How Princess Diana shaped politics – The Economist

NETFLIX’S FLAGSHIP series, “The Crown”, has done a fine job of telling the story of post-war Britain through the prism of the monarchy. The previous series left viewers in the mid-1970s, mired in the miners’ strike and the three-day week. The new one, which begins streaming on November 15th, introduces us to two women who were destined to change the country in profound ways—Margaret Thatcher and Lady Diana Spencer.

Lady Thatcher made it clear from the first that she was in the business of changing the nation. Lady Diana Spencer was a bird of a very different feather—a shy girl who had failed all her O-levels twice and had no interest in politics. She was brought onto the national stage for the sole purpose of producing (male) heirs to the throne. Yet the country is still living with her political legacy as surely as it is with Lady Thatcher’s.

Princess Diana’s genius was to mix two of the most profound forces of modern politics—emotion and anti-elitism—into a powerful populist cocktail. She was one of the modern masters of the politics of emotion, feeling the people’s pain just as they felt hers. She repeatedly outmanoeuvred Prince Charles during the long “War of the Waleses” because she was willing to bare her soul in public. Her interview with Martin Bashir of the BBC in November 1995 is now the focus of controversy, as her brother, Earl Spencer, claims that it was obtained under false pretences, using forged documents. Whatever the reason for giving it, the interview was a masterclass in emotional manipulation. At one pivotal moment Princess Diana acknowledged that she would never be queen but hoped that she would be “queen of people’s hearts”.

The princess used her mastery of the politics of feeling to turn herself into a champion of the people against the powerful—the “people’s princess” in Tony Blair’s phrase. She patronised charities that helped marginalised folk such as HIV patients, and kept company with pop stars and celebrities rather than with the usual royal waxworks. The most memorable music at her funeral was not an historic hymn but a song by Elton John, adapted for her but originally written about another icon-turned-victim, Marilyn Monroe.

Her anti-elitism was directed not at the monarchy’s wealth—she happily lived in Kensington Palace and received a £17m ($23m) divorce settlement plus £400,000 a year—but at its stunted emotional state. The traditional deal to which royals signed up allowed them to behave as they liked in private—kings have almost always had mistresses because they marry for reasons of dynasty not compatibility—so long as they behaved with decorum in public. Princess Diana regarded this as humbug.

She succeeded in reconciling the most jarring of opposites. Despite being a top-tier aristocrat (her family, the Spencers, looked down on the Windsors as German carpetbaggers) she was universally known as “Di”. Her death in a car crash won her a spectacular posthumous victory against the royal court. It produced the greatest outburst of public lacrymation Britain has ever seen and led to widespread demands that the royals should display more emotion, as if the damp cheek had replaced the stiff upper lip as the definition of Britishness. “What would really do the monarchy good, and show that they had grasped the lesson of Diana’s popularity,” an editorial in the Independent thundered, “would be for the Queen and the Prince of Wales to break down, cry and hug one another on the steps of the Abbey this Saturday.”

Since her death, her emotional populism has threaded through politics. Tony Blair presented himself as the people’s prime minister. He championed “Cool Britannia”, surrounded himself with pop stars and urged his staff to “call me Tony”. The next Conservative prime minister, “Call me Dave” Cameron—a distant relation of Princess Diana’s—adopted this combination of compassion-signalling (hugging hoodies instead of cracking down on juvenile delinquents) and studied informality (chillaxing and kitchen suppers replacing previous Tory premiers’ stiffness).

Both men were too responsible to let emotional populism interfere with the affairs of state. Domestic and foreign policy choices continued to be conducted according to the icy dictates of reason and evidence. Brexiteers, by contrast, followed the Diana-script. They appealed to the heart rather than the head; to win their arguments they used feelings of patriotism and resentment rather than facts about trade flows. They denounced the elites for trying to frustrate the wisdom of the people in much the same way as Dianaphiles had denounced the Palace for ignoring the people’s emotions. They turned on the nation’s core institutions—Parliament, the civil service, the Supreme Court—when they suspected attempts to frustrate their wishes. They succeeded in defeating the establishment in much the same way as Princess Diana had, by claiming to stand for emotion rather than reason and the people rather than the elite. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has reconciled the opposites he embodies just as she did. A card-carrying member of the metropolitan elite, he has managed to sell himself as a man of the people. As she was Di, so he is Boris.

The first series of “The Crown” shows a young Queen Elizabeth studying Walter Bagehot’s “The English Constitution” under the guidance of Sir Henry Marten, the vice-provost of Eton, who kept a pet raven in a cage and addressed the young princess as “gentlemen”. Bagehot’s great work distinguishes between the dignified branch of the constitution (the monarchy) and the efficient branch (elected politicians). Implicit in that distinction is Bagehot’s perception that emotions pose a dangerous threat to the proper conduct of politics. The monarchy provides a controlled outlet for them, thus enabling responsible people to get on with the difficult task of running the country.

By using people’s feelings as the fuel for her astonishing career, Princess Diana broke that safety valve. Britain will be living with the consequences of the emotional populism that she helped to release for years to come. ■

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “A populist in the palace”

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