Diana [antikvár]

Foreword 1 ¦"he tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997 plunged the world into paroxysms of grief, despair and regret, unrivalled in the modern era. This spontaneous eruption of anguish was a sign not only of her enormous personal impact on the world stage but of the potency of her position, of what she represented as a woman and as a flag-bearer for a new generation, a new order and a new future. Even now we are still trying to come to terms not only with her loss but with what she meant to us, why those who never met her felt moved to a depth of grief that they would not display even for their own kith and kin. By some indefinable alchemy she had come to embody the spirit of the age, so that when we buried her we also laid to rest something of ourselves. Those who came in pilgrimage to lay flowers at Kensington Palace, her London home, wept not just for her but for themselves. Ironically, she was once asked what she would want as an epitaph on her grave. 'A great hope crushed in its infancy,' was her reply, a phrase that unwittingly captured not only her short life but the spirit she represented. Amid the tears and the flowers, there was guilt, shame and anger at the royal family who abandoned her and at the mass media who hounded her. The mood ran much deeper, demonstrating how far the temper of the times had changed; the tectonic plates which underpin society having shifted culturally, socially and politically in the previous few years. Just as the people had spoken in the elections of May 1997 which gave the Labour Party a historic landslide victory, so in the days before and during Diana's funeral they voiced their collective displeasure and disappointment at two other mighty, but unaccountable, institutions, the media and the monarchy, whom they believed had betrayed the wishes not only of Diana, Princess of Wales, but of themselves. She was of the people and for the people, and the Prime [9]