Simon Jenkins: Bringing the cameras into their lives was a big risk for the royals

Monday night’s tribute on ITV to Princess Diana by her sons was undeniably moving. To hear two men talking about their dead mother is unlikely to be comfortable but it was never maudlin.

Diana was a celebrity, as are they. It is a feature of celebrities that they can invite the public to share their private emotions with such ease.

In doing so, they of course play with fire. The princes should realise that when they invite intrusion, they cannot complain when they lose control of that intrusion. Celebrity is not a meal eaten à la carte.

Today’s sympathetic headline is tomorrow’s shock horror.

This was a paradox that Diana never resolved. My intermittent dealings with her concerned just this boundary between her privacy and publicity. I realised how deeply she craved the cameras, as if they offered her the reassurance denied her by an unhappy marriage. She even switched tennis clubs because the more private one was “too quiet”.

Yet she wanted publicity to be on her terms. Celebrity was to her an extreme sport: it agonised and thrilled her.

London in August 1997 was an extraordinary place. Diana had retired from public life and was now a private citizen, engaged in a complicated affair with the playboy son of an Egyptian tycoon. Yet her death snapped something. It sent the public into collective hysteria. People who were never monarchists wept. Flower mountains piled around palaces. The Queen disappeared. Politicians lost the plot. There was talk of renaming Heathrow and the M25. Tony Blair, then prime minister, leapt before every camera to declare mourning for “the people’s princess”. The national cliché was: “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

At the time of her death, Diana’s indiscretions represented a sort of running rebellion against the monarchy. The idol of monarchists, she was an idol also of anti-monarchists.

She was a bird of paradise locked in a gilded cage, from which she had contrived an escape. She famously said: “There were always three in our marriage.” We knew who she meant, but a fourth might as well have been the monarchy.

Death somehow galvanised Diana’s status as a dissident. The Queen’s absence from London misjudged the national mood, brilliantly depicted by Helen Mirren in the 2006 film The Queen.

For the first time since the war, there was a slump in royal popularity, down 39 per cent, according to MORI, though this curiously did not diminish overall support for monarchy as such.

What it did was illustrate the tenuous basis underpinning a hereditary king or queen. Her validity is her standing in the polls. There is no other accountability.

Today the Queen’s popularity is beyond doubt, boosted with each signpost of longevity. Republican support is stuck at 18 per cent or less.

The role of the royal family is more ambivalent. Back in 1969 the Queen gambled by inviting cameras to peer behind the mystique of monarchy and see just “an ordinary family”. The intention was to normalise and update the image. The boys did not go to Eton. The family went on endless picnics. What could be more ordinary, more devoid of mystique?

No one foresaw the downside of deluging royal children with public attention just when they were entering on adulthood.

The predictable result was the Queen’s “annus horribilis” of 1992, when Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne all broke with their partners, when the Squidgygate and Camillagate tapes were publicised and when, for good measure, Windsor Castle was partly gutted by fire.

Five years later, Diana was dead and somehow it was the royal family’s fault. Monarchy, not to put it finely, looked a bit of a mess.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands are model social democracies with hereditary heads of state scrupulously kept under wraps. They are pure figureheads, the nation anthropomorphised. Nothing is required of them but an occasional signature and presence at state occasions. Royal families stay out of the public gaze.