A quarter century has already passed since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. I was in bed, here in Gozo. The phone woke me. It was my mother asking whether I had heard the news about Princess Diana. And my knee-jerk response was “Oh, God! What has she done now?”
“A car crash,” said mum. “How bad?” I asked. “Oh,” said mum: “She’s dead.”
And my (unspoken) reaction – I am not proud of this – was of relief: no more Diana stories. Quite frankly, I was sick of them.
But in red-top newspapers like mine the economics were simple: put Di on the front and circulation sales increased by five per cent. If you have more than 10 million readers a day, that’s a lot of money.
But if you were a reporter as I was (or had been), it meant that good stories couldn’t get the show they deserved, because Diana trumped everything for the front.
Mum was ringing, I think, because she felt the loss personally – as, it transpired, did most of the population. She also knew (and would have told her friends) that I had met her a couple of times. Learning that I was his ‘editorial adviser’, Diana wanted to know “What’s Robert Maxwell really like?” There was never much more to the conversation than that.
Mum also knew that neither photographs nor newsreels managed to depict her true beauty, because I had told her so. She was, if it is possible to imagine, beyond beautiful; she had this presence, in that you knew when she had entered a room, even if you hadn’t seen her yet.
She was also clever and conniving. Every day (or so it seemed) she would ring our chief photographer, personally, and tell him her immediate plans. Sometimes it would be “a strictly private and personal visit… so if you are standing at the back door of the hospital, I’ll be coming out about 10.30”.
How did I know that?
Because on more than one occasion I was talking to him when the call came through.
Then readers would gawp at the pictures (at 36, she was the most photographed person in the history of the world), read the caption, and say: “Poor thing – she can’t even have a private visit without the photographers getting to her.”
Diana was beyond beautiful; she had this presence, in that you knew when she had entered a room, even if you hadn’t seen her yet- Revel Barker
On the day she died she told pressmen in the south of France that she was about to have some big news to impart. Then she affected surprise that there were so many waiting for her on that fateful night in Paris.
And, let’s get one thing straight, it wasn’t the paparazzi that caused her death. It really was not, as the conspiracy theorists were saying, within hours of her death, Prince Philip who had ordered an assassination (by the SAS, of course), nor MI5, who were offended by her not-so-discreet affairs, not even Mossad, appalled that she had an Egyptian boyfriend.
It was because her driver was drunk, and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. If you are driving a big Merc you don’t need to avoid photographers on motor scooters: let them do their worst, they will always come off second best.
What you don’t do, when chauffeuring a princess through a Parisian tunnel, is drive into a concrete wall.
The immediate result was a nation in mourning.
I was back in London that week as, it seemed, was most of the population, arriving by the trainload to deposit flowers and to be interviewed expressing their personal grief with real tears.
Like all good stories it eventually wore itself out (although I suspect that it kick-started the UK’s depression industry). Before Diana, the photo that readers had wanted to see had been of Joan Collins. After Diana, the pictures that had the same effect were of Posh Spice.
What does that tell you about newspaper readers? Fickle… or what?
Revel Barker is a former Fleet Street reporter and a long-term resident of Gozo.