As the 10th anniversary of Diana’s death approaches we’re going to spend a lot of time debating whether or not the public reaction to her death ushered in a new, more emotionally open Britain or whether it was a mawkish display of grief which we all ought to be rather embarrassed about.
As Jonathan Freedland points out in The Guardian there’s a political dimension to this question:
Indeed, I’d say that Hague lost the 2001 election that morning when he came out and delivered a perfectly proper tribute to Diana but one that seemed painfully stiff and out of touch in comparison to Blair’s more emotionally savvy response.“Tony Blair added to the electoral mandate he had gained on May 1 a kind of emotional mandate, forging a bond with the nation that Sunday morning when he correctly intuited the public reaction to the death of the princess – a connection that kept him riding high until the Iraq war.”
So have the electorate rejected this kind of emotionalism as part of the Blair backlash? The lauding of Brown’s seriousness suggests so. But I still suspect that if another Diana moment comes along, the public will expect their Prime Minister to not only feel but express their pain.
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