I HAVE no idea where I was when JFK was assassinated. However, I do know where I was when the black Mercedes carrying Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed and Henri Paul crashed in a Parisian tunnel killing its three occupants. Like most people I was in bed.
The time was 23 minutes past midnight; the date August 31 1997. Saturday night was morphing into Sunday morning. The phone went. It was the managing director of The Scotsman, the newspaper I worked for at the time. "Diana's been hurt in a car accident, " he said. "Possibly badly. You'd better turn the television on."
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About the same time Tony Blair, asleep in his Trimdon constituency home, was also awoken, first to be told about the crash, then to be informed a few hours later that Diana was dead. Anxious about what his role might be, he paced up and down in his pyjamas and according to Andrew Marr had "expletive-ridden" conversations with Alastair Campbell. Labour and Blair had been in power for a matter of months, taking the helm of a country which, in Marr's words, was "spangled and sugarcoated by a revived fashion for celebrity".
No-one knew better than the new prime minister that when it came to celebrity Diana was top of the bill. She was is the celebrity's celebrity. Blair's role, as his organ grinder no doubt reminded him, was to ensure that some of her lustre rubbed off on him.
Diana's death was tragic, as is that of any young woman and mother. It was also, as Gore Vidal said when he heard that Truman Capote had shuffled off, a good career move. She was 36 when she died and in her prime. Her marriage to Prince Charles was over and she was desperately seeking a purpose in life. Stripped of royal privilege and its invisible concomitant routine she seemed all at sea.
Lovers came and went, scared away by the constant harassment of paparazzi and tabloid nosey parkers poking their whisky-veined snouts through their letter-boxes and riffling like rats through their bins.
Squiring a woman as beautiful and as famous as Diana was all very well, but one way or another she was just too high maintenance, the kind of arm candy who was good for a fling but was not the material from which long-term relationships are forged. Diana, they knew, attracted publicity and trouble in equal measure. Thus, when the going got rough, the suitors made themselves scarce.
Diana's death transformed her from a potentially pathetic and embarrassing figure pace Marilyn Monroe into a "legend" who will never die. Or so at least thought Elton John. The days following the Paris crash demonstrated emphatically that Britain was a country as capable of mass hysteria as any other.
"The gates to Kensington Palace became a gigantic floral snowdrift bobbing with pictures of Diana, " writes Tina Brown in her book The Diana Chronicles, published to capitalise on the 10th anniversary of its subject's demise.
"The mountains of bouquets, clipped out photographs, teddy bears, poems, messages, rosaries, queens of hearts, playing cards and children's drawings; the sounds amid the crowd not simply of quiet crying but deep, gasping sobs; the lines to sign the condolence books at St James's Palace stretching away to vanishing point it was amazing, and a little scary." Indeed it was. And, from the perspective of Scotland, in the throes of the debate preceding the devolution referendum, utterly mystifying. There were calls by those determined at all costs to kill the idea of a Scottish parliament to postpone the referendum to which, thankfully, no heed was paid. But that the possibility was raised at all is an indication of the degree to which the country had suspended all rationality and given itself over to the kind of collective keening witnessed only where a sense of proportion is conspicuously lacking.
Much of this, of course, was driven by the likes of Brown, for whom Diana had proved such an indispensable meal ticket, allowing her to graduate from salivating at Tatler over the neanderthal antics of characters PG Wodehouse would have thought preposterous to the editorship of the New Yorker, which she swiftly brought down to her own level, the issue on the death on Diana's death a perfect example of what can happen to a great institution once it falls into the wrong hands.
Brown, however, is surely right when she says that Diana and the media were complicit. Amid the weeping and wailing, voices of dissent were rare. Brown quotes the dyspeptic diarist, James Lees- Milne, who wrote: "The grieving over Princess [Diana] is beyond belief." Lees-Milne, though, was very much in the minority. Day after day, page after page was filled with tributes, as if by writing about Diana she could somehow be kept alive. For the papers and magazines, more so arguably than for the broadcast media, Diana's death marked the end of the glory years, which began when she was first identified as Charles's future wife. From an early age Diana loved to pose, an addiction she never kicked. Moreover, the fickle lens loved her. One picture, as she well knew, could add tens of thousands of sales on the newsstands and make the photographer instantly rich.
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