It soon became abundantly clear, however, that it was the government and not the family she had once been a member of that knew best how to deal with Diana in death. In London and borne to power by the biggest electoral victory in Labour’s history, the Blair administration could sense and see what the royal family, out of touch in rural Scotland, could not; they recognised the mass hysteria her demise had caused. Flowers were left in front of the gates of Buckingham Palace and on park lawns in front of Kensington Palace where she had lived. They grew into fields and then into vast savannahs. Trees and lamp-posts were ringed with candles. Notes, teddy bears, gifts, photographs and hand-written verses of poetry were pinned to railings. Churches which had stood virtually empty for years were filled with people on their knees praying for her soul. It was a spectacle that was both childish and moving, part Beatlemania, part national mourning and decidedly un-British. In its spontaneous desire to honour a woman who had died at the side of her playboy lover, a nation that had always prided itself on its self-control and its reserve threw off its restraints and allowed itself to be swept up in a frenzy of lamentation.

By contrast, the royal family demanded the right to be left to grieve for one of their own in privacy. It appeared they wanted to have it both ways. In the mind of the public at large, it was the royal family who had rejected Diana, isolated her, stripped her of her title as Her Royal Highness, leaving her a princess not in her own right but under sufferance and only for as long as she remained unmarried. But the further they had tried to push her into the shadows, the more potent her symbolic status had become. The royal family were dealing with a real person. The public were captivated by an emotional icon and in death Diana was posthumously crowned.

The family, gathered in the seclusion of Balmoral, simply did not understand what was taking place over 500 miles to the south. More damagingly, nor did their senior advisers – at least, not at first. The politics of the street was something they regarded with well-bred disdain. They ignored the ever-more frantic messages they were receiving from London and instead sought refuge in the battered redoubt of precedent.