When the phone rang in the early hours of Sunday 31 August 1997, my first reaction, emerging from deep sleep, was to wonder who I knew called Diana, because something awful seemed to have happened to her in Paris.
Within an hour I was in Broadcasting House in London, where we were getting rumours that her injuries weren’t serious, but by the time we went on air 5am, I was sitting with Peter Allen of Radio 5 Live. All the radio networks had been brought together so we could start to tell a story – with hordes of listeners joining every minute as they woke up to the news, and with the word spreading at lightning speed – that we realised would be with us always.
When the car carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, crashed in the Pont de l’Alma underpass in Paris just after midnight, an old world gave way to the new. The monarchy was engulfed in an electric storm greater than any it had known in the Queen’s long life. And beyond the palace walls, the fervour and the tone of the public spectacle that followed were a harbinger of profound changes in the way our politics and public life are conducted. It is a day that remains a watershed.
This is as true for people who spend little time thinking about the monarchy or the constitution as it is for those with a closer emotional connection to the event, either personally or through a public life.
A family tragedy – and the sadness of a life violently eclipsed after only 36 years – became a moment of national introspection and, bizarrely, a signal for public breast-beating at the same time, as if the country could not decide whether to adopt the traditional decorum for a royal death, or crank up a festival of mourning of a kind we had not seen before.
No one who wandered along The Mall close to Buckingham Palace in the succeeding days will forget the piles of flowers, the queues of families with children carrying their bouquets and wreaths that gave the week its fevered air – and the sweet smell of flowers that hung over central London.
On Friday 5 September, the night before Diana’s funeral, one newsroom veteran in Broadcasting House looked at pictures showing Diana’s coffin on its procession up Constitution Hill to Kensington Palace, with vast crowds spreading across the parks holding lighted candles, and shouted to no one in particular, but apparently in despair: “This isn’t England, this is Spain!”
It caught the spirit of the time, shot through with the drama of Earl Spencer’s speech during the actual funeral the next day in which he set Diana’s “blood family” against the whole royal system which he believes to this day destroyed her.
And had it not been for the Queen’s decision – personal and resolute – to give a live address from Buckingham Palace the night before to speak about her admiration for Diana, there are many who believe that the months afterwards could have shaken the institution more seriously than the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, the long shadow in which she herself had grown up.
The public was demanding a reaction that flew against all the Queen’s instincts, which were to allow the family – princes William and Harry especially – to close the gates and grieve. But the time for such stiff-upper-lip calm had gone. In the dawning age of the internet, every convention was up for grabs and every aspect of public life – and death – was being turned into entertainment.
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Diana’s glamour, and the long public melodrama of her marriage and divorce, exacerbated this. Leaving aside the fact that New Age conspiracists were beginning to realise that they had a playground the size of the world wide web, the tragedy in Paris became a focus of world attention because it had a potent mix of beauty, cruel fate, a family story of drama and even intrigue, and an historical backdrop like no other.
Yet it wasn’t simply Diana’s story that fuelled the atmosphere of those days. Everything was changing. “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” Tony Blair had said on the morning after election night in May 1997. He may not have been a radical agenda, but it was certainly one of change, under a prime minister who was the Queen’s first to have been born after she acceded to the throne. In age and style perhaps as much as anything else.
And the national spasm that followed Diana’s death was a signal that the national consciousness – and the expectations of public life – were changing too. As profoundly as the end of the age of deference in the 60s, this was going to be a time when everyone was encouraged to let go.
Rolling 24-hour news coverage, especially in the United States, was changing the discourse. Within five years – after the cataclysms of 9/11 – the sounds in the public square were louder, more raucous and perhaps more unforgiving too. The age of politics as entertainment was not far off.
None of this came about as the consequence of one accident in Paris. But looking back, those days lifted a veil on how differently we were talking about each other. Public life is different, like the monarchy itself. And so it had to change. It was perhaps inevitable that in the Harry-Meghan drama – so similar to the arrival of Diana in the Family – we see the kind of decisiveness that caused the Queen to force them to choose between a Hollywood life or royal duty, when they thought they could manage both. Her concept of duty would not be sacrificed, as the Duke of York has also discovered.
The Paris crash did not have direct political consequences, but you cannot look at public life over the past few decades without placing it near the centre – and watching the ripples. Diana’s death was not only a turning point for the monarchy, but for the rest of us too.
James Naughtie is a special correspondent for BBC News
