She failed her O levels and in the same period began to suffer from bulimia, but she also began a series of meetings and encounters that began to suggest what a royal marriage might entail. The ears and eyes of the public grew larger. The queen herself played no part in guiding or advising the young couple, although by Diana’s own account, the publicly unresponsive Prince Philip did. It seems that destiny or, in this instance, fate, was to make its own progress.
The narrative of the next few years has been retold a thousand times. ‘The pack’ were at her heels, chasing every move she made. In a mood of deep despondency, she told her sisters that marriage would not be possible. ‘Bad luck,’ they said. ‘Your face is on the tea towels.’ It was on the mugs too, with ‘my prince’, as she called him, supporting Diana with one arm, and her head cocked at an angle. Her reception within the palace elicited feelings of anxiety and betrayal, while her loneliness was compounded by disappointment. It has been said that while a man fears a woman’s future, a woman fears a man’s past; and so it proved in this instance. Another love still held sway over the prince. There were confidential interviews with ‘friends’, and books, authorized or unauthorized. ‘I never thought it would end up like this,’ she told one friend. ‘How could I have got it all so wrong?’ Their separation was announced in the early months of 1996, and their divorce soon after.
An impulsive and unselfconscious person, Diana rarely calculated the effects of her actions on others, but nothing could have averted the final disaster. She was in Paris with her companion, Dodi Fayed, when they entered the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel and their speeding car crashed. At four in the morning of 31 August 1997, she was declared dead. The press took a morsel every hour, as if watching the collapse of a stock market. At one point, Diana was struggling, at another she was said to be recovering. The nation awoke to news of her death.
Her death released a torrent of tears. These were shed for her smile, for her work with the victims of AIDS and of landmines, for her status as a free spirit and wronged wife. And inevitably she was mourned in mythic terms, as fearless martyr and sacrificial lamb. The shock of her demise in Paris was compounded by the fact that her two young sons were still in England; her former husband hardly seemed to enter the nation’s sorrow. Her relative youth was one cause of dismay, but it was her sudden and brutal absence that provoked the greater mourning. Something seemed to have torn out the heart of Britain, recognized even in the overwhelming wave of grief that dominated the days after her death.
It soon seemed as if England had become moist in mind as well as in soul; some universities began to include ‘Diana studies’ on their curriculum. When the singer Elton John adapted his song ‘Candle in the Wind’ to celebrate Diana, the nation bought the record by the million. So promiscuous an outpouring of grief inevitably provoked satire. A cartoon in Private Eye showed a frightened householder being menaced by two men in dark glasses with the reproach ‘We have reason to believe you haven’t bought “Candle in the Wind”.’
It was Blair who coined the expression ‘the people’s princess’; it may be that he saw himself in the role of ‘people’s prince’. But for all the later calumnies, New Labour was not a one-man show. At the apex of the new government stood a triumvirate of equals. Blair brought his charm and Brown his brain and his industry, while Peter Mandelson offered his skills as a strategist. He became known as ‘the Prince of Darkness’, but the jibe was as frivolous as it was unjust. Like many in the new government, he had abandoned the strict socialism of his youth only with intense misgivings. Mediating the ‘message’, as it became known, was Alastair Campbell, Blair’s press officer. He had been editor of the Daily Mirror, and the knowledge accrued there served him and the government well. Under his auspices, ministerial pronouncements became subject to strict censorship; to be ‘on message’ was all.
Having clawed at its cage for eighteen years, Labour bounded out with teeth bared. If the economy seemed serviceable, little else did. Haste was needed. Under Gordon Brown, the Bank of England was permitted to set its own exchange rates, a concession that effectively granted it independence. It was a move widely praised, even in the Tory press. The government also sought to discard the image of Labour as the party of the cloth cap, backward-looking and aggressively masculine, by bringing 101 female MPs into parliament. The jibe of ‘Blair’s babes’ soon acquired currency, though the term was swiftly dropped. Its mocking successor, ‘Tony’s Cronies’, would take longer to exorcise.
For Blair, Europe represented a wound that would turn septic if not addressed. Major had opted out of the Social Chapter. Blair accordingly opted in, accepting the Maastricht Treaty in all its fullness. Signs of future conflict were nevertheless apparent when, after a particularly difficult set of discussions, the normally ebullient prime minister offered the bleak observation ‘We can’t do business like this.’ With such an imposing majority, Blair could perhaps afford some latitude in respect of parliamentary procedure. In a move widely seen as presidential, he reduced the amount of time allowed for Prime Minister’s Questions. There was, he assured everyone, too much to be done.
Devolution for Scotland and Wales had long been on the new movement’s agenda. ‘Central knows best’ had been the damning slogan ascribed to the Tory administrations of the past decade; such an impression of arrogance must be avoided at all costs. Therefore, and in another break from the party’s roots, unity would now encompass diversity. In 1997 the government announced referenda on the question of devolution. The Scots had been chafing for some such concession for years, while the Welsh, having spent the best part of two millennia in a struggle with the English, were more blasé. Scotland was given back its parliament, and Wales was offered an assembly.
These were the halcyon days for the government. Even airy talk of a political ‘third way’, under which New Labour would inaugurate an era of apolitical politics and harness capitalism to serve the common good, found eager listeners. The twin extremes of trade union hegemony and unfettered monetarism were alike disposable. ‘Socialism’, as Blair put it, was the new watchword. There was nothing original to this initiative, but it proved a useful soundbite.
In the spring of 1998, the spirit of devolution took a new turn. It was determined that a new London Assembly should be set up, at once a nod to the former Greater London Council and a rebuff to its connotations. Ken Livingstone was not deterred by the fact that his name lay at the root of those connotations. After much internal wrangling, he was expelled from the Labour party for running against Frank Dobson, the official Labour candidate for Mayor of London. Blair had warned against Livingstone, saying: ‘I can’t think of Ken Livingstone without thinking of Labour’s wilderness years … I think he would be a disaster for London.’ Livingstone went on to prove that the New Labour consensus was not universally shared. Speaking as the newly elected Mayor of London, he began, ‘As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted sixteen years ago …’
Blair’s government developed a taste for what came to be known as ‘humanitarian intervention’, one of the more revealing euphemisms of the period. Robin Cook, the foreign secretary, had spoken of Labour conducting ‘an ethical foreign policy’, but how could such a policy be maintained? There can be little doubt that some of the causes selected were deserving. Under Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia had already made itself a pariah during the Bosnian civil war. Its subsequent repression of the largely Albanian province of Kosovo led in 1999 to a bombing campaign sponsored by Britain. This had the effect of forcing a Serbian withdrawal but also of imbuing the Serbs with something like the spirit of the Blitz. In Belgrade, posters were unveiled that alluded to this irony. ‘We’re following your example’ was their message.