26 years since the death of Prince Diana. The People’s Princess & the British tradition of anti-monarchism.
It’s the twenty-sixth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana on 31st August. Anyone much under 40 will know of the event through reading recent history and media coverage is much lower key than the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2022. This may also reflect the continuing disquiet over the role of a number of senior Royals.
At the time Diana was dubbed the ‘People’s Princess’. Alastair Campbell is in his diary for the period attributes the phrase directly to Blair himself. Certainly the newly elected Labour Government made much of the changing times.
Tony Benn’s diary for the period makes interesting reading. He noted on 31st August that he had refused interview requests because ‘there is nothing whatsoever to be said’. The following day he notes that the Guardian had 14 pages on Diana’s death.
However a few days later he noted the mood had changed as the Royal Family were seen to be reluctant to mark the death of Diana. He wrote on 4th September ‘People are angry with the Royal Family. Blair is trying to cash in on it..’ After the funeral he wrote ‘Tony Blair has come out of it very well because he is supposed to have told the Palace how to handle it’.
There were other views on the left, and indeed beyond. W H Smith refused to carry the Diana edition of Private Eye, far from a publication of the left, but very much anti-monarchist.
There is a sense however in which England was the original world leader in anti-Royalist sentiment. On 30th January 1649 King Charles 1st lost his head and a period of Parliamentary Government, the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell was established.
Official British society still struggles to come to terms with his period, as can easily be seen by a visit to the churches which Parliamentary forces visited, which often contain little or no reference to the period.
The monarchy was restored in 1660 but the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688 laid the basis for the system still in place today, a constitutional monarchy, where the King or Queen has a role but policy is determined not by ‘God’ via the monarch but by Parliament. At least officially
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