The Princess Diana: HEY, WANNA BUY SOME PIX?

Hollywood celebrities were cropping up so often on TV talk shows last week that you would have thought it was Oscar time. They were grieved, of course, over the tragic death of Princess Diana. But they were also eager to gripe about the paparazzi, whose aggressive tactics may have played a role in her death. Elizabeth Taylor called them murderers. Tom Cruise recounted how he and his wife Nicole Kidman had been chased by photographers through the very same Paris tunnel. Everyone from George Clooney to Whoopi Goldberg chimed in; boycotts were advocated; legislation proposed. Some stars reportedly even want to investigate the private lives of tabloid editors, to give them a taste of their own medicine.

There was a self-serving side to all this, of course. Hollywood stars would like nothing better than to cow the press into docility, thus clearing the way for nonstop coverage of their thriving careers, happy home lives and unflagging concern for the spotted owl. Yet in this instance, Hollywood perfectly tapped into the public mood. The week of mourning that followed Diana's death also saw an outpouring of revulsion at paparazzi tactics, prompting a fresh round of self-appraisal by publications that use their photos and, tacitly at least, condone their excesses.

Paparazzi--the celebrity photographers who trail stars looking for shots of them in unguarded moments--have been around for decades, dogging the tracks of people like Elizabeth Taylor and Jacqueline Onassis. But the game has grown increasingly fierce in recent years, as media outlets devoted to celebrities have proliferated, and new technology, such as digital photo transmission, has come into use. And lately, the absence of wars and other world crises (as well as skimpier budgets for covering foreign news) has forced many photojournalists to do celebrity work just to make a living.

There's big money to be made. Two weeks before Diana's death, the Globe tabloid ran eight pages of photos of her and Dodi Fayed on their vacation off the island of Sardinia, and boasted in a note to readers of paying $210,000 for them: "It was a big payday for photog Mario Brenna, who stands to make as much as $3 million worldwide." Lured by such sums, paparazzi are resorting to ever more aggressive tactics--sometimes even provoking confrontations with stars in order to catch their temper tantrums on film. "About a year ago there was a real increase in invasive kinds of pictures," says Valerie Virga, photo editor for the National Enquirer, "people really going over the edge to get the picture--climbing roofs, scaling buildings, super-super long lenses into people's backyards. We've turned down hundreds of pictures over the last year for that reason."

U.S. photographers blame their European counterparts for upping the ante. "They are ruthless," says Scott Downie, the owner of Celebrity Photo, an agency that covers official show-biz events. "Those who came here in the '80s laughed at us as babies: 'You don't know how to get a good photo. We're here to get them in a private moment, not in diamonds at an event.'" Yet every paparazzo is familiar with the pressures. "It's a collective hysteria," says Mark Saunders, who has covered Diana for the past five years. "It's the adrenaline flowing and that desperate need to get a photograph. I've seen [U.S. photographers] in action outside John Kennedy Jr.'s house. If America wants a tragedy on the same scale, just allow that to continue."

Saunders says Diana's death confirmed a decision he made six months ago--to get out of the paparazzi game altogether. But most other paparazzi, and the agencies that hire them and peddle their photos to magazines, were incommunicado or unrepentant last week. "I feel no responsibility, legal or moral," says Goksin Sipahioglu, director of the Paris-based Sipa agency. "Of course, I'm sad, because someone we all adored is dead. But when you become Princess Di, you are a public person." In a telling irony, several of the agencies representing photographers detained by French police after the accident would not release photos of them to the press. And some agencies supplying pictures of Dodi and Diana to magazines last week specifically asked that they not be given the usual credit line.

Yet editors of publications that rely on paparazzi are taking a fresh look at how far their intrusive tactics should be allowed to go. Shortly after the accident, Steve Coz, editor of the National Enquirer, publicly vowed not to buy any photos taken at the scene, while claiming that his tabloid had instituted a policy a year ago of not using so-called stalkerazzi pictures. (The Enquirer issue on the newsstands when Diana was killed, however, featured several candid shots of the princess with Fayed, trumpeted by the cover line DI GOES SEX-MAD. The issue was pulled by a number of newsstands after her death.) Dan Schwartz, editorial director of the more freewheeling Globe, also promised to toughen standards. "We're going to become more conservative about our assessment of what will offend people, because we have to," he said. "People's consciousness of what is paparazzi and what isn't has been raised."

Mainstream publications are hardly exempt from the debate. Dozens of publications, including TIME and Newsweek, used paparazzi shots to illustrate their stories on the tragedy last week. A news photo of Diana's two sons glimpsed inside a car after her death--a shot that could easily be regarded as intrusive--ran even in the sober New York Times. Though editors and publishers say clear-cut rules are hard to set, the tragedy has heightened their sensitivity to the issue. "You have to exercise judgment when you know competitive forces are going to exercise less judgment and less taste," says Mort Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News. In a letter to readers in this week's PEOPLE (published by Time Inc.), managing editor Carol Wallace writes that decisions on whether or not to use paparazzi photos are made "on a case-by-case basis, weighing the news value of a picture against a story subject's right to peace and privacy."

Such self-policing is unlikely to satisfy the paparazzi's sharpest critics. California legislators like Tom Hayden are planning to introduce legislation to curb paparazzi exploits, such as requiring photographers to maintain a certain distance from their subjects. Such laws, however, might have a tough time passing constitutional muster because of the threat they pose to freedom of the press. (Not to mention the freedom of any grandmother at Disney World to snap pictures of a famous person who passes by.) Legal experts point out, moreover, that most abuses can be dealt with by current criminal laws (against trespassing and assault, for example) or by civil lawsuits, as Jacqueline Onassis brought when she won injunctions against photographer Ron Galella.

Both legislation and self-regulation have been tried overseas, with mixed results. A French law enacted in 1970 allows the courts to punish press actions that are deemed an "assault on intimacy or privacy." Actress Isabelle Adjani used the law to win a judgment against the tabloid Voici in 1995 for running photos taken without her permission. Still, French paparazzi are widely perceived to be among the world's most brazen. In Britain, meanwhile, the Press Complaints Commission, established in 1991, has drawn up a code of practice to prevent invasive press tactics. Though hard to enforce, the rules have succeeded in removing at least some paparazzi shots from the raucous British tabloids.

The campaign against paparazzi has its dangers. Almost by definition, journalism involves some measure of intrusion--investigating matters that the subject would rather not be publicized. In covering Hollywood, moreover, journalists must battle a sophisticated armada of publicists, who seek to manage every jot and tittle of media coverage of their client. "The paparazzi have become more aggressive because celebrities and their publicists have got so controlling," says Steve Sands, a New York City-based celebrity photographer.

Nor are the stars above using the paparazzi for their own purposes. When the Kennedy family gathered for a family outing in Hyannis Port, Mass., two weeks ago, photographers snapped pictures of the happy clan playing touch football. Far from shooing away the nosy cameras, the family clearly welcomed the coverage as a chance to let the world see their togetherness in the wake of recent family troubles. Then there are the people who buy the newspapers and watch the TV shows that keep the paparazzi in business. These consumers of celebrity news got lectured last week by those same celebrities for not curbing their appetites. They may yet listen. But for now, they are too busy paying their last respects to the biggest celebrity of all.

The Princess Diana: WHO SHARES THE BLAME?

Princess Diana's death was one of those large events that happen in an instant, like the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, leaving everyone to grope for some explanation of how a whole world of certainties can be undone so quickly. Everywhere that Diana's name is known, which is most places, people are trying to comprehend the events that led to her death and wishing they could reach back somehow to change them--to fend off the paparazzi, maybe to find a different driver for Diana's car, or even just to buckle her seat belt.

 

So who bears what part of the blame for her death? From the start, the chief suspects have been the paparazzi. Nine photographers and one photo-agency motorcycle driver were arrested and released last week. Police say others who fled the crash are still at large. When French prosecutors complete their investigation, they will decide whether to charge some or all of them with involuntary manslaughter and failure to provide aid at the scene of an accident. Mohammed al Fayed, Dodi's father, the parents of Henri Paul, the Fayed security man who was driving that night and died in the crash, and the Spencers, Diana's kin, have all taken steps to become civil parties to the French investigation.

But each of the photographers has his own story to tell. One of them, Jacques Langevin, a highly respected war photographer who works for the Sygma agency, says he never followed the car but took pictures outside the hotel, then headed off to a dinner party only to come upon the crash scene while driving across town. Nikola Arsov of Sipa, another agency, says he also came upon the accident scene by chance after following the decoy cars sent out by the hotel. "I took five or six photos, but I forgot to turn on the flash and they didn't come out," he says. The photographers who admit to chasing the car claim they were hundreds of yards behind when it crashed.

That picture is contradicted, however, by a man who told French police that at the tunnel entrance he saw the black Mercedes surrounded by motorcycles, one of which appeared to cut it off just before the crash. The witness, Francois Levi, who was driving with his family that night, says he entered the tunnel two cars ahead of Diana and Dodi. "When the motorcycle cut in front of [Diana's car]," he says, "I saw a large white flash."

Judicial sources told TIME they are examining what appears to be a fragment of the sedan's side mirror. It was found at the scene a considerable distance behind the wreckage, which suggests that the car might have made hard contact with something just before it spun out of control. Investigators wonder if that something was the handlebar of a paparazzo's motorcycle. All the same, insists Goksin Sipahiouglu, head of the Sipa photo agency, it would have been pointless for the photographers to catch the Mercedes or pull alongside it to take pictures. "A moving photo of a car with tinted windows would have no value at all," he says.

The story of a car recklessly pursued by bloodthirsty photographers has been complicated by questions about whether the driver was drunk and speeding. Police lab tests performed after the accident show that Henri Paul had nearly four times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood, the equivalent of a bottle and a half of wine. Friends say Dodi would never have permitted reckless driving. The Fayeds are aggressively refuting the idea that Paul, the hotel's deputy chief of security, was too drunk to drive. If true, it would leave them with some responsibility for allowing him to take the wheel. At a London press conference last week, an al Fayed spokesman introduced a professor of forensic medicine from the University of Glasgow, Peter Vanezis, to raise the O.J. question: Could the blood samples used by police have been contaminated? Though he offered no evidence that any contamination had taken place, his appearance may have been a signal of the legal course the Fayeds will take. Family representatives also produced a 26-minute videotape, edited from two hours by the Fayeds, taken by hotel security cameras. It partly shows that, at least when he took off from the hotel, Paul accelerated at a moderate rate.

The groundwork for Diana's death may actually have been laid years ago, when she decided to give up the around-the-clock British security she had enjoyed as a royal princess, a move opposed by Scotland Yard. After separating from Prince Charles, Diana was eager to regain some semblance of a normal life. Though she used official bodyguards at public events or when she was with her sons, she preferred to move around on her own. On the night of her death, Diana was entirely in the safekeeping of the Fayeds. She was not represented by anyone in her own employ, someone who might have raised objections to the arrangements being made to drive her away from the hotel.

Diana was probably inclined to trust a great deal in Dodi. The pair had just completed a 10-day cruise in the Mediterranean on the Jonikal, the Fayed family yacht. At 3:15 p.m. Saturday, after a flight from Sardinia in a private jet belonging to Harrods, the al Fayed-owned London department store, they arrived at Le Bourget Airport, near Paris. They were met at the airport by Paul, who drove them into town, stopping first at Dodi's apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, then moving on to the Ritz, where they settled down briefly in the $2,000-a-night Imperial Suite.

From the moment the couple arrived, the paparazzi were on to their scent. When Diana headed out for some shopping on the Champs-Elysees, the photographers surrounded the Range Rover that was ferrying her around. Later, after their car pulled up in front of Dodi's apartment, the paparazzi descended again, and one of the Fayed bodyguards pushed a photographer and hit two others.

Cameras were nothing new in Diana's life. But their intrusion may have seemed even more intolerable last week, when she was settling into a new, deepening relationship with Dodi. Before dinner, Diana called Richard Kay, a favorite reporter for London's Daily Mail, to tell him she was planning to withdraw from her public duties around November. Hussein Yassin, a Saudi relative of Dodi's, who spoke to him at the Ritz earlier in the day, says Dodi confided that they had decided to marry.

The Fayed family says Diana had given Dodi a pair of cuff links that belonged to her late father and a gold cigar clipper with a tag inscribed WITH LOVE FROM Diana. Dodi had written a poem for Diana, had it engraved on silver and placed beneath her pillow at his apartment. At their last dinner together, on Saturday, he presented her with a $205,400 diamond ring that he had arranged to be made by Albert Repossi, a Paris jeweler. Was it an engagement ring? "He told me how much he was in love with the princess," Repossi said later. "He wanted to spend the rest of his life with her."

He did, but the time was short. Dodi and Diana had an 8:30 reservation that night at Benoit, a trendy one-star restaurant near the Place des Vosges. Sometime after 9 p.m., the couple headed off to dinner. Realizing en route that their plans for a quiet meal at Benoit would be spoiled by the photographers piling up outside the restaurant, Dodi suddenly opted to return to the marbled pillars and plush carpeting of the Ritz, where hotel security could be counted on to fend off the photographers.

Or so he thought. When their Mercedes pulled up in front of the hotel's main entrance in the Place Vendome at about 9:45, some paparazzi were already there, causing the couple to wait several minutes in the car before getting out. A visibly flustered Dodi exchanged some heated words with them before disappearing through the revolving door. Even at the hotel's two-star restaurant Espadon (French for "swordfish"), the stares of fellow diners made Dodi uncomfortable. The couple were all the more eye-catching in the formal Espadon because they were still wearing the casual clothes--jeans and cowboy boots for him, white slacks and a blazer for her--that would have been suited to Benoit, a bistro. After just 10 minutes, at Dodi's insistence, the couple transferred back to their Imperial Suite to finish their meal.

Meanwhile, a call was put through to Paul, who three hours earlier had gone home to the modest apartment on the rue des Petits-Champs he shared with his mother. A onetime French air force officer, he had worked at the hotel for 11 years. Though he had taken two special driving courses at Mercedes headquarters in Stuttgart, he apparently did not have the professional chauffeur's license that French law requires. Acquaintances last week told reporters he had once been a heavy drinker, though a Ritz employee claimed that over the past year Paul's drinking had slowed down. The Fayed family insists that no one on the hotel staff saw any sign that Paul was drunk. But French and British papers last week carried anonymous quotes from people described as Ritz employees who said it was obvious he arrived at the hotel intoxicated. In the French daily Liberation, one says he arrived "overexcited and drunk as a pig."

By the time Diana and Dodi's last meal ended, 20 or more photographers were still waiting outside the hotel. Inside, it was decided that Dodi's Mercedes and the black Range Rover that Diana had used for shopping, both cars familiar to the paparazzi, would be used as decoy vehicles to lure them away. To complete the illusion, Dodi's regular driver was assigned to the Range Rover. Meanwhile, Dodi, Diana and a Fayed bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, 29, would be driven away by Paul in a smaller Mercedes 280 leased by the hotel. At 12:20 a.m. Paul pulled that car up to a rear entrance of the hotel off the narrow rue Cambon. "I saw happiness in their faces," says a woman who watched the couple exit the hotel that night. "They were laughing."

Fayed spokesmen deny the claim that as he drove away, Paul taunted the paparazzi with "You won't catch us." A few paparazzi followed the decoy cars, but others soon spotted the car carrying Diana and Dodi and took pursuit. In an interview with Liberation, the photographer Langevin said that after the Mercedes left the Ritz, it proceeded normally, along with its entourage of paparazzi on motorbikes, until it reached a traffic light at the Place de la Concorde, a few blocks away. "Everybody stopped as usual at the red light," he said. "That's when the Mercedes took off with a roar before the light turned green, racing toward the embankment road."

On the straightaway of the riverside drive, Paul could have picked up speed. How much speed? Initial reports that the speedometer was frozen on impact at 120 m.p.h. are denied by the Fayed family, who say the speedometer was at zero. French police refuse to confirm officially either claim, and auto experts say the postcrash position of a speedometer needle is an unreliable indicator of a car's final velocity. Partly on the basis of the condition of the car at impact, police speculate that the Mercedes arrived at the tunnel entrance--where the roadway bends and dips sharply to the left--at between 80 and 100 m.p.h. The car appears to have first scraped the right side of the tunnel, then rocketed left into one of the concrete support posts about 100 ft. inside the tunnel. It slammed one more time into the tunnel wall before spinning to a stop.

Paul, 41, died instantly. His body, thrust halfway through the windshield, leaned against the horn, which wailed bleakly out of the wreckage. Rees-Jones, the only passenger wearing a seat belt, was alive but badly hurt, his jaw shattered and his tongue reportedly severed. If Diana had been wearing a seat belt, would she have survived? Though the front of the car was crushed, the rear passenger compartment, in which she and Dodi were riding, was not. She came to rest in the footwell, slumped so that she was facing toward the rear of the car with her head leaning against the right side door. A trail of blood descended from her right ear. Dodi, already dead, was lying prone across the rear seat.

Frederic Mailliez, a French physician who came upon the accident scene by chance, says he found Diana unconscious but "moaning and gesturing in every direction." There was another sound in the tunnel that night: the whirr and click of paparazzi cameras, like little guillotines. Mailliez says that when he arrived, 10 or 15 photographers were already at work. First to arrive were Romuald Rat, 24, of the Gamma agency, and Christian Martinez, 41, of Angeli. Rat insists that he tried to help by opening the car's right rear door and feeling Diana's pulse. "I saw the princess sitting on the floor, her back to me," he told French television. "I said in English to stay calm, that I was there, that help would arrive." Martinez started snapping pictures as soon as he reached the scene. According to the French police report, he told an officer, "You are pissing me off. Let me do my work. At least at Sarajevo the cops let us work." Though both were released on bail, they are the only two photographers who are denied the right to work at their profession until the investigation is over.

If it follows the example of most such investigations, the French inquiry into the accident will take two months. British authorities are also expected to open a probe. For now, Rees-Jones, the only survivor, is too badly injured to speak. No one knows what he will be able to remember, or if, as an employee of the Fayeds, he can be counted on to recall any events of that night that might prove embarrassing to the family. Even then, there is one question no investigation may be able to answer: Why did Dodi or Diana think it necessary to go to such lengths to avoid the photographers that night? And who ordered, or permitted, the driver to speed?

Meanwhile, in the absence of final explanations, there are the conspiracy theories. The Internet, naturally, is full of them. Everywhere in the Arab world, where Dodi's relationship with Diana had become a source of national pride, there is speculation that a British plot killed the princess to prevent her from marrying an Egyptian. It's more likely that the Windsors may have been thinking that marriage to Dodi, a man routinely described as a foreign playboy, would have been a public-relations blunder for Diana and a badly needed plus for them. For once it would make their tweedy rectitude seem appealing to the British public. When compared to the chaotic sequence of greed and blundering that took Diana's life, the thought of a well-organized conspiracy would be a comfort.

The Princess Diana: THE NAUGHTY GIRL NEXT DOOR

Diana Spencer was nothing like as gifted as Judy Garland, nowhere near as sexy as Marilyn Monroe, but like those equally doomed young women, she had the power to touch us--that is to say, if one examines the response dispassionately, to make us feel sorry for her. She was a terribly mixed-up kid. We felt close to her (when we were not infuriated by her) because she represented in herself so many of the worries our own children are likely to foist upon us--disappointing school grades, anorexia and bulimia, unsuitable young men, a tendency to show off, a preoccupation with clothes and publicity, a rotten marriage, single motherhood and trouble with the in-laws.

Sometimes she went too far, as children do, and we were fed up with her. Sometimes we felt that she was deceiving us. She doth protest too much, we occasionally thought, when she complained about the attentions of the paparazzi. When, after so many years of burning extravagant candles at both ends, she died at last so squalidly in that underpass, some of us for a moment thought, as the Friar thought about Romeo and Juliet, "These violent delights have violent ends..."

But she touched us--that's the thing. As the Friar went on to remark, "So light a foot will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint." She was so lovely to look at. She appeared to be so shy. Like all our children, she seemed to float above the drab and everlasting flintiness of our ordinary lives. Time and again we found ourselves ready to forgive her, just as in the end we always give in and send our wayward offspring another check to pay the telephone bill; and we did it as always with a shrug of the shoulders that was part affection, part exasperation, part amusement, part forgiveness--and part pity. Even a doubter like me, when the news arrived from Paris that Sunday morning, felt the tears come to my eyes.

But then we saw in her too some larger allegory. She mirrored our personal anxieties, and the perennial anxieties of the young--for it is hard to believe she was 36 years old. She was truly a cliche of the age itself. Much of the angst of this troubled fin de siecle was indexed in her brief life. Wars and poverty, sickness and prejudice, uncertainty and despair--this daughter of an earl, this mother of a putative King of England was paradoxically familiar with them all: and when the end came, it was a properly symbolic end as, with her playboy lover, she was driven at midnight by a drunken driver much too fast in a Mercedes through a city underpass, pursued by photographers on motorbikes.

How sad! What a pathetic life, after all, enlarged for us all by unrelenting advertisement, blown up like a fictional drama so that it is already entering, before our eyes, the realm of myth--an apotheosis that in previous ages took centuries to happen. In the world at large, she is already on the way to join Elvis and Marilyn on a flying saucer somewhere: in Britain she is mourned with a hysterical intensity that seems pathological, ordinary people standing in line for seven or eight hours to sign a memorial book nobody is ever going to read, or preparing to camp out all night long to see the funeral cortege pass by.

Of course, this is partly a tabloid mourning, just as Diana herself had become a tabloid star--almost a fictional star. Since the days of Thomas Hardy at least, people have been moved to passionate sorrow by the death of public personalities they have never met, and who sometimes never existed. No doubt thousands wept over the fate of Tess of the d'Urbervilles when her story appeared week by week in the Graphic in 1890, just as truly as they wept for Diana when they read of her death in the Sun in 1997. They have been deluded into thinking they actually knew her by the tireless machines of the media, and they have cried for her as for one of their own children.

Then again it is doubtless partly mass hysteria--groupies genuinely mean it too, when they swoon in the presence of their idols, one scream leading to another, one pair of panties thrown onstage soon leading to a storm of votive lingerie. It is partly resentment against the in-laws. Despite late damage limitation from the palace, many Britons see the British royal family as villains in this soap opera, stuffy and reactionary guardians of an old order into which Diana came as a lovely catalyst, only to be spurned as young heroines so often are.

But perhaps, I like to think, the death of Diana has acted as a kind of catharsis for her nation. This has not been a happy half-century for the British. It has been a time of frustration and febrile self-doubt. Most of the national institutions, from the monarchy itself to the BBC, have lost their old sense of confident authority. In an age when no island is an island anymore, the very national identity, once apparently so unassailable, has been whittled away. British traditions have been discarded, British values have lost their meaning. A great people seems to be in moral limbo.

With the death of a lovely if maddening princess, out it has all poured. Something, as the old song said, had to give, and perhaps this fantastic display of public grief, so vulgar in many ways, so unconvincing in others, has to it some spiritual element after all. Perhaps in their hearts--or so I hope--the British people see Diana as a fellow victim of degraded times, and have instinctively seized upon her death as the moment for a fresh start.

Jan Morris is the author of several travel books and the forthcoming Fifty Years of Europe: An Album. She lives in Wales



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The Princess Diana: THE MEN WHO WOULD BE KING

When the news of the storming of the Bastille reached Versailles, the hapless Louis XVI expressed the hope that this was a mere revolt. "No, sir," replied the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, "it's a great revolution." For the sake of the House of Windsor, we must trust that those advising the royal family at this unhappy time will also be blunt. The national outpouring of affection and grief for the "people's Princess" could be dismissed as a form of collective hysteria that will die away as surely as the echo of muffled funeral bells. No tumbrels loom for a monarchy that still figures centrally in the British psyche and way of life. But if the monarchy is to survive and thrive in the new millennium, it will be because it has listened to its subjects and responded, not with mere tactical concessions--a waiving of protocol here, a letting slip of the mask there--but with the courage to think and act strategically.

 

Listening to the will of the people shouldn't be difficult, even for a royal family with a propensity to shelter behind the carapace of tradition and ceremony. With voluble outrage and grief to match our confessional age, editorial writers and citizens on the streets told their royal family that business as usual is not an acceptable reaction. Once upon a time it may have been enough. When George VI and his Queen remained stoically at Buckingham Palace to share with Londoners the horrors and dangers of the wartime blitz, he sealed the affections of his people and prepared the ground for the new Elizabethan era. But this, now, is a revolutionary era, and like the Bourbons it has caught the Windsors by surprise. Call it the era of Diana, who revolted against the "firm" and revolutionized the people's perceptions, not only of what the monarchy is, but what it could become. Even as the Windsors grieve, they and the country should give thanks that Diana has shown them the way. And dreadful irony as it may be, her untimely death creates the opportunity for the Windsors to take charge of the revolution.

The Prince of Wales, who once said the realization that he was heir to the throne hit him as a "ghastly, inexorable sense," must lead the way. The British want evidence that the chilly Charles is the right man for the job--the job not only of King but also of father to the young princes, William and Harry. The decisions that he makes now will give him a critical opportunity to resolve his country's doubts. The monarchy will probably survive--it has, after all, endured wars and divorces, beheadings and exile. But in the wake of Diana's death, the House of Windsor must settle back down on its foundation quite differently.

From the beginning, the fuss throughout Britain over how to grieve made it clear that the palace would be in a bind. Every gesture it made--or failed to make--was scrutinized like smoke from the Vatican and found wanting. For much of the week, the royal family took a battering from the press and from the people: the proper flags were not flying in the proper places at the proper heights; the royals were not attuned to the desires of the "people" for a suitably populist funeral for the "people's Princess"; the brief statement of sorrow issued shortly after the family learned of Diana's death was soon forgotten and, if remembered, deemed inadequate. "What is the nation to make of silence and absence at a time of vocal and visible lamentation?" the London Times wondered.

The Windsors had entered uncharted territory, and the royal machinery moved, as is its wont, a bit ponderously. But in the end, Buckingham Palace proved pliant. Complaints that the funeral procession was too short led the palace to triple its length to accommodate the crowds. When mourners queuing as long as 12 hours to sign the condolence books at St. James's Palace complained that they needed refreshments, the palace granted Mohammed al Fayed permission to send along Harrods' vans toting tea and sandwiches. SHOW US YOU CARE, the Daily Express had demanded, and caring they got. Prince Charles and his sons helped persuade the Queen to return to the capital earlier and face her clamorous subjects; on Friday, Charles, William and Harry went on a walkabout at Kensington Palace, shaking hands and accepting piles of flowers from well-wishers. The crowd applauded. The Queen had her limousine stop outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, stepped out and, with Prince Philip, mingled with the mourners; she then shored up supporters with her live--and surprisingly moving--TV address.

When the news came of Diana's death, the royal family was ensconced at Balmoral, the Queen's summer retreat in Scotland. Insiders say a distraught Charles agonized for hours over what to do. He has been deeply affected by violent death before: in 1979 his beloved godfather Lord Louis Mountbatten was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army. Charles informed his sons of their mother's death shortly after 3 a.m., and the boys, according to family friends, sought comfort by maintaining their usual Balmoral Sunday-morning routine, attending services at Crathie Church. In the afternoon, he boarded a private flight to France to bring Diana's body back home. Still, Charles was criticized by the press for the supposed heartlessness of taking his sons to church. "They are dealing with their grief in their own way," noted Ronald Allison, the Queen's former press secretary. "It may not be our way."

Prince William, 15 and already raising his profile in the firm, and Harry, who will mark a sad 13th birthday this week, were consulted at every turn as the family prepared for the funeral. Charles was adamant that his elder son be allowed to decide for himself what place to take in the procession. Meanwhile, the palace left Diana's clan the space to make important decisions about the ceremony. "The wishes of the Spencers are paramount," says a Downing Street source; Diana's sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale chose some of the music, and the siblings agreed that Diana should be buried at Althorp, the Spencer home in Northamptonshire.

The official word out of Downing Street was that the Labour government would be a mere facilitator for the funeral, providing public services such as police blockades. In fact, Prime Minister Tony Blair reportedly spoke with Prince Charles on the phone several times during the week and was instrumental in persuading the palace to change the parade route, as well as to weight the guest list not with dignitaries but with representatives of Diana's charities. Blair's approval rating is soaring above 70%, and he demonstrated his ability to be in tune with the nation by using the phrase the people's Princess.

The trick for Charles will be to help his sons do what his ex-wife did so naturally: "walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch," as Kipling put it. Publicly, at least, Diana was the more ostentatiously devoted parent, and the boys, blond and already casually handsome, appeared to take after her. A visitor to her apartment at Kensington Palace described the rooms as overflowing with pictures of the young princes, and she made her hands-on style very plain from the earliest days of motherhood, taking nine-month-old Wills along when she and Charles made an official visit to Australia. With their father they hunted, fished and rode, while with their mother they jetted to the Caribbean or to theme parks, and shouting with laughter rode together down water slides. Diana insisted they make forays into the real world outside the confines of Kensington Palace, and took them along on visits to some of those less fortunate, even to a homeless shelter in the middle of the night. "I want them to have an understanding of people's emotions, of people's insecurities, of people's distress, of their hopes and dreams," she said.

That common touch is what the homely Charles--formal in attire and stiff of bearing--has sometimes comically seemed to lack. But some royal insiders dismiss reports of Charles as a cold and distant father. "The Prince on parade is not the man his friends and family see," Penny Junor, a biographer of Prince Charles, wrote in the Daily Telegraph. "It is quite wrong to judge him by what the camera seems to reveal." And physical affection was not Diana's province alone: kisses, Junor claimed, are also "in plentiful supply at Highgrove [the Prince's home]." For the heir to an ancient throne, Charles has been a fairly modern dad. He was present at the birth of both children; he changed their diapers and bathed them; and he would delay early-evening meetings to be with William and Harry before bedtime. According to Junor, the three Windsor males laugh with one another and play practical jokes. Charles and Diana may not always have seen eye to eye on the style of their sons' upbringing, but they agreed on the substance. Diana was a believer in the monarchy; she just wanted a warmer, sleeker, prettier version--much like herself. And Charles shared her desire to give the boys a less spartan education than his own gloomy days at Gourdonstoun. The couple settled easily on the choice of Eton for Prince William--Diana's father and brother had attended the school. Eton offered something for everyone: tradition, discipline, discretion--and convenient proximity to the steadying influence of the Queen, just up the road at Windsor Castle.

Tensions between Diana and Charles had been easing in recent months. They both attended Christmas carols at Eton last year and traveled together to and from William's confirmation last spring, chatting warmly. "They were settling into a new relationship," says Douglas Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary who knows both Charles and Diana well and has a child at Eton with William. "They met, talked, and discussed things."

Without their mother, of course, there is good reason to worry about what will become of the young princes. William, initially so bubbly and mischievous he was dubbed "His Naughtiness," has plainly hit adolescence, towering above his father, and is considered the sensitive one, a "deep thinker," as Diana called him. During his parents' separation and divorce, he took on the role of his mother's protector, reportedly slipping tissues under her door when he heard her crying. He is said to have suggested the charity auction of her frocks last June. He also developed an early aversion to the press. At age 11, he had to be restrained from a fight with photographers on the ski slopes in Austria. And according to Richard Kay, a columnist for the Daily Mail who spoke to the Princess the Saturday of the accident, William had called his mother that day, complaining that Buckingham Palace was making him "perform"--asking him to pose for the hated photographers at Eton, where he was due to report last week. Now it is Harry who is the impish one. To get a chance to mature a bit more, he will repeat a year at Ludgrove, the boarding school Wills attended, before probably joining his brother at Eton.

But for all his affinities with his mother, William has recently begun to shoulder royal duties. Last January, the increasingly independent William chose to forgo a Swiss ski vacation with his father and brother and stay at Sandringham with the Queen, Prince Philip and a host of junior royals and friends, including his pal and cousin Peter Phillips, son of Princess Anne. He apparently has a close relationship with his grandmother, whom he regularly visits at Windsor for Sunday-afternoon tea and chats about his future role. "Relationships with grandchildren are always easier than those with your own children," says someone who knows the Queen. "There will be no problems with William's turning to the Queen for help and support." The 71-year-old Elizabeth may have stressed duty over spontaneity with her son, but she may have learned her lesson. Says this source: "She has mellowed quite a bit."

The palace has also moved swiftly to ensure that the boys have a younger--and spunkier--maternal presence by turning again to Alexandra Legge-Bourke, Charles' former social secretary who in recent years served as a boon companion to the young princes. This move has cheered some royal watchers as evidence that the Windsors are keeping the young princes' needs clearly in view. "Tiggy," 31, has the right credentials--her mother is a lady-in-waiting to the Princess Royal--and, better yet, the right easygoing nature. A former nursery school teacher, Tiggy loves to ride and hunt and is always ready for a raucous laugh with her young charges. Hired in 1993, Legge-Bourke had a famously chilly relationship with Diana; she turned to lawyers after Diana allegedly made a nasty sotto voce comment about her at a St. James's Palace Christmas party. She left Charles' employ last spring but was still close to the princes, visiting them on weekends at Highgrove and attending an Eton end-of-term celebration last June at William's invitation.

Though no official announcement has been made about when William and Harry will return to school, both Ludgrove and Eton are expected to offer a return to comforting routine. William will enter his third year in Manor House, the ivied building where he has lived with 49 other boys. Andrew Gailey, the warm and erudite housemaster, as well as Christopher Stuart-Clark, his tutor, and Elizabeth Heathcote, Manor House's matron, will lend support to William, as they did during his parents' divorce. "William is comfortable there and popular with the boys," says Hurd. "It's a very flexible place."

There is no such safe haven for Prince Charles; perhaps there never was. As he once said, "There is no set-out role for me. It depends entirely on what I make of it...I'm really rather an awkward problem." Now, notes David Starkey, a lecturer in history at the London School of Economics, the death of Diana "has put Charles in an impossible position." Just a few weeks ago, a poll revealed that Britons were contemplating the notion that he might marry Camilla with less aversion, if not outright support. Even Diana, shortly before her death, told BBC court correspondent Jennie Bond that Parker Bowles should be given public recognition for her loyalty to Charles. "She realized Camilla was the love of Prince Charles' life," said Bond. "She went on to say that there was no need for them to marry, and I believed she felt that it was all right that they carry on as they were." Now, though, citizens may feel significantly less forgiving. "The public would feel this was stepping in Diana's shoes," says John Vincent, professor of history at Bristol University. For the short term, Charles' relationship with Camilla is likely to retreat back underground.

In theory, though Charles has said he has no intention of doing so, he could marry Parker Bowles and still take the throne. If crowned, he would be the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which traditionally does not conduct marriages between divorced people when a previous spouse is still living. Charles and Camilla could instead have a civil ceremony, although that would be unseemly for the future head of the church. Or the Church of England could be "disestablished," disentangling it from the monarchy. But getting off on a technicality may enrage too many people: the more traditional clergy are deeply opposed to the idea of his remarriage.

There has been talk of installing the popular William after the death of the Queen--which may not be for decades, given that the Queen Mum is 97. But the one thing Charles will not do, according to people who study these matters, is step aside. "There is a slow, tenacious obstinacy about the man which is a characteristic of his grandfather George VI," Starkey notes. "He wants to be King." Says Lord Blake: "Charles' whole life has been geared to the assumption that he will be King. There is not the slightest evidence from anyone that he has any intention of giving it up." Even if he wanted to turn the throne over to William, the choice of succession is not his to make. Parliament would have to agree to allow Charles to leave, then pick a new King--as it did when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936--and that could throw the entire idea of monarchy open to official, and perhaps fatally rancorous, debate.

This is a risk Charles--or the country--may not wish to take. Outsiders may regard the monarchy as a gilded anachronism, the mere guardian of a glorified theme park offering more pomp than circumstance. But that ignores the monarchy's role as part of the warp and woof of the fabric of British life and institutions. Opinion polls may show that the monarchy's popularity waxes and wanes, but there is no evidence that the country has turned decisively against its Queen or her heir.

Nevertheless, the Prince of Wales has been working at fine-tuning his image, a process he began once his divorce was settled. "He knew he was never going to be glamorous," says an aide, "but all he wanted is a bit of respect and appreciation for what he has been doing." Like his ex-wife, he believes the monarchy must do good works; from an annual income estimated at more than $6 million, he contributes as much as $2 million a year to such charities as the St. Luke's Hospice and the Devon Wildlife Trust. The Prince's Trust, which he established in 1976, is Britain's largest charitable network. In the coming months, he will be refining his public image even more. "He is a worrier," says Hurd. "He takes infinite trouble with things, and he will worry his way into his new burdens."

Even without the threat of an organized republican movement in Britain, the Prince knows now, if he did not before, that he must help the monarchy evolve. For that, it seems, is really all the public is after. "People have clearly not lost interest in the monarchy," says Ben Pimlott, a professor of government at the University of London and the author of a new biography of Queen Elizabeth. "People who think that we can just skip out of this royal relationship and pretend that it does not exist need to look at all the flowers outside Buckingham Palace."

In death, Diana may have taught the Windsors how to survive.

The Princess Diana: THE HEART OF THE GRIEVING

Every so often the public surprises an established class by a great display of public grief for a figure who has died. The funeral takes on the quality of a demonstration. One such occasion was the funeral of Cardinal Manning--an unlikely public hero, you would think, if you read about him today: the old Harrovian Archdeacon of Chichester who converted to Rome and became a man who in his rigid religious orthodoxy was almost more Catholic than the Pope.

But Manning was a political radical, and when the dockers went on strike, causing the possible ruin of themselves and their families as well as disrupting trade on an unparalleled scale in 1889, it was Manning who intervened and eventually settled it. A "toff" had never shown the common touch this way in English public life. And it was to this the public responded. He had the largest crowd at his funeral of any figure in the 19th century--bigger even than Queen Victoria's. People queued and stretched all the way from the Brompton Oratory to Kensal Green.

The novelist Colette was a very different figure. Indeed, her private life was so irregular by Catholic standards that the church forbade her a Catholic funeral in Notre Dame. The French government, sensing a public outcry, responded with the unprecedented gesture of giving sexy, wild, outrageous Colette a state funeral.

Princess Diana's funeral was of this order. Of course it was a spontaneous outburst of grief for a much loved young woman who died too soon and with hideous violence. But if it was also something of a demonstration, it was not necessarily a demonstration of anything except howling grief.

Journalists are paid to have opinions, and so they have tried in the past week to make this demonstration articulate. They have tried to say the crowds that have gathered in London to mourn the Queen of Hearts arrived there, like the followers of Wat Tyler in the Peasants' Revolt, with a list of articulate demands.

One of the ideas that such clever journalists have tried to put into the mind of the mob was that this was some kind of demonstration against the royal family. The monarchy is under threat, say the pundits. The crowds loved Princess Diana's common touch. Unless the Queen can adapt herself and become more like Princess Di, then the monarchy will crumble.

Before Her Majesty starts acting on this idea, we should earnestly advise her to pause and think. Maybe if she exercised each morning at the Chelsea Harbour Club, Her Majesty would rate higher in the popularity polls--but I somehow doubt it. Maybe if the Queen came on telly to say how difficult she had found married life with Prince Philip, she would win many admirers, but again, I rather doubt it. Maybe if she had an affair with an army captain, and then a rugby footballer, and then the son of an Arab shopkeeper, and if she spent her last day on earth in Paris shopping till she dropped, Her Majesty would become an icon. But again, perhaps not.

The point is that no one really wants the royal family to be even remotely like our late beloved Princess Di. We should be horrified and amazed if any member of the official "firm" behaved as Di has done over the past five years. Nor would it be possible, without some constitutional problems, for the Prince of Wales or his sons to adopt good causes in quite the way that Di did.

Don't forget, only a little while ago she abandoned nearly all the charities that were represented in her funeral march. She suddenly wanted, like Garbo, to be alone. Then she changed her mind and emerged again as the friend of those charities that particularly engaged her attention or concern.

There is only one category of person in whom you tolerate the degree of caprice that Diana showed throughout her public life. That category is: women with whom you are in love.

The British public was in love with Diana. Men loved her for obvious reasons. Women loved her, as has been said many times since she died, because she went public with many of their concerns. She was not afraid to moan and cry and admit her vulnerability. She wasn't afraid to behave badly.

She was just as popular for her so-called faults as for her alleged virtues. She was, as so many of the cards and posters and messages on the railings of the palace aver, one of us.

You could say, if you wrote down Diana's life story on the back of a postcard, that no one ever lived who was less like one of us. She was born into one of the oldest and grandest aristocratic families in England. She was always very rich, and in latter years she was extravagant on a scale that would have made Marie Antoinette blush. But the crowds were not wrong to suppose that she was one of us--any more than an earlier generation was wrong to feel that the Queen Mum (equally aristocratic and remote in reality from the concerns of us ordinary mortals) really cared, really understood.

"Do you think the King knows all about me?" asks the child of Alice in A.A. Milne's poem. Diana's star quality was that she made us all believe, in our fantasy life, that she did know all about us.

It's as simple and as personal as that. And that is why we weep for ourselves and for her.

A.N. Wilson is the author of The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor and, most recently, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle.



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The Princess Diana: A Lesson In Loss Diana

Joined by tragedy and sorrow, family or fate, the people whose lives were forever changed by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, move on

August 31, 1998

Her glamor and style still captivate, her good works still bring comfort, her smile—captured in endless news footage and on countless magazine covers— still radiates. Is it any wonder that as the anniversary of the death of Princess Diana approaches, it is so hard at times to believe she is really gone? More than 2 billion people watched her funeral on TV, and Britain seemed paralyzed with grief for a week following her death. But the investigation into the horrific crash in Paris on Aug. 31 that claimed her life at 36 (as well as the lives of Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul) has yet to provide answers. Memorials—from the museum her brother Charles erected at Althorp to the shrine soon to be unveiled at Harrods by Dodi's father, Mohamed—keep her legend alive. Her legacy too endures: the press has become more considerate of the royals, the Queen more caring of her subjects. But for those touched most personally by her passing—her dashing young sons, her grieving ex-husband, the crash's sole survivor—the loss is all too real. On the following pages, read how their lives have changed.

On Aug. 23, 15,000 were expected to follow part of the route, from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, taken by Diana's casket last year. On Aug. 31, the anniversary of her death, the Spencers will gather for a private ceremony at Althorp. But Princes William and Harry will be vacationing at Balmoral, where they always go in late August, and where, it is hoped, the familiar surroundings will bring them comfort.

"Up there nothing changes," says author Brian Hoey. The boys' companion Tiggy Legge-Bourke, 33, will be on hand (though presumably not for sports outings after her recent blunder in allowing the princes to abseil—rappeling headfirst down a steep incline—without helmets) as will their cousins Zara, 17, and Peter Phillips, 20, Princess Anne's children. Days will be spent shooting, fishing or biking. There will be movies too. "They like to watch them after dinner," says Hoey. "If it's a war film, Prince Philip will tell what the filmmakers got wrong. He used to make William laugh out loud."

In fact, William and Harry (who turns 14 on Sept. 15) seem to be adapting with ease. "The boys are doing surprisingly well, partly because they're not being pulled in so many directions [now that Diana is gone]," says Majesty editor-in-chief Ingrid Seward. That isn't to say they don't miss their mother. Bubbly Harry now often seems lost in thought. "He's the one showing the effects of his loss," says the British Press Association's Archer. "But William could be storing up problems for later."

Though reporters have kept a respectful distance since Diana's death, it didn't help that a birthday surprise the boys had planned for their dad—a specially written play by Stephen Fry, starring Emma Thompson and the young princes—was spoiled by a newspaper report of it. Still, as a future king, says Archer, William "must learn to live with the legitimate interest of his subjects."

He has made something of a career out of his angst over architecture. He's also passionate about polo, not to mention his place in history as next in line to the British throne. But the role that now most defines Prince Charles is that of single parent. And, like most people new to that task, he has spent much of this year figuring out how to juggle professional duties and parental responsibilities.

Racked by grief after Diana's death, Charles immediately canceled most of his engagements to be with his boys. And as time went on, he arranged, when school holidays allowed, to have them join him. In November, 13-year-old Prince Harry was at Charles's side during an official trip to South Africa, where they were entertained by Zulu dancers and the Spice Girls. Then, over Easter break, both brothers tagged along on a royal visit to Vancouver, followed by a skiing vacation at Whistler, B.C.

"The prince has warmed to the task of being a single parent," says British Press Association royals correspondent Peter Archer. He has engaged in public displays of affection—exchanging a goodbye kiss with William on Aug. 4, for example, as they boarded separate planes for a vacation in Greece—and indulged in kid-friendly outings, such as a trip with Harry July 6 to see a London stage performance of Dr. Doolittle. He has even been heard poking fun at himself. Meeting Doolittle's cast, Charles quipped, "They say I talk to plants; now I'm talking to a Pushmi-Pullyu."

The prince has also taken steps to make a place for his longtime love Camilla Parker Bowles in his family life. He has had some help. Her introductory tea with Prince William, 16, at Charles's St. James's Palace apartments on June 12, leaked to the press as a chance encounter, was in fact orchestrated by William. (Harry's introduction, at Highgrove, took place a few weeks later.)

It's a scenario Diana might have foreseen. "She would be rather irritated that the boys have met Camilla, especially as they probably quite liked her," says Majesty's Seward. Still, says a Palace insider,"at the end of her life, Diana was more resigned to Charles's private life and wished him well."

According to her wishes, Charles enrolled Harry at Eton, where he will reside in William's house. As for William, "Charles wants to introduce him to his royal role, albeit gently," says Archer. For now, Charles's main goal is to provide the emotional support his sons need to heal. "Charles and the boys," Archer says, "are a close family."

You've got to hand it to her: over the past six years, Parker Bowles has been condemned, resurrected and buried again. Yet she has come through it all with her humor intact, even using—prior to the tragedy in Paris—Diana's epithet on herself by answering the phone in her Wiltshire home, "Rottweiler here." Friends aren't surprised. "Camilla is very good at laughing at herself," says author Jilly Cooper. "That's what has saved her through the appalling mauling she has had."

Nor has she ever been anything but discreet. After news of her private June 12 meeting with Prince William at St. James's Palace appeared in newspapers last month, Parker Bowles was quick to accept the resignation of part-time aide Amanda MacManus, who confessed to inadvertently leaking the story in pillow talk with her husband, a Times newspaper executive. (He then mentioned it to a pal in New Zealand, who in turn passed it on to his tennis partner, The Sun's chief reporter, John Kay.)

Parker Bowles's patience began to pay off in the weeks before Diana's death. On July 18, 1997, she and Charles appeared together openly—though privately—at the 50th-birthday party he threw for her at Highgrove. "Having been the most vilified person in the country, Camilla had just about crawled out of the bunker," says her biographer Christopher Wilson. Even Diana had backed off. "She had to accept the relationship," says Majesty's Seward, "because it wasn't doing her any good being obsessive about it."

Diana's death, however, "was bad news for Camilla," adds Seward. "All the love that had been directed toward Diana could easily be directed in hatred toward her." After lying low for months afterward, Parker Bowles is testing the waters once more. How the public responds will be clear when she and Charles appear publicly as a couple. (Bets are on the Oct. 29 wedding of Santa Palmer-Tomkinson, the daughter of Charles's close friends Charles and Patty, to Simon Sebag-Montefiore.) Meanwhile, Parker Bowles appears to have won the acceptance of those who matter most. At their father's birthday play on July 31, William and Harry sat her in a place of honor, next to Charles. "They don't see her as a villain," says author Wade. "She too has had a rough time."

She had suffered her share of setbacks in 1992, the year she called her annus horribilis. But the days immediately following Diana's death were among the bleakest for the Queen. The public's reaction to such gaffes as the family's retreating behind the doors of Balmoral and the Queen's refusal to break with protocol and fly a flag at half-mast—or at all—at Buckingham Palace in honor of the Princess, even though the Queen wasn't in residence, was summed up by a headline in The Express: "Show Us You Care."

She got the message. On the eve of the funeral she addressed the nation live from Buckingham Palace. And within eight months the Queen, now 72, could be found on her first official foray ever to a pub (during a tour of Devon) and riding in a taxi (another first, to promote environmentally friendly liquefied petroleum fuel). Though some reforms—such as the disclosure of certain royal financial records—had been in the works for some time, "Diana's death provided the jolt that was needed," says the Queen's biographer Ben Pimlott. "She showed the way forward."

Indeed, last month the Queen even hinted that she had given up wearing fur except on her ceremonial robes. What's next: a nose ring? Not likely (although body piercing has invaded the Palace: Princess Anne's daughter Zara is sporting a stud in her tongue). But there's no doubt that change is afoot in the hallowed House of Windsor. With the Queen's consent, Tony Blair's Labour government decommissioned the royal yacht Britannia, saving taxpayers some $12 million a year. Royal travel expenses became public, revealing, among other extravagances, the Queen's $17,600 trip aboard the royal train to 1997's Derby horse races. The Queen put up no resistance to the government's proposal to abolish primogeniture (an eldest son's right to precede an older sister to the throne). And, on her own initiative, the Queen pronounced an end to compulsory bowing and curtsying (though they're still appreciated).

Further fine-tuning of the Queen's image awaits the arrival of her new $368,000-a-year communications director, Simon Lewis, 39, who is due to start work in September. But the media are already impressed. "The Queen showed a new face to the nation," the Mail on Sunday editorialized after the monarch had chatted with rock singer Julie Thompson, 21, at a Buckingham Palace function in April. "She publicly embraced, for the first time, the generation that will decide the future of the House of Windsor and won it over."

Public opinion may be harder to sway. "We have become a lot less reverential and a lot less deferential," says royals author Brian Hoey. "People no longer believe royalty walks on water." But if they no longer rule the waves, the royals still serve a purpose. "The monarchy provides the social glue that binds people together," says Pimlott. And, as the headlines of the past year show, "people remain enormously interested in all things royal."

In Britain the measure of a bounder can often be gauged by the number of his former lovers who have vented to the press. Earl Spencer, the man once known as Champagne Charlie, certainly has had his share. But Josie Borain, 35—the former Calvin Klein model who accompanied the earl to Diana's funeral and supported him through his messy divorce from wife Victoria before quietly dumping him in January—looked like a holdout. For a while.

"I found him calculating and manipulative," Borain finally blurted to the Mail on Sunday in July, adding that Spencer, 34, had cheated on her at least once and had had some 20 lovers during his marriage. "Generally," she said of their 10-month affair, "it was a bad investment, a waste of good-quality-loving time."

Harsh as that salvo was, it was just the latest in a year that saw the earl accused of all kinds of bad behavior, from disloyalty (for criticizing the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, of which his sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale is president, for not dispensing its monies with dispatch) to profiteering (by charging a $16 entry fee to the Diana museum he created at Althorp).

For his part, Spencer is "battered, but unbowed," by criticism of the Althorp memorial, he told his local newspaper The Northampton Chronicle. "If it was more subtle, it would be hard to deal with. But as it is, it is just ludicrous," he said of complaints such as those over the potential traffic snarls that could have accompanied the 152,000 pilgrims who visited in July and August. (No such problem arose.) "She was my sister after all . . . and if we are proud of what we are doing, then that is all we can achieve."

As for Spencer's golden moment at Diana's funeral, where he eulogized his sister eloquently while castigating the royal family, it is now at best a tarnished memory and at worst another excuse for a public flogging. "William and Harry did not appreciate it at all," says the British Press Association's Archer. "There was a relative—their uncle—criticizing their father, who is, after all, all they have left now."

Spencer has tried to continue Diana's legacy. Last month he took William abseiling. And in March he followed in Diana's footsteps to Cambodia to highlight the plight of victims of land mines. "He was horrified by what he saw," says Philip Dixon, chairman of the Cambodia Trust, which Diana had supported. "The corridors were full of beds of people in various degrees of disability."

If the experience changed him, then all the better, says former lover Chantal Callopy, 39, who supported her new friend Victoria Spencer through the acrimonious divorce in November. (In a settlement, Victoria got $3.2 million and her Capetown house; and she retained joint custody of children Kitty, 7, twins Eliza and Katya, 6, and Louis, 4, who will stay in Capetown, where Spencer also has a home.) "He has probably done a lot of soul-searching," Callopy says. "Maybe, with this charity work, he has found a niche."

Even Borain seems to have mellowed. "I have no animosity against Charles," she told People. "He is not that bad a guy. He is just young and insecure like the rest of us."

In another family it might have seemed a predictable way to spend a summer weekend. At the invitation of her former son-in-law Prince Charles, Diana's mother, Frances Shand Kydd, spent two days in July visiting with him and grandson Prince Harry (Prince William was off with friends) at Highgrove, Charles's country estate in Gloucestershire. The trio dined and chatted and took walks together in Charles's prized garden. "Charles is keen for Harry and William to see [Mrs. Shand Kydd]," says the British Press Association's Archer. "She is family, after all."

True, but lately Little Red Riding-Hood might have less trouble recognizing her grandmother. Tucked away in her modest, three-bedroom home on Scotland's Isle of Seil—where she will probably mark the anniversary of Diana's death quietly—Shand Kydd, 62, has seen little of the princes since riding on the train with them to their mother's burial at Althorp last September. And despite the friendly weekend—a royal nod toward Diana's wish that her mother be consulted in the boys' upbringing—that is not about to change. "The meeting was simply a gesture," says one insider. "The Spencers are treated with the same disregard as they always have been."

Displays of togetherness are just as rare among the Spencer clan. "Shand Kydd has tried to draw the family together," says Archer. "But there has not been any great show of unity." In fact the matriarch appears to have found as much comfort with commoners as with her own titled kin. In a recent documentary for FOX-TV, she told of mingling—unrecognized—with the crowds of mourners outside Kensington Palace after Diana's death. And when she is not busy hand-writing replies to the many thousands of sympathy letters she has since received, the Roman Catholic convert is occupied with works of charity, such as the trip to Lourdes that she chaperoned last Aprilfor a group of disabled children. "She thinks that the way to keep Diana's memory alive," says Majesty magazine's Seward, "is to keep on with her good work." Growing up, the Spencer girls were a study in contrasts: Sarah, the oldest, was the wildest of the bunch. Jane was considered quiet and dependable. Then came Diana, shy, pretty and eager to please the outgoing Sarah, whom she idolized from the start. "When Sarah returned home from West Heath School, Diana was a willing servant," Andrew Morton wrote in Diana: Her True Story, "unpacking her suitcases, running her bath, tidying her room."

Ironically, by the end of Diana's marriage, McCorquodale, now 43, had become her unofficial lady-in-waiting. "I think Sarah knew about Diana's affairs," says royals author Judy Wade. "In a way she even encouraged Diana to be wild and to have lovers." Meanwhile, Jane, 41, grew more distant from Di because of her own marriage—and loyalty—to Sir Robert Fellowes, who became the Queen's private secretary in 1990. Now, a year after Diana's death, the two sisters find themselves again in contrasting states: one thrust reluctantly into the public domain and the other constricted by her own grief.

Diana may have called her "the only person I know I can trust," but McCorquodale has had less success in winning the confidence of the British public. As president of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, she has borne the brunt of criticism that the fund has been slow to hand out its $132.8 million to charities and has accepted endorsement deals of questionable taste, associating Diana's memory with lottery tickets and margarine. (In March the fund dispensed its first $12.8 million to eight of Diana's favorite causes, and an additional $8 million is currently being distributed.) But a warmer reception may greet McCorquodale across the Atlantic. In the fall the fund will open an office in New York City. A town that saw a 300 percent jump in the number of newborns named Diana last fall is unlikely to balk at Princess of Wales keepsakes.

Yet the strain is beginning to show. "Sarah looks more tired, more drawn," says a royal watcher. "She has aged." Her three-hour commute twice a week from Lincolnshire—where she lives with her husband, Neil, a farmer, and their three children—to the fund's London office can't help. As for Fellowes, also the mother of three, her emotional state prevents her from pitching in. Still mourning deeply for Diana, who died before they could resolve the strain between them, Fellowes has kept a low profile.

The sisters are like-minded on one subject: making time for Di's boys. They've attended Harry's Ludgrove soccer games and visited William at Eton. And though the boys' summer schedule has left little time for their aunts (they turned down an invitation to vacation with them and their cousins in Cornwall in August), the sisters are there for their nephews, says the British Press Association's Archer, "at a time when they need friendship and support."

As glamor goes, it's a world away from the Paris Ritz. That's just what Trevor Rees-Jones, 30, had in mind when he quit his desk job at Harrods in April to return to his hometown of Oswestry (pop. 15,000), 200 miles northwest of London. The former paratrooper, who spent last summer watching over his boss's playboy son Dodi Fayed on his travels with Princess Diana, now sells sneakers part-time at a sports store within walking distance of the two-bedroom cottage where he lives alone. (Estranged wife Susan, reported The Sunday Mirror, now lives with another man in the home she once shared with Rees-Jones.)

Meanwhile, twice-weekly physiotherapy sessions, to repair an injury to his left arm that he suffered in the crash, have paid off. Healthwise, "he is coming along well," says a pal. He has also developed a friendship with his physiotherapist Helen Calaghan, 27. But Rees-Jones won't know if—and whom—he can sue for damages until fall, when the Paris judge investigating the crash issues his findings. Until then, says Rees-Jones's lawyer Ian Lucas, "it is difficult for him to move forward with his life."

Diana called him "my rock," and onetime butler and confidant Paul Burrell, 40, continues to have to live up to the title. "Criticism makes him more resilient," says a friend of the man who was the only nonfamily member graveside at Diana's burial. Since then he has been appointed events and fund-raising manager for the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund (salary: $45,000) and also serves on the government's Memorial Committee, charged with creating a series of Diana commemoratives, including a [sterling] 5 coin. Both jobs have brought controversy. In July newspaper columnists and locals took Burrell to task for his support of a scheme to build a $16 million memorial garden at Kensington Palace, which the art critic Brian Sewell publicly decried as nothing but "a focus for idiot tourists."

More difficult for Burrell, though, was overseeing the dismantling of Diana's 10-room Kensington Palace apartment in the months after her death and the dispersal of her possessions (furnishings and clothes went to Althorp, while her sons had their pick of her photos and beloved stuffed animals). According to an insider the space will remain empty "until the foreseeable future."

Burrell too has been uprooted. Last month he moved out of the three-bedroom apartment he and his wife, Maria, 42, and sons Alexander, 13, and Nicky, 10, occupied at the palace and into a converted barn in Farndon, Cheshire. "Paul is the last thread of the Princess at Kensington," says an intimate of the still fiercely loyal Burrell. "The memories he has he will carry until he dies."

Frederic Mailliez crosses Paris's Alma Bridge nearly every day on his way to work and marvels at the crowds gathered at the site, now an unofficial memorial to Princess Diana, who was fatally injured in the tunnel below. "I'm amazed people were so affected by her death that they still come to that spot," he says.

Mailliez, 37, has reason to be more affected than most. A physician specializing in emergency care who works for SOS Médecins, a private 24-hour house-call service, he was off-duty, driving home, when he came upon the crash moments after it happened. Sizing up the situation—two dead, two seriously injured—he rushed to his car to phone for assistance, grabbed a handheld respirator and ran back to help the Princess, while a volunteer fireman who happened by tended to bodyguard Rees-Jones until ambulances arrived minutes later. It wasn't until the next morning that Mailliez learned his patient's identity. "I was surprised," he says. "People surrounded the car; some had cameras, but they never got in my way." In fact, the only obstacle was his lack of equipment. "It was frustrating to be there with almost nothing but my bare hands," he says. "I couldn't even take her blood pressure."

Yet he has the comfort of knowing he did his best—and he believes the others who treated the victims did too. Might Diana have lived if she had reached the hospital sooner? "It's impossible to say," Mailliez says. "I have spoken to emergency and thoracic-surgery experts who don't believe they could have saved her." As for the paparazzi, all nine of whom are still under investigation for manslaughter and non-assistance to accident victims, he says, "I have nothing to reproach them for."

Mailliez, who has testified three times about the crash, will do so again in September. Still, for all the attention, he insists, "this experience has not changed me. The only contribution Ihave to make is to tell the truth. I feel I'm the guardian of a part of Princess Diana's memory."

 

The Princess Diana: 10 Years On The Long Goodbye A decade after her death, Princess Diana still looms large in Britain's psyche

How Diana Transformed Britain

The British have always been good at silence — at family meals spent wordlessly; intense emotions expressed through a hand on the shoulder — but on Sept. 6, 1997, they surpassed themselves. London, the big, braying capital, was stilled as over a million mourners of Diana, Princess of Wales, kept vigil along the route to Westminster Abbey. The hush amplified the sounds of the cortège as it set out from Kensington Palace: the rumble of wheels on tarmac, the clopping of horses' hooves, and a bell that tolled at listless intervals. But as the procession came into view, turning out of the palace gates onto the public road, a shriek pierced the morning air: "Diana, my Diana!" and then a despairing wail: "We love you, Diana!" Britain's customary stoicism had been overwhelmed by raw, unbridled grief.

It has become commonplace in the decade since Diana's death on Aug. 31, 1997, to say that the festival of mourning which culminated in her extraordinary funeral marked a transformation — the moment when the old British virtues of reserve and silent suffering, of "mustn't grumble" and "could be worse," gave way to publicly expressed catharsis. The People's Princess had unlocked hearts, reordered values, presided at the triumph of emotional intelligence over cold intellect, of compassion over tradition.

The truth is harder to pin down, as tricky as the Princess herself could be. If Diana mattered, her significance rests in a series of interlocking social and political revolutions in a nation with a disproportionate impact on global culture, high and low — revolutions in which she participated, part unwitting catalyst, part canny activist.

This October will see the resumption of the inquest into her death by the British courts, the third inquiry to examine her fatal car crash in Paris. But even before these proceedings are concluded, there is little real doubt that Diana's death was precisely what it seemed to be at the time: a tragic accident.

Ten years on, Diana is still the world's most famous Briton, but many of her own compatriots don't seem sure if she did much more than wear designer dresses and shift a lot of tabloids. So here are a few incontrovertible facts. Diana shook up the British monarchy and speeded its modernization. She helped to tear down prejudices about AIDS. She raised awareness of eating disorders. She coalesced opposition to land mines. These are pretty hefty achievements for a woman of little education who mocked herself for being "thick as a plank." Add to these a more dubious accomplishment — her skillful manipulation of media images — and it's clear why, a decade after her death, Diana remains an inescapable presence in British life: mostly, but not always, benign; a restless and seductive ghost. It's time to peer into the many corners she still haunts.

Modernizing the Monarchy

When 19-year-old Diana asked Charles if he loved her, her churlish fiancé replied "whatever that means." Yet the Windsors thought they knew about love. It looked like patriotism. It was respectful and waved flags. It didn't sob on the streets or scream like a teenage girl glimpsing her rock idol. The quiet affection of the British people for Queen Elizabeth II has barely wavered during her 54-year reign. There was a low ebb early in 1998 — Diana's legacy — but even then the monarch's popularity rating dipped no lower than 66%. It's now 85%.

Of course, there has always been dissent: some 18% of Britons have called for the abolition of the monarchy since MORI, a polling firm, first began gathering opinions on the royals in 1969. That figure seemed as impervious to change as the Queen's fashion sense. Then Diana died and, for one week, republican numbers swelled.

The Queen never gives interviews — a wise policy that has helped to preserve the fraying mystique of royalty. But as her subjects wept on the streets and dying flowers carpeted the sidewalks, Elizabeth's Trappist vow looked either boneheaded or stone-hearted. Dickie Arbiter, a former press secretary to the Queen, Charles and Diana who was responsible for the media arrangements for Diana's funeral, says it was neither. "The Queen was always going to pay tribute to Diana," he says, but she planned from the outset to make her broadcast shortly before the funeral. "There was a furor because she was at [the Scottish castle] Balmoral and not down with the sniveling mobs in London. [But] William and Harry needed her more than hundreds and thousands of people keeping Kleenex in business."

Yet while the Queen and her immediate family kept their grief to themselves, there was a whiff of revolution beyond the palace gates. The U.S. academic Camille Paglia, speaking two days after the Paris car crash, foretold the fall of the house of Windsor. "With its acquisition of Diana, the monarchy had restored its modernity," she told Salon.com. "Instead its treatment — its mistreatment — of her ... may mean the end of the monarchy." Not so. As soon as the Queen walked among the mourners, support for ditching her plunged to historic lows. It was as if Britons had peered into the abyss of republicanism and drawn back in horror. The royals had learned a lesson too, says Robert Worcester, MORI's founder: "The monarchy realized that it stands or falls on public opinion." That realization has informed a program of stealthy reform that has made the monarchy, by almost imperceptible degrees, more professional. The Queen agreed to change the rules on primogeniture to allow her female descendants equal rights in the succession to the throne. Her children took stock and decided they had better justify their existence to the outside world.

Granted, their options for doing so are limited. In her charitable work, Diana set a standard that's hard to equal. She ignored the prevailing prejudices and fears about AIDS to clasp the hands of sufferers, and embraced leprosy patients in Indonesia. Arbiter remembers a visit to a home for the blind where Diana noticed that an old resident was crying: "She asked what was the matter and he said, 'I can't see you.' So she took his hand and put it on her face." Charles still doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, but it's increasingly evident that it's in the right place. His Prince's Trust organization raises a good deal of money for charities helping young people, and he's gaining respect for his stance on environmental issues, as mainstream thought catches up with views he's propagated for years.

In other ways, too, Diana lives on in her family. Charles has visibly stepped up to the task of rearing their boys, not in the model of his own upbringing, but just as the Princess would have wanted. William and Harry see how much happier their father has become. Charles' visible contentment has also helped to turn around public opinion, once set firmly against Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, his second wife and longtime lover. Just before Diana died, MORI asked in a poll if Camilla should become Queen; only 15% supported the idea. By April of last year, that figure had grown to 38%. Voices in the British press have fulminated at plans for the Duchess to attend a memorial service for Diana later this month; there's some sympathy with this view, but little sign of a real backlash. With no small irony, the ideas the Princess popularized — the pursuit of personal happiness, compassion for human weaknesses — have helped the cause of a woman she detested.

Unbuttoning Britain

Diana had been brought up in about as old-fashioned an environment as was possible in the last quarter of the 20th century, but nothing could have prepared her for the antiquity of palace life. Britain had been postimperial for more than a generation, which meant that the values associated with empire (or with its rulers) had long lost their edge. By the time she married it was already — and especially in London — a place less homogeneous, more multicolored than it had ever been, and far less deferential to the Victorian virtues that the royal family represented. Yet in the royal household, those virtues — and that deference — held sway. The new Princess could not fit in. Her rebellion, inchoate and self-destructive at first, reverberated far beyond the palace walls. Tina Brown, the latest of Diana's biographers, relates asking former Prime Minister Tony Blair if Diana had found a new way to be royal. "No," Blair replied. "Diana taught us a new way to be British."

Blair's party, New Labour, had been given power by electors who were reviewing their values. After the brash, moneymaking 1980s came the hangover of the early 1990s. Britons were searching for spiritual and emotional succor. That didn't make them deep. They set increasing store by celebrity. Success was measured by the ability to find fulfillment. It was a confessional age. Even before the country convulsed in grief for its lost Princess, Brits were eager to let it all hang out — at least by comparison with their grandparents and great-grandparents. If you doubt that, consider this passage in The Ascent of Everest, the account of the first conquest of the mountain in 1953, by John Hunt, who led the expedition. Hunt is describing the return of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to camp after summiting. "Everyone was pouring out of the tents, there were shouts of exclamation and joy. The next moment I was with them: handshakes — even, I blush to say, hugs — for the triumphant pair."

Diana led the charge for emotion and the unembarrassed displays that now routinely go with it: from hugs and kisses to public tears. Unlike her remote royal in-laws, she touched the people she met, literally touched them, and bought their trust with a coinage she had in endless supply: her most personal thoughts and feelings. That's partly because her unhappiness drove her humanitarian impulses. Arbiter says, "She always championed the downtrodden" because she was attracted to their suffering. "She was a bit of an ambulance chaser, with the best of intentions." She also experimented with different therapies that encouraged her to unburden, if not necessarily in public. The comedian David Baddiel, whose novel Whatever Love Means begins on the day of Diana's funeral, sees her as an exponent of "a degraded version of therapy culture," a self-help addict who couldn't stop spilling her guts. She "didn't know who she was but gained an identity through her messiness, through her lack of identity, by splattering her lack of identity on the walls of our culture," he says. "People chimed with that."

After her separation and divorce, Diana's efforts to redefine herself took on an edge of urgency. She had given up her patronage of most of the charities she once represented. She fantasized about becoming the wife of one of her boyfriends, a heart surgeon called Hasnat Khan, and living in anonymity. Yet she could never hope to become normal. Instead she became a celebrity. Then came Dodi Fayed.

Though friends say he was just a distraction, her choice of two Muslim boyfriends looked set to test how deep the tolerance of New Labour's Britain would go. This much is plain: she had long since escaped or shed the attitudes of many white Britons. After her death, Trevor Phillips, a black Labour politician who now chairs Britain's Commission for Equality and Human Rights, told Newsweek Diana "embraced the modern, multicultural, multi-ethnic Britain without reservation." Unlike most Europeans, she had "no flinch, no anxiety about race ... for nonwhite Britons, she was like a beacon in the darkness."

Wayne Sleep, a ballet dancer and media personality, got to know Diana well and remembers her "poking fun at aristocracy." In her final years, she mingled less and less with her own class, preferring instead the company of the self-made aristocracy of entertainment and fashion. The members of this élite were from different countries and cultures — gay, straight, black, white and united by fame. In Blair's Britain, they could expect invitations to 10 Downing Street, not always because of their talent. (Britain may have shrugged off its forelock-tugging subservience to the ruling classes, but in Cool Britannia money and celebrity counted.) Diana fitted into this new world perfectly. She wasn't seen as posh. She was one of the people. By example, she reassured them that anyone could be a star. All you needed, she seemed to imply, was the chance to display yourself to the world. After all, she'd done that more than once herself. In 1985, at a gala evening to celebrate Charles' 37th birthday, she left the royal box and appeared on stage, shimmying with Sleep. Charles was appalled. Diana's scheme to please him may have come undone, but she had helped Britain to unbutton.

From Fairy Tale to PostFeminist

Imagine this: Diana is still alive. She's a well-preserved 46, with a new boyfriend and an apartment in Manhattan. Is she popular? Maybe. A legend? No way. By dying young, Diana ensured her immortality. Better dead than wrinkled.

Celebrity culture is cruel, but especially to women. "One of the characteristics of celebrity culture is that you first build someone up and then you write about their downfall," says German writer Tom Levine, the author of a book on Britain's first family. "If Diana had lived she would have been going on that up-and-down train." Her last summer was already something of a downward ride. A slight weight gain set the press speculating she might be pregnant. She wasn't, and such close attention could not have been easy for a bulimic. But her public admission of her eating disorder in a 1995 interview with Martin Bashir for the BBC had encouraged hidden sufferers to seek help. Her life reflected many of the concerns of ordinary women — their weight, their relationship troubles — and by talking openly she also eroded the stigma attached to failure. Even a Princess battled the bulge, even a beauty lost her husband. Diana was criticized for her "American style of emotionalism," says feminist writer Naomi Wolf, but her approach actually represented a liberation theology in hidebound Britain. "It was very radical. She didn't just talk the talk, she walked the walk."

That was not the fate feminists predicted when the news of her engagement to Charles broke. The feminist magazine Spare Rib ran an article headed "DON'T DO IT DI". This slogan, rendered as a lapel button, became a fashionable accessory for the thinking woman. "On 29 July 1981," wrote the British journalist Beatrix Campbell of the fairy-tale wedding in St. Paul's Cathedral, "the deceitful and depressed engagement ended when this thin, wan, whiter-than-white woman walked down the aisle, propping up the aged patriarch who had got her into all this ... Her ivory silk wedding dress was a shroud."

By the time Diana died, however, many feminists had read her struggle against a sclerotic system as a parable of empowerment. Paglia dubbed her an "incredible superstar." That she was, but she would never have located herself in the feminist firmament. She wasn't interested in gender equality. She fought against a patriarchy because it was old-fashioned and restrictive, not because she repudiated its male values. The Princess was one of the first and most potent symbols of the "girl power" celebrated by the Spice Girls with their mildly predatory allure and celebration of girly friendship. It was a neat fit for Diana, with her close women friends and her troubled search for a mate. What Royal Spice really, really wanted was not at all radical: to love and be loved.

The Political Princess

Diana's body was transported to Westminster Abbey on a gun carriage. Arbiter says that's a detail of Diana's funeral that troubled Blair's communications chief, Alastair Campbell, and his team. The vehicle had been chosen because, unlike a hearse, it would be open to the crowds. To the palace it also seemed appropriate: Diana had, after all, been the honorary Colonel-in-Chief of six regiments.

Yet Diana's last, passionate campaign was distinctly unmilitary: she called for the abolition of land mines. She had visited Angola with the British Red Cross in January 1997, angering some Conservative MPs, who thought she was showboating. Peter Viggers, a Tory member of the Commons Defence Select Committee, said: "This is an important, sophisticated argument. It doesn't help simply to point at the amputees and say how terrible it is." Undaunted, Diana spoke at a conference on land mines and made a second fact-finding trip, to Bosnia.

Few would have predicted such engagement from the plummy girl who emerged onto the public stage in 1980 as Charles' latest squeeze. The royal wedding in 1981 — with Diana's endless train, the pages and flower girls, the choirs and coaches — was widely seen at the time as a reaffirmation of tradition in Britain, a throwback to an age when nobility and pomp held the nation in thrall. That it should have taken place during Margaret Thatcher's first term only added to the idea that Britain was becoming a more conservative society, and that Diana, the girl from the old aristocracy who had married into royalty, epitomized it.

Yet the Princess was never in tune with the Iron Lady. "Who is society? There is no such thing," Thatcher told Woman's Own magazine in 1987. "There are individual men and women and there are families." Thatcher's bracing doctrine of personal responsibility was always at odds with Diana's faith in the power of redemptive understanding, of allowing the weak to be weak. Her belief system very much included an entity called society, which rejected and marginalized people. "Someone has got to go out there and love people and show it," she said in her BBC interview.

By the time the Princess died, Thatcher was long gone, her pallid successor John Major was vanquished and Blair was in 10 Downing Street, with a huge popular mandate to build a more inclusive, caring Britain. That agenda echoed Diana's. The Princess had two secret meetings with Blair before his election. According to Alastair Campbell's recently published diaries, she told the intermediary who set up the meetings that "she would like to help [Labour] if she could." Diana had certainly made her mark on Campbell, who recorded that the Princess "had perfect skin and her whole face lit up when she spoke and there were moments when I had to fight to hear the words because I'm just lost in the beauty." Today Campbell has a more sober assessment: "She was very small-p political. I have no idea if she would have ended up taking some kind of unofficial role with a Labour government, but I am sure she would have found a way of harnessing her own skills and popularity to the sense of Britain as a more modern and compassionate country."

We will never know if she would have achieved such a dispensation. But the fact that she was — undeniably — on occasion manipulative, deceitful and self-centered should not blind us to the fact that, during her 17 years in the limelight, she had grown as Britain had grown, changed as Britain had changed, and that by the time she died she had something increasingly vital to offer. Arbiter recalls a strange, muted, mournful night after the Princess died when he encountered a group of wheelchair users on their way to lay flowers at Kensington Palace. "They were saying, 'Who's going to speak for us, now?' They had a point. The disabled: who's going to speak for them? The AIDS patients: who's going to speak for them? The drug addicts, the down-and-outs, the homeless, the elderly? She was their voice and drew attention to their plight." Arbiter pauses. "She'd have made a good Queen, you know. But that's it. She's gone." Gone? As anyone who knows anything about the strains that make up modern Britain will tell you, that is very far from true.