If getting there had been fraught, there was still more upheaval awaiting them in Westminster Abbey. Built by Edward the Confessor in 1065, it is the spiritual font of the British monarchy. Kings and queens had been crowned and buried there for almost a thousand years. It can therefore only be construed as an act of calculated revenge for the unhappiness he believed they had caused his sister, that Lord Spencer chose it as the setting in which to deliver a swingeing attack on the family of the sovereign to whom, as a peer, he had sworn ‘to bear true allegiance’.

The press came in for a fierce lashing in his address. ‘She talked endlessly about getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she had received at the hands of the newspapers,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.’

Spencer himself had once been a part of the media he so savagely lambasted. Indeed, he had once been employed by the giant NBC television network in America specifically because he was Diana’s brother. The problems in his own marriage had quickly brought him into conflict with the press, however, and given his anguish and the paroxysm of recriminations it had induced, his remarks were perhaps understandable.

What was far more striking and totally unexpected was his condemnation of the royal family. When he said, ‘She needed no royal title to continue to generate her brand of magic,’ he was referring to the Queen’s questionable decision to strip her daughter-in-law of the designation Her Royal Highness, which reduced Diana once again to the rank of commoner.

His closing remarks were even more barbed. ‘She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry, from a similar fate, and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf. We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair. And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.’