Diana, 10 years on: full coverage

Memorial services, unlike funerals, should be celebrations of a life.

Ten years after losing their mother while still barely teenagers, Prince William and Prince Harry are still struggling to have her remembered as they would like. Too many other people feel that they possess a part of her.

Ten years to the day after Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris underpass, her younger son, Prince Harry, joined a senior Anglican bishop in appealing for her memory to be left in peace.

A Perrier with the Princess

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

Multimedia

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BACKGROUND

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“She made us . . . happy,” he said at the memorial service at the Guards’ Chapel in Wellington Barracks, Central London.

“May this be the way that she is remembered.”

Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London and a close friend of the late Princess, underlined the Prince’s point succinctly. “Let it end here,” he told the congregation of 500, condemning those who used Diana’s memory for scoring points.

Prince Harry was 12 when his mother died, and Prince William 14. Yesterday it was the 22-year-old Prince with the reputation for riotous behaviour who delivered the most eloquent testimony to the late Princess of Wales. Reading from a script he had written himself, Prince Harry took to the lectern in front of more than 30 members of the Royal Family, a whole clutch of Spencers and 400 other guests from Gordon Brown and Sir Elton John downwards, to return a son’s verdict on his mother.

He seemed to teeter momentarily at the precipice of emotion when he said: “To lose a parent so suddenly at such a young age, as others have experienced, is indescribably shocking and sad. It was an event which changed our lives forever, as it must have done for everyone who lost someone that night.”

And then he cut to the chase. “But what is far more important to us now, and into the future, is that we remember our mother as she would have wished to be remembered, as she was: fun-loving, generous, down-to-earth, entirely genuine.”

With his father, the Prince of Wales, and his brother, Prince William, listening in the front row of the light, bright, modern chapel, Harry concluded: “Put simply, she made us and so many other people happy. May this be the way that she is remembered.”

Harry, the younger son, has always been the more willing of the two to talk about his late mother; William, perhaps feeling a greater weight of gravitas and responsibility on his shoulders, has been the more reticent.

A crowd of several thousand who had gathered to watch the royal arrivals and departures and heard the service over loudspeakers, broke into spontaneous applause. Earlier they had enjoyed the sight of Harry standing with his brother and father at the chapel door, patting his pockets like a nervous bridegroom to make sure that he had remembered his speech.

It was a curious echo of Diana’s funeral, yet quite the other side of the coin. When Earl Spencer delivered an attack on the Royal Family and the media in what was supposed to be eulogy for his sister in Westminster Abbey ten years ago, the crowd listening outside broke into a burst of applause that rolled through the Great West Door and all the way up the Abbey aisle, stopping just short of the Queen.

Yesterday Earl Spencer simply sat among his family with no part to play.

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