The American Spectator

Special Report

(Page 2 of 2)

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We apologize for the Princess Diana Page One Headline "Di goes sex mad," which is still on the stands at some locations. It is currently being replaced with a special 72-page tribute issue: "A farewell to the Princess we all loved. Diana -- her final hours."

br> Publications and people of higher intellectual credentials joined in. The London Spectator , which prides itself on cool-headed cynicism, apologized for having run an advertisement for Mercedes cars. Paul Johnson (Yes, Paul Johnson!) claimed that "It is not often an entire people speak, and they are asking that a woman, cast out in life, be listened to in death. A new spirit is moving across this country!" He continued that: "In all sincerity, and at the risk of seeming blasphemous, I am reminded of the Blessed virgin who, told of her destiny, announced with proud modesty, 'I am the hand-maiden of the Lord'...all the original saints were chosen by popular acclamation." Months later he wrote that: "I now pray to her." (To her, not for her.) Piers Paul Reid also likened her to the Virgin Mary, while John Mortimer QC drew significance from the fact that the funeral had passed under the arch of a house where the Duke of Wellington had once lived.

I HAVE TROUBLE NOW BELIEVING the notes I made at the time, but they say that Conservative Party leader William Hague suggested Heathrow Airport be re-named Diana Airport, and was criticized for the moderation of the way he put the proposal (but then, Liverpool's Speke Airport, originally named after an African explorer, really was re-named John Lennon Airport not long after, in honor of the popular drug-culture icon and IRA supporter of that name).

The papers raved against the "loathsome" paparazzi they had paid. Denouncing media intrusiveness, the Daily Mail published a covertly obtained photograph of the Prince of Wales with the caption, "Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt" (it re-published this a few days a go, in tasteful commemoration of the anniversary).

Ten thousand tons of flowers and legions of teddy-bears, were for some reason piled up in front of Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace. Two elderly Czech ladies who took two of the teddy-bears (clearly abandoned property) were seized and sentenced to a month's prison, even though the judge accepted that they had only taken the bears as a tribute to Diana and had had no criminal intent. The sentence, he said, must reflect public outrage. Sentencing for this particular crime was not consistent, however: another tourist who took a teddy-bear was fined a mere $200 but then beaten up outside the court.

On the day of The Funeral, as my wife and I walked the London streets looking for an open tea-shop, a man was being beaten up by a mob not far away for the sacrilege of washing his car. Mr. Mark Woodsworth, aged 31 and about to marry, paid tribute to the deceased princess by hanging himself. Professional suicide counselors and organizations asked that a National Diana Helpline be set up, though in the Daily Telegraph one Christine Doyle bravely reassured readers that the mourning need not "have a damaging impact on our collective psyche and our physical health." Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky wrote that he had seen nothing like it since the death of Stalin in Moscow in 1953, when "a massive and unrestricted brainwashing campaign by the media and the government wrought the populace into a state of hysteria and idolization."

Weirdest of all, almost none of the real individual people I actually met, either among my own or my children's circle of friends, took any of it particularly seriously. The gentle old barman at my club, who made no bones about the occasional spot of cross-dressing, lamented the loss of a fashion exemplar. That was about it.

A swarm of wasps entered the floral tributes banked up outside the gates of Althorpe House, causing children, as the Observer thought worthy of reporting, to scream: "The bees are eating the princess!" Something important had happened, but it was hard to say what. Public life had entered an area where the political and the mystical came clammily together in the exaltation of unreason. Some vast, useless force had been unleashed, a harbinger of the cultural incoherence and breakdown of Blair's Britain and what was briefly known then as Cool Britannia.

Well, I had been present at a great historical event -- how else can you describe something that consumed more media-space than any other in the history of the world?

topics:
Africa