With his instant oxymoronic soundbite

In Britain, the undisputed champion of implausible self-pity was Lady Diana Spencer. At the time of her engagement to Prince Charles in 1981 she was just another dim, roundfaced Sloaney girl of the kind you could see on almost every street in Pimlico, Kensington or Earl’s Court, clad in the unprepossessing uniform that prompted some observers to liken her, cruelly but accurately, to a stewardess from Air Bulgaria. By the time of her funeral sixteen years later she was routinely if ludicrously described as one of the most beautiful women in the world, and the most saintly. (‘Critical judgment musters no lustre beside the sheen of global celebrity, and royal celebrity at that,’ the philosopher Glen Newey wrote. ‘Imagine Diana’s life as a comparably talentless prole – a single mother in Gateshead, say – and you get the picture.’) More implausibly still, the simpering princess transformed herself into a feminist heroine with her 1995 appearance on the BBC’s Panorama: staring nervously at the interviewer through smudgily kohl-rimmed eyes, she spoke of her betrayal by the man she adored, Major James Hewitt, and by the prince she married. Elaine Showalter hailed her as ‘one of the great success stories of contemporary psychotherapy’.
Not everyone accepted the invitation to share her pain. ‘That Diana’s therapised victim-speak could turn her into a feminist role-model seems like a bad joke,’ the literary critic Linda Holt complained. ‘But it is the result of the way feminism – as a movement and ideology – has fragmented and become round up in a cultural backlash against its original political project. Much of what has been called “victim feminism” has been absorbed into mainstream culture, shorn of its political context, no more than a licence for rampant subjectivity… In this “new feminism” even flamboyant consumerism, as exemplified by Diana’s pursuit of fashion and beauty, can be celebrated as an emancipatory choice.’ Plenty of Fleet Street commentators shared Holt’s distaste, though for different reasons, and continued to deride her as a spoilt and manipulative little vixen until the very eve of her death.
All that changed with the car crash in a Parisian tunnel in the early hours of 31 August 1997 – so much so that the demise of Mother Theresa a few days later was all but eclipsed. Overnight, the ‘simpering Bambi narcissist’ became not only the loveliest woman of the century but also the Queen of Hearts, the Nabob of Sob. According to Elton John, singing his heart out in Westminster Abbey while mixing metaphors with glorious abandon, she was also England’s rose, a candle that never faded with the sunset when the rain set in (as candles so often do) but strode off across England’s greenest hills, its footprints preserved for eternity. The leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, proposed that Heathrow be renamed Diana Airport without delay. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, wondered if the anniversary of her death should be henceforth be a public holiday, Diana Day. But the prime minister effortlessly outdid them all with his instant oxymoronic soundbite about ‘the People’s Princess’, and his hilariously hammy reading of a passage from Corinthians at her funeral service. Those commentators who praised Tony Blair for ‘capturing the mood of the nation’ had unintentionally stumbled on exactly the right verb: when he dubbed her the People’s Princess, at 10.30 on the Sunday morning, most of the nation had scarcely taken in the news from Paris, still less transmuted its reaction into a ‘mood’. (There was, to be sure, sadness and shock at a life cut short; but many viewers must also have wrestled uncomfortably with the knowledge that only a few days earlier, studying the pictures of Diana cavorting with a dodgy playboy on Mohamed Fayed’s yacht, they had derided her as hedonistic flibbertigibbet.) Blair’s pre-emptive tribute set the tone for the mourning, foreclosing any more measured assessment – and, as an American writer noticed, subliminally offered his own Christian decency and choirboy countenance as claim on the virtue represented by the deceased.
On that Sunday afternoon I was telephoned by a neighbour, a ferociously columnist on the Daily Mail: ‘I can’t bear much more of this. Fancy a drink in the pub?’ He had been given a week’s holiday from the paper after informing the editor that he couldn’t participate in the national ululation and genuflection; having watched several hours of hyperbolic homage on TV, he was beginning to fear that he might be the only sane person left in the country.
The obvious solution, to flee abroad for the next few months, would have offered no escape. In France, the publishers Descartes rushed out Diana Crash, a collection of essays such as Régis Debray and (inevitably) Jean Baudrillard. The princess’s funeral was carried live on all American networks, after a week in which Diana had been the sole topic of conversation on all US chat-shows. For a front-page story on 13 september, the New York Times interviewed forty psychotherapists in New York and its suburbs, of whom only two said that their female patients hadn’t talked about the princess. Tellingly, both were men.

uit: How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the world : a short history of modern delusions - Francis Wheen

____