Why Princess Diana still fascinates us

Chris Hampson London bureau chief • E-mail

LONDON — I was walking back into the newsroom when a colleague rushed past me and, over his shoulder, turned and said: “She’s dead.”

And I said: “Don’t joke. She can’t be.”

It took a while for me to grasp what had happened. It was too big, too unthinkable.

At that moment, and in the hours and days that followed, my own reaction was multiplied many millions of times, as the news sank in around the world.

Princess Diana was young, beautiful and brimming with life. She was a princess. She was the devoted mother of a future king, and was once destined herself to be queen of England.

Surely my friend was mistaken?

The next days were long and largely sleepless, as the tragedy of that crazed, deadly dash into a tunnel in Paris unfolded piece by piece, and the world’s media reported around the clock each and every development in the unfolding drama.

Ten years on, it seems not much has changed. We are still reporting it. Still talking about it.

Still fascinated
There are some moments you truly never forget. For millions of people — whether they liked her or loathed her — Diana’s death is one of them.

In those strange days and months that followed, there began an outpouring of public grief that my country has seldom, if ever, seen. Though we have lived through many disasters, both natural and manmade, it was unparalleled.

It was as if we’d been cheated of something.

There are, of course, those who say: “Move on. Too much fuss. We don’t care.” There are many who are embarrassed by the outburst of sentimentality that followed and persists to this day. Others, a far fewer number, say: “We never cared.”

But many — here and around the world — are still fascinated, still moved, some perhaps even still grieving, for the woman Prime Minister Tony Blair memorably described on the morning of her death as “the people’s princess.”

I remember his words at the time, and the effect they had. It was as if he was validating the nation’s immediate — and continuing — emotional involvement. In three words, he put a title on the legend that Diana had become.

Royals — aloof, distant figures
For my part, I confess, I have never much loved the royals.

There is in my country, without doubt, a widespread respect for the institution and what it represents. But to my hard-working parents and to me, they were distant and detached, living behind the high walls of their palaces and country estates, while the rest of us muddled through as best we could.

Other than having to stand up whenever the national anthem was played in public, the royals didn’t much impact my life. They were figures in the landscape.

The newspapers largely used to keep their distance, too. The royal family was protected, respected, their lives lived mostly on a pedestal. No paparazzi then. Not much reporting of their private lives. It simply wasn’t done.

That’s not to say the public wasn’t fascinated by them, or that they were perfect.

Queen Mother Elizabeth was known to have a taste for gin and a love for the horses.

The queen’s sister — the late Princess Margaret — was famously flirtatious. (And she, too, liked a drink.) At 43, married and a mother, she fell in love with a garden designer 18 years her junior. Their affair scandalized her family and much of the country. Five years later she became the first member of the immediate royal family to divorce since King Henry VIII.

For the most part, however, the royals remained aloof, cocooned from their subjects.

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