A swell of republican sentiment
Now we know what we always knew. The verdict in the Diana inquest ought to chasten everyone in the victims’ families: their deaths could have been prevented.
The conspiracy theories that have swirled around the inquest obscured the deadly implications of systems disoriented by hype, hysteria and more money than sense.
The notion that the House of Windsor wanted Diana dead might have seemed excessive — but it was thinkable. The royals have form; they’ve got a history of topping ex-daughters-in-law, ex-wives, unwelcome suitors, rivals, priests and critics. Millions thought they’d done the dirty on Diana. The reaction was an unwelcome shock to both the royal family and a craven, royalist parliamentary culture.
The popular diagnosis that her marriage was made in hell derived from all the symptoms that had been allowed by our political culture to go unnoticed: that the royals still lived by the ancient lore of droit de seigneur, patriarchal primogeniture, and anti-Catholic sectarianism, not to mention tax-dodging.
The royal family had depended on daughters in law to bring their dull lustre into pleasurable public scrutiny. But then their behaviour towards their daughters in law, in life and in death, provoked a swell of republican sentiment and inchoate distaste unseen in Britain for a century.
Despite their brittle decorum, the royals are inflamed by visceral jealousy that is personal and political. These people have love and hate tattooed on their tiaras. — Bea Campbell
A public drunk on paparazzi
In case you wondered exactly how low in the public’s estimation are the people who feed their habit for celebrity photographs, a jury in London has provided the answer. They rank alongside drink-drivers who kill their passengers.
More than 10 years after the event, the British public finally gets to hand out the blame for the death of Diana. The paparazzi and the driver are guilty. The passengers who didn’t wear a seatbelt are innocent. So will this verdict bring an end to hyper-aggressive photography? Hardly.
The one sector of the print media bucking the downward trend in advertising revenue is the celebrity magazine. Diana’s death in Paris was almost incidental to this growth.
Los Angeles, the biggest celebrity city in the world, had managed to keep journalists and photographers at bay until the international market finally broke down the door at the start of the 1990s. Splash, set up by Brits, brought red-top professionalism — or ruthlessness — to Beverly Hills. The money followed.
Last month one Splash photographer, Nick Stern, quit with a troubled conscience over the pursuit of Britney Spears. He made Mulholland Drive sound like the Pont d’Alma tunnel. But the global market for paparazzi pictures is unlikely to be dented by occasional attacks of self-doubt by the photographers themselves, any more than it is by inquest juries. There may be one thing that will change it — and that’s stars selling photographic access to their lives.
If the right money goes high enough and the deals brokered get enough riders, then it might well begin to squeeze out the paparazzi more effectively than a jury’s moral censure. — Adrian Monck