What did Diana change?

Matt’s cover a few weeks back illustrated how the Royals had absorbed the lessons of Diana’s life and death. There is little doubt that Diana has had a huge impact on the monarchy–which is, as Matt notes, in a far more secure state today than it was in the mid 1990s–but I wonder if she wasn’t more of an expression of things that had already changed rather than a driver of change herself. All the talk of how her death loosened our collective stiff upper lip forgets that Paul Gascoigne had already cried his way into the nation’s hearts in 1990 and how Tony Blair was doing soft-focus politics long before August 1997. Indeed, the public manipulated Diana–and certainly her memory–to its own ends far more than she manipulated it.