History of England 1-6

‘Cool Britannia’ was the watchword of this epoch. Like Harold Wilson, but for different reasons, Tony Blair sought to identify with the culture of the young. Wilson’s courting of the Beatles was not a gimmick; he recognized the value of the common touch, but he knew also that his pipe and his age were against him. For Blair, however, inviting pop stars to Downing Street was an existential statement; in the manner of middle-class public schoolboys the country over, he believed that he could become proletarian by proxy, that ownership of a guitar and cordial relations with workingclass pop stars granted him access to the world of the labouring man. A spirit of conciliation seemed to seep through his very smile, always ready to sink into a thoughtful grimace should its object fail to reciprocate. People spoke of the ‘Blair effect’. He was charismatic, clearly middle class and ‘trendy’, although it was John Prescott, the seaman’s son and well-known ‘bruiser’, who declared that ‘we are all middle class now’. When Blair came to power, many on the Continent felt in his accession the gust of a warm wind. A fluent French-speaker, Blair was more Europhile than any of his immediate predecessors and understood the sometimes blunt, sometimes byzantine, ways of the European Union. Like Major, he saw himself as the heir to Thatcher, perhaps with more reason. More than one former colleague used the word ‘messianic’ to describe him.

63

The princess leaves the fairy tale

And so came about the disappearance of a prime minister who had made far less impression on the public than most of his predecessors. Yet that year was distinguished by one shocking and tragic event in the marriage of the Prince of Wales. Charles and Diana were not the best matched of couples. He was a man of strong convictions and a stubborn streak; she had come of age with only a vague idea of what it meant to be a member of the royal family. A curious snobbery informed this ignorance. Her family regarded the German-descended Windsors as parvenus; Diana was even heard to say that she felt she had married beneath her. Nevertheless, in more formal times it could have been the model of an arranged marriage, with each going their separate ways. Their holidays were taken apart; their friends seemed to have little in common. But the public was always present, with ears pricked and eyes hungry.

It soon became apparent, to those at court, that the princess was seriously disturbed. She threw herself down the stairs and used a penknife, a lemon slicer and a razor blade against herself, while her husband carried on his principal duties of hunting and fishing. The truth was that they had nothing in common but the children, but she had the gift of intimacy. There are certain people who for a brief period represent the ideals of the nation and come to embody them. She herself acknowledged this attribute when she recognized that ‘you can make people happy, if only for a little while’. The ‘queen of people’s hearts’ was the one figure who came to represent the Eighties and Nineties, principally by first defying and then by ignoring the traditions in which she had been raised.

Diana Spencer was born in 1961 in what would have been the best of circumstances, had she not been the classic ‘third girl’ and had her parents not argued constantly until they separated in 1967, a traumatic episode that did not leave her. She was to all appearances an ordinary girl, but ordinariness can be one of the most effective disguises. She was talkative, with a marked tendency to giggle, but she was enormously afraid of the dark. When her father suggested that she should be dispatched to a boarding school, she is supposed to have said, ‘If you love me, you won’t leave me.’

She failed her O levels and in the same period began to suffer from bulimia, but she also began a series of meetings and encounters that began to suggest what a royal marriage might entail. The ears and eyes of the public grew larger. The queen herself played no part in guiding or advising the young couple, although by Diana’s own account, the publicly unresponsive Prince Philip did. It seems that destiny or, in this instance, fate, was to make its own progress.