It wasn’t just the millions of mourners who had to be placated, however. There was also the more intimate problem of the Spencers to deal with. Lady Jane and Lady Sarah were willing to fall in with whatever plans formulated by the royal family and Jane’s husband, Sir Robert Fellowes. Their brother was not. Charles Spencer, who had succeeded their father as the ninth Earl in 1991, had what might best be called an ambivalent relationship with his famous sister and the two had seen little of each other in recent years. As the head of the Spencer family, however, he claimed the right to have a say – and a decisive one at that – in the funeral arrangements.

Even without his intervention, there were plenty of complications. The royal family is swaddled in ceremonial rituals supposedly drawn from the mists of an ancient past. Most, in fact, are of much more recent fabrication and few pre-date the Victorian era when pageantry became an imperial art form. But this ability to invent a rite to fit the occasion had withered along with the Empire which spawned it. Precedent had superseded improvisation, and by now the House of Windsor and the bureaucrats who serve it had become trapped in the entanglements of their own rules. Without an example to turn to, they had no clear idea of how to honour a princess they had expelled from their fold.

The only model they had available was the one that had been devised for the Queen Mother, and it was in desperation that the funeral committee was reduced to plundering the plans she had so carefully laid for what would be her own last great state occasion. As the last person alive with any experience of organising such an event, following the death of King George VI, she had spent several years checking every detail, down to where the soldiers would be positioned. Without an alternative, this became the template for Diana’s funeral. Britain’s last Queen-Empress was understandably piqued at having her own meticulous preparations purloined for a woman who had never been a queen. Along with the rest of her family, she was also nonplussed by Lord Spencer’s interference in what, like it or not, was now clearly a royal event.