Diana, apparently, is a whore, at least according to the tabloids. That's going to make her media soubriquet even more cumbersome: Princess of Wales, Princess David, Celebrity, Wife, Mother, Saint, Saviour, Queen of Hearts, English Rose and now Harlot.
She was inconsequential in life and has been dead for more than ten years. Surely the ongoing media fascination with her life and death now amounts to necrophilia, and not just on the part of news editors; the cloth-heads who buy the newspapers and pounded their chests on Pall Mall ten years ago should take their portion of shame.
I may already have antagonised some readers. During that week in 1997, I was bewildered by the strength and sincerity of the grief indulged in by people I'd considered sane. I asked a colleague what the fuss was all about. I acknowledged that the death was very sad, that Diana had seemed a perfectly nice girl and that it was no doubt a life-changing tragedy for those close to her; as opposed to cretins who thought they were close to her because they'd seen her on the telly.
The response was de profundis. With vitriol in her eyes and a catch in her throat, the colleague established that, grandparents aside, I'd never lost anyone close to me, and therefore couldn't possibly understand. Taking my life in my hands, I ventured that unless my colleague had an exotic secret life, she hadn't lost anyone close to her either if we were talking about said Queen of Hearts. This apparently confirmed my irredeemable cold-heartedness.
I couldn't work it out at the time. I remember a roving TV interview with some ordinary bloke waiting for the cortege; he confessed, without a hint of embarrassment, that he'd cried more at Diana's passing than he had at his own mother's. Had we really become so culturally corrupt that we couldn't tell where fiction ended? Had celebrity really become an achievement in its own right?
So she was pretty and took a laudable interest in some worthy issues. Wouldn't that suffice as an epitaph? She might be pitied for her unhappy love life and being the fox to the paparazzi hounds. Then again, she was wealthy and never had to worry about such vulgarities as working for a living. And she certainly learned to use the media to her own ends. We shouldn't forget the vision thing: Diana was pretty, blonde and a master of the dewy-eyed, down-turned glance. Would the famously hard-working Princess Anne have inspired such weeping and gnashing of teeth had she and her retriever died in a horrific Land Rover accident? Would the McCann family have had a different media response had they been less pretty, less blonde and from the wrong side of the tracks?
Then I saw illuminating footage of Winston Churchill's state funeral in 1965. Swinging London stopped whatever mischief it had been making and stood to attention. The old order was being cast off but it deserved respect. Love or hate Churchill and what he stood for, he was undeniably a significant historical figure, a maker of decisions that gave us the world we live in. It was right that the cranes on the Thames dipped in salute because his passing was momentous.
Thirty or so years later, our emotionally incontinent, historically myopic society pulled out all the stops to send a pretty sloane with a vague interest in charity-work into the beyond. Were we really so desperate for something to worship? The cultural ground shift between Churchill and Diana makes us look like a decaying culture well past its prime: a senile dowager who would lavish the same love and wealth on interring a pomaded pekinese as she would once have done on a loved one who mattered.
Perhaps we deserve to be pitied, not punished. So, editors and media whores everywhere, for pity's sake leave Diana alone and bring us some news instead.
