Angola and Bosnia, and visited limbless people in hospitals. No one had the power to influence and reverse the use of landmines until then, but in the ten years since her very short lived and only newly started campaign, landmines have become the pariah of weapons, and have declined rapidly.
After that night, the Purpose of Diana sprang to life and Britain couldn't help but notice. Suddenly it became clear that she had found the key to manipulating her fame, image, breeding in a way that put other stars to shame. Her popularity soared. After that, no one could say quite where Diana would appear next, or what she'd be campaigning for, or who she'd be with. But for the first time, those of us who never took notice, watched with interest and growing respect.
Finally, - if you remember - Tony Blair had just been elected and the country was electrified with anticipation for change. The combination of him as the new, young prime minister and Diana, forged an imagined partnership that knew no limits. Somehow the idea of Blair without Diana was unthinkable. As for the Dodi-mania that summer, there's rarely anything for tabloids to write about in the summer apart from celebrities, and because of the groundswell in her popularity by then, the papers couldn't get enough.
So the grief was not so much for the death of a princess, as for a future that Britain would never have a chance to play out.
--Dual Cit
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Applebaum is being disingenuous to suggest that Diana didn't change the way Britons see themselves, or that they tired of Blair's emotionalism. Reality TV and the out-of-character hysteria for just-retired tennis player Tim Henman both reflect a post-Diana ability for emotional vomiting that wasn't always so obvious. As for Blair, he stayed in power for ten years, and left office with a much higher approval rating (in spite of Iraq) than Thatcher after a similarly long period in office. Of course Gordon Brown is currently more popular; he's been power less than six months. At this stage in Blair's premiership he was among the most popular prime minister's in British history.
--Toby
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(9/5)