The trouble is that I suddenly don't want to be part of journalism any more.
Ruin and unemployment loom. It is my own fault, I suppose, for consuming too
many media, but how else is a provincial to keep up? Now, though, the weight
of it has toppled over and crushed the spirit.
For if Diana, Princess of Wales, was a candle in the wind, we media are the
wind-machine. Our racket smothers the central sad simplicity of what
happened. We are saccharine, self-regarding, neurotic and competitive; we
waver between sentimentality, misplaced outbreaks of cleverness and dreadful
plonking comments about The Culture and The People.
An agony aunt turns up in a tabloid castigating the idea of the Princes
walking behind the coffin; once they have done so - with a dignity they will
be glad of all their lives - the same writer pops up in a broadsheet to
condemn tabloids which tell the Royal Family what to do. Another, who
sneered incessantly at Diana in life, justifies a sugary volte-face by
prosing on about the nature of myth. The vaunted mood of national unity is
marred by class hostility as the pop papers wilfully misunderstand the
usefulness to "toffs" of a dark suit and a stiff upper lip, while the
broadsheets wonder superciliously why the common people leave the Cellophane
on their bouquets. (Easy. Cellophane and ribbons mean "look, I didn't nick
these from the park, I paid good money for them, to prove I care".)
Then the political writers break cover, with a graceless rant from an
archetypal Tory boy in The Sunday Telegraph accusing Labour spin-doctors of
somehow stealing Diana. Print sneers at television while watching every
frame, television steals newspaper angles while sneering back. Talk Radio
asks listeners to nominate an actress to play "Di" in the biopic. Only Radio
4, an oasis of phlegm, decides that what the national psyche requires is a
repeat of The Winslow Boy and Penelope Keith reading Winnie the Pooh.
All other news is drowned by the roaring of the wind-machine: even yesterday,
plucky little souls attempting to interest us in Scottish devolution
struggled like mountaineers trying to pitch a pup tent in a hurricane. Only
the irreplaceable Terry Wogan struck a bearable note on Radio 2. "Ah now,
I'm like the rest of you, I want to keep on moping but we mustn't, must we?"
I hoped not to be part of this. The weekend mostly passed in what felt like a
reasonably appropriate contemplative quiet, talking with my children, sewing
and sorting and marking things for the new school term. Life far from cities
and cathedrals was normal, if quiet and tinged with the universal sadness.
The queue stretched a little way outside Saxmundham Market Hall to sign the
book of condolence, everybody shut their shops and friends talked quietly
about the senseless sadness of it all, and how it brought to mind past
losses of their own. I would rather have left it there, something never to
be forgotten but not to be harped on. However, with apologies, I am going to
add my one last word. I want to defend Earl Spencer, all the way.
Some of the phrases used about his funeral eulogy have been extraordinary:
"calculated vengeance", "brutality" and "opening wounds". He was bitter,
they said, "intemperate...divisive...ill-judged". Irrelevant, too: just an
"expatriate uncle" from a "dysfunctional family" which could offer little to
his nephews.
Puzzled, I went to the tape and watched the Earl's speech again, just as we
had watched it on Saturday, sewing name-tapes into school socks through a
mist of tears. Had I missed something? Something to justify "brutal, bitter,
divisive?" No. All I could hear was a brother.
It is, these days, a largely unsung relationship; but several women said to me
that last week they wished for the first time ever that they had a brother
of their own. Even those with sisters said it. There is powerful, ancient
comfort to be felt at the idea of a man - without the possessiveness of a
husband or the authority of a father - defending and praising a woman
strongly but without illusions: giving a tribute better than admiration,
glowing with utter familiarity but untainted by the weariness and guilt of
daily contact. I have three brothers and to me Lord Spencer sounded just
right. Analysts may pretend that his words were political or iconoclastic:
instinct accepts them as brotherly and brave.
What did he speak, but the plain truth? It is true that Diana's qualities did
not depend on royal title alone. Cynics predicted that the fascination with
her would diminish when she lost a part of that title, but it did not. She
shone even brighter alone, more fascinating to worshippers and more
comforting to those whose sadness she tried to alleviate. Why should her
brother not say so? It is a fact: strange, but true.
And he did not, after all, gloss over other facts, such as her emotional
vulnerability and her eating disorder. Stripped bare by grief, rejecting
cliche and platitude, he spoke of his sister with the frank ness which is a
brother's privilege. We should be grateful to him. After a week of mawkish
illusion in which every one of us constructed our own phantom Diana, Lord
Spencer spoke of the real one. He affirmed the reality of the girl who kept
her small brother amused on the long, gloomy train journeys between
estranged parents, of the sister with a wicked laugh, of the chronically
(perhaps sometimes annoyingly) insecure woman who yearned for love. No girl
is a heroine to her brother, but there is great security in the fond,
exasperated kinship of somebody who harbours no romantic ideas about you.
Nor was it disrespectful to promise his nephews that the "blood family" of
their mother would always be with them as a counterweight to royal life. The
boys are Spencers, too. Their uncle spoke for half their lineage and half
their temperament. As he did so there was a fleeting shadow of old Earl
Spencer, who had his failings but whose cheerful disregard for strict
dignity once charmed onlookers on Diana's engagement day. Remember him,
beaming at the Palace gates with his battered camera to take his own snaps?
Why is it irreverent that with Diana dead, her brother should pledge himself
to encourage her boys in her warm, instinctive style?
Every child has a right to its emotional inheritance from two families. The
earl explicitly acknowledged their Windsor heritage of duty and tradition,
but firmly laid claim to his own side. His sister wanted them to have wide
experience of people, to talk informally, to trust their feelings and let
their souls "sing openly". If her siblings can further that aim, it is their
duty: which of us - however much we like them - wants our children brought
up entirely in our in-laws' ways and values?
In the same way, the earl intervened to take Diana's body to safety on the
lake island, defying those who wanted constant public access to her grave.
That too was a brotherly act: the alternative posed horrible risks. The
parallel, pace Simon Jenkins, is not with Churchill's grave but with that of
Sylvia Plath, which to this day is still regularly claimed and ideologically
defaced by those who think they revere her, but never knew her and care
nothing for her living children.
All week we have been told that Britain is sloughing off the carapace of old
formalities for an attitude more respectful of individuals, less like an
army and more like a family (heck, even the army has just promised to be
more sensitive to recruits). It is a very British irony that a belted earl,
who heads a family in archaic precedence over his elder sisters, should be
the figurehead of this change. But on Saturday, it seemed to me, the young
Lord Spencer stood precisely where the nation stands: between tradition and
modernity, the idea of "great families" and the acknowledgement of plain
family feeling.
He is not a diplomat, but he is her brother and he did a brother's duty. There
is no need to look for a spark of hostility, still less to fan it with our
wind-machines. The Prince of Wales is a just and gentle man. He will respect
the earl's claim. And if any royal courtiers dispute it, they have only to
remember how the applause filled the parks and the streets and spread, in a
shocking, liberating moment, right into the gloomy heart of the abbey. It
was not for the gentle hagiography of Elton John that the congregation
inside the building broke protocol and silence. It was for the authentic,
irrefutable, unsentimental claims of a brother, and of blood.
