Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have been quoted in today’s Observer by Mary Riddell in an interesting discussion of the monarchy ten years after Diana. Our political class is still very nervous about what happened when she died and the media are now trying to close down the memory of it by calling it “a moment of madness”. This description is false. A large majority of the population were moved but not hysterical or afraid. The clapping and flowers that accompanied her coffin were, I wrote at the time, the equivalent of ‘Well played, Diana!’ – a cheer for the fright she gave the establishment.
Before the accident the monarchy had been threatened by the civil war which broke out within its ranks - and by the prospect of two competing courts both claiming the allegiance of William and Harry. It was saved by Diana’s premature death which resolved the conflict. Earl Spencer, Diana’s younger brother, who made the savage speech in the Abbey in front of the royal family (who could hear the applause of the crowd outside listening to the broadcast) was engaged in a family affair: the Queen was his Godmother and he had served as her page. It was the last expression of defiance, not a call to arms: ‘the firm’ as the royals call themselves, had won.
What was important, and positive, was the way lower-case people took it on themselves to define how Diana’s death should be saluted. Both the monarchy and, equally important, the press and media were taken by surprise. The spontaneity was not republican, obviously, but nor was it any longer deferential or obedient. In particular it was multi-racial, the first mass public event in Britain in which ‘the people’ were black and Muslim and gay and all equally at home.
My conclusion then was positive:
"Different routes are possible into the modern world. And commentators found themselves in difficulty, because the terms in which we think and expect, when faced with large crowds, are still embedded in old stereotypes. The received categories for describing lower-case people taking to the streets are out of date. They were neither republican hoards itching to boo the Queen, nor gullible, infatuated dupes reproducing traditional royalism. Yet both caricatures hovered behind much of the thinking, as the starting point for an assessment. The common assumption behind such stock images is that, whether opposition or conventional, the masses are mindless.
The millions who responded to Diana's death were mindfull. A thinking multitude, the great washed - with flowers - rather than the great unwashed; well dressed not sans culottes; a vast mass movement of people who by their very existence demonstrated that the premise of the 300-year-old British constitution had been swept away. The people are now independent-minded and capable. Their letters, messages and applause, which carried the UK before it, demonstarted that the country is ready for full democracy, British-style: informal, good-humoured, inventive and measured. The question now is whether the political elite will allow the constitutional transformation to proceed."
It didn't.
