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

London on the morning of Diana’s funeral. I asked him to sum up the mood of his parishioners, which I thought was a fairly perfunctory line of questioning, but it unleashed a stream of comic-strip tears. Nothing more aptly illustrated the weirdness of that week than to have a 60-something parish priest crying on the shoulder of a 20-something journalist.
    By now, of course, Diana had been appropriated by the masses, who had taken their cue from the British prime minister, Tony Blair. Casting himself as the country’s grief counsellor, he had described her – touchingly, haltingly and with great theatricality – as ‘The People’s Princess’.
    Whereas Blair grasped immediately the public mood and started to tap the well of hyper-emotion, the royal family followed so far behind that they appeared to inhabit not so much a parallel universe as an entirely different epoch. That morning, when the queen, Prince Charles and the royal princes gathered for morning service at Crathie Kirk parish church near Balmoral, Diana’s name was not even mentioned, and the tragedy was dealt with in an oblique reference during one of the prayers. Then there was the cold grammar of the Court Circular, which dealt matter-of-factly with her death: ‘… the royal family learnt this morning with great sadness of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Divine service was later held …’
    At the start of the week, there was a fierce backlash against the press, the supposed accomplices of the Paris paparazzi. By Wednesday, however, the anger had been redirected towards the royal family. Britons remained sufficiently deferential to put upwith the social exclusivity of the monarchy but not its emotional aloofness. Scapegoated to begin with, the tabloids could hardly believe their luck and now started to harness the mood of rebelliousness against the monarchy.
    â€˜Where Is the Queen When the Country Needs Her?’ asked The Sun . ‘Why Can’t the Royal Family Show its Grief?’ blasted the Daily Mail . ‘Your People Are Suffering. Speak to Us Ma’am,’ screamed the Daily Mirror . Speak to us she did. Breaking with the usual rules of British deference, a monarch bowed before public opinion – even going so far as to deliver her live speech to the nation in a room overlooking the Victoria Memorial, so that she could co-opt the mourners as her backdrop.
    The next morning, the BBC launched a massive outside broadcast, which brought together on the wireless its two main networks, the venerable Radio Four and its adolescent upstart Radio Five Live, the news and sports channel. One offered the traditional voice of measured authority; the other was edgy, estuarial and classless. With the joint broadcast bringing together the stars from both networks, veteran presenters from Radio Four’s flagship news program suddenly found themselves rostered alongside sports correspondents who normally commentated on the football or cricket. The results were inadvertently hilarious.
    As the funeral cortège made its way down Whitehall, one of Radio Four’s most plummy presenters handed the commentary baton over to one of the football correspondents, who felt compelled to quote from another Diana. Should we not remember the words of the American songstress Diana Ross, he suggested, before quoting the first two lines of ‘Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hand)’. Then, presumably hoping to make the world an even better place, he reprised it again.
    As he, in turn, handed over to another pukka presenter, listeners must have thought the BBC was suffering some terrible identity crisis. But it perfectly captured the confused national mood, where populist and emotive forms of expression had crowded out more traditional ideas about decorum and self-control. A nostalgic imperial culture was vying with a celebrity culture and even a football culture, that other great outlet for mass