John Simpson

John Simpson Remembers Diana

"It felt like watching someone in my own family. And indeed thanks to all the unwanted revelations, all the snooping, all the betrayal by one-time friends and associates - and all the self-revelation too - we knew as much about the Princess as we knew about some of the people closest to us.

"So we've lost more than the public beauty and the well-publicised shows of compassion - and the private acts of compassion too, which were never publicised at all.

"We've lost someone we've all grown up with. I watched the gawky figure in her late teens using a pudding-bowl haircut to hide her eyes from the photographers and the cameramen who ran around her in the streets of Earls Court; and the pictures which showed the awful suit of acrylic blue which she wore for her first formal television interview. It was like coming across old pictures of yourself, and thinking 'Oh no, did I really look like that? Did I really wear those clothes?'

"And then there was the wedding in St Paul's, the grandest occasion to have happened in this country since the Coronation. Even friends of mine who were noisily anti-royalist felt that something pretty impressive and happy was going on that day: something which wasn't mixed, like so many things were at the time, with gloom and anxiety.

"And when the public facade of the marriage started to crack up, and the rumours surfaced in the tabloids, there was something in most of us that didn't want to believe it; even though we knew more about what was going on in that marriage than we knew about any other except perhaps our own.

"But there was another side to the story altogether. It wasn't just a gloomy tale of the break-up of a marriage, leaving a little trail of wrecked or damaged lives behind it. There was a sense of redemption too - of someone picking herself up and recreating her life all over again.

"The awkward, plump teenager shed the weight and the awful suits and the hairdos, and became the most glamorous woman in the world, bar none. And instead of retreating into herself she went out into the world and sought out people who were suffering and did something for them. At a time when there were demonstrations against AIDS clinics, she held the hand of someone dying of AIDS. It had a real effect.

"Maybe some of it seemed manipulative from time to time; maybe there was too much show-business about it all. But the point is that the Princess refashioned her life from scratch, and made a huge, worldwide success of it. In today's catchphrase, she reinvented herself. And maybe, if she'd lived, she would have found new ways for the monarchy to thrive in the modern world.

"As the picture-editor put tape after tape into the machine, I found myself thinking more and more about my own contacts with her. I didn't know her at all well, and only met her socially.

"But there was one particular time, after a state banquet at Buckingham Palace, when I spent a long time with her, talking about her life, and mine, and the world in general. I'd been amazed to find out how bright she was, because that wasn't always what I'd assumed.

"But more than that, she had the knack of giving you her total attention, so you would feel that for that moment you were the only person in the world who counted. And it wasn't only susceptible ageing males who found this: several people I've talked to, of different ages and backgrounds and both sexes, say the same thing, and I feel my life is a bit emptier for the loss of that. Most of us, I guess, would feel the same way today."