YES: Andrew Marr
NO: Joan Smith
Dear Joan
6th July 2007
On one thing, I'm sure, we can both agree: the days from Diana's death to her funeral were slow-motion surreal and unforgettable. As a newspaper editor then, struggling to understand the mildly mutinous, tearful crowds lapping around the streets of London, I became increasingly irked by what I took to be un-British, almost Mediterranean sentimentality. Perhaps the oddest moment was when a normally level-headed reporter came back to say that an image of the dead princess was appearing in the corner of an oil painting of Charles I in St James's Palace. "Great, mass hysteria story then?" I asked, or words to that effect. No, came the reply, according to everything I can discover, she really is appearing…
What came out of those mad-as-cheese epiphanies? Constitutionally, nothing. In retrospect, the attacks on the Queen for staying up at Balmoral too long with the boys were overdone. At the time it briefly seemed as if the monarchy might be tottering, but it recovered. Tony Blair played his part in helping it regain balance. His famous words about Diana were followed by private warnings to the Queen. He knew what was happening. What else followed? The national enthusiasm for leaving flowers, teddy bears and handwritten notes at the scenes of fatal accidents or murders had begun before 1997, but it became ubiquitous after Diana's funeral. I don't much like it.
The answer is partly personal. I was brought up as part of what I called in my history of postwar Britain the buttoned-lip generation, taught to repress my emotions in public and to recoil from the lolling exhibitionism of that iconic piece of sub-constitutional soft furnishing, the daytime television sofa. And, in brief, it seems to me that the Diana moment was a great defeat for this puritan sensibility; and a good thing too. In stark contrast to the repressed blood royals, she let her feelings show, understood the power of optimism and sympathy, and declined to know her place. Her position, and the drama of her death, forced a collision between the last of the old hierarchical Britain and the new Britain that had been building since the late 1950s. Waiting in line to go into Westminster Abbey for the funeral service, I was standing just behind two Guards officers in matching uniform, complete with big leather boots and spurs. And behind me were two gay men, also dressed in matching outfits, again including a fair amount of leather and metal. And I remember thinking—yes, what an odd country we are, and what an odd country she helped to make us.
For the thing is, I like this odd country, its revived culture of public sentiment, as well as its lingering tradition. What has really happened, partly through the medium of television, is that forthright emotionalism, always far stronger in working-class culture than in the middle class and upper-class culture of Britain's imperial age, has broken through again. A liberal acceptance of what people do in their private lives, so long as it doesn't harm others, has spread more widely and more quickly than would have seemed remotely possible, even in the early 1970s. We are a more relaxed and more emotionally healthy people than we used to be, and the "Diana moment," for all its weirdness and excess, marked this change. It was a telling national catharsis, and the moment too when "holding it all in" was no longer seen as a virtue.
I like what we have become. I like the footballers' hugs, and the rude musical girl power of Lily Allen, and the disrespect for unearned authority, and the fact that gay people can amble around the centre of our cities unconcernedly. I don't think it has reached a preachy or oppressive level. It may even be becoming unfashionable again, as the more serious Brown years begin. I can still remember the pompous, braying voices dismissing Diana as a silly girl, a self-indulgent hysteric, and sneering at her charity work, and becoming almost hysterical themselves as they saw her growing influence. And though I've no knowledge of, or interest in, the flashy life she was latterly leading, and have never bought Hello! or even wanted to meet her when she was alive, I know which side I'm on.
Yours
Andrew
Dear Andrew
7th July 2007
You've summarised your argument succinctly, and in a style which reflects the informality you characterise as one of Diana's legacies to us. More informal, less deferential—yes, I'd agree that this country is both those things, but I'm not sure how much credit I would give to Diana. The baby-boom generation, which you and I belong to, grew up in a period of great social mobility and it never occurred to me, as a working-class girl growing up on council estates, that I had to be deferential to anyone. I was thrown out of the Brownies for preaching atheism and republicanism long before anybody had heard of Diana Spencer, and I think our generation of politicians and activists can claim authorship of most of the beneficial changes you ascribe to her. I'm sure it helped, having a widely admired public figure who treated gay people (for example) just like anyone else, but other figures in popular culture, such as Elton John, have been as influential.
As for the days after Diana's death, I wish you were right to say that there was a moment when the monarchy appeared to be tottering—but the issue was one of style, not substance. It certainly didn't take much to correct the error, once it had been pointed out to them. Diana's legacy, in that sense, has been a modest modernisation of the monarchy which may yet be enough to save it, despite the tireless efforts of her ex-husband to heap ridicule on the edifice. It's true that she's bequeathed us two sons who wear jeans, go to nightclubs and feature regularly in Hello! magazine; it's also true that they were sent to Eton, throw tasteless theme parties and recently thanked the "little people" who did all the legwork to make their concert in memory of their mother a success. Not my idea of a progressive, classless society, but then that's not what Diana was about.
I can see why, coming from where you do, you have championed the notion that she helped to make us less repressed. I also can't help wondering how much gender has shaped our different perceptions of what's going on here. If you grew up—as I did—with the idea that the personal is political, took part in consciousness-raising groups and immersed yourself in feminist psychoanalysis, you'd have found repression getting pretty short shrift from the start; those of us who took Germaine Greer seriously when she asked whether we'd ever tasted our own menstrual blood had little to learn from Diana on the subject of getting in touch with our hidden motivations. On the contrary, one of the things that dismayed me about Diana's persona towards the end of her life was a kind of victim feminism, in which everything that happened to her was someone else's fault—ghastly people like Charles and Philip, not to mention poor James Hewitt (who once kissed my hand wistfully at a party as if he was heading off to the third battle of Ypres).
Just before she died, I suggested in an article that Diana should get some education and a job, which might jerk her out of an unhealthy condition of self-pity and perpetual grievance, but she had a philistine upper-class contempt for anything connected with intellectual life; I read somewhere that when Katharine Graham made a similar suggestion to her face, Diana snapped back that she'd already received a full education at the university of life, thank you very much. Her and Alan Sugar, no doubt.
To return to your letter and the so-called "Diana moment" which followed her death, what I do find helpful is your final remark about knowing which side you're on. Isn't that exactly the problem? The raw emotion generated by the car crash was not felt by everyone. I came across many people who felt as I did: shocked by the sudden death of a well-known person, especially in such absurd and avoidable circumstances, but not personally involved. We were immediately perceived to be on "the other side"—deficient in compassion, sympathy, empathy, whatever you want to call it.
Obviously there was a powerful element of identification among women of Diana's age, for whom she symbolised the dissatisfaction with men which was one of the leitmotifs of the second half of the 20th century: "Some Day My Prince Will Come" morphing into "I Will Survive." The event acted as a catalyst, providing a shared space in which people could grieve over other, more personal losses, although at times this effect became positively weird: I'll never forget the man who said he'd cried more over Diana's death than he did when his own wife died. In my new novel, which is set in that summer, I have a character compare the mourning of Diana to a mother cult. All the way back to ancient Greece, ideas of maternity and sacrifice are closely linked.
The point I'm making is that the reaction to Diana's death was open to many interpretations, but what we got was a for or against. Either you were a modern touchy-feely person, like Diana herself, or you were a stuffed shirt, like the royals, who couldn't bear this spontaneous outpouring of grief for a much-loved princess. From where I was standing, it looked much less benign, an abrupt shift in which the shock waves from the death legitimised not just being in touch with your emotions but a kind of emotional exhibitionism. I've sometimes thought that Diana's death was the first in a series of coercive moments in which we are told what the national mood is—sorrow, joy, anger, triumph—and that we'd bloody well better join in with it. The link I'd make here isn't to Mediterranean or indeed middle eastern culture, where grief and celebration have always been performed much more publicly, but to Big Brother and the whole phenomenon of "reality" television. If Diana were alive today, do you really think she would be able to resist an invitation to appear in the next series of Celebrity Big Brother?
Warmest regards
Joan
Dear Joan
8th July 2007
Yes, my reactions are as much about where I came from as yours are about where you came from. I accept that if you don't need to open up, then clearly an opening-up moment is bound to pass you by. More to the point, though, is that I am not arguing that Diana herself was a self-conscious princess-liberator of the national id. As I said, she was highly manipulative and damaged herself, and was probably heading towards a flashy life among the idle rich of the Côte d'Azur and Manhattan. The debate about whether she was a hunted victim or a predatory nightmare is plainly silly. She was both. Had she lived, I don't think she would have ended up on Big Brother, but nor do I think she would have become a convincing champion of progressive values. As to her sons, points taken; but given what they have been through, and what they have had to live with since, it's a miracle they sound even slightly level-headed.
My case is different: that the widespread reaction to her death was a benign and significant moment of national self-recognition. A moment is not a process, but sometimes the brief flicker of time in which a process becomes fully revealed and accepted. As I chart in my History of Modern Britain, the liberalisation of our culture had been moving strongly from the late 1950s. It is a long road, for instance, from the trial of homosexuals in 1954, through the Wolfenden report and the rise of gay liberation, to Diana's funeral with so many "out" gay men present. The same goes for the slow rise of informality and (even slower) emotional education of middle Britain. There, you would certainly credit British pop, children's television and women's magazines. Diana contributed in a small way, by touching men with Aids, discussing her bulimia and so forth, but this came late in the story. Yet it seems to me that the "Diana moment" matters, in the same way that the final whistle isn't the football game, yet rather matters too.
It did pitch pro and anti against one another in a reductive, hysterical way, but that's what happens at these cathartic times. I can't shake off, however, the feeling I had then that the country was visibly and rather proudly a different one than it had been even a decade earlier, and that Diana's progress across the national stage was a useful emblem of the change.
Reality television isn't such a crime against humanity. Nor, really, do I agree with you that Diana deployed "victim feminism." Wasn't it more a human reaction to the icy and fossilised behaviour she encountered? As to the coercive aspect, the country being told how to feel—well, perhaps you are right, but after the Diana death, I've never really noticed this myself. Dreadful events like the Madeleine McCann kidnapping still produce near-universal reactions in the media, though even there the naysayer is sought after. Outside newspapers and television studios, people seem to me as robustly reluctant to be told what to think as they ever were.
Yours ever
Andrew
Dear Andrew
11th July 2007
You argue that Diana's death was an opportunity for the new Britain you talk about—liberal, tolerant, informal—to put on a show. I remember it differently. In the week before the funeral, I clocked a series of incidents that alarmed me. I heard an interview on Radio 4 with a man who had just had a tattoo of Diana etched on his inner thigh; there was a report that the crowd outside Kensington Palace had turned on a tourist who had innocently picked up a teddy bear; in Portland Place, I saw a poster on a lamppost which said "if Jesus is God's only son, who is Diana?" You may say these were unrepresentative reactions, but they hinted at the anger and craziness which were not far below the surface. The crowds seemed to be enjoying themselves, like a Greek chorus passing judgement on people they would normally treat with reverence—and would soon start deferring to again. There was a cloying atmosphere of self-congratulation, as if the death had revealed to us what a sensitive, intuitive, demonstrative people we were; only a year later, friends of mine who'd been swept along with it were sounding embarrassed and asking, "What was that all about?"
Where there is a legacy, I don't see it as a healthy one. I don't share your view of the harmlessness of "reality" television, whose defining characteristics are emotional exhibitionism and an encouragement of the bullying which is such an unpleasant feature of contemporary culture. Like many damaged human beings, Diana was self-obsessed yet unreflective, and the demand that other people acknowledge your feelings, no matter how irrational they are, easily tips over into a kind of coercion. In that sense, the tabloids which she both courted and denounced are her natural heirs, picking somewhat arbitrary events—the Soham murders, the McCann disappearance—and commanding us all to parade our compassion once again. This process, which can be quite coldly cynical—it was clear after the first 24 hours that the poor McCanns were unlikely to get their child back safely—distorts our priorities, dragging politicians into events they can do very little about. It encourages false hopes and rescue fantasies which actually impede the police investigation.
If rich businessmen have some spare cash, I wish they would spend it on girls' schools in Afghanistan or help women who have been raped in Darfur, instead of putting up rewards for the return of a missing child. I never expected Diana's death to have a lasting political impact, let alone destroy the monarchy—I just wish it hadn't transformed private grief into a species of showbiz.
Warmest regards
Joan
Dear Joan
16th July 2007
Though it is true that much reality television is a boring waste of human spirit, I think the bullying you identify is a constant of social life, like the dissimulation, gamesmanship and small-group politics which provide the narrative millions of people follow avidly. When my kids watch Big Brother, they are observing and judging people in just the way they do at school; it's not as toxic as you suggest. As to the tabloids, they used Diana and she used them, but they are far softer than they used to be—less cruel, certainly, than in the 1980s. And the McCann story was a collaboration between the parents and the media to keep the disappearance at the front of all our minds, in the hope that this would jog memories or winkle out the abductor. It hasn't worked, but I cannot find it in my heart to object. The point about the Diana moment is that a born-to-be-silent, acted-upon national mannequin had turned herself into an emotional, rather rebellious and surprisingly shrewd player in the national story, and that we admired that, and liked it. In the end it's personal, but I ended cheered up, not cast down—and I still am.
All my very best
Andrew
Dear Andrew
17th July 2007
The difference between us, I think, is this. There are many things I like about contemporary culture—what I don't like is the infantilisation, whether it's expressed as an obsession with celebrities or an insistence on the absolute authenticity of emotion. If someone feels something, they act on it, and that leads not just to unreasonable demands but bullying. We agree that Diana's political legacy is negligible. What she has contributed to is a culture which is less reflective and less rational than I would like, a situation symbolised by the astonishing number of people who persist in believing she was murdered. The queen of hearts has turned into the mother of all conspiracy theories, and that cannot be a benign legacy.
Very best wishes
Joan
