As summer drizzled to its close, we cleared the shed. Uncrowded rural life presents a two-edged privilege: for indecisive hoarders, outhouses and attics become space-wasting oubliettes. A terrible silt builds up, poignant or funny or plain baffling. And in the final mouse-gnawed box I found, incredulous, a bundle of newspapers from 1997. I must have felt the hand of history on my shoulder or something. There were May front pages blaring “New Kids on the block” and “A new world dawns” as the Blair family posed outside No 10. And there was a full set of UK newspapers from the week Diana died.

Well, the Blair Triumph went straight into the 2007 skip, with that familiar sense of queasy disappointment. The Diana ones I brought indoors, earwigs and all. In the week of the memorial service it seemed fitting to remember that extraordinary time, and try to judge how much was real sympathy and how much a horrid confection of sentiment and malice.

I remember seeing the real sadness on the first morning, on holiday in Oban: as yet unprompted by media mawkishness, two big lads from the Cal-Mac ferries were knuckling tears from their eyes in the newsagent’s. That was honest and discreet empathy, comparable to the shared bleakness after a bomb attack or a Dunblane. We felt it too: Diana’s children were the same age as mine, and my son and his friend formally told me that if I wrote anything it should be that the princes must be left alone “and not even have people guessing about their feelings”. So I did.

But, leafing through the yellowing newspapers, the rest of that ghastly week sprang back more vivid than in any television retrospective or conspiracy theory. What became clear is how horribly inhumane were the media. Not towards the princess –– she got headlines like BORN A LADY, DIED A SAINT –– and not towards the crowds in the street. The nastiness was deployed towards her family, even including the princes, whose feelings were certainly not left private.

A Perrier with the Princess

Peter Stothard, former Editor of The Times, recalls a discussion with Diana about memos, mistresses and the media

Multimedia

• Interview on the latest revealing Diana biography

BACKGROUND

• Prince comes home with 'the People's Princess'

• The explosion of vileness that followed her death

• Why I could not mourn Diana

Related Internet Links

• Diana - 10 years on

From broadsheet pontifications that “William will be undergoing the first stage of the grief response” to tabloid mews of “Harry’s tears”, they were pegged out for mawks to enjoy weeping over. Little boys whose mother has died violently do not need long lenses poked at them on their way to church the same morning. The princess suffered nonsense writing –– varying from “Diana the martyr . . . she who died for our sins” to “Diana the destroyer, greatest force for republicanism since Oliver Cromwell”. But at least she was beyond harm.

The real cruelty was reserved for the family in shocked privacy at Balmoral. It got nasty by day three. “Show us you care!”, “Mourners call for Queen to share our grief”, “Not one tear has been shed from the royal eye” (how did the writer know?), “Charles weeps bitter tears of guilt” (ditto). There were strident demands –– “Your people are suffering, speak to us Ma’am!” and “Your not-so-loyal subjects are now demanding that their wishes be taken into account”. Even the haughty Independent leader said: “What would really do the monarchy good . . . would be for the Queen and the Prince of Wales to break down, cry, and hug one another on the steps of the abbey. That such an event is unthinkable showed how great is the gap between the people mourning ‘their’ princess and the Royal Family.”

It was bullying, and it did not originate on the streets: an acute piece by Thomas Sutcliffe noted that the vox-pops were eerily repeating phrases from the previous day’s papers and television. Left alone, I suspect the common sense of the street mourners would have told them that everybody must grieve in their own time. The media, however, encouraged by the Prime Minister and his jackal, exulted in putting pressure on the Windsors and winning: “The Queen bows to her subjects”; “Finally the royal family have done the decent thing”.

It was horrible. Horrible because, whatever their complex feelings about Diana, the experience of the Balmoral party was real. This was the mother of two loved grandchildren, the wife for a decade of a troubled son. Real grief, real shock, is nothing like the vicarious sort. It is disorientating, hollow, private; it contains strange pockets of numbness, even of hope. The bereaved need to be private or among close friends, if only because their behaviour may be counterintuitive: they may even laugh at ironies or incongruities (ask any undertaker). They do not need to be put on display, looking stricken for the benefit of onlookers. Not until the funeral, at least. Anyone should know that.

And somehow we didn’t. What happened that week was a form of mob violence, a magnified warping of sentiments that started out as genuine and kindly. It was done for pleasure: the pleasure of taunting the Windsors, and a sicklier pleasure too. Sutcliffe, again, put his finger on it: “What I felt was not the tedious, wrenching misery that those who had a real intimacy with her will feel. It was something sweeter and, oddly, more cherishable . . . How many people became connoisseurs of their own sorrow?”

I threw the papers into the skip. As a media worker I suppose I must share the guilt, although I think the worst thing I personally did was to fall for the appalling Earl Spencer’s line at the funeral.

But why dwell on this ten years on? Well, first, because a comforting lie has grown up that the media somehow “read” the public mood and “helped” the Windsors to mend their ways. Secondly, because this greedy, judgmental grief-fascism endures in media attitudes to other shocked families –– the McCanns, the Bulgers, even Rhys Jones’s parents.

We think we have shareholders’ rights in their sorrow, because we watch it. We don’t.

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