Princess Diana's influence on the royal family lives on (776 hits)
Fifteen years on, Diana's memory has faded but she can be credited with the Queen's Olympic cameo and much more
Fifteen years ago this morning my wife woke me at 6am with an uncharacteristically robust thump: Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris after trying to escape the paparazzi in the company of Dodi Fayed. Melodramatic and tacky, it was in that dawn moment close to being that over-used word: unbelievable. "Is it really true?" people later asked each other on the tube as they read the shocking newspaper headlines.
It was indeed, and the royal family fell into its gravest crisis since the abdication of the Queen's uncle, Edward VIII, in December 1936. Its response to Diana's death was inept and seemingly callous. If the House of Windsor was saved by the shrewder "people's princess" instinct of its new prime minister, it was not grateful: neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown was invited to last year's royal wedding.
But the Windsors have recovered and Di's memory – once so vivid, often so radiant but also wretched – has faded, as wise hands knew it would. How many anniversary articles to mark her death in 1997 did you read today? I had forgotten it myself, though at a Guardian lunch I once sat across the table from her. You don't forget that.
Yet Diana's posthumous influence on the royal family lives on in significant ways, irritating though it must be to be reminded of it. She forced them to raise their game, she enlivened their Hanoverian gene pool.
In a series of initiatives to "detox" the brand, the Queen and her family have engaged in a series of informal gestures to ease the unbending and remote image which the late Elizabethan age had acquired and Prince Charles, in his frustrated waiting-room prime, had failed to dispel – by virtue of his temperament and constraints. The party at the palace, the Queen's Olympic cameo … they and much else would once have been unthinkable.
But Di – none of this Diana, Princess of Wales stuff in the new era – also bequeathed the Windsors her sons, the heir and the spare. Even royal watchers like Penny Junor, whose new biography charts the lives of the Duke of Cambridge and his bride, do not really tell us what Prince William is like. His privacy is well guarded and he apparently likes it that way.
William shares Lord Justice Leveson's distaste for the press but, perhaps unlike Leveson, is more realistic about dealing with it. Those supermarket photos in north Wales suggest he knows the need to feed the beast. He cannot leave the PR department all to brother Harry and his well-documented wild side.
