Saturday August 30, 1997

Circa 19:00 Diana is chauffeured from the Ritz, where she and Dodi Fayed are staying following their holiday in Sardinia, to the Champs Elysées to do some shopping. The press pack is in close pursuit. 

21:53 Diana returns to the Ritz for dinner with Dodi. He arrives 10 minutes later, having been dropped off by his personal chauffeur. The couple dine in the hotel's Michelin two-star restaurant, the Espadon. 

Circa 23:00 The couple now face the problem of evading the waiting paparazzi on their 25-minute journey to the Duke of Windsor's former apartment in the Bois de Boulogne. Dodi's regular driver departs from the rear of the hotel in an attempt to lure photographers away from the Princess. Henri Paul, a member of the Ritz security team, is instructed to drive the couple to the 16th arrondissement in a hotel vehicle, an S-class Mercedes. 

Sunday August 31, 1997

00:00 

The couple leave the rear entrance of the Ritz, driven by Henri Paul and accompanied by bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones. Seven paparazzi follow on motorbikes. The car, travelling at high speed, passes through the Place de la Concorde before heading west along the Seine and approaching the underpass beneath the Pont de l'Alma. Paul loses control of the vehicle. It strikes the central reservation, hits the opposite wall and careers into a concrete pillar before rolling to a halt facing the oncoming paparazzi. 

00:27 The fire brigade receive an emergency call from an American tourist. 

00:33 Police arrive. They find Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul dead, Diana unconscious and gravely injured, and Rees-Jones alive but with serious injuries. Five photographers are arrested. 

00:42 An ambulance arrives and the crew begins to cut Diana free from the concertinaed vehicle. Intravenous drips and painkillers are administered. 

02:00 After more than an hour cutting the wreckage, the rescue crew lifts Diana clear of the car. She is taken to the Pitié Salpetrière Hospital and rushed into surgery. Shortly afterwards she suffers a cardiac arrest. Surgeons repair a ruptured pulmonary vein but internal bleeding continues. For two hours, doctors perform heart massage. 

04:00 Diana is pronounced dead. 

04:41 The Press Association issues this newsflash: "Diana, Princess of Wales, has died, according to British sources, the Press Association learned this morning." 

04:57 French interior minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement officially announces that the Princess is dead. 

Dodi Fayed

Dodi Fayed, 41, died instantly in the crash. He had been sitting behind the driver Henri Paul and is believed not to have been wearing a seat belt. His body was flown back to England in the Fayed family helicopter and, after a service at the Regent's Park mosque, was buried at Brookwood cemetery in Woking, Surrey in accordance with Muslim law that states that a person must be buried within 24 hours of their death. 

Born in Alexandria, Egypt as Imad Mohamed Fayed in 1955, Dodi Fayed was the eldest son of multi-billionaire Mohamed al Fayed. Dodi Fayed was a graduate of the British Army's elite Sandhurst Military Academy and once served as a junior officer in London for the United Arab Emirates. Fayed set up a film production company in 1979 and immediately achieved success as a producer with the cult hit Breaking Glass. In 1981 Fayed acted as executive producer alongside David Puttnam on the multi-Oscar winning Chariots of Fire. Fayed moved to Hollywood and up until his death was renowned as a keen socialite and extravagant host. He married American socialite Suzanne Gregard in 1987, but they divorced after eight months. Other films with which he was associated included The World According to Garp, F/X and Hook. He was also a director of his father's London department store Harrods. 

Dodi Fayed first met the Princess of Wales at a polo match in 1986 at Windsor in which he was playing in a team against Prince Charles. Their relationship first became apparent this summer when they holidayed in the Mediterranean on his father's yacht Jonikal, giving rise to intense media attention. 

Henri Paul

Henri Paul, 41, the driver of the Paris Ritz Mercedes S280 saloon which was carrying Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed when it crashed in the early hours of August 31, was killed instantly when the car hit a central column. Prosecuting authorities have since confirmed that he was driving the car at approximately 120mph, that he was not wearing a seat belt and had 175 milligrammes of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood, three times the legal alcohol limit, in his body at the time of the crash. The autopsy also revealed that his blood contained traces of the anti-depressant drug Prozac and that of tiapride, a substance used to prevent alcoholics from getting 'the shakes'. 

Henri Paul was deputy head of security at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and had been in service for 11 years. According to a Ritz spokesman he had been an "exemplary employee" who had attended two courses in Stuttgart on how to drive a powerful Mercedes. The courses also included anti-terrorist techniques. 

Trevor Rees-Jones

Trevor Rees-Jones, 29, still remains under armed guard at the Pitie Salpetriere hospital in Paris. As the only survivor, police are waiting to question him about the events leading up to the accident on August 31, 1997, which killed Diana, Princess of Wales, her companion Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul. Rees-Jones, who was travelling in the front passenger seat and who was the only person wearing a seat belt, suffered extensive facial and internal injuries as well as several broken bones. Since the accident he has been in and out of consciousness and has undergone several operations after receiving an emergency tracheotomy at the scene of the crash. 

Trevor Rees-Jones had been serving as Dodi Fayed's personal bodyguard. His wife, Sue Rees-Jones, whom he married two years ago and who was a former Harrods buyer, had introduced her husband to the Fayed family upon his departure from the Army. While in the Army he had risen to the rank of lance corporal and had served with the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment from August 1987 to August 1992. He completed two tours of duty in Northern Ireland as well as serving in the Gulf War. He also spent time with the Royal Military Police close protection squad. Nicknamed 'Dodi's Shadow' by colleagues in the Fayed familyâs 40-strong bodyguard team, Trevor Rees-Jones is known in his home town Oswestry, Shropshire as a keen rugby player and a member of the Oswestry Otters swimming club. 

Saturday August 30/Sunday August 31, 1997:

Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed return to Paris after their holiday on the French Riviera. They dine together in the Ritz hotel owned by Dodi's father, Mohamed al Fayed. Paparazzi photographers surround the building, waiting for them to leave. 

Towards the end of the meal, Dodi tells his chauffeur to drive his car back to his private villa in the 16th arrondissement in the hope of distracting the photographers. He then asks the security chief at the Ritz to arrange for someone to drive him and Diana back to the villa, where they had planned to spend the night prior to Diana flying back to London the next morning. 

Outside the Ritz a queue of black Mercedes S600s are parked in the Place Vendome. Several decoy cars are driven off to lure away the photographers. At around midnight, the couple leave the Ritz by the rear entrance. 

They are photographed as they get into a dark blue, bullet-proof Mercedes. Diana and Dodi sit in the back seat, apparently without seatbelts, and Dodi's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, takes the front passenger seat. As the car is driven off by Ritz employee Henri Paul, it is followed by photographers on mopeds and motorbikes. 

The journey from the Ritz to the villa usually takes about 25 minutes. The route chosen takes the couple along the perimeter walls of the Jardin des Tuilleries before entering the Place de la Concorde, where the traffic flows four or five cars abreast. It is here that, according to reports, Paul hits the accelerator in an attempt to shake off the paparazzi. The Mercedes speeds on towards the River Seine. 

The dual-carriageway exit to the west, along the Cours de la Reine, funnels vehicles into a narrower road with a low, central dividing wall. The speed limit is between 50 and 70km an hour. Before the tunnel entrance, there is a shallow underpass, illuminated by yellow strip lighting from frosted glass panels on one side. 

With at least seven paparazzi still in pursuit, the Mercedes makes another attempt to power away. As the car swings left and races into the second underpass below the Pont de l'Alma, the driver loses control of the vehicle. Skid marks, streaked with black paint, are visible on the central dividing wall marking the point where the vehicle veered to one side. The Mercedes then ricochets off an opposite wall and slams into the pillars supporting the tunnel roof. 

Monday September 1, 1997

It is revealed that the driver, Henri Paul, was three times over the French legal alcohol limit. A statement from the Paris prosecutor's office says: "The blood analysis revealed that the alcohol level was illegal." 

Gilbert Collard, a lawyer representing the paparazzi, tells ITN that Paul taunted photographers before leaving The Ritz, saying: "Don't bother following, you won't catch us." 

A spokesman for the RAC describes the effect drinking would have had on the driver of the car: "In this situation, the driver would have had no chance of controlling a big car at high speed in a confined space." 

A report on the wreckage reveals that the car's speedometer was frozen at 121mph after the crash. 

Tuesday September 2, 1997

A manslaughter inquiry is launched in Paris into the behaviour of the paparazzi at the scene of the crash. Seven men facing charges are released, although two, Romuald Rat and Christian Martinez, are forced to pay £10,000 bail. 

Witnesses claimed that the photographers on motorbikes had stopped more than 100m before the scene of the crash, which contradicts a statement later released by a Parisian police officer: "They [the paparazzi] were virulent and objectionable, pushy, continuing to take pictures and wilfully obstructing the officer from assisting the victims." 

Wednesday September 3, 1997

The judge leading the manslaughter inquiry, Hervé Stephan, orders the police to search for the other 15 photographers who witnesses claim were present at the scene of the accident. 

One of the seven men already under investigation, Romuald Rat, is the first photographer to break his silence. Speaking in an interview on French television, he says: "I told her [Diana] in English to stay calm, that I was there and help was coming. That was it. I did nothing wrong." 

Mr Rat is supported by other photographers. Goksin Sipahioglu, owner of the famous SIPA photographic agency, denies that paparazzi were pursuing the car. "What was the point of chasing it?... They didn't want a photograph of Dodi and Di in the car, they already had photographs of them together in Paris. They were simply following to find out where they were spending the night. They didn't have to hurry." 

Of Henri Paul, Mr Sipahioglu says: "A professional driver would never have handled photographers like he did." 

Some of Paul's colleagues also question his credentials, claiming that he did not have a licence to drive the Mercedes S series. One chauffeur is quoted as saying: "These are very powerful cars and because of the weight and the horse-power one must apply for a licence." 

Thursday September 4, 1997

Debate continues to rage over who was responsible for the crash. Reports say that legal action could be taken against the Ritz for allowing a drunk and unqualified chauffeur to drive Diana and Dodi on the night of their deaths. 

A new witness comes forward who claims to have seen a motorcycle cutting in front of the Mercedes as it entered the tunnel. The witness, Mr Francois Levi, says he was driving a car in front of the Mercedes at the time of the crash: "In my rear-view mirror, I saw the car in the middle of the tunnel with the motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car. As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light but then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see the impact." 

Friday September 5, 1997

Mohamed al Fayed holds a press conference at which he shows footage from the security cameras at the Ritz which captured Diana and Dodi as they left the hotel. The video also recorded footage of Henri Paul, which seems to show him as relaxed and steady on his feet. There were also no shots of Paul and members of the paparazzi together, which throws doubt on claims that Paul had taunted the photographers when leaving the hotel. 

The video footage is used by the Fayeds to refute suggestions that Paul was driving when drunk. A pathologist hired by the Fayeds, Professor Peter Vanezis, makes a statement claiming that the evidence of Paul's intoxication is not conclusive. Professor Vanezis issues a statement saying that in a violent accident damage to internal organs can create a misleading impression of the blood/alcohol level. On top of this it is alleged that only one sample of Paul's blood was taken for testing. 

Three more photographers are arrested then released on the condition that they do not leave the country. 

Sunday September 7, 1997

According to French police sources, Diana and Dodi's drivers had been known to drive fast and aggressively. An account of a journey made by the couple the day before the crash recalls that their car moved through the streets of Paris at high speed in an attempt to shrug off the press. The account recalls how Diana "asked the driver repeatedly to slow down to avoid hurting photographers or causing an accident, [but] Dodi appeared to be enjoying the situation." 

This account tallies with reports of Dodi's interest in fast cars and speedboats. It also raises further questions about the role of the driver in the crash. As one source told the Observer: "When you have a chauffeur, he does not drive against your wishes." 

Tuesday September 9, 1997

The results of a third blood test on Paul confirm that he was three times over the French legal drink-drive limit. They also reveal that he had taken Prozac and tiapride, anti-depressant drugs often used to combat alcoholism. 

Patrick Toseland, a consultant toxicologist for the RAC concludes: "With these two drugs I would place a reasonable bet that the driver had a drink problem. The fact they were found together is quite significant." 

There are now nine paparazzi photographers under investigation for manslaughter.

Thursday September 11, 1997

The Fayeds retract their support for Paul. Michael Cole, Director of Public Affairs for Harrods, makes the following statement: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms anybody who would drink and drive or take these cocktails of drugs." 

Mohamed al Fayed's lawyer, Bernard Dartevelle, says: "Obviously Paul should not have been at the wheel. But he was the only one to have been aware of his real condition." 

Wednesday September 17, 1997

French police are investigating the possibility that another vehicle was involved in the crash. The BBC have reported that the remains of a tail-light belonging to a Fiat car were found among the wreckage of the Mercedes. Police also discovered traces of paint which did not conform with standard Mercedes colours. The police have so far been unable to identify the age or the model of the other vehicle. 

The judge heading the investigation into the crash is expected to interview the sole survivor, Trevor Rees-Jones, at his hospital bedside. Judge Hervé Stephan regards the testimonial of Diana's former bodyguard as crucial, although when the interview will take place is uncertain. A spokesman at the hospital La Pitie-Salpetriere said: "Mr Rees-Jones is able to talk a little but whether he is yet able to discuss the accident I cannot say." 

Monday September 1, 1997

Even after death, Diana will continue to make us all question the ethics of the family that rejected her

By Henry Porter

One thing is certain in the aftershock of the death of Diana and that will be her lasting impact on the Royal Family. She arrived in public life in 1980, a sweet-natured girl, in awe of the institution and apparently compliant to its conventions. There was no hint of the mettle with which she would later challenge the courtiers and the Queen, causing the Royal Family's esteem to fall to an unprecedented low. And there was absolutely no sense that this retiring girl would reduce the family to a state of agonised self-doubt. 

Most women of her class would have been happy to have kept up appearances, taking satisfaction from the fact that they had served the House of Windsor's dynastic needs. But she rebelled against the hypocrisy and went her own way. And then, instead of submitting to the inevitable process of isolation, she turned the tables, so that the family itself came to appear out of touch and removed. The Queen may have deprived Diana of her HRH status in the divorce settlement, but Diana, Princess of Wales, escaped with an inextinguishable royalty of her own. In Tony Blair's words yesterday, she became "the people's princess". 

She had taken on the royal establishment and won, but not without considerable damage to herself. Even before the weekend's terrible events, it was clear that both sides had been badly damaged in this collision of modernity and convention. The Royal Family could no longer rely on the blind loyalty of the people, and Diana herself found difficulty in creating a role which straddled her status as the mother of the eventual heir to the throne and an international celebrity. 

It is true that nine months before her death she had begun to focus on the issue of landmines and only a few weeks ago she started to find a successful emotional life with Dodi Fayed, but the passage had been a long and arduous one, and there was never respite from the press. 

In almost anything she did - even well before the break-up of the marriage - she struck a contrast with the old ways of the family. Her charitable concerns were decidedly modern, while theirs seemed distant and titular. 

She took her boys at the dead of night to visit homeless people living on London's streets; she comforted and embraced the victims of Aids and of landmines. No member of the Royal Family had ever confronted pain with quite the boldness and lack of fear that she exhibited. 

That is what made her especially attractive to the media, and the effect of her coverage was to point up the formality and emotional stiffness of the family that she had left. Part of the contrast was simply image, but there was also much that was rooted in reality. In bringing up her children, she emphasised emotional needs while the family appears to have stressed duty and destiny. One wonders whether, if their father, not their mother, had been killed in an accident, whether she would have taken them to church the morning afterwards to face the public and the television cameras. 

You can understand why the princes travelled with the Queen to Balmoral church, because that is the culture of stoicism and example which the Royal Family cleaves to. But one suspects that her priority yesterday morning would have been different, because she put emotional needs before duty. In fact, those needs were what informed a sense of duty. 

These are, perhaps, unfair comparisons because the instant that Mercedes hit the pillar, Diana, Princess of Wales, became an icon. The Royal Family now has to contend with her unassailable reputation, which is fixed by her tragic end. She did much to expose the House of Windsor while she was alive and her often unwitting work will continue long after her death. 

It now seems out of the question for the Prince of Wales to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, who was one of the principal reasons for the divorce, and Diana's subsequent expulsion from royal circles. In a curious way, her death enhances doubts about Charles's ability to inherit the throne and to act effectively as the head of state. However wrongly, his behaviour in their marriage will be seen as one of the causes of her death. 

The irony is that members of the Royal Family and of the establishment that worked so patiently against her during the divorce negotiations must now honour Diana in death as they never did in life - at least not in the last six years. 

She will be buried with the most solemn ceremony that the country can mount and at the centre will be her stunned in-laws, raked by regret and remorse. For the truth is that she never really left the Royal Family. In the people's eyes she became more royal than any monarch of the last hundred years, and her death will be mourned with as much grief by the nation. 

In the long term, this is a problem the House of Windsor may not overcome until the throne passes to Prince William. He carries his mother's discreet endorsement, which is in memorable contrast to the way she spoke of her husband in the Panorama interview. She doubted his ability to be king, and a nation in mourning may regard this as a warning. Charles will find it extremely hard to win the support of the people, particularly in this period of change and constitutional examination. 

The Royal Family will miss Diana because, even though she was semi-detached, she was the only person in any of the royal palaces to represent the spirit of the times. She understood instinctively what people cared about and used the media to great effect to concentrate attention on important issues. No one else has that gift in the royal household. That will matter very deeply over the years. She had a magical appeal, possessed by only a handful of people this century. She is a hard act to follow, but follow they must. 

The greatest problem for the family is responsibility. Her impact on the assumptions and behaviour of Buckingham Palace was almost incalculable. She enhanced and reduced the institution simultaneously, forcibly wrenching it into the late 20th century and, at the same time, exposing its hypocrisy. What will count in the coming months is the impact of Buckingham Palace on her life. 

There is no doubt that she was wilful, often difficult to deal with and that she knew how to manipulate the media in her favour. But it is the manner in which the machinery first attempted to intimidate Diana, who had said on her engagement that all she wanted was to be a good wife, and then when she failed in this ambition, pushed her as far as it could from the centre of national life. 

This in retrospect will seem an unpardonable mistake. There must have been better ways of reconciling the differences between the Palace and the Princess, ways which would have avoided the acrimony and appearance of expulsion. People will say that, if she had been found a proper role in British life, she would not have been in Paris dodging the paparazzi in a Mercedes without proper protection. This falls into the category of what might have been, but some moral responsibility will accrue to the palace, as well as the press, during the coming weeks of self-examination. The ethics which govern the Royal Family and propel its survival instinct will be questioned - the greatest damage Diana Spencer ever inflicted on this ancient monarchy. 

Any institution is only worth the sum of its individual members and the Royal Family has proved lacking in an ordinarily human way. Most of us would probably have made the same mistakes over the last 16 years. But that is not an excuse, more of an accusation. If the future head of state can make such a mess of his personal life, and be supported by courtiers in his attempts to extricate himself, then people are entitled to wonder about the principles of inheritance on which the monarchy is based. Surely the Royal Family has been set apart precisely so that its members will behave differently from ordinary people? 

Diana had become increasingly doubtful about the role of the monarchy in its current form in a modern society and had begun to wander whether it would last beyond the present generation. She fought for many things during her life, not least her own survival in difficult circumstances, but it is the manner of her death which may achieve what she predicted at the end of her marriage. 

Tuesday September 2, 1997

Julie Burchill celebrates Diana as a glorious force for republicanism

When it comes to 20th century iconography, we really have been fed a load of old rope. One blurry man jumping on the back of a car containing another blurry man, who could be anyone from John Kennedy to Julian Clary. A space suit, allegedly with a man inside it, floating on the end of a cord over a cratered surface, allegedly the moon. But now, at last, this sad, glittering century has an image worthy of it: a wandering, wondering girl, a silly Sloane turned secular saint, coming home in her coffin to RAF Northolt like the good soldier she was. 

Only one thing jarred: Diana's coffin was covered with the Royal Standard, not the Union Flag. In death the House of Windsor is eager to claim her; in life it had already frozen her out with a staggering mean-mindedness best seen in the stripping of her HRH style and the official removal of her name from the prayers said daily for the royal family by the Church of England. 

No, Diana was once again the commoner she had always really so radiantly been. And like other commoner heroes, she made it clear that loving one's country and loving the sorry bunch of dysfunctional Graeco-Germans stuck on as an afterthought at the prow were two entirely different - and sometimes actually contradictory - things. 

In the soft-focus shampoo commercials being churned out in such indecent haste, no glimpse of the other Diana has yet been seen. We have seen Diana the Good, Diana the Stylish, Diana the Dutiful. These were, of course, real and valid Dianas. But we have not yet seen the other great Diana - Diana the Destroyer. 

And destroyer she has been, gloriously so, with bells on; the greatest force for republicanism since Oliver Cromwell. She leaves the Royal Family with one big ticking gift-wrapped timebomb of a farewell present: the fact that, for the first time, more subjects of the House of Windsor are against it than for it. 

When the BBC televised the flag and played God Save The Queen on Sunday, it seemed almost ironic; you could almost visualise Diana's slow, sly smile and mocking, mischievous eyes. God Save The Queen? God HELP The Queen, more like, especially if she's got Nature Boy and the Rottweiler as her great white hopes to look forward to on her deathbed. 

Diana's was not the republicanism of economics and pie charts; it was, like all her politics, based on emotion and none the worse for it. Coming from one broken home, yearning to create a real one, she was treated by her husband and his parents with a level of deliberate exploitation, manipulation and deceit that would be dazzling if it wasn't so vile. 

It was a fairytale, all right - one scripted by the Brothers Grimm, or a version of Cinderella in which the unsuspecting, virtuous heroine was not plucked from isolation and cruelty as a reward for her beauty and purity, but rather condemned to it. Very soon - with the dry, very English, self-mocking wit which provided a welcome balance to her occasional over-emotional, therapised American - she was calling herself the Prisoner of Wales. 

And from the scraps she was thrown, sitting there in her sumptuous scullery, she made a life: a real, well-lived, well-used life in which she visibly pushed herself from a state of bovine upper-class ignorance (the only qualification she took from Heathfield School was a certificate for Best-Kept Hamster) to a state of inquisitive, crusading sentience. 

And in getting herself a life - in wanting to know, in daring to look naive - she showed the House of Windsor up for what it was: a dumb, numb dinosaur, lumbering along in a world of its own, gorged sick on arrogance and ignorance. 

Above all, she showed up her husband, the supposed 'intellectual' of the Firm, for what he was: a third-rate mind with delusions of adequacy, a veritable human jukebox of philosophical clichés completely unable to concentrate or contribute to any cause for any length of time. 

(I always found the idea that Diana failed to provide the Prince of Wales with the intellectual companionship he craved a real scream - this was the man who turned to Camilla Parker Bowles, Dale Tryon and Selina Scott for solace! You'd get more cerebral stimulation from the Three Stooges.) 

"She had an inquisitive, strong mind," said Magdi Yacoub. She also had a real sense of duty and an enthusiasm which made it look more like a vocation than a duty. She showed up the House of Windsor's total lack of rapport with, or affection for, its people with cruel clarity; her amazingly busy life, and her desire towards the end to play as hard as she worked, made them look sluggish and moribund, uneasy with anything on less than four legs or two knees. 

She was a great republican hero because her very presence made nonsense of the idea that you can be Born To Rule; she, the outsider, took to royal life like a champion and for one brief shining moment made sense of it all while her husband, with every wince, flinch and faux pas, made it painfully obvious that he found it increasingly difficult to love his people or do his duty. She was a fresh, unpretentious breath of roll-up-your-sleeves, best-foot-forward Englishness amidst the Gothic gloom of our own House of Usher. 

Diana went into her marriage with an open heart and high expectations; when it finally dawned on her that she had a gift, a gift for loving and being loved on a global scale, she offered it proudly to the family she had married into and now would try to make the best of. She really did want to make them look good. When, envious and fearful, they threw it back in her face, she turned. She didn't get mad, she got even. And she got even by making the House of Windsor look like the biggest bunch of bastards who ever wore a crown. She still hasn't stopped. She never will. 

"Diana the Martyr," Prince Charming used to taunt his troubled, needy young wife when she first started to reach out to the sick in order to heal herself, to the dying in order to understand her life. And now she is: martyred by metal piercing that beautiful body, a body which spent a lifetime being dissected as surely as any corpse up for a post-mortem, and the bursting of that big brave heart. 

If Diana had lived she might well have become - thanks to the incessant whispering campaigns of the Windsors and their media lackeys - a joke: Lady Diana Fayed, an Arab merchant's bit of posh, endlessly sunning herself on the deck of some gin palace hooked up in the Med, toasting herself until her skin lost its bloom and she lost her husband to a newer model. 

But her death has preserved her forever at the height of her beauty, compassion and power. She will be the mourner at every royal wedding and the bride at every coronation. Her brave, bright, brash life will forever cast a giant shadow over the sickly bunch of bullies who call themselves our ruling house. We'll always remember her, coming home for the last time to us, free at last, the People's Princess, not the Windsors'. We'll never forget her. And neither will they. 

People came from all over the country to pay their respects to their princess and share their grief. See The People and the Princess 

"Ten thousand people, the police estimate, are queueing through the night and 10,000 more bunches of flowers line the Mall, adorning the statues, the Inigo Jones church, and the roadside. 

There is no weeping or hysteria, but a collective doggedness to see the night through and to sign the books. Fed by Harrods and the Salvation Army, the lines wind back and forth, chatting easily of their experiences. 

Jo has been standing 18 hours so far, all day as a bar worker and now all night and he expects half the next day. Why have he and his mates come from East London? 'I don't know. It was just something we felt we should do. It's about respect, isn't it?' 

The Jones family came down from Birmingham, just jumped in the car at 11pm, no sleeping bags, blankets, thermos or umbrellas. Why? 'We had to be here.' 

Some sit on the ground until the queue lurches forward. Others swap life stories. Wide boys, punks, lads, young and old. Some stoop with age and hold on to sticks. Businessmen are here, the homeless. Ghanaians, Scots, Colombians, Americans. Two Hassidic Jews lean over the railings, their hands clasped in prayer. 

Yes, it is a pilgrimage, says Jason from Newcastle. He and his family set off early and have driven all night. 'We had to come. We had no choice,' they say. For them, too, it is about respect." From Through the long night the capital becomes a shrine. 

by John Vidal in the Guardian, September 6, 1997 

Saturday September 6, 1997

By Kamal Ahmed

Princess Diana will be buried within the grounds of Althorp Estate in Northamptonshire. 

This eases concerns that the village of Great Brington would be over-run by visitors seeking to pay their respects at the village church. 

Earl Spencer, the Princess's brother, said that Diana's body would be buried on an island surrounded by an ornamental lake, an area that could be visited in private by her sons. 

The site will open for a few weeks each year to allow the public to visit the estate. Plans for a separate memorial in the village are still being discussed. 

The ground, which includes trees planted by members of the Royal Family, was consecrated by the Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Rev Ian Cundy, at a private service on Thursday. 

It was originally planned to bury Diana alongside 20 generations of Spencers in the family chapel at St Mary the Virgin in the village. 

But plans were changed after parishioners and residents expressed fears that the village would be overwhelmed by people travelling to visit the chapel and that the church would be turned into a shrine. 

"It has been decided to bury Diana, Princess of Wales, in the grounds of Althorp Park, where her grave can be properly looked after by her family and visited in privacy by her sons," said a statement on behalf of the Spencer family. 

"It is proposed to open the place of burial each year for a number of weeks. But appropriate public safety and security measures must be taken in view of the anticipated number of people who may wish to visit." 

The family said that they will consult with the police and local authorities about announcing when the park will be open. Diana will be buried in an area known as the Oval, an island in the Pleasure Garden lake. A bridge to the island was constructed yesterday, ready for the arrival of the cortège this afternoon. 

The Oval was designed by Samuel Lapidge, the head landscape artist working with Capability Brown in the 18th century. 

In the 1850s the fifth Earl Spencer, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, restored the area and rebuilt a temple bought for £3 from Admiralty House gardens in London. 

An arboretum surrounding the temple on the island includes trees planted by members of the Spencer family, including Diana, and the Royal Family. 

Prince William and Prince Harry have planted oaks there, as have the Princess's sisters and late father. The Queen, the Queen Mother and Prince Charles have also planted trees. 

The Bishop of Peterborough agreed to consecrate the ground after Earl Spencer approached the Rev David MacPherson, priest of St Mary's. Local and diocesan church officials drew up a plan to meet the family's wishes for today's private committal service. 

The family have reiterated a request for privacy. 

Monday September 1, 1997

By Charles Nevin

Her life, it was often said, though not so much of late, was like a fairytale. She was, it was often said, though not so much of late, a fairytale princess. And although this was one of those typically lazy Fleet Street labels, you could see the truth in it when the young Diana Spencer first emerged blushing and blinking into this lens and that lens, and all those lights and clicks and whirrs and shouts. 

For the young Prince had been seeking a bride; but, as with princes, a pure bride of noble breeding. And these were in such short supply in the kingdom that some despaired of his ever finding one. Until, suddenly, she was there. 

Our first proper view was the one of the nursery assistant, shyly pretty, caught in the playground, innocent of the sunlight and the lenses and clicks and whirrs and friendly shouts and guile that would make her skirt entirely diaphanous. 

It was a fairytale moment; but a 20th-century fairytale moment, with a knowingness among the smiles. And, as we all ought to know by now, 20th-century fairytales do not end happily. 

No, they spin faster and faster, whirligigs powered by the pursuit of fame and profit and every last detail, a conspiracy of interests heavy with the inevitability of tragedy, large or small, but never underplayed or undersold, and always with the lights and the headlines. 

None other has come close to matching the life and death of Diana Spencer. And not only in its twists, turns, heroes, speculations, confirmations, villains, stark reliefs and immense, unrelenting profile in which every quality, every event was endlessly exaggerated and simplified for the century's easier digestion. Here, also, the century met the monarchy in a collision that may in time prove as fatal as the desperate event in Paris; a collision between the light and the magic that royalists had long warned against but in the end proved powerless to prevent, and even helped to fix. 

But, despite all our cynicism and countless hindsights, it still did not seem quite like that as Lady Diana Spencer stood in the nursery playground on that day in 1980, posing for that photograph. 

Then, in royal terms, it seemed a happy, clever, almost perfect match. A public tiring of an endlessly energetic bachelor prince who nevertheless seemed to be achieving little, publicly or privately, was delighted with Lady Diana, as were the photographers and their editors. 

She was fresh, unknown, beguilingly shy, already with the appealing and trademark upward glance. And, most importantly for the photographers and their editors, and unlike many another royal or would-be royal, she was genuinely pretty and in possession of that most vital of 20th-century qualities: she was very, very photogenic. 

Good news, then, for Fleet Street, especially at the lower end, where Rupert Murdoch and his Sun newspaper in particular were increasingly alive to the attractions for readers of royalty, of a young and fresh royalty. 

Buckingham Palace's more traditional concerns were equally satisfied. This might be the first English woman to marry an heir to the throne for over 300 years. But this was no common English woman. 

Lady Diana's father, the eighth Earl Spencer, had been an equerry to both George VI and the Queen. Her maternal grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, was a close friend and lady in waiting to the Queen Mother. 

Diana was born on July 1, 1961 at Park House, on the Sandringham estate, in the same room in which her mother, Frances, had been born. In her childhood, she had played regularly with Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. This was a girl who knew the form. But also a girl unaffected by the hauteur and distance that usually go with the form. 

Journalists who spent a lot of time in the early days of her courtship with the Prince of Wales on the doorstep of the ungrand flat she shared in Coleherne Court in Kensington were surprised to find how approachable, how friendly she was. 

If it is easy to see the seeds of future troubles in this now, it would have been much easier then to see other seeds in other parts of her background. 

But such was the enthusiasm, high and low, for Diana; and such was the shortage of other supposedly suitable mothers for a future monarch that little attention was paid to a childhood that had been anything but stable or happy. She had been only six when her mother left to take up with the lively and witty Peter Shand Kydd, a businessman and something of a contrast to her father, whose friends and pursuits she found dull. 

By accounts, Lady Fermoy was determined that custody would remain with Diana's father, the then Viscount Althorp, and not with her daughter, irrevocably deemed, even in the "swinging Sixties", a "bolter". 

Diana's fall from a horse while in her mother's care formed part of the custody proceedings. She was later to recall rows and violence between her parents. When her mother left, she would later recollect, she and her young brother, Charles, now Lord Althorp, cried themselves to sleep together; she could remember, she said, the crunch of the gravel under her mother's shoes as she left. 

Thus, classically, and beneath that appealing freshness, was to emerge the bulimia that was, by her own frank admission, to so plague her. 

She was sent to Riddlesworth Hall, a boarding school near Diss, Norfolk, at the age of nine. She did not shine academically, either there or when she moved on to her mother's old school, West Heath, near Sevenoaks, although her former teachers did speak loyally of sporting prowess, particularly at swimming. 

She failed all her O levels, twice, leaving school at 16. She spent a brief time at the Institut Alpin Videmanette, a Swiss finishing school, before moving to the London flat bought for her by her father. 

Initially, before becoming an assistant at the Young England nursery in Pimlico, she had had various temporary jobs cleaning, acting as waitress at cocktail parties and nannying. Not the form thing, either. 

Her elder sister, Jane, had followed a rather more conventional route by marrying Robert Fellowes, an assistant private secretary to the Queen later to become principal private secretary. Her eldest sister, Sarah, had been an earlier girlfriend of the Prince of Wales. 

These connections, and Lady Fermoy's close interest, combined to bring Diana to the attention of the Prince and the Palace. In the summer of 1980, one of the early royal watchers discovered her through his binoculars, poised attractively on the banks of the Dee at Balmoral, looking up admiringly at a fishing Prince of Wales. 

And so to the Coleherne Court doorstep, the nursery playground and, in February 1981, the announcement of the engagement. 

The couple were haltingly, stiltingly, interviewed on television, Diana doing much upward looking, displaying her engagement ring, hiding chewed nails and much else, if probably not as much as her fiancé. 

In a segment endlessly replayed throughout the tortuous doings that were to follow, they were asked if they were in love. "Of course," replies Diana, in an embarrassed rush. "Whatever love is," replies the Prince, in an embarrassed rumination. 

Much has been made of the contrast, particularly in the light of the revelation that the Prince of Wales was conducting at the time, and continues to conduct, a relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, an old girlfriend who had, for the usual complicated reasons, married someone else. 

Not so much has been made of other subsequent revelations about Diana's worries about the match, even up to the 11th hour, when she had to be persuaded to go ahead by her sisters, with their only half-joking warning that the souvenir teatowels were already on sale. Duty did not play its part only on the Prince's side. 

Even less has been made of how significant it was that an interviewer should have dared in the first place to ask the question of whether they were in love. It is hard, for example, to imagine it being asked of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten. It was also a question that prepared the way for the even more intrusive questioning of the couple years later by Jonathan Dimbleby and Martin Bashir. 

But the nation, buoyed up by the earlier celebration of the royal jubilee, remained in the mood for pageantry, and the wedding, on July 29, 1981, was carried off with style amid genuine public interest and happiness. Their long kiss on the balcony at Buckingham Palace was judged a great success, although observant lip readers had seen the Prince asking for permission. 

The differences between the couple in ages and interests did not excite much comment. Royal marriages had never dwelt overmuch on compatibility. Duty remained the watchword. 

But so absolute a concept was becoming increasingly isolated in a Court that had taken a conscious and determined decision to modernise itself. Only by revealing more of itself, argued the modernisers, led by the Duke of Edinburgh, could the monarchy be made more easily understood, its use more easily recognised. 

The Victorian constitutional theorist, Walter Bagehot, had warned that letting light on to the monarchy would destroy its mystique. The modernisers were more confident. But they reckoned without a society which, influenced by an ever more irreverent media, was rapidly discarding deference. More particularly and to the point, they neglected to note how attractive newspapers and their readers were finding royalty as soap opera. The threat was both within and without. 

Diana, with her beauty, her youth, her genuinely winning manner, her seeming unstuffiness, her artlessness, her clear and unforced compassion, was prime fascination. Any amount of pop psychology has been devoted to the effect of this on a young woman from an unhappy and insecure background, but, in truth, she was facing new pressures that no amount of royal training could have prepared anyone for. 

But clearly, too, Diana enjoyed the attention, whether or not, as the pop psychologists argue, this was to compensate for the lack of attention she suffered as a child. Clearly, too, what she saw as a lack of private attention from her husband contrasted cruelly with the unending public attention. 

Outwardly, at first, all seemed well with the royal marriage. Prince William was born in 1982; Prince Harry in 1984. A spare and heir achieved; popularity across the world, a leader of fashion, a patron of charities, another week, another magazine cover, another month, another triumphant foreign tour. 

Later, though, the Princess was to declare that her marriage was dead in three years, effectively ending after the birth of Prince Harry. 

The Prince, unhappy in his marriage, took refuge in his old round of holidays and country pursuits, and in his old mistress. 

The Princess, as with any princess, took refuge in her children and her charities. But, this being modern times, there was also her Walkman and an extensive range of advisers and consultants, including a psychotherapist, an aromatherapist, a reflexologist and an astrologer. 

Rumours about the state of the marriage continued to emerge, usually in the Sunday newspapers, and usually dismissed as "downstairs gossip". 

They were further fuelled by a number of public incidents, endlessly speculated on, first starting with the Prince's early return on his own from a summer holiday in Majorca in 1986, through various foreign tours where she asked for separate rooms, turned her head away just as he was about to kiss her, and posed alone and forlorn in front of the Taj Mahal. 

Then, in 1992, came publication of Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story, much of which seemed, even given the previous years of whisper and rumour, incredible. Morton alleged that the Princess suffered from bulimia nervosa; that she had thrown herself down the stairs at Sandringham while pregnant with Prince William; that she had slashed at her wrists with a razor blade, a penknife and a lemon slicer, and that she had once thrown herself against a glass cabinet. 

It also disclosed that the Prince kept in touch with Camilla Parker Bowles even while on honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia, a disclosure allied to the one that Diana had found an inscribed gold bracelet intended as a gift from the Prince to Parker Bowles only days before the marriage. A fairytale romance, indeed. 

Once again, Buckingham Palace threw doubt on the allegations. But Morton claimed that the information had all come from close friends. And three days after the first extract from the book had been published in the Sunday Times, Diana made a public and tipped-off visit to one of them, her former flatmate and bridesmaid, Carolyn Bartholomew. 

In its way, this use of the media to put her case was as startling as the more sensational allegations. It followed earlier private briefings by the Prince and Princess to newspapers and marked a significant step beyond any previous contact between the press and royalty but also a determination by Diana not to be crushed by the Court. The modernisers suddenly discovered that they were being rather outplayed at their own game by someone for whose intellect they had not previously shown an immense amount of respect. 

But the gift for public relations displayed by the incident, and particularly its timing, is one of the more compelling aspects of a much misunderstood and complex personality. Certainly, the Prince and the Palace were perpetually on the back foot thereafter, which is where, after yesterday, they will perpetually remain. 

In December of that year, the Prince and Princess announced their formal separation. This brought no respite from the line of allegation and disclosure, growing ever more public and ever more tawdry as the opposing sides, authorised or not, attempted to create two hard, clear and opposing images. The Prince was portrayed as a weak, heartless, hidebound figure, bullied by his father, overwhelmed by his responsibility, dominated by his selfishness. 

For her part, the Princess was to be seen as neurotic, unbalanced, frivolous, flighty, in sway to fame and frocks. 

There was something in both characterisations. But there was rather more to the Princess. A surprisingly steely resolve, a gift for friendship, certainly; but also something more elusive. That early artlessness, openness and friendliness, that which in more formal days had been usually described as the "common touch", had become translated into a quality of compassion, a gift of ease, and had been put to apt work, with children, with Aids victims, and in areas where, like with her recent landmines campaign, a high-profile example or a large amount of publicity could be more use than any amount of earnest cajoling and lecturing. 

Thus, despite the sneers, Saint Diana. But also, uncomfortably for times where the simplicity of the message is the most prized, it went hand-in-hand and fed off all those sessions with consultants, all those meetings with celebrities, all those frocks and smiles. 

It was also, sadly, inextricable from the accompanying and tawdriness of the commonplaces of a broken marriage made extraordinary by the married. 

In 1994, the Prince told Jonathan Dimbleby in a television interview that he had been unfaithful. In Dimbleby's biography, published the same year, the Prince conceded he had been bullied into the marriage by his father; he had, he said, never loved his wife. 

The Princess responded by arriving for a dinner in Hyde Park on the night of the Prince's adultery confession in an outfit so black and daring as to capture a good proportion of the front pages and raise more doubts in the public mind about the tastes and good sense of its future monarch. 

In the same year, Diana was linked with the England rugby captain, Will Carling. They had met at one of the public gyms used by Diana, whither and whence she was to be seen most days when she was in London, and whither and whence she was, most days, photographed. 

It was a curious relationship, that between Diana and her photographers. She could be at turns friendly or distant. That distance was frequently misjudged, vividly this year in the case of a long-time freelance pursuer of her who found himself being attacked by a member of the public at her behest. 

The sneerers claimed it was all part of a need for publicity which had become unbalancing, and claimed to see much piquant irony in the affair in 1993 when the Daily Mirror published photographs of her exercising taken clandestinely by a gym owner. 

Similar doubts were raised in 1993, when the Princess announced that she intended to reduce her official engagements and become more of a private figure. Four months later, she was back. But, once again uncomfortably for the stereotype of a fame junkie, it was to a role, as Red Cross roving ambassador, where she would be able to point out real achievement in the face of a sceptical and lukewarm government. 

Her supporters claimed that the very public gym trips and the lunches were vital to maintaining some sort of normal life, and that the relationship she cultivated with the press and the paparazzi was also vital to maintaining that normality, even if it did have its explosions and inconsistencies. Whatever the faults on whichever side, it was a relationship that was eventually to kill her. 

Her part, in the public eye, as the innocent party in the marriage break-up was felt to be a crucial part of the Princess's popularity. When, before the separation, the "Squidgygate" tape recording had surfaced, allegedly detailing a telephone conversation between Diana and a lover, the story was widely disbelieved as a malicious invention, much more so than the so-called "Camillagate" tape, in which the Prince of Wales, inter alia, appeared to be favouring reincarnation as a tampon. The most clear response to Squidgygate was that the Princess of Wales's Regiment began proudly, if unofficially, to refer to itself as "Squidgy's Own". 

In 1994, too, the publication of Anna Pasternak's book, Princess in Love, supposedly detailing her five-year affair with a former army officer, James Hewitt, was similarly derided. 

But, in another extremely shrewd piece of PR timed for its influence on the couple's possible divorce and its custody implications, Diana gave an interview the next year, 1995, to the BBC Panorama programme that held the nation gripped with its combination of intensity and artlessness assisted by an artifice that by now seemed second nature. 

It had a candour clearly influenced by the psychotherapeutic treatment the Princess had been receiving. 

Asked by Martin Bashir "were you unfaithful" with Hewitt, the Princess replied "Yes". She agreed that the Squidgygate tape was genuine, and that she had made a series of phone calls to a married friend, Oliver Hoare. 

The interview, which attracted 15 million viewers, was as clear an example as exists of the contrasts in the Princess's personality. For as well as these concessions, there were references to her husband's staff as "the enemy", the questioning of his suitability to become king, and the clear declaration that she had no intention of seeking a divorce. 

There was the winning, telling soundbite: "We had three of us in this marriage, it was a bit crowded." And there was the typically overblown soundbite, that she would never be Queen of the country, but she would like "to be a queen of people's hearts, in people's hearts". 

She continued, tellingly: "I don't think many people will want me to be Queen. Actually, when I say many people I mean the Establishment that I married into because they have decided that I'm a non-starter... because I do things differently, because I don't go by a rule book, because I lead from the heart, not the head. That's got me into trouble in my work, I understand that. But someone's got to go out there and love people and show it." 

Any member of the Prince's party listening to it all would have concluded, as did Nicholas Soames, that Diana was in the "advance stages of paranoia". 

This, though, was a complete misjudgment of the public's mood. For it was perhaps the greatest mark of the Princess's many and curious gifts that she continued to remain personally immune from the republican mood in the country that she had done almost as much as anyone to foster. This again, in contrast, to all the other troublesome young members of the Royal Family, in particular the exuberant and ultimately very silly Sarah Ferguson. 

After the Panorama appearance, the divorce could not be long delayed; and was, indeed, urged by the Queen, at last, but far too late, disturbed by all this media manipulation. 

In February 1996, three years after the separation, the Princess, after a private meeting with her husband at St James's Palace, once again wrongfooted the Court by releasing a statement to PA News (the Press Association) that she had agreed to a divorce, shortly after breaking the news to the Queen by telephone. 

Negotiations began between respective solicitors, with the Princess's lawyer, Anthony Julius, of Mishcon de Reya, himself being touched by media celebrity as discussions continued until July on the size of the settlement, access and custody, the Princess's role and future title, much royal magic being considered invested in the dignity of Her Royal Highness, the title withheld from the Duchess of Windsor at the behest of the Queen Mother. 

On July 12, 1996, the terms were announced: a settlement believed to be around £15m (the Princess had been reported to be asking for nearer £50m), equal responsibility for the upbringing of their children, and the demotion in title to Diana, Princess of Wales. 

It is almost impossible to resist the temptation to see the period since then as one of acceleration towards the horror of yesterday. 

The Princess's behaviour, in the way it was highlighted, at least, seemed to be at once a little more erratic, and its reception a little less respectful. 

The narrowness of the public role she had agreed and chosen was another danger. The number of the charities she actively supported was drastically cut at the time of her divorce settlement. The controversy that had first greeted her entry into the landmine debate earlier in the year had only last week been resurrected in an interview with a French journalist in Le Monde where she was alleged to have described the Tory government's policy on landmines as "hopeless". There had also been more sideswipes at the press. A feeling that Diana's PR, formerly so successful, if famously erratic, needed more control was fuelled by the row that followed when her office denied that she had so described the Tories, thus extending and exaggerating a row which would have quietly deflated on its own. 

But there could be no doubt about the sincerity and the worth of her work for charity in areas normally carefully skirted by royalty and the establishment. Turning Point, the national drink, drugs, mental health and learning disabilities agency, an unfashionable charity with which she was involved for 10 years, is a good example of this. 

But her habit of doing good by stealth, the clandestine hospital visits, the charity auction of her wardrobe: such things were treated increasingly as eccentric rather than saintly, while such events as the charity auction of her old outfits was seen, unfairly, as having more to do with her fascination with the world of Hello! magazine celebrity, a feeling strongly reinforced by one of the year's strongest images, her red-eyed appearance earlier in the summer at the funeral of Gianni Versace, consoling a weeping Elton John. And strongly reinforced, too, by the long summer of Dodi Fayed, the posing and the confrontations, the promises of a "big surprise", retracted but soon fulfilled in the shape of the Egyptian. 

We will now never know whether this decline in the immunity of her public popularity was temporarary, and, indeed, whether it would have survived a lengthy liaison with Dodi Fayed and, more particularly, his controversial father, certain to become only more controversial. As Jackie Kennedy discovered, immense private wealth and privilege has a way of corroding the affection and admiration gained in the attractive exercise of public wealth and privilege. But the consolation of such a horrible, 20th century, twisted metal, senseless kind of death, if there is any consolation, is that the reputation of Diana, Princess of Wales, as a beautiful, winning, intriguing woman unfairly treated by fate but touched with a rare compassion and influence for good will remain forever frozen in time, inviolate. 

Diana, Princess of Wales, Lady Diana Frances Spencer, born July 1, 1961; died August 31, 1997

Monday September 1, 1997

By Alan Travis and David Ward. Her charity work 

Diana's intensely personal involvement in campaigns to ban landmines, for Aids patients to be treated humanely and for greater support for homeless youngsters was beginning to give her a more serious role in public life. 

Although thwarted in her stated ambition to become some kind of official ambassador for Britain, she had become successful in swaying public opinion and even governments about causes she embraced. 

South Africa's president, Nelson Mandela, said yesterday: "The fact that South Africa and Mozambique as well as Angola have decided to abolish landmines is due to a very large extent to her contribution." 

The former Liberal leader, Sir David Steel, said a worldwide coalition of aid agencies had made no progress in their two-year campaign on the issue until Diana took up the cause. 

The International Development Minister, George Foulkes, said yesterday that a worldwide ban on the manufacture, export and use of landmines would be a fitting tribute to her memory: "She has brought the issue to prominence in a way no one else could have done." 

The Princess's visits in January with the Red Cross to Angola and last month to Bosnia to highlight the plight of limbless landmine victims provoked an international reaction. 

The former Tory government's hostility was barely concealed, with a junior defence minister, Earl Howe, said to have branded her a "loose cannon". She later responded by describing John Major's government as "hopeless" because of its policy on landmines. 

Diana's newfound ability to confound governments began in 1987 with a simple gesture which seems uncontroversial now only because of her efforts. 

In 1987 she opened the first specialist Aids unit at a British hospital - the Middlesex in London - and was photographed shaking hands with seven Aids patients. People were shocked that she had worn no gloves, and she was even attacked as the "patron saint of sodomy". 

But she pressed on, later taking Barbara Bush to an Aids ward and talking of the need to give sufferers a hug: "Heaven knows they need one," she said. 

Part of her commitment flowed from the death of her friend, Adrian Ward-Jackson, a fine art dealer and deputy chairman of the Aids Crisis Trust, whom she helped to care for before his death. 

Simon Garfield, the author of The End of Innocence, a history of Aids in Britain, said yesterday: "She had a huge impact not only in the way that people perceived Aids but also gave a great boost to people with Aids." 

Nick Patridge, chief executive of the Terence Higgins Trust, said: "Diana took the stigma away from Aids. She was one of the first and most committed champions on this issue." She was due to visit London Lighthouse, the Aids charity, in the next fortnight. 

This was not run-of-the-mill royal charity work, as the unannounced night visits and fund-raising events such as the New York sale of her most glamorous dresses confirmed. 

When she decided to scale down her charitable work in the aftermath of her divorce, more than 100 organisations were named as recipients of her time and backing. 

Instead she said she would concentrate her efforts on just six organisations, including helping the young homeless, supporting Aids sufferers, working with sick children and her other great passion, the English National Ballet. 

A spokeswoman for Centrepoint, which campaigns for homeless youngsters, said: "We were always struck by her interest and commitment to homeless young people, not simply as a deserving cause but at a very personal level. 

"She was happy and totally at ease in the company of young people and seemed to have a special rapport with them." 

Diana made regular visits to Great Ormond Street hospital in London, of which she was president. "She always put a smile on people's faces," said a spokeswoman. "She loved chatting to the children and her visits were a great boost to the staff." 

English National Ballet's deputy executive director, Richard Shaw, said: "She had very strong relationships with some members of the company, the dancers in particular, and she helped us a lot in our fund-raising work." 

Tuesday September 2, 1997

She went from homespun florals and frills to super-chic sleekness but, as Susannah Frankel reports, Diana's status as fashion idol always owed more to her radiance than to her clothes 

There were times when it seemed that people were more interested in Diana's clothes than in anything else about the woman. From the moment her engagement to the Prince of Wales was announced and she was photographed, all pretty blonde flicked hair, ruffled blouses and pearls, to the day her life came to an end - when the Sunday Times Style Section had a light-hearted dig at her poor taste in T-shirt dresses while on holiday with Dodi Fayed - she was scrutinised by the fashion police almost as mercilessly as by the much-maligned paparazzi. 

But for every lovely magazine cover, photographed by a superstar photographer, there was a not-so-lovely snippet about Diana's cellulite. The saddest thing about this was that she actually felt the need to defend it, explaining that marks left by her textured car seat were to blame, rather than any human failing. 

For every fashion triumph - like the night she showed her husband what he was missing by appearing at an opening at the Serpentine Gallery dressed in a dangerously short, black, off-the-shoulder dress, legs to die for - there was a faux pas. Diana famously wore a John Galliano (for Dior) slip dress at a gala opening in New York, for example, without an accompanying corset to hold her in. Whoever heard of such a thing? 

And Diana, of all people, was particularly vulnerable to this. She was openly and unhealthily obsessed with her body image and such intense focus on her physical appearance (whether she welcomed it at the time or not) can hardly have helped her overcome any illness. 

Now, more than ever, Diana is heralded as a fashion icon. In her short life, say those in the know, she has done more for British designers, from the Emmanuels to Catharine Walker, than any other celebrity. She has continually been included on every 'best-dressed' list worth mentioning. 

She's even been attributed with anticipating a return to ethnic style, wearing a shalmar kameez on her visit to see her friend Jemima Khan in Pakistan. What else was she supposed to wear? A Versace mini-shift, perhaps? In Pakistan? 

Ironically, though, it was in her early, shy-Di days (pre-bulimia), around and immediately following her engagement to the Prince of Wales in 1981, that Diana's style was at its most influential: far more wide-reaching than it is today. She was not only more beautiful than any other member of a Royal Family hardly famous for its glamour, but also in possession of her own sweetly naive signature style which was soon to be copied by every high-street chain worth mentioning. 

People rushed out to buy floral skirts, pie-crust collars and ropes of pearls in their droves. They couldn't fail to identify with (and aspire to imitate) the romantic heroine pouting prettily in florals and frills who'd nabbed herself a real live prince. Who knows how many people bought copies of her famous engagement ring or strained to recreate that extraordinary hair. 

Then came the makeover. Although the public loved Diana's homespun (and, it has to be said, highly idiosyncratic) take on fashion, it was hardly sophisticated and Diana was soon being advised by some of the world's leading stylists on how to update her look and make it more in keeping with the woman who would, one day, be Queen. 

Enter sleek Diana, dressed in super-chic beaded column dresses by the likes of high society designers Catherine Walker and Jacques Azagury. Still beautiful, but far more contrived and, somehow, older than her years. 

Her body, too, was undergoing 'new and improved' changes. In place of the prettily rounded thing that captured the hearts of a nation was a far lither Diana, more in line with fashion's stereotypical image of how a woman should look. Rumours about her eating disorder and her increasingly troubled marriage to Charles were rife. 

The Princess's new look also relied far more on money than on individuality. Not that Diana wasn't emulated. When she started driving an Audi Cabriolet 2.6E in 1994, for example, Volkswagen saw sales rocket from 568 to 989 in a year, adding £10.2 million to revenue. 

A survey by Majesty magazine, meanwhile, estimates that she generated £14.5 million worth of free publicity for products she used. Harrods, the magazine said, made a tidy £21,000 out of her endorsement, her exclusive Chelsea gym, The Harbour Club, £73,000 and Chanel £12,000. 

Small wonder that she cropped up on magazine covers more often than any other so-called 'real' person in history. Diana was a commodity - but her fashion appeal was by this time restricted to the monied few who could afford to do as she did rather than by legions of adoring teenagers. 

After her separation from Charles was announced, Diana seemed keen to shake off her image as fashion's favourite princess. She wanted, she said, to be queen of people's hearts, not just their wardrobes. The sober navy suit she wore for the Panorama TV interview proved just how serious an ambassador of the people she could be. An equally austere affair was her garment of choice the day her separation from the Prince of Wales was officially announced. A Christie's auction of her clothes earlier this year, which raised £3.5 million for charity, was nothing if not testimony to the fact that fashion was no longer as important to her as it had been. 

In the final weeks of her life, Diana was photographed more than ever: in a leopardskin bathing suit, healthy rounded belly on display for all to see; from behind, these days, happily, entirely oblivious to any possible sniping about cellulite. Dressed far less self-consciously, in chinos, white shirt and flat shoes in Angola, for example, she finally looked comfortable in her own skin. 

Diana was also happier than she ever had been. In these last pictures it was the beauty of the woman, her spirit and capacity to give, that shone through. It was always far more radiant than her clothes. 

SEPT. 5, 1997 An "Exceptional and Gifted Human Being"
Robert Seely

LONDON (AP) Queen Elizabeth II, speaking from the heart as "your queen and as a grandmother," paid tribute today to Princess Diana as an "exceptional and gifted human being." She spoke hours after people in the streets had reached out directly to Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, and to her and Prince Charles outside the palaces which have been a focus for an immense public tribute. 

"We have all been trying in our different ways to cope," the queen said in an extraordinary live broadcast. "It is not easy to express a sense of loss, since the initial shock is often succeeded by a mixture of other feelings: disbelief, incomprehension, anger and concern for those who remain." 

The queen normally speaks to the nation only on Christmas Day. This was the second exception in her 45-year reign; the other was on Feb. 24, 1991, at the end of the Gulf War. The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, also paid their respects at the coffin of their former daughter-in-law. "I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness," the queen said. "I admired and respected her, for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys." 

During a week in which the family was secluded at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, "We have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered," the queen said. Speaking steadily through one of the most testing times of her reign, the queen said, "We have seen, throughout Britain and around the world, an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana's death. We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart. I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are, join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss, and gratitude for her all-too-short life," the queen said. "It is a chance to show to the whole world the British nation united in grief and respect." 

The queen, wearing black, arrived from Scotland earlier today and went to Buckingham Palace. Stepping from her limousine, she spoke with some of the thousands who gathered to offer condolences, shaking hands and smiling bravely as she accepted their flowers. The queen later met other mourners outside the Chapel Royal at St. James's Palace, and paid her respects at Diana's coffin. 

The family of Diana's new love, Dodi Fayed, said today that Diana had given him a pair of cuff links that belonged to her late father and a gold cigar clipper with a tag inscribed "With love from Diana." The family also confirmed reports that Fayed gave Diana a $205,000 diamond solitaire ring shortly before they were both killed in a car crash early Sunday in Paris. "What that ring meant, we shall probably never know," said Michael Cole, spokesman for Fayed's father, Egyptian-born billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed. 

Cole also showed reporters a security video containing shots of Diana and Dodi's last hours at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The video showed Diana waiting inside the hotel's rear entrance, Dodi's arm around her waist. When the Mercedes Benz limo arrived, they got in the back seat and the limo drove off slowly. Footage from a security camera at the front of the hotel showed a posse of figures then racing toward motorcycles. The Fayed family released the video to counter reports that Diana's driver, Henri Paul, had raced off at high speeds. French police say Paul was legally drunk at the time of the crash. 

The royal family had been strongly criticized earlier this week for going into seclusion in Scotland while Britons lined the streets in a massive display of public grief over Diana's death. Today, they laid that criticism to rest during an emotional homecoming. "Thank you very much," Prince William, 15, told a woman who reached from behind barriers to hand him flowers. William, tall and bearing a striking resemblance to his mother, walked with his father and brother, Prince Harry, 12, near the railings of Kensington Palace, Diana's former residence, which was engulfed in a sea of floral tributes. The princes' arrival from Scotland was kept secret to avoid attracting a media crush, but television networks were permitted to broadcast the scenes live. 

"Prince Charles said to me, `We appreciate you coming, we appreciate all the flowers, we are very touched,"' said Rosalind Wederell, from Chatham, who was at the front of the police barrier at Kensington. Charles gulped several times before making a remark to the boys, and William looked moist-eyed. But the young princes conducted themselves in an assured way. "Prince Charles seemed overwhelmed and somehow a lot more human than he ever seemed to be before. I said to William, `You are a wonderful boy,' and he smiled at me," Wederell said. Londoner Andy Kalli said William thanked him. "I said to him, `Be strong, your mum is in a good place,' and he smiled." 

With the funeral approaching, there has been no letup in the public surge of emotion. Police estimated that 12,000 people were in line today, a 10-hour wait, to sign condolence books at St. James's Palace. 

Diana will be buried privately Saturday after a public procession and a Westminster Abbey funeral that will blend Anglican funeral rites with a song by Elton John. The procession and funeral will be broadcast on three giant TV screens in London, two in Hyde Park and one in Regent's Park, as well as around the world. 

Diana's brother, the ninth Earl Spencer, announced today that his sister will be buried on an island on the grounds of the family's stately home, Althorp Park, instead of in the nearby church. The change reflected fears that the village of Great Brington would be turned into a shrine to the 36-year-old Diana and overrun by sightseers. 

French police, meanwhile, held three more photographers in their investigation of the crash that killed Diana, Fayed, and their chauffeur. Earlier, seven photographers and a motorcyclist were detained. The paparazzi could be charged with manslaughter and other crimes. All of those detained have denied claims that the high-speed pursuit of Diana's car caused the wreck that took her life. 

A man claiming to be one of the photographers at the scene of the crash Sunday told the French daily Liberation that he and other colleagues took photos and left without trying to help the victims. "OK, we took photos without thinking," the man, who was not identified, was quoted as saying in today's edition. "What was I supposed to do? I'm neither a doctor nor a fireman." The man, who was not identified, also insisted that Diana's driver was going too fast. "I have never seen anyone take off like that," he said. "He was driving like a gangster." 

Authorities are particularly interested in how one photographer's car came to be parked in front of Diana's crumpled Mercedes. One man, Franck Levi, told The Associated Press that a motorcycle did cut off Diana's sedan, which was two cars behind him as he entered the Paris tunnel that night. "When I was halfway through the tunnel, I saw a motorcycle cut in front of it," he said. "When the motorcycle cut in front of him, I saw a large white flash." After that, he said he saw the Mercedes' headlights "go to the left, to the right and again on the left." He then lost sight of the Mercedes as he drove out of the tunnel. 

What can be said, or written, about a woman who has had more of her personal life exposed to the public than any pop icon in recent history? She was every little girl's fairy princess personified, every young woman's role model of fashion and society, and in her charity work, she was everyone's best chum. 

In an earlier interview, months ago, she said she no longer cared to be Queen of England, only Queen of people's hearts. With the worldwide mourning for "Lady Di," it seems she's gotten her wish. Lady Diana was one of the few people in the world that everyone had an opinion about. You either loved or hated, supported or criticized her. The untimely death of the Princess of Wales lifts her to the status of other legends such as John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean. 

We all have our time-fixes in life, where we can remember where we were or what we were doing when something happened. Earlier generations can remember where tbey were when men first walked on the moon, or when JFK was shot, or when Elvis died. For this generation, it's the space shuttle Challenger's explosion and the death of Diana. 

Scanning the Associated Press wire in my newsroom, I find stories from my collegues, domestic and overseas, of her past, her style, her motherhood and her charity work. She was a vibrant and energetic figure in her openness with the public and her royal accessibility. Judging from London news reports, her death seems to have prompted a national call for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles to rebuild the monarchy's prestige by following her example. It's about time. 

In life, her behavior sometimes raised an eyebrow or two, but in death all is forgiven, it seems, for the "people's princess. "Diana dead may threaten their stability and tranquility as strongly if not more so,than the divorced Diana they could not silence," said Polly Toynbee, a columnist for The Independent, in London. "Diana the difficult was a problem the palace could tackle, but Saint Diana is something it can never contend with." 

Her marriage to Prince Charles on July 29, 1981, was one of those events that people recall more vividly than other moments in their lives. Some remember being awakened by mothers at 3:30 a.m. to watch the wedding broadcast live. Others took off work, or skipped school, to witness a modern day fairytale come true. An estimated billion people around the world watched the ceremony. It was the fairy-tale romance so many of us wished for, and in that couple, we found an outlet through which to live out our fantasies of castles and queens and a love that would never die. 

But, "never" came rather quickly. When the fairy tale fractured, we saw another story, altogether. It was one that many, particularly women, could relate to. This princess had her twentieth century problems, bulimia, the twentieth century disease of low esteem and the desire to 'find herself,' to give her life meaning. 

Though the royal family wished the spotlight would go away, we learned of Prince Charles' admissions of adultery and heard embarrassing, tape-recorded endearments to his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. We also learned of Diana's accounts of descents into eating disorders self-mutilation, suicide attempts and retaliatory adulteries with men not chosen for any sense of discretion. Guess who we cheered for... 

Yet in her work for people with AIDS, she broke through her difficulties and found an outlet for her emotions and her beliefs. She sought out the untouchables of our society and she touched them. Her campaigns took place in a world beyond politics as, unerringly, she found issues in which the moral high ground could and should be seized. 

Her most recent work was campaigning against land mines. The campaign by Diana and The Halo Trust helped focus international attention on the issue and forced President Clinton to enter the United States into negotiations with about 100 nations, aimed at banning anti-personnel land mines by the end of the year. 

Delegates to a global conference on land mines stood, silently, this past Monday to pay tribute to Diana, the world's most visible advocate of banning the deadly devices. The roughly 400 delegates from 100 nations rose at the opening of the Oslo, Norway conference for a moment of silent reflection on Diana's efforts to draw attention to the 26,000 people killed or maimed by land mines, each year. 

The conference began Monday, the day after the crash that took Diana's life. "We shall spare no effort at this conference to achieve the goals she set for herself," Norway's Foreign Minister, Bjorn Tore Godal, said. 

Though the marriage ended, officially, with their divorce just over a year ago on August 28, 1996, the rivalry between Diana and Charles for public approval continued until her death. In recent weeks she posed, knowingly, on Mediterranean holidays with her friend, Emad Mohamed Fayed, known as Dodi, apparently in an effort to show the world that the once-troubled young woman had found personal happiness. 

Reports came in after the crash that Diana was presented with a diamond ring, worth more than $200,000, at dinner a few hours before the fatal crash. There were also reports that Diana was preparing to change the way she lived life. "She told me she had decided to radically change her life," the Daily Mail's royal reporter, Richard Kay, wrote in Monday's editions of the newspaper. Kay, one of Diana's favorite media contacts, said she had telephoned him six hours before the accident. "She was going to complete her obligations to her charities and to the anti-personnel land mines cause and then, around November, would completely withdraw from her formal public life," Kay wrote. "She would then, she said, be able to live as she always wanted to live. Not as an icon, how she hated to be called on, but as a private person," Kay said. Kay said the influence for the change was 36 year-old Diana's relationship with Dodi Fayed. "She was in love with him and, perhaps more important, she believed that he was in love with her and that he believed in her. They were, to use an old but priceless cliche, blissfully happy," Kay said. 

Diana had announced a withdrawal from most of her public work on Dec. 3, 1993, but it didn't last. Kay said that, on Saturday, she also talked of plans to open a series of hospices around the world. The reporter said that after detailing her plans, Diana said: "But, I sometimes wonder what's the point? Whatever I do, it's never good enough for some people." 

It seems that Diana's eldest son takes after his mother. Over the objections of Buckingham Palace, Prince William has insisted on leading the procession behind his mother's coffin, Saturday, en route to the funeral in Westminster Abbey. Skeptics wondered why the royal family resisted 15-year-old's desires. 

Did it stem, less from concern for any emotional stress he might endure, than from fear that his starring role in a drama that will be viewed around the world by an audience estimated in the billions might renew suggestions that the handsome, young prince, and not his divorced father, Prince Charles, would be a more fitting direct successor to Queen Elizabeth II? The dust-up, one of many that has plagued planning for the princess's last rites, is a stark reminder that even in death, Diana could mean trouble, and perhaps eventual extinction, for the monarchy. 

Ironically, the funeral will be the biggest event London has seen since the wedding in 1981. Her life ran the gamut for the royal family, from their finest hour when the couple wed, to their most difficult hour in balancing the approval of the public with the desire to do things by the royal "book." It is far too early to say whether Diana's funeral will mark a real change in the way the palace conducts its affairs, or whether this is merely a respectful dispatch of the biggest thorn that was ever in the monarchy's side. 

If Charles "and his entourage think that after the solemnities of the funeral it will be business as usual, they are misleading themselves," the Independent said Tuesday. On Wednesday, the paper declared: "What would really do the monarchy good, and show they had grasped the lesson of Diana's popularity, would be for the Queen and Prince Charles to break down, cry and hug one another on the steps of the Abbey" after the funeral. "That such an event is unthinkable," added the newspaper, "shows how great the gap is between the people mourning 'their' princess and the royal family to which she never, quite, belonged." Now we all prepare for Saturday's funeral, tissue box on one side, coffee on the other (the funeral is being broadcast at 2 a.m. in the midwestern US). We will bid her goodbye in our own way. 

Icons invade the public consciousness, they are dazzling and controversial characters who enhanced others' lives in some way, only to have their own lives cut short, with much left unfinished. They are the modern day gods of Mount Olympus, beings who still have power in our minds even though we can not see them, or hear them. We still have the memories of Diana and her good works, and we have her son William, touted in the British press as the last, best hope for the continuation of the monarchy. 

SEPT. 5, 1997 Diana's Funeral is About What Might Have Been
Rita Truschel

WILMINGTON, DE, USA I will be up at 6 this morning watching Princess Diana's funeral, just as I was up at dawn 16 years ago with millions of others worldwide to see her wedding on TV. I was not a Diana fan; the wedding was as much about Prince Charles finally taking a bride with the full array of British pageantry as it was about his lady's shy charm. People seem to forget the prince was once a popular fellow. 

But in the end, having flowered and faltered in front of cameras all her adult life, all Diana had anymore was an audience without the actuality of being an eventual queen. So it seems the right thing to do to observe her last rites, to close the circle. 

I didn't envy her. I thought the fuss over her hair and clothes was silly, and the intrusive speculation on her private life obnoxious. Be glad you're common if this is what constitutes the royal treatment. Much of what she did was frivolous and unexceptional. Hers was a fragile femininity, and for all the talk of her influence on the monarchy, she was a pretty conventional woman: a bride and mother, charity sponsor and glamour girl, a divorcee. Love eluded her. The 'more' she was looking for was just out of reach when she died at 36. That and the cumulative stupidity behind her fatal accident multiplies the shock of it. 

Her life journey was one so many different kinds of women can identify with. Most every girl grows up knowing the Cinderella story. But we forget that fairy tales are dark, full of sacrifices and monsters. Every woman has lived with disappointment and grief. And history is full of dead queens. 

Queen of Hearts Among the privileges of royalty are affection and awe and distance from the herd. But class cuts both ways. There's a demand for duty and dignity, and distance becomes estrangement. Diana asked to be loved because she was lovely and needy, bartering her magic for the illusion of intimacy with strangers. But the self-styled Queen of Hearts was still looking for meaningful work and reportedly wandered her palace apartment alone on many a Saturday night. As in a fairy tale, the princess was pathetic until she let down her hair, but then she didn't really behave like a princess anymore. 

She died pictured as the playmate of a playboy. The fabulous diamond ring found in the crushed Mercedes doesn't compensate for much. The woman of substance she might have become was still a suggestion. This year she visited Bosnia and Africa to campaign against anti-personnel land mines, in conjunction with treaty negotiations among 100 countries. She met with Elizabeth Dole at Red Cross headquarters in Washington and visited with Mother Teresa in Harlem, aligning herself with these women notable for their serious purpose and independent strength. "I want to be like you," she seemed to be saying. 

Still, the princess who defied protocol to cry she was more than a mannequin continued to perfect her beautiful face and figure and carry off beautiful clothes like any of the run-of-the-mill pop stars and fashion models she admired. 

She might have had it all. Her sons were growing up well. Her prestige as the mother of a future king was assured. She was still young and spirited enough to take more chances at love and a new marriage. And she seemed to have grounded herself in causes that could become a career in significant public service. 

But wealth and glamour only put her in the back seat behind a drunken hotel driver, on the run from the publicity monster crazed by her new romance. She promised so much to the public imagination. Her death was so shockingly pointless. Yet the best most of us can do who knew more about her personal business than we had any right to is pay our respects by long-distance television. 

Rita Truschel is a Wilmington (Del.) News Journal editorial writer. Send e-mail to rtrusche@wilmingt.gannett.com 

From Cinderella to rejected wife, devoted mother to saint, Diana became an icon for women of the modern age.

No one to lover her, except the world:

No one to love her, except the world "Diana was Cinderella. She was the anorexic girl. She was the Lady of Shallott, imprisoned in her tower. She was the betrayed wife, jilted and abandoned. She was the divorcée, representing all the millions of people who are divorced and alone and wounded. She was the single mother and on the side of all those other single mothers up and down the country (although without their money problems). She was the girl about town, with her nippy car and visits to the gym. She was the rock 'n' roll princess. She was the nurturer, visiting the sick and the poor and laying on her hands. She was the language of modernity in the time-warped Royal Family. She was the time bomb ticking away under the House of Windor. She was the victim, passive and abused. She was the strong woman, fighting back. She was the great survivor and not even the whole weight of the establishment could crush her. She was the performer. She was the besieged star, caught in the glare of the flashlights and yearning for privacy. She was the adoring mother, hugging her boys, running to meet them but never meeting them enough (there is a heartbreaking photograph of her hurtling towards William on the royal yacht Britannia with outspread arms and a flaming smile of delight on her face)." 

By Nicci Gerrard. Extract from the Guardian, September 7, 1997

You, me, her, us:

"Diana's unhappy marriage charted a familiar course for millions of women and made them feel that, however disastrous their lives, they were not alone. Her story, from falling in love with an apparently eligible older man to the misery of a marriage gone wrong, could be seen as a paradigm of women's experience in the late 20th century. Talking not just about her troubled marriage but about her eating disorder was unprecedented. During a speech at a charity event, she likened the experience of bulimia to wanting 'to dissolve like a Disprin'. Vulnerability is a very human quality and it turned her from a figurehead into a real person. And if it lost her much of the protection of her royal status, it gained her the admiration of women." 

By Joan Smith. Extract from the Guardian, September 2, 1997

The pop Princess:

"Diana is the first royal icon raised on and sustained by pop culture. She is our pop Princess. This goes far further than the string of spats with her husband over her reading habits, her lack of interest in the visual arts and her love of cheap music - most memorably, when she came on stage during Wayne Sleep's 1985 Royal Opera House show and did a three-minute routine with him to Billy Joel's Uptown Girl. The Princess's popness can also be seen in her immediacy, her fresh and open emotions and her impatience with protocol - in fact, everything that makes her so lovable and loved. She is, of course, a great showman, but there is nevertheless the feeling that she is the one member of the ruling house actually happier among the people than among her people. Her smiles of elation and tears of compassion when with the young, old or sick are a stark contrast to the look of sheer boredom which can cloud her face during family parties. Like all great stars, she is only truly alive when performing." 

By Julie Burchill. Extract from the Observer, September 6, 1997

"Diana's shyness was one of her most misleading character traits. It is not the bashfulness of youth, but the statement of her whole style of operating. The generation gap is far more profound than a matter of age. It is the yawning sensibility gap between the Me generation and the Yuppie generation. The Princess of Wales is mentally and emotionally light years away from the career girls, the rebels, the bolters, the experimenters Charles associated with in his dancing years. She is one of the new school of born-again old-fashioned girls who play it safe and breed early. Post-feminist, post-verbal, her femininity is modelled on a Fifties concept of passive power. The style is all summed up by her voice, which is flat with half-swallowed vowels - 'Pritz Chuls' for Prince Charles, 'yaw' for yes, 'hice' for house. 

By Tina Brown. (Extract from an article first published in Vanity Fair 1985; republished in the Observer, September 6, 1997) 

SEPT. 5, 1997 Can the Windsors Survive Princess Dianas Death?
Robert Seely, Associated Press Writer 

LONDON (AP) Revolution may not yet be in the air, but people outside Princess Dianas Kensington Palace home were saying it with flowers. Diana "more royal than the royals," said a sign attached to one bouquet Sunday. "It was you who should have been queen," said another. 

Its a bewildering time for the House of Windsor, beset with harsh criticism of how the royal family treated Diana, both in life and in death. Did Diana, by her warmth, her publicly demonstrated affection for her two sons and maybe even her frank admissions of failures, show up the monarchy as an irrelevant anachronism? Or was she proof that as the 21st century approaches, monarchy still wields a unique magic that thrives even in fiercely democratic ages? 

"Politicians all know any modern system has to be republican," Stephen Heseler, chairman of Republic, a group advocating an end to monarchy, said on Sun- day. The Sunday Times took the opposite approach: "Reaction to Diana's death has shown ...that the spiritual dimension of royalty can survive in these hectic, cynical times." 

Dianas legacy is a divided one for the monarchy. Joining the royal family made her a star and her fresh face and charm boosted the institution's popularity. But her later unhappiness, culminating in her divorce from Prince Charles last year, shook it. 

The saga damaged Prince Charles, the heir to the throne. But her aura sur- rounds 15-year-old Prince William, the Windsor next in line behind Charles. Last week, the queen misjudged the nations mood when the palace made one, brief statement on the royal family's behalf in the first four days following Dianas death on Aug. 31. 

Tabloid newspapers, under fire because photographers were pursuing Diana when she died and because her brother said editors had "blood on their hands," turned their fury on the queen and Prince Charles. The royals regained ground as Charles and his sons went out in London to meet some of the grieving public, and the queen made an unprecedented, live address to the nation. 

More than 1 million people turned out for Diana's funeral procession on Saturday and more than half the country watched on TV and saw Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, lambaste the royals for failing to support his sister. 

Talk of far-reaching reform for the monarchy abounds, with newspapers reporting that Charles is pushing his mother to change the monarchys image, and pension off many of her old advisers. 

"There's too much protocol, their family is too rigid. Thats why they clashed with Diana," said Andrew Glowachi, 35, who took his son Adam, 4, to Kensington Palace to see the bouquets. "When Diana's procession passed Buckingham Palace, the royals were there, lined up, expressing humility before the people. Its never been seen before," he said. 

Prime Minister Tony Blair, who caught the public mood more successfully than the royals, defended the queen on Sunday. "Youve got a simple choice in the end as to whether you have a monarchy or you elect a president. I personally think that the monarchy is a tradition which we want to keep," Blair said in a BBC inter- view. 

But he also said it needed to evolve. "I think the monarchy changes and adapts the whole time, and it changes from generation to generation." 

And far back in history. Henry II bared his back for a thrashing by the monks of Canterbury after he was held responsible for the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. In the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell's republicans sent Charles I to the chopping block, but Charles II was restored to the throne after Cromwell died. 

The royal family became the House of Windsor during World War I, when its previous name, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, sounded much too German. The royals' 20th-century survival strategy was to be a model family, the embodiment of characteristics in which Britons took pride: stoicism, decency, honor and duty, the elements of the the fabled "stiff upper lip." 

With Diana's death, much of the nation preferred a moist eye. "The idea that national pride and dignity may only be conveyed by cold obedience to precedent and protocol could not survive the week," Patrick Collins wrote in The Mail on Sunday. 

William Rees-Mogg, columnist for The Times, said, "Diana's generation had been brought up to believe that all you need is love. The queen's generation grew up in World War II. For most of us, the Battle of Britain in 1940 was our formative historic experience." 

"Open displays of grief for lost brothers, lovers and husbands were frowned upon as a united nation battled for survival. The queen has been criticized for her belief in the stiff upper lip. For our generation, there was not really much alternative," he said. 

SEPT. 5, 1997 The Princes' Grief
Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press Writer 

LONDON (AP) In a display of courage that reduced a grieving nation to tears, Princess Diana's beloved young princes walked behind her coffin, Saturday, with a quiet dignity that would have made her proud. 

Their faces solemn, their heads bowed, Prince William and Prince Harry kept their composure until Elton John sang a specially rewritten tribute to their mother, beginning "Goodbye, England's rose." There, in Westminster Abbey, with no cameras filming them, the tears came. "We are all chewed up with the sadness at the loss of a woman who was not even our mother," the prin- cesss only brother, Earl Spencer, told his nephews in a moving eulogy. "How great your suffering is, we cannot even imagine." 

At the culmination of the most tragic week in their lives, the young princes made up their own minds to honor their mother by following her coffin past crowds standing 10 deep and a watching world. Their father, Prince Charles, had left it until the last minute for them to decide. When the gun carriage bearing her coffin neared Buckingham Palace, William and Harry moved in behind. They walked the last mile to Westminster Abbey with their father; their grandfather, Prince Philip; and Spencer, their uncle. 

Atop the coffin were three wreaths, two from the young princes, the smallest bearing a note from Harry reading simply "Mummy." William, at 15 already a lanky 6-foot-1, kept his hands clasped in front; 12- year-old Harry looked up occasionally, but his eyes were aimed straight ahead. At the entrance to the abbey, Spencer put a guiding hand, first behind Harry, then William, before they walked down the aisle behind the coffin. Once inside, they could grieve out of reach of the cameras. 

The two boys appeared on the verge of crying as the 2,000-strong congregation sang the first hymn, "I Vow to Thee, My Country." It was a favorite of Dianas from her school days, and William wanted it played, according to BBC televi- sion. But it was when Elton John sang his reworked version of "Candle in the Wind" that their tears began flowing. When John sang the words, "Your candle burned out long before your legend ever will" Harry buried his face in his hands and sobbed quietly. And William became tearful when he sang: "All our words cannot express the joy you brought us through the years." 

Diana was grooming William to be a modern king who shared her compassion for the less fortunate. In his eulogy, Spencer pledged to his sister that her blood family would ensure both boys were not simply immersed in duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned. We ... "will always respect and encourage them in their royal role," he said. "But we, like you, recognize the need for them to experience as many different aspects of life as pos- sible to arm them spiritually and emotionally for the years ahead." Spencer also pledged that the family would not allow the young princes to be hunted by the paparazzi as Diana was. 

Listening to his uncle, William was visibly moved. After Diana's private burial at the Spencer family estate, Althorp Park, Charles and his sons departed and were believed to be going to Charles home, Highgrove, in Gloucestershire in western England. 

Janet Haddington, founder of the National Association of Bereavement Services, warned that the boys face a very difficult time coming to terms with Diana's death. "The princes are going to be reminded of her every day of their lives because of her fame," she said. "I hope that we as a nation have the generosity to let her go because, without that, they wont be able to address their private grief." 

Tuesday 9th September 1997 Reflections on a Visit to Kensington Palace
Gardens Richard Smith

NORFOLK, ENGLAND. Yesterday, we travelled the hundred or so miles by train and tube to Kensington Palace Gardens. According to the BBC evening news late last night we were amongst 30,000 people to visit the gardens on that day alone - nine days after the Princess was tragically killed - to lay memorial flowers with the huge mass already lying in a great semi-circle in front of the black and gold wrought-iron gates of the great house which was Diana's home. A news helicopter hovered motionless high overhead all the time we were there, and it was quite something to return home late in the evening and see the film of the great mass of flowers in the Gardens where we had been, shot by their overhead camera. 

The British police constables were polite and helpful, after what one described to me as: "the longest two weeks of my life!" ushering and directing when people requested. A security alert later turned out to be unfounded, in connection with the Israeli embassy nearby. People were apparently still queueing to add their thoughts to the 43 books of condolences at the back of the Palace to which they had been moved, but the queue was somewhat shorter than the twelve hours which people had been patiently waiting at its height. 

The mood has changed. I only saw one person openly weeping, and like many people, my wife Claire, her mum and I were enormously touched and uplifted not only by the extraordinary sight of so many, many flowers - a whole field of them, their cellophane wrappers sparkling and twinkling in the gentle breeze, as nine-year-old Michael noticed, something that would not come across in still photos or overhead filming. But even more touching were the messages - not only on the bunches of flowers on the ground, but pinned and hanging from every tree along the perimeter paths of the large park and all the trees close to the gates of the House. So many, many, touching messages, many from children, many with pictures of the Queen of Hearts or the playing card itself attached. One small card hanging from a branch particularly struck Claire, and I copied it down. It expresses very well how we, and I am sure many, many other people feel at this time: 

**Sadly Diana, I never appreciated all the good you did, now that you are gone I hope that all of us can give a little more to make up your loss.
You will be missed. OUR QUEEN OF HEARTS. Stephen.** 

We were a party of seven - my wife's mother, 70, who had especially requested for us to come, I and my wife, and our four children,aged 9, 6, 3 and just four months. It would have been unwise (on safety grounds) for us to travel to central London for the service on Saturday, since between 2 and 6 million people were expected, and we would not have wanted to leave anyone behind. So we watched it on British TV, switching channels for the best commentary and view, and, like everyone else, saw how excellently the whole service was conducted, how well people behaved, and, also like everyone else, were moved by 'Goodbye England's Rose' and Earl Spencer's speech - someone on the train yesterday referred to it as 'the speech of the century.' I have certainly never heard any two performances so eloquent, so perfect, and yet so full of deep emotion. 

We will all remember this - and by we I mean we, the human race. It is a chapter in history so well documented that it will never be forgotten or misread by the mass. Our three older children each laid two red roses on the great mass of flowers, and we adults one each. One red rose bud fell from our bunch, and we kept that, but there was no souvenir hunting. No one could have taken anything. 

Further written messages seemed superfluous and inadequate at this point. The size of the main mass of flowers was so great that we were able to join the line of people right at the edge of it, next to the flowers themselves, to lay our own. They lay two feet deep - more in places - bunches on top of bunches, so that the ones on top are still fresh. It was then that I appreciated the scale of the problem of what to do with this amazing, amazing tribute and outpouring of people's hearts, not just here, but in front of Buckingham Palace, at the gates and road in front of Althorp (pronounced by the owner of the house as it is written - not 'All-throp') House, where Diana has been lain to rest. The police have requested people stop taking flowers there, since Althorp Island where she is buried is now completely covered in flowers taken there from the gates. An air exclusion zone to protect their privacy has been announced over the Althorp estate, with two incursions warned off so far. All this just goes to reinforce the incredible, incredible, nature of the phenomenon, with which the world is still trying to come to terms. Some try to ignore it and return to normal, to others it seems like a fantastic dream. 

And it is a moral phenomenon, too. The Spencer family have requested that people now donate any further money that might be spent on flowers to the Memorial Fund: 

The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund Kensington Palace LONDON W8 4PU (UNITED KINGDOM)
(sterling cheques money orders, or British postal orders made payable to The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund )
or for credit card donations telephone: 0990 66 44 22
adding international code prefix to the U.K. telephone number above. 

Because of the huge continuing response it is an automated system, which accepts donations by means of the following cards: 

Access Visa Diner American Express Switch 

The credit card donation line was on Monday reported to be receiving telephoned donations alone of £7,000 per hour. It will be used to support and carry forward the charitable work which Princess Diana did her best to publicise and help during her life-time, including the mammoth task of attempting to clear the estimated 100 million mines laid in developing countries and trouble spots around the world, from which are killing and disabling innocent people (mainly women and children) - by the Hazardous Areas Life-S upport Organisation (HALO) which cleared around 10,000 mines and 25,000 tonnes of unexploded shells in Angola and elsewhere last year alone. (For which information I am indebted to an article by Martin Revis in this magazine to be found on the internet at: 

article by Martin Revis about the HALO Trust or for more information contact: 

HALO Trust P. O. Box 7712 LONDON SW1V 3ZA (UNITED KINGDOM) 

With almost certainly the best-selling single of all time, and an album of Diana tributes by British artists like Paul McCartney, Sting, George Michael and others planned for Christmas, Diana's should be the biggest Charitable Fund of all time. My own suggestion - suggested by many other al