Adventures in Correspondentland by Nick Bryant Read Free Book Online Page A

office on Friday night without a mobile phone. However, although the news from the Philippines had beenhanded to our correspondent under embargo, it was inevitable that someone would soon break it.
    Sky News, often the nippy speedboat up against our hulking carrier fleet, was already reporting rumours that Diana was dead. Not only were there now competitive pressures to weigh but also a moral dilemma. The BBC was wilfully reporting something that we knew to be untrue: that Diana was alive.
    This point was made most forcefully by our distinguished royal correspondent, Paul Reynolds, who found himself fighting a behind-the-scenes battle in between long stints live on air. The author of one of the most searing lines of that troubled decade for the British royals, ‘the knives are out for Fergie at the Palace’, Paul was simply too honourable a journalist to continue with this charade. Finally, the Press Association broke the embargo and announced at 4.44 am on Sunday 31 August that Diana had died. Eventually, we followed suit and marked Diana’s passing, as the guidelines decreed, with the playing of ‘God Save the Queen’ – a gesture that would seem ridiculously incongruous by the middle of the following week.
    Like many of my compatriots, I had gone to bed thinking that Diana was still alive and awoke to the jolting news of her death. Unlike many of my compatriots and colleagues, I failed completely to grasp its magnitude, and I compounded this lapse by not even bothering to rush back to London. Returning much later along the motorway, again with little haste, we listened to the stream of interviews with Aids patients, landmine specialists and the homeless, which did so much in those early hours to produce the instant revisionism on Diana’s contribution to national life. Still, it was only when we reached Kensington and saw for ourselves the police outriders blocking the traffic so that the black hearsecarrying her coffin could continue unimpeded that its impact started to more fully register. Even then, however, there was little hint of the unreality about to unfold.
    Arriving home, I retrieved from the wardrobe my most sombre dark suit and headed immediately for Buckingham Palace. Mourners had already made a start on one of the many carpets of flowers that would appear at the royal hubs of grieving. As I watched them descend on the palace late into the night, I remember thinking that the first waves were made up of the types of people you would have expected to make the journey: Elizabethans and arch-monarchists – the sort who would line The Mall for the trooping of the colour and purchase small Royal Doulton tea sets to mark the great regal jubilees – and a sprinkling of American tourists, who found themselves eavesdropping on Britain’s day of mourning.
    As the vigil went on, however, and journalists were confronted by this great ‘outpouring of grief’, to redeploy the overworked phrase of the week, the character of the crowd changed. Multi-generational, multi-faith and fabulously multi-ethnic, this polyglot patchwork of people looked much more like modern Britain. It helped explain why emotional gears that had been hitherto held in check were raced through so very quickly. More than that, it reminded us that those dog-eared national stereotypes were woefully out of date.
    For me, two encounters with members of the public linger still in the mind. One afternoon in the middle of that week, as I was driven the short distance from Buckingham Palace to Kensington Palace in the back of a black cab, the taxi driver started telling me about the death of his own mother, a bereavement that had been dragged back to the forefront of his mind. By the time we reached the Royal Albert Hall, he was in tears. A few hundred metreslater, as he set me down opposite the flower-bedecked gates, he could hardly read the meter.
    Odder still was a conversation with a local parish vicar in north