The battle between the two positions Queen of Hearts versus the Madame of Media

The battle between the two positions, Queen of Hearts versus the Madame of Media, threatens to crush all those who, like me, subscribe to neither view.I am largely indifferent to the monarchy, and bored by tales of Wills, Harry and Zara’s tongue stud. Camilla and Charles are more intriguing, but – as with many areas of media colonisation (the Spice Girls, David Beckham) – what is of interest or significance is usually extracted in the first five minutes, leaving us with months and months of pith and wind And I have never read an article about Fergie. The day when Diana died I feared an explosion of sentimental, monarchic rubbish that would cover everything in a metre-thick layer of bullshit.That didn’t happen, and something else did. The bullshit-purveyors were left peddling their wares to no one much, while hundreds of thousands of British people did things that they hardly knew they had it in them to do. They went to the park and talked about death and love in quiet voices, and their applause for Earl Spencer spread through Hyde Park and in through the doors of Westminster Abbey. The tabloids and the self-appointed encapsulators of schlock TV weren’t in charge; they spent a week sprinting, trying to catch up. Nor was this mass hysteria, or, if it was, it managed to be the least hysterical hysteria that I’ve ever seen.

The only evidence adduced for this “hysteria” was the punching of an Italian flower-nicker by some beefy idiot And that was it. Well, I’ve seen more hysteria at a school concert.To see whether any of this feeling has endured, we should look again at that poll. Forget “only”, and focus on the fact that almost one in five people answered “yes” to the question, “did the death of Diana change the way that you personally think about life?” I think that this is a staggering result. It means that every fifth person you meet in the street believes that their life has been altered by the death of someone they had never met, and who exercised no power over them.

Are they bonkers?Or are they reflecting on a moment of crystallisation, a moment when trends in British society became evident to everyone, and which helped to construct a language in which to talk about them? It is a fact that we have been living through a feminisation of society, and that this has raised questions about emotional literacy. It is also true that the death of ideology, and the failure of religion, leave us without overarching or supernatural structures from which to derive moral strength and direction. Morality hasn’t “gone away”, as some claim, but it is uncomfortingly down to each of us to construct a morality of our own – a way of dealing with being human. There are some of our fellow citizens who became aware of bits and pieces of this while lighting candles or writing cards.Naturally, some of this is good and some of it is bad That’s dialectics for you, folks.