Diana’s gone, and the Press be damned
By Roy Greenslade

IT was an ordinary sort of Monday for London’s Daily Mail newspaper on July 27: a news story about teachers being allowed to deal with unruly pupils, a polemic on the eve of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s reshuffle and some fluff about the Spice Girls achieving their seventh number one hit. But eclipsing them all, across the top of the front page, was a blurb announcing: "Free Diana Fashion Video For Every Reader" next to a mandatory picture of a smiling, designer-dressed Princess.

To discover how we could obtain this "exclusive 51-minute video" which gives a unique insight into Diana’s development, revealing how she used her clothes to express her personalities, we turned to page 43 to cut out the third token. There, we also found the 32nd token to collect our free Diana candle and were told this could be used to purchase a binder for the Diana fashion artwork published in previous weeks.

By the time we reached this point in the paper, however, we were very familiar with Diana. A stock picture appeared on page 9 (that supposedly controversial one with Lord Hindlip’s hand on her bottom) to illustrate a feature complaining about the "culture of familiarity". On page 12, we noted an item in Keith Wat-erhouse’s column complaining (quite rightly) about ideas to establish a Di Armistice Day. On page 35, we read a Nigel Dempster piece with a Diana headline.

Yes, just another day in the life of the Daily Mail and another day in the death of a Princess. She remains, almost a year after she died, as potent a seller of papers as she was in the 17 previous years. Daily Mail is far from alone. Diana is the patron-saint of tabloids. They created her and they refuse to let her go. Acres of space are still being devoted to her. No day passes without a Diana headline. Papers go on concocting reasons to carry stories about her, with obligatory picture from a seemingly infinite archive.

London’s broadsheets are not shy of Diana either. Lord Snowdon digs up as old Polaroid and there it is, blurbed on the Daily Telegraph’s front page and displayed big inside. The Times has had a regular diet of Diana. The Guardian, since you mention it, is not innocent: two weeks ago it billed an interview with Queen Noor of Jordan by asking whether she was "the new Diana". And, since you are bound to mention it too, I readily concede that by writing this article I can be accused of indulging in the very practice I am decrying. So be it. Just a little of the material can be justified as news, well sort of news, about the causes of the crash, say, or the latest bout of haggling over the appropriate way to memorialise the Princess. But most of it is entirely spurious. It amounts to an unashamed attempt to cash in on the enduring fame of the woman, whose celebrity the Press helped to foster and whose death it helped to hasten.

Some stories have bordered on the tasteless. "So did Diana really love Charles until the day she died?" Daily Mail; and "Di Ecstasy tablets being sold in London" (Evening standard). Some have been daft: "Diana Spencer was here in this cupboard" (Daily Mirror); and "Did Diana plan to marry on this Greek island?" (Daily Mail on Sunday). Some offerings have been risible: Diana rose bushes in the Mail; Diana poems in The Sun; Diana stamps in the Mirror. Magazines have happily joined in this macabre feast of commercial exploitation. Diana’s face stares out from the covers on news-stand racks, smiling from the shelves, more enigmatic than ever but just as potent a force for circulation-chasing editors. Hello recorded its highest sale of the year with an issue dedicated to Diana. Even Left-wing magazines have used her image on their front pages. New Statesman presented a Warhol pastiche; Red Pepper gave us Diana as Che Guevara; Living Marxism — I kid you not — thought her face worthy of a cover.

If there are protests from readers, they are muted. Most people seem to be lapping it up. The Times’s serialisation of a book about the crash added 2 per cent to its sales, while the News of the World added 330,000 copies with a 24-page magazine investigation into her death. Mirror’s exclusive interview with Al Fayed boosted circulation. Daily Mail’s magazine partwork on Diana’s life increased its Saturday sale by more than 400,000 every week for 12 weeks. Its immediate successor, a 12-week fashion part-work, did almost as well. This reluctance to move on is, in one sense, understandable. It would be strange indeed if, suddenly, nothing was published about a woman who dominated the editorial agenda for so long. But the way papers are maintaining Diana’s charisma and legend, smells of ingenuity at best, and desperation at worst. Readers seem not to care. They appear to have adopted the role of the paparazzi they claimed to loathe. They chase her image through every page, seeking out every reworked detail of her life, unconcerned by the ethical issues, such as the possible effect on her sons and the rest of her family. She is in death, as she was in life, public property.

So, as we prepare to face the media orgy marking the first anniversary of her death on August 31, we should take stock, to ask what has happened in the months since that crash in a Paris underpass. How have papers evaded all criticism for the manner of her death? Has a chastened Press cleaned up its act? Have we begun to question the cult of celebrity? Are papers now respecting people’s privacy? Is self-regulation working better than before? To answer these questions let’s make the briefest of trips back to the beginning. From September, 1980, when Daily Star revealed that Prince Charles’s new girlfriend was a certain Lady Diana Spencer, she was the subject of intense Press scrutiny. In the earliest days she was door-stepped every day at her London flat. She learned early about Press persistence and bloody-mindedness, but she found her own way of coping. During those months, the public perception gained by TV viewers and newspaper readers was of a pretty, naive, shy 19-year-old with an aura of mystery. No editor was in any doubt that the audience response was positive. People were beguiled by Lady Di, and the Press quickly made up its mind: this was the woman for Prince Charles.

Despite anecdotal evidence, we cannot be sure about claims that the palace pressured him into marrying Diana, nor that he did so because he could see how popular she was, nor because journalists were in favour. But I think it safe to assume that Charles could not but take into account the fact that palace, Press and people seemed united.

What we do need to understand if we are to grasp the initial reason for the Press’s obsession with Diana is the then state of the British newspaper industry. Note that the first Diana scoop was obtained by Daily Star, a brash new tabloid, barely a year old, which was eating into the circulation of the market-leading Sun. As Sun sales began to seep away, so the second-placed and formerly dominant Daily Mirror rediscovered its competitive urges. Similarly, Daily Mail and Daily Express were fighting against falling sales in 1980. All five of these intensely competitive papers, along with their similarly declining Sunday tabloids, were desperate to find a way of winning back readers.

Rupert Murdoch chose a new editor for Sun in 1981 (Kelvin MacKenzie), and hired executives from Star, and the sales war took off. Daily Mirror poached Star’s successful royal correspondent, James Whitaker, in early 1983. Little did Diana realise that her fate was to be cannon-fodder in this increasingly bitter struggle.

Editors didn’t foist the image of the Princess on to their readers. They could see that their portrayal of her was in tune with public admiration. It’s difficult to disentangle the way in which papers both reflect the public will and help to foster it. But in this instance there appeared to be a spontaneous unanimity of feeling. The fairytale had begun. And so had the nightmare. For the next 15 years or so, Press fascination was unrelenting. Diana was the queen of the papers’ hearts, the quintessential media-made heroine. Beautiful, fashionable, photogenic, unpredictable, wilful, loving, caring, tactile and, most important of all, royal. Well, attached to royalty, a quasi-commoner who, as far as papers and public were concerned, was royalty made flesh.

Editors were never able to accept that the woman whose picture sold so many thousands of extra copies was not theirs to do with as they wished. One can only guess at the effect this had on Diana, but we do know from her later interviews and leaked conversations that she became as obsessed by the press as they were by her. She loathed the intrusion but gradually, accepting that she could do little to stop it, she tried to mitigate its effects by influencing the intruders.

By early August last year, when Diana’s relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed became known, the photographic stalkers had grown into an army. When the couple were finally pictured together, a distant, long-lens shot of them — possibly kissing, probably hugging —made one photographer $2 million. That may be the most lucrative photo of all time. Three British tabloids between them paid almost £ 500,000 for the so-called "kissing set". The public loved it. Every paper that published those shots put on sales. Then, like a Greek tragedy, a week later she died.

In the immediate aftermath the press was on the rack. With chasing paparazzi initially blamed for causing the high-speed crash, the trenchant statement made by Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, turned the public against newspapers. I always believed the press would kill her in the end," he said. "But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case. It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana’s image, have blood on their hands today." Photographers taking pictures of the crowds gathered outside Diana’s home were attacked, as were television camera crews. Broadsheet papers vilified tabloid papers. Politicians added their voices to the chorus of protest against press misbehaviour. Rarely have tabloids been so reticent and so obviously ashamed.

But once it emerged that the driver had been drinking, and that photographers had not been as close behind the car as first thought, they quickly absolved themselves of any blame. They were careful to avoid giving offence. Too many examples of bad practice by photographers had been chronicled for tabloid editors to ignore the prevailing public climate. They knew they had to be seen to clean up their act, even, if it was to be a cosmetic exercise.

Despite the tabloid papers’ belief that they are in the clear over Diana’s death, we should be under no illusion about the truth. Perhaps we’ll never know the exact cause of the crash. But let’s be honest. The reason Diana and Dodi Fayed chose to swap drivers was to avoid the paparazzi who had followed them throughout the day. The reason the car was going fast was to shake off the following paparazzi. The reason they were chasing is because they were trying to take pictures which would make them money. The reason they knew they could make money is that the world’s papers and magazines were prepared to pay.

So the press, and especially the British tabloid press, were the indirect, underlying cause of that crash. Our papers created the conditions for such an accident to happen. That doesn’t make the papers legally culpable. But it does make them morally culpable. They cannot escape that fact, no matter how often and how loudly they say the driver was drunk. In that sense, Earl Spencer’s funeral oration was correct. In that poignant address, he spoke of Diana being "the most hunted person of the modern age, and of the media’s permanent quest to bring her down."

With those words ringing in their ears, editors drew up new rules of engagement. From January 1 this year they have been operating under a revised code of practice, administered by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). It outlaws the kind of paparazzi activity that haunted Diana, banning the use of pictures and information obtained "through intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit". It states that "everyone" is entitled to privacy and gives special protection to children under 16.

These tougher clauses were qualified: if editors could show they were acting in the public interest, they could invade privacy, pursue someone and interview children. So how has this new code of practice in the post-Diana era worked out? For Princes William and Harry it has generally been beneficial. The papers have obeyed the rule about not publishing "snatched" pictures of the princes.

But it has largely been business as usual for other famous people. One of the code’s clauses states that "the use of long-lens photography to take pictures of people in private places without their consent is unacceptable". How then do we explain the following blatant breaches? In February, when the ink on the new code was barely dry, Mirror published pictures of actress Farrah Fawcett leaving hospital after plastic surgery. The same week, Mirror used a front-page picture of actress Nicole Kidman leaving hospital after an operation for an ovarian cyst. She was clearly distressed. It was both intrusive and insensitive.

Other kinds of intrusions have occurred, such as the episode reported in The Guardian in June by TV researcher Giovanni Ulleri. He was wrongly accused of having an affair with both Louise Woodward and her mother. Then there was the hounding of child killer Mary Bell, when a book about her was published, and the dubious exposure of Jack Straw’s son for "dealing" in drugs.

Clearly, there is no public interest defence to any of the photographs detailed here. They are the pictorial equivalent of gossip: they embarrass the victims to the delight of an audience which has become used to intrusion into the lives of celebrities. Just as they did Diana.

Neither the papers nor their readers have really changed. Concern in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death about invasions of privacy has dissolved. People have wallowed in Diana material, invasions of privacy continue, the celebrity circus has never left town. There is no post-Diana effect. Her death hasn’t changed a damn thing.