A decade to forget

It’s 10 years since we woke up to the news Diana, Princess of Wales had died. I suspect that, apart from the dwindling necro-band of Daily Express readers, many of us are somewhat fatigued by the wall-to-wall media coverage of an event which, though located firmly in the past, seems still to have a visceral presence.

Last year, when speculating how Diana’s death might have been covered differently in an age of the Internet and blogging, I gave my own perspective:

No sentient being could have been unmoved by the cruel despatch of a glamorous young woman in her prime; nor by the sad prospect of two young boys destined to grow up with ever-fading memories of a loving mother.

And those of us with any empathetic sensibilities will have also appreciated quite what a mixture of conflicted emotions must have intermingled in the hearts and minds of Prince Charles, the Queen and Prince Phillip. To lose someone you love is hard enough; to lose someone you used to love can be even harder.

At such times, you need space and privacy for your family to try and make sense of it all. What you absolutely do not need is a baying press demanding you expose your guilty grief to the masses to satisfy some mediaeval pain-lust which has momentarily taken grip of a minority, and been projected in real-time onto the soul of the nation.

In the claustrophobic week which smothered us all between Diana’s death and her funeral there was scant space for such reflections. Media coverage was driven not by those, like me, who spared a thought or prayer for her and her family, and then moved on; but by those who queued to exhibit their ersatz anguish in full view, to assert their über-humanity, and show the rest of us how grief ought to be done.

An alternative take is provided here by the comedian Eddie Izzard, who lost his own mother, aged six:



This diversity of perspective simply goes to prove that journalism’s lazy, glib and clichéd short-hand of assuming a nation will find itself united either by grief (at the death of a public figure) or joy (when a sporting team wins a trophy) is far from the truth. The complex swirl of human emotions cannot be so easily condensed and distilled into such neatly-labelled bottles.

It was a point made by a BBC documentary, The People’s Princess (1998), which filmed 68 hours of public reaction to Diana’s death in the immediate aftermath. The reporters, such as Adam Alexander, discovered, unsurprisingly, that “there were many motives for joining the crowd and a wide array of emotions at play”:

What was there was not simple. People wept, applauded and threw flowers at the hearse. But there were also people who took snapshots and enjoyed the day out, socialising in the pubs, arguing and expressing many different opinions.

"It was a fantastic weekend. I'd pay double to do it again. I've got history on tape," said one woman. A drinker in a pub in Bedminster, a working class Bristol suburb, did not agree. "I didn't expect to see it on in this pub," he said, stabbing a finger towards the television screen in the corner. "I came here to get away from the f******* funeral."

While many people evidently and genuinely wanted to pay their last respects, many others were tourists enjoying a great event, or were people who wanted to see and be part of a bit of history, or were just plain curious. …

One thing is certain. The way the media covered the event was far from representative. For a short while we forgot to question. Instead we latched on to a very one-dimensional reaction to the tragedy of Diana's death.

We don't live in a country where we all have to think and feel the same thing. So it's surely about time we acknowledge the fact, as one viewer does in the film Even Diana Doesn't Matter to Everybody.

It says much about the amazing pressure exerted on, and by, the media to conform to the settled view of the time that it took a year for the documentary - which after all was simply reflecting back to the public what the public had said to the film-makers - to be broadcast.

When Private Eye published its famous front cover pointing out the dual hypocrisy of the media and public, it provoked a storm of outrage, and the typically supine WH Smith banned it (while happily continuing to stock porn mags).

A decade on such a heavy-handed response seems bizarrely misplaced and reactionary.

Indeed the claustrophobic conformity which engulfed us is itself deeply ironic, given that the week of mourning following Diana’s death, has been hailed as a progressive catharsis, even by such a normally sane commentator as Andrew Marr: “we are a more relaxed and more emotionally healthy people than we used to be, and the ‘Diana moment,’ for all its weirdness and excess, marked this change.”

For myself, I think this week’s Economist gets much closer to the real truth:

With hindsight, the public seems to have lamented Diana as much because she was one of the royals as because she was estranged from them. At a distance, the masses look less insurrectionist than conservative—and were quickly salved when the queen walked amongst them. (Only a traditional people could have got quite so worked up about how high a flag flew over a palace.) Seeming to challenge the status quo, the moment ultimately reinforced it.

Maybe next year, and in the years to come, we can leave it simply to Diana's family and friends to remember her; and the rest of us can let it go.

Haven't they got anything useful to do?

Sometimes I despair of MPs.

Today, the Culture, Media and Sport select committee published a highly self-serving report accusing the Press Complaints Commission of failing to protect Kate Middleton (Prince William’s current/former girl-friend, M’Lud) from harassment by paparazzi photographers:

The Press Complaints Commission took too long to act to protect Kate Middleton from clear and persistent harassment.

Let me make it clear from the start - I have a lot of sympathy with Ms Middleton. Living your life in the public eye simply because you rather fancy the heir-to-the-throne-but-one cannot be much fun, and has doubtless put a huge strain on their relationship. The tabloid press - which clearly includes snide, gossipy titles like the Mail and Times - deliberately makes the lives of many of those in the public eye a needless misery. Their muck-spreading soils us all.

But the PCC is underpinned by an important principle - that it acts solely on the basis of a complaint made by the individual or their representative. It does not accept third party complaints, nor does it intervene of its own volition. This has to be the right and proper way. It is certainly the only practical way.

However, this is not enough for the select committee’s band of something-must-be-done worthies, who assert:

The PCC appears to have waited for a complaint to materialise: it could and should have intervened sooner.

Are our MPs seriously suggesting the PCC should have made an exception to their published code of practice for Ms Middleton? (Whose interests, it should be added, have been well-represented by a firm of solicitors, Harbottle and Lewis.)

Do our MPs seriously expect the PCC to intervene each time they somehow divine an individual is feeling harassed, even though they haven’t yet made a complaint? If they do, perhaps they could draw up the criteria by which the PCC can objectively decide in which cases to intervene, and in which to wait for a complaint.

Of course, the MPs who wrote the report understand only too well that what they are demanding is utterly unworkable. Their concluding two sentences are the most pusillanimous on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other cop-out imaginable:

The Commission should be readier to depart from its usual practice of issuing a desist notice only in response to a request. However, we recognise the force of the argument that an individual who seeks the protection of the PCC should make a formal complaint.

But that doesn’t matter to those MPs responsible. They got a cheap headline, which is what they wanted - their job is done, their work complete.

I’m sure they won’t fully appreciate the irony that the only point of their report into press intrusion has been to quench their own lust for media aggrandisement.

What if...? How would we react to Diana's death today?

Here’s an interesting counterfactual to conjure with - how might the media coverage of Princess Diana’s death have been different in today’s ultra-connected world?

The question is prompted in my mind by a story in today’s Telegraph, ‘BBC had regrets over Diana coverage’:

Confidential BBC documents show that nearly half the population (44 per cent) felt alienated by the blanket media coverage of the Princess's death and funeral, which they thought was excessive and over-emotional. …

A BBC debriefing paper on the coverage of the death of Diana, dated January 1998, stated: "One of the things that became clear about the death, and the immediate aftermath, was that there was a range of public reactions to the death. The BBC, perhaps, did not pick up quite quickly enough on these differences in reactions. We were not always precise enough in our use of language, especially when we started to use phrases such as 'the mood of the nation', 'the grief of the public'. There was no single public mood, rather there was a variety of moods."

The conclusions were based on audience research carried out in the months following the Princess's death on August 31, 1997 and funeral service at Westminster Abbey.

I was one of those who felt utterly disenfranchised by the mawkish response of media coverage, and repulsed by the moralising mob-rule of those hell-bent on dictating to the Windsors what should be their emotional response to this family tragedy.

Pundits commenting with hindsight often seek to separate the ‘public mood’ into two distinct phases: first, in the immediate aftermath, stunned, grief-stricken hysteria; and, then, in retrospect, a certain shared embarrassment at our collective national breakdown. (A breakdown from which the execrable Express has yet to recover.)

The BBC’s research shows quite how inaccurate such glib, hand-sweeping generalisations can be.

No sentient being could have been unmoved by the cruel despatch of a glamorous young woman in her prime; nor by the sad prospect of two young boys destined to grow up with ever-fading memories of a loving mother.

And those of us with any empathetic sensibilities will have also appreciated quite what a mixture of conflicted emotions must have intermingled in the hearts and minds of Prince Charles, the Queen and Prince Phillip. To lose someone you love is hard enough; to lose someone you used to love can be even harder.

At such times, you need space and privacy for your family to try and make sense of it all. What you absolutely do not need is a baying press demanding you expose your guilty grief to the masses to satisfy some mediaeval pain-lust which has momentarily taken grip of a minority, and been projected in real-time onto the soul of the nation.

In the claustrophobic week which smothered us all between Diana’s death and her funeral there was scant space for such reflections. Media coverage was driven not by those, like me, who spared a thought or prayer for her and her family, and then moved on; but by those who queued to exhibit their ersatz anguish in full view, to assert their über-humanity, and show the rest of us how grief ought to be done.

Back to my question: how might media coverage of such a momentous news story differ in today’s Internet world?

Well, the 44 per cent of us who had no voice, and began to wonder if we were the only ones with any sense of perspective, would have soon realised how widely shared was our reaction. Blogs, Internet forums, newspaper websites - all would have reflected the spectrum of public opinion.

That, in turn, might have prompted the media to take a step back, to look with rather more cool analytical detachment at the varied response of the public, rather than assume an entire nation had lapsed into a self-absorbed stasis of group-think emotional incontinence.

The job of journalism is to make that which is complex accessible to the public: to simplify, but not over-simplify, recognising that society is rarely so obliging as to supply easy answers.

Update: Iain Dale has posted an alternative take here.

To robe, or not to robe?

I don’t go to many civic ceremonies as a councillor - most are held during the working day - but the one I make every effort to attend is the Remembrance Sunday service held at the war memorial on St Giles, in the centre of Oxford.

(Incidentally, the one year I was absent, like so many of my colleagues, earned some little local notoriety in the Oxford Mail. Since when, attendance has much improved…)

It is, of course, important to honour those who lost or risked their lives defending the liberties that we too often take for granted today. One of the warmest rounds of applause during each year’s procession is reserved for the surviving veterans of the last world war.

In the last couple of years, there has been the added poignancy also of realising quite how many of our troops are currently in operational service - 22,700 of them are, as of now, located in:

• Afghanistan (5,800);
• Bosnia and Kosovo (900);
• Iraq (7,200);
• UN missions (300); and
• Northern Ireland (8,500);

with a further 27,390 on non-operational service in Germany, Cyprus, the South Atlantic Islands, Gibraltar and Diego Garcia.

It seems only right and proper that, one day each year, I should think how lucky have been the post-war generations not to be conscripted into military service; and all the more appreciative of those who voluntarily sign up so that I don’t have to.

There is one decision I consciously make each year, though - and that is to dispense with the robe which, as a councillor, I am entitled to wear on such civic occasions. This is an entirely personal decision, but one I have stuck to since I was first elected, back in May 2000.

I dislike such ostentatious ceremony, the point of which appears to be to show that councillors are separate from (perhaps grander than) those we represent. For sure, it is part of the city’s tradition, and maybe the spectacle of civic dignitaries in funny clothes is what the public wants, what they expect. But I am uncomfortable with outward displays of hierarchy which appear to exist for their own sake, and which symbolise the ‘them and us’ perception of politics among the public.

So I dress smartly and appropriately, as this photo from today’s service demonstrates (I’m fourth from the right). But I shall continue to eschew my robe.

And of course I stay silent during the singing of the National Anthem - I have no problems with God saving the Queen (though others are probably in greater need), but have no wish to lie through my teeth in His name by asking that she is ‘Long to reign over us’.

As every thinking schoolboy should, I became a socialist and a republican aged 16. I soon realised my juvenile mistake, allowing my socialism to lapse, then be converted into liberalism. However, my republicanism remains entrenched (albeit pretty dormant).