Thoughts on the Death of Diana

 31 Aug 1997 — Diana’s Death

This isn’t a review of Earl Spencer’s biography of his sister Diana, but hearing that it’s being published it made me think of the years between that day in August nearly thirty years ago. I had just started living in London and for a while at least I was lucky enough to live quite comfortably despite having little money, in a bedsit in Judd Street, just by Kings Cross St Pancras and Russell Square. The job wasn’t especially good but it was a good foundation, and having access to the centre of London was a thrilling prospect. I mostly looked at things that I couldn’t afford, or wandered around near to ‘forbidden’ places like the BT Tower which proclaimed on a sign that it was not open to the public.

I would go out to the theatre or cinema when I could, and I had some American friends living in the same building. On this particular weekend they were not around, and suddenly at around 3 in the morning (I’d slept with the radio on) the news broke that Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris, along with her partner Dodi Al-Fayed and the driver of their car, who turned out to have been drunk. But, the paparazzi had being chasing the car and the blame quickly fell on them. The whole country went down a very bizarre path and back then I thought it meant everything. I even heard someone on the news say that it could have brought down the government… had the government handed it differently.

In the months before Diana had been quite conspicuous, but then she always had been and I guess on some level she courted the attention even in the beginning. She was on the cover of Vanity Fair, a now famous monochrome shot which I walked past so many times on my commute and it stuck with me even before she died…

I can’t say that for sure because I was very young in 1984 and I was pretty callow in 1997 with a skewed view of the world. I thought I knew what was going on, and I enjoyed discussions with people on USENET groups. I most probably got a bit caught up in it all although I didn’t lay a wreath. I did go and look at the enormous floral display lain against the gate of Buckingham Palace. The television channels cleared their schedules for pretty much the entire week and although there was a lot of love for Diana there was also annoyance that her death had done what it had seemingly done to the country. The Evening Standard and other newspapers probably did really well as the daily commentary got more and more excited by the various stories: from the public grief to the Royal anguish and the conspiracy theories which immediately emerged. I initially thought it was a hit of some sort, but I went off that idea as I realised that it was an inevitable result of a set of circumstances, and sometimes these things happen to people like Lady Diana Spencer, as she originally was known.

But this isn’t about the facts of that event, it’s about the scale of it and my ability to comprehend that scale. I could walk down the middle of Piccadilly on the morning of the funeral, to an empty London which suggested a science-fictional level of event. And I am sure you know where I’m going with this…

However let’s go back to January 28th, 1986 and the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I’d been a young nerd because at Primary School I asked if we could watch the launch of the first Shuttle on April 12th, 1981 (And the recovery of the Mary Rose on October 11, 1982). By 1986 I was in High School and it was the first time I put the television on in the afternoon and an international news story was being broken by the news show for young people: John Craven’s Newsround. There was not a lot of speculation, and just the one film of the explosion. This was very far removed from the rolling news and camera phone. The news presentation seems in retrospect to be unprepared and as shocked as the rest of us… and maybe that’s a more honest reaction than we’re used to now.

It was a bit like that with Diana, to begin with. The idea of rolling news came in during the first Iraq war in the 1990s. Now we were used to the visual language of rolling news being applied to the tragic death of a former Princess. So the camera trained on an RAF aircraft with Prince Charles looking stricken, accompanying the casket back home.

This is about how it felt, though. At the time my feelings were heavily influenced by the chatter, by the news. People in real life didn’t really have much to say other than it was a tragedy—and that only lasted a few days. Online and in the media there was a little more colour to the discussion, and when the TV stations cleared their schedules for days that was the start of a bit of a backlash. I don’t remember anyone I know being very outraged. That may well be because my circle was very small. Obviously people went out to look at the scenes around Buckingham Palace and obviously some of them took flowers and left messages. And people sat in front of the ongoing news and they’ll have formed their opinions. Did those millions of collected viewpoints feed into government and to Buckingham Palace (the office of the Monarchy—the family themselves were at Balmoral, on holiday). Something must have happened because on the Friday after the accident, and the day before the funeral, the Queen made a broadcast paying tribute top Diana.

And so the Saturday dawned. I went down to Green Park fairly early on and it was on my way back that I walked down the middle of Piccadilly and didn’t see anyone. I returned to my flat and watched the funeral. The suave Bible reading from the Prime Minister Tony Blair, just a week after his tea-mug tribute to the ‘People’s Princess’ a week previously, he was on a a world stage. So too were Elton John and the Princess’s brother, Earl Spencer. I’d forgotten that he had been quite excoriating of the media in the days before. When he had billions as an audience, he really went for it.

And of course the young sons of Charles and Diana were there, in full view: who knows what that does to you? Well, now they do. Some commentators felt the sympathy and said so. The Royal Household looked mechanical and cruel that week, even if Earl Spencer got a round of applause.

Regarding Elton John: on the one hand the record made a lot of money for charity, which is laudable. On the other hand it’s a terrible song and tarnishes the original—about Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe was exploited on a different level, and her trajectory in life was entirely different to that of Diana—Diana was not a performer and doesn’t have some of the greatest films of the postwar period on her resumé. 

I completely accept that Elton John loved her and wanted to do something but Bernie Taupin failed to match the quality of his original lyrics. I don’t suppose they could have written something successful in good time but then it would have been a better idea not to break a statue funeral up with an Elton John song.

After the funeral my mind slid back into not thinking a lot about Diana and her death. I was not especially interested in conspiracy theories despite my initial very quick reaction that she had been murdered. Mohammed Al-Fayed was the chief advocate of this theory, and his son had died too of course. I did go to Harrods and happened to see the table from the Ritz in Paris complete with Diana’s wine glass with its lipstick stains. It was a tacky display, to be honest. The memorial fountain never interested me and I didn’t follow the dramas that surrounded it. This was perhaps not a remarkable world event, but it certainly was remarkable for seven days.