Did people really love Princess Diana that much?

[canjest]

I just wondered as I knew she was well liked but videos like this show brown men crying!

www.instagram.com/reel/CnOCMtSKK_b/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

@Blossomtoes I remember that coverage of a total empty motorway even though it was not closed.
I remember the discussions in offices about whether to close as a mark of respect.
What younger people are not getting is that the reactions came from the public.

And the Op is right. People were shocked. I am not a fan but I am also not a rewriter of history. I worked in an office in town at the time and I remember walking regularly past an enormous queue of people all waiting to sign a condolence book in the town hall. It seemed to me a bit mad to queue for hours and hours to do that, but people wanted to express their grief.

@Fluffygreenslippers

Everyone had her book in their book shelves.

I have no idea what book you are referring to and certainly didn't have it and I suspect none of my family or friends did either.

I don't know about love when Princess Diana was alive, but there were grown up people in tears after her death.

I don't think anyone disputes that the things you described did actually happen AskAwayAgain but rather people are questioning quite how universal they were and whether they really represented a spontaneous outpouring of love.
They definitely weren't universal. I know a lot of people who didn't engage with any of it (and I was in my 30s so quite grown up.)
I don't think it was completely spontaneous either. The media, the royal family, the Spencer family, politicians and other celebrities all manipulated the situation to some degree, for, I would think, lots of reasons including deflecting attention from themselves and self promotion depending on who they were!
And I don't think it was love. Is it even possible to really love a celebrity that at best you have superficial knowledge of? I think a comparatively small proportion of people had a strong emotional attachment to Diana - or at least the idea of Diana- by the time of her death, but most people who stood in those queues did not have particularly strong feelings about her whilst she was alive.
There was a big element of shock. She had after all been one of, if not the absolute highest profile woman in the world for a decade and she died a tragic and violent death. And she had relatively young children. That did touch people definitely. And some will have felt a degree of guilt if they had relished the scandals and the invasive photos.
But some of it I think is definitely that there is a tendency for humans to be want to be part of Big Things. I'm no psychologist but I think that a lot of us do get something out of being part of some kind of mass event or movement. It's not a perfect analogy but it is on the same lines as the millions of people who get excited about England in the World Cup but never watch any other football match, or who develop a short lived fascination with some obscure sport that a Brit excels at in the Olympics, or bang saucepans on their doorsteps in pandemics - we get something out of belonging to something bigger than ourselves. I happened to be in London shortly before the Queen's funeral and thought that since it was a historic time I should go to The Mall and see the flowers etc. I was surprised by my emotional response to be honest. I'm not a royalist, I am fairly neutral, but being part of that crowd moved me. I think that happened to a lot of people around Diana's death, but very intensely for some. And there was peer pressure too. Like the clapping in the pandemic there was some stigma to not conforming.
It was definitely a big event and a lot of people had a strong emotional response to it, but was it because "everyone really loved Diana"? I don't think so.

People totally lost their minds - I worked on Brighton Pier when she died, and we got at least one actual bomb threat because we weren’t planning to shut for her funeral (management bowed to pressure eventually).

There was intense public pressure to fit in - saying you weren’t fussed either way was like saying you enjoyed stomping on little puppies in your spare time. People were literally assaulted for not looking sorrowful enough in public. The newspapers went nuts about any sign of “disrespect to our glorious princess” - and also used it as an opportunity to stick the knife into the queen and royal family.

It was like living in a North Korea when the dictator has just died. So a lot of people rolled their eyes and kept their mouths shut.

People were assaulted?

I am surprised by that I must say.

I liked Diana a lot as did many people I worked with. I don’t like it when people seem to take pleasure on here in blackening her reputation. I didn’t think she was a saint though and plenty of people in my circle were genuinely surprised by the outpouring of grief that followed her death.

My workmates and I mainly felt shock and sad for her that her life was cut short and terrible sadness for her dc when she died. We all laid a posy of flowers but none of us cried or wailed. And we were able to maintain a degree of objectivity about the whole situation I think like most other people we knew.

I think some people on this thread are trying to say everyone was madly hysterical to try and somehow undermine the genuine affection that so many people felt for her at the time. (I don’t mean you you Saschka.)

So to be clear there were absolutely no displays of hysterics in my immediate circle but there was genuine sadness. And no one was ousted from our group or criticised if they weren’t particularly bothered or thought the public reaction excessive. I think that was true for the majority of people tbh.

Sorry not RTFT, so this might have been mentioned, but I too was bemused by the mass mourning around her death & funeral. I was a clueless 21 year old at the time, and was quite gobby about 'all the saddo's mourning after someone they'd never met!'.

However, as I reflect now, at the time, I think about the other stuff going on in the country at that time and can see how people were rocked by it. There was great political change going on in the country. We had a Labour government for the first time in my (conscious) life, I remember feeling quite scared when the conservatives lost as I hadn't known anything else. ( I was from a tory family, and 'we'd' never lost before). But it also wasn't the Labour that the seventies had known and loved, so it really was different for everyone.

Then there were lots of things (good and bad) that shocked and divided the nation such as the Jamie Bulger trial, Brit pop and music mixing with politics, not just with songs as it always had been but actually attending party conferences etc.,New Age travellers & illegal raves and the public order act that stopped them.

Although I'm sure I didn't realise it at the time, I think it felt very different and was probably unsettling for many people.

Then one of the most famous people in the world died under horrendous circumstances, possibly proving for many that bad things can happen to anyone. I can't believe that all those people mourning thought she was the angel that the press made her out to be but by uniting in some way (grief for example) it provided stability and unity which was may have been very comforting for the turbulent times we were facing/had just faced.

Diana’s death was a good example of mass hysteria. Literally just the day before people were calling her by all the names usually reserved for women who say no to men. She was the female equivalent of a rich playboy. There were still early editions of newspapers gleefully detailing her exploits in that direction in circulation while ‘The People’s Princess’ was being invented.

Mmmm saint v whore? I wonder whether both of those characterisations came from?

Is it possible she wasn’t either?

From the outside it was and continues to be odd. Mass hysteria guided by the media in my opinion.

Seriously, you feel that the entire country was unsettled and needed ‘comfort’ from the ‘turbulence’ of no longer living under the Tories?

There was a complete mass hysteria taken advantage of by Alistaire Campbell and Tony Blair who liked to portray themselves as the goid guys helping an out-of-touch monarchy. In fact history makes mockery of the stupid charard

And of course the idiotic film the Queen starring Helen Mirren is a complete distortion of the facts. Bilge.

That’s absolute nonsense. Blair was the very recently elected PM who was expected to provide leadership and who recognised that it was a moment of real jeopardy for the monarchy. A lot of people were very angry with the Queen because she did an excellent impression of not caring, the headlines of the time clearly show that.

The last thing a new Labour PM, whose party had been out of power for 18 years, needed was for the monarchy to be destabilised on his watch. It was essential for the success of his government that the surge of resentment against the Queen was shut down as fast as possible.

I didn't realise she was "so loved " until she died the hysteria was insane she was elevated to a Saint !

I think people who related to her loved her and her personal life touched home for a few people like evil in-laws, the ow etc. Other than that, we are a country that follows the media which then leads to mass hysteria. Remember covid, the Queens funeral? Those who didn't wear a mask or crossed the 2m line or those who didn't wear black for 90 days and those who queued up for days to visit lying in state.

Any woman dying at 36 leaving 2 kids is tragic. But I think many people in this country were surprised how genuinely upset they were by her death - ie no particular interest in the monarchy in general or her in particular.

I was over the fucking moon personally.

Well, but these are the same people who retain those same ‘evil inlaws’ as an unelected monarchy, camp out overnight on royal wedding routes to wave little flags, and tie themselves not knots trying to find an ongoing rationale for a frankly insane, undemocratic situation?

@Penniless exactly 🤯

Agree. I recall a huge wave of optimism after the election in fact. Obviously it would vary depending on what circles you were moving in and where you lived but the vast majority of people I knew (mainly young professionals, large Northern city) were excited and hopeful.

I’d just moved to the UK, so had no personal experience of life under any previous government, but I certainly remember the political atmosphere as optimistic and positive.

Absolutely. The mood was so positive and hopeful after the election, it felt like things were really changing for the better. Labour had a huge landslide victory, public mood was very much behind them.

Not sure what on earth die-hard Tories could be scared of. Paying fair taxes for decent public services?

The fact that history shows otherwise and that it was the palace in charge of events not Blair and his spin doctor is of course irrelevant. Of course the media turned on the Queen as if it were her fault she prioritised comforting her grandchildren rather than grandstanding to the hysterical mob. Thankfully when she appeared people somehow came to their senses