History of England 1-6

The narrative of the next few years has been retold a thousand times. ‘The pack’ were at her heels, chasing every move she made. In a mood of deep despondency, she told her sisters that marriage would not be possible. ‘Bad luck,’ they said. ‘Your face is on the tea towels.’ It was on the mugs too, with ‘my prince’, as she called him, supporting Diana with one arm, and her head cocked at an angle. Her reception within the palace elicited feelings of anxiety and betrayal, while her loneliness was compounded by disappointment. It has been said that while a man fears a woman’s future, a woman fears a man’s past; and so it proved in this instance. Another love still held sway over the prince. There were confidential interviews with ‘friends’, and books, authorized or unauthorized. ‘I never thought it would end up like this,’ she told one friend. ‘How could I have got it all so wrong?’ Their separation was announced in the early months of 1996, and their divorce soon after.

An impulsive and unselfconscious person, Diana rarely calculated the effects of her actions on others, but nothing could have averted the final disaster. She was in Paris with her companion, Dodi Fayed, when they entered the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel and their speeding car crashed. At four in the morning of 31 August 1997, she was declared dead. The press took a morsel every hour, as if watching the collapse of a stock market. At one point, Diana was struggling, at another she was said to be recovering. The nation awoke to news of her death.

Her death released a torrent of tears. These were shed for her smile, for her work with the victims of AIDS and of landmines, for her status as a free spirit and wronged wife. And inevitably she was mourned in mythic terms, as fearless martyr and sacrificial lamb. The shock of her demise in Paris was compounded by the fact that her two young sons were still in England; her former husband hardly seemed to enter the nation’s sorrow. Her relative youth was one cause of dismay, but it was her sudden and brutal absence that provoked the greater mourning. Something seemed to have torn out the heart of Britain, recognized even in the overwhelming wave of grief that dominated the days after her death.

It soon seemed as if England had become moist in mind as well as in soul; some universities began to include ‘Diana studies’ on their curriculum. When the singer Elton John adapted his song ‘Candle in the Wind’ to celebrate Diana, the nation bought the record by the million. So promiscuous an outpouring of grief inevitably provoked satire. A cartoon in Private Eye showed a frightened householder being menaced by two men in dark glasses with the reproach ‘We have reason to believe you haven’t bought “Candle in the Wind”.’

It was Blair who coined the expression ‘the people’s princess’; it may be that he saw himself in the role of ‘people’s prince’. But for all the later calumnies, New Labour was not a one-man show. At the apex of the new government stood a triumvirate of equals. Blair brought his charm and Brown his brain and his industry, while Peter Mandelson offered his skills as a strategist. He became known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’, but the jibe was as frivolous as it was unjust. Like many in the new government, he had abandoned the strict socialism of his youth only with intense misgivings. Mediating the ‘message’, as it became known, was Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press officer. He had been editor of the Daily Mirror, and the knowledge accrued there served him and the government well. Under his auspices, ministerial pronouncements became subject to strict censorship; to be ‘on message’ was all.

Having clawed at its cage for eighteen years, Labour bounded out with teeth bared. If the economy seemed serviceable, little else did. Haste was needed. Under Gordon Brown, the Bank of England was permitted to set its own exchange rates, a concession that effectively granted it independence. It was a move widely praised, even in the Tory press. The government also sought to discard the image of Labour as the party of the cloth cap, backward-looking and aggressively masculine, by bringing 101 female MPs into parliament. The jibe of ‘Blair’s babes’ soon acquired currency, though the term was swiftly dropped. Its mocking successor, ‘Tony’s Cronies’, would take longer to exorcise.