Diana’s death ten years on

The Britannica blog has been running a rather good forum on Diana and the cult of celebrity. Theodore Dalyrmple’s contribution challenges the sentimentality that has come to surround her in death.

“In the orgy of demonstrative pseudo-grief that followed her death, Mr Blair said that the people had found a new way of being British. Indeed so: they had become emotionally incontinent and inclined to blubber in public when not being menacingly discourteous. They had come to believe that holding nothing back was the way to mental health, and their deepest emotional expression was the teddy bear that they were increasingly liable to leave at the site of a fatal accident or at the tomb of someone who had died in early adulthood.”