KEY POINTS:
What exactly did happen 10 years ago next Friday? Or, more to the point, a day or two later. The death of Diana, as I recall, was a strangely delayed phenomenon. The news came through on a Sunday afternoon here and was a big item on the evening's
TV and next morning's papers, but not that big, not as big as it would become.
Newspapers around the world were doing something they hadn't done since Kennedy, clearing several pages for a single story. They sold every copy. TV news channels, too, cleared their schedules for round-the-clock coverage.
The public appetite for the subject was extraordinary and seemed only to grow over the ensuing days and weeks. What was it?
The approach of the 10th anniversary has already brought thousands of words on the subject but nothing has gone to the heart of it better than last year's brilliant movie that brought Helen Mirren an Oscar, The Queen.
The film focused on the Queen's awkward behaviour in the days after the death of her former daughter-in-law. Mirren and director Stephen Frears could have portrayed the real Queen as nothing more than a stiff, stubborn, straight-laced prig divorced from sentiment and reality. They didn't.
They presented a person wrestling with an identity crisis, not her own but that of the country she thought she knew so well. Closeted with Charles and Diana's children at Balmoral castle, she watched British people on television behaving completely out of character.
They were crying in public, making mawkish comments like Americans, placing flowery tributes outside Buckingham Palace - for someone they could not have known except through glossy photographs of her beauty, tabloid reports of the troubled royal marriage and her racy life since, and that insufferable self-pitying television interview she once did.
Mirren's Queen was caught unaware by a social change that nobody had noticed. Diana had largely created it just by being herself: beautiful, camera-conscious, tough, vulnerable, honest, flirty and fun.
By the time she divorced the heir to the kingdom, her popular impact was bigger than any royal perch. People everywhere didn't realise how much they loved having her alive until suddenly she wasn't any more.
Then they responded in her style, unafraid of emotion, open to warmth, permitted to touch.
Some of us, like the Queen, were disturbed by it, wondering if it was real or a mass hysteria attributable to the loss of social connections. Several times I toyed with the idea that the phenomenon could be put down to the mediated lives we lead and the role that celebrities play in our vicarious existence.
But it happened. Britain and societies like it, ours, had changed.
Societies change all the time, of course. Each generation is a little different from its parent, slowly displacing it. But the new character of the population is not always perceptible to those who study social statistics or imagine that politics expresses all possibilities.
Tony Blair was one politician who sensed the significance of Diana well before her death, according to the recently published diaries of his press secretary, Alastair Campbell.
Campbell's book records several meetings between them during the year before Blair became Prime Minister. Campbell, incidentally, was instantly smitten.
"There was something about her eyes that went beyond radiance," he writes. "They locked on to you and were utterly mesmeric. She had perfect skin and her whole face lit up when she spoke and there were moments when I had to fight to hear the words because I'm just lost in the beauty."
At a private dinner in January 1997, Blair raised the modernisation of the monarchy, saying the British people are "capable of great rebellion" and telling her, "You tap deep into the psychology of the nation".
He said compassion would be a key theme of his election campaign and that they could learn from her.
She, according to Campbell, advised Blair to go and meet the down-and-outs on the Bullring, go to the London Lighthouse to met Aids victims or visit a hospital.
"She spoke in fairly calculating terms of how she had gone for 'the caring angle'. But she also saw it as her work to make people feel happier and better, and support causes which didn't always get strong support."
She wasn't a saint. She was calculating like most people who make change.
Her death I think changed a country more than her life could have done. It brought Blair's great rebellion of a kind, the best kind in which people unbend, find their emotional confidence and keep it.
* The editor has received an email from a reader who says, "It is driving me crazy. How the hell does John say his name, Roughan? Ruffan, Rawn, Rowan, Roan, are there any other contestants?"
Rowan it is, but I answer to them all.
