Charlotte woke me unexpectedly, at 7am, on August 31, 1997. “Rosemary, I think you ought to know that Diana has died.” “Best thing that could have happened to the Royal Family,” I muttered sleepily. “What happened?” “An accident in the Pont d’Alma tunnel.” “Thank heaven I’m not in the office.” Then I began to wake up. “Oh my God, I’m in Paris. If the phone rings, I’ve gone for a long walk.” And I did. And the phone in the apartment rang, and I wasn’t there, wasn’t reachable. Mobile phones were not as standard then as they are now.

Never before or since have I gone AWOL when I knew The Times would need me. I simply couldn’t face it and I am still, ten years on, thinking about why that was. That day would have been my intensely loved husband’s 70th birthday. He had died of cancer less than five months earlier. I had gone to Paris, in so many ways our spiritual home, to be with our closest and oldest friends on that day. Death was very close, grieving was raw. I could not mourn for my father, whose reception of the news of my husband’s death had been a triumphant “Ha!” (I don’t blame him for that, at 95 every proof that you’ve outlived ’em can become a strange cause of satisfaction), but I’d had to sit with him through his unquiet atheistic death only four weeks after Bill’s involuntary departure and discovered, awful though it looks as I write these words, that there was no space left for him in my broken heart. By August, I was just beginning to learn how to protect myself; in that wry and ironic line of T. S. Eliot’s, which now had a new meaning, to “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”. Mourning is a terrible, quiet, intimate thing.

So I was utterly unprepared, unutterably shocked, when I opened The Times the next morning and saw that the entire paper was devoted to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Shocked, and curmudgeonly, and, distinctly prematurely, the “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” caricature we journalists have of a certain kind of elderly, mustachioed Daily Telegraph letter writer.

I could see, of course, that the special edition had been well, even brilliantly, done. But all I could mutter was that a lot less fuss had been made of Churchill’s death, and what had she done for the nation? Hug an Aids sufferer, a landmine victim, OK; but it was always to camera, always about her. I remember her attending open heart surgery on a tiny black baby, performed by Magdi Yacoub. In the operating theatre, there she was, wonderful eyes fixed on the press cameras. Fully made-up, loads of mascara above the surgical mask. Mascara in an operating theatre is an absolute nono: loaded with germs. She could have killed that child.

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

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• Diana - 10 years on

It got worse. The crowds, the (to me) hysteria, the insane indignation about the Queen being in Balmoral – what greater priority, I thought, could a grandmother have than being with her young grandchildren and shielding them from public view – the media-inspired national debate about whether the Union flag over Buckingham Palace should have been flying at half-mast. The soggy plastic and paper-wrapped bouquets. The rest of Britain thought this a “wonderful outpouring of affection”. Blair seized the limelight with that ghastly – and effective – effusion about the “People’s Princess”. I thought of Noël Coward’s spoof on Vera Lynn in the drab days of the immediate postwar: “So we’ll untense the muscles till they sag, sag, sag . . .” This was not my country. How could people put on so, the public traps of mourning for someone who had used royalty as a prop to lend glamour to a sad, self-obsessed, manipulative and, ultimately, self-indulgent life? How could they join in this, to me, ersatz, phoney, lemming-like outpouring of emotion? I still tremble at the possibility of Posh getting a state funeral.

The Princess’s was sickening. The Queen sitting through that harangue by Earl Spencer, a man who had done nothing for anyone in his livelong life and who was soon to be charging tourists top gun for a peek at the Princess’s mausoleum, to the congregation about the royal maltreatment of a sister in whose life he had not, apparently, greatly figured. The maudlin Elton John singing, no doubt sincerely, that ghastly English Rose stuff. The clapping, for heaven’s sake, more LA than Westminster Abbey. Several days later, I went to lunch with friends who live near Kensington Palace. The nearby Tube station was still closed. I walked back to Knightsbridge, reading the messages on those by then less than fragrant bouquets. Thousands of them. The next day I talked about them to Peter Stothard, then our Editor. “What did they say to you?” he asked. “One thing,” I said. “The nation cannot spell.” True. Angel was Angle, Heaven was Hevven and Love, more forgivably, was Luv.

Ten years on, I still think that her death was the best thing that could have happened to the Royal Family. Alive, divorced, capricious and still, no question, seductively beautiful, with the media wrapped around her finger, she was a thoroughly modern Morgan le Fay, a sweet poison in the nation’s sap. But I think I understand – and respect – the outpouring a little better now that I can mark the distinctions and see that private agony had dulled my understanding of the mood. I no longer think it was all about her tabloid stardom. I now see, I think, how national dramas can release us from the individualism of our quotidian lives and bring us momentarily together as a community. It was because she was young and beautiful and died suddenly, yes. But it was also because she was Diana, Princess of Wales.

It was said then that the monarchy rocked on its throne. Maybe what it really told us was that, as a nation, we are still monarchists at heart, monarchists because we need symbols to shape our sense of selfhood and nationhood. Even if they have the madness of King George. Even if their beauty secret is bulimia.

Time to tackle the great pall of China

The efforts by Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to get China to sign up to binding targets on global emissions predictably met with a brush-off in Beijing this week. Wen Jiabao, China’s Prime Minister, reminded her that the West had been building up trouble for 200 years, and the Chinese for only 30. In other words, cut the cackle. He softened the blow by adding that the Chinese want “blue skies, green hills and clear water” as much as the rest of us.

Indeed they do. Air and water pollution kill 500,000 Chinese a year, according to the World Bank – a statistic that the party officials tried in vain to get excised in a recent bank report. Public disgust with the great pall of China is spilling over into what China’s masters call “mass incidents”, with nearly 1,000 demonstrations a week being logged by environmental activists.

The economic cost of China’s fast-deteriorating environment has been put as high as 10 per cent of national output. All this has Beijing worried. Zhou Shengxian, China’s top environmental official, is trying to bully local governments and factories into behaving, accusing them of turning more than a quarter of China’s seven main river systems into “sticky glue”. They are too busy getting rich to listen. Forget about climate change tomorrow: most Chinese would settle for less filth in the here and now.

A loss of royal Saxe appeal

Back to the royals. A friend tells me that when, at the height of World War I, George V decided it would be a tactful gesture to change the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the Royal House of Windsor, his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II remarked: “I suppose Shakespeare’s play will now be known as The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg.”

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