September 02, 2007	Sunday	Sha'aban 19, 1428

LONDON: “Let it end here,” intoned the Bishop of London, weighting these words in his address with sonorous emphasis. How this great assemblage of 30 Windsors on their knees must have prayed fervently, sincerely, deeply for just that. “Let this service mark the point at which we let her rest in peace,” said the bishop. And lo, miraculously, their prayers were answered. The nation did just that.

For outside the chapel, where police with barriers expected multitudes, there were barely more watchers than at an ordinary August changing of the guard. An outraged Daily Telegraph had called for 10 giant screens to satisfy the expected throng. But journalists and camera crews from around the world almost outnumbered Royalists, with a shortage of Diana worshippers to film. Most who thinly lined the rails were curious tourists, few were British. Whatever that strange wailing, teddy-bear hugging spasm of public anguish was 10 years ago, it ended here on Friday.

What remained that was best of Diana was there in her son Harry’s touching, feeling, unWindsorly tribute with his memory of her death as “indescribably shocking and sad” and his simple 12-year-old’s description of her life: “She made us and so many other people happy.” He had written it himself and polished it with others, they said. It takes a certain skill to write with such word-perfect innocence.

Did Diana change the nation’s relationship with its monarchy? Perhaps not as much as Helen Mirren did in her Oscar-winning transformation of Queen Elizabeth II into a woman filled with tender private emotional dignity. At the memorial service, the real Queen, her consort and her heir wore lemon-sucking expressions, looking as if they were doing a wretched penance. Who knows what they feel, but how they must hope the ghost of Diana and her cult is at last at rest.

As many predicted at the time, Diana dead was far harder for the monarchy to cope with than Diana living. Ten years ago the crown wobbled in that sea of decomposing flowers, candles, poems and queen of hearts cards. Yet even at the time, reporting on the crowds in Green Park the night before Diana’s funeral, I found mainly cheerful trippers there for the spectacle, come to stare at others weeping, bringing their children so they could tell their grandchildren about the great event.

Yet who didn’t feel that gut-wrenching, visceral shock at the death of such a beauty mangled in a tunnel by an unsuitable lover’s drunken driver? People needed someone other than Diana herself to blame, so Charles, his mother and Diana’s “rottweiler”, Camilla were obliging scapegoats. For a time, the sheer power of the princess’s radiant face was a daily rebuke to them, damaging them deeply.

If now, apart from the obsessive acolytes with altars bedecked with mugs, dolls and tea-towels, the Diana cult is at last over, what was her legacy? A slight unbending in royal etiquette has not left the Windsors looking less alien or stilted on display in peculiar hats on Friday in the Guards Chapel. A BBC poll found 56 per cent said they were “out of touch”.

The whole Charles and Diana saga ripped a veil or two off royal mystique. When last asked, half the electorate thought the country would be better or no worse off without a monarchy, according to Ipsos Mori. Even if there is no groundswell to make the monarch Elizabeth the Last, this marks a weakening of old bonds.

But what of Friday’s Channel 4 television poll, suggesting that a quarter of us still believe Diana was murdered? Sometimes when asked daft questions, it’s fun to give daft answers. For how could Buckingham Palace have wanted a dead Diana, saint of celebrity, people’s princess up in the firmament with Mother Teresa and Marilyn Monroe, a taunting icon far beyond their control?

Alive, where would she be now? How much more easily the monarchy could have handled her were she now a jaded New York Jackie O, fading slightly at the edges, losing her cachet with a string of ever less appropriate suitors, shopping and bitching in toe-curling interviews, forever betrayed by “friends” and therapists. True or not, how easily Buckingham Palace could have made her seem that way, demolishing her with acid briefings, leaking her expense accounts with rumours of unruliness and belittling of the good she did.

But Diana in the sky with diamonds has been untouchable for this last decade. At her memorial service they must have hoped it was the last time they will have to kneel before her memory. Requiem in pace (sic), they prayed and they may well have hoped the everlasting light would shine upon her a little less brightly from now on.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service