40 Britain The EconomistNovember 14th 2020
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etflix’s flagshipseries, “The Crown”, has done a fine job of
telling the story of post-war Britain through the prism of the
monarchy. The previous series left viewers in the mid-1970s, mired
in the miners’ strike and the three-day week. The new one, which
begins streaming on November 15th, introduces us to two women
who were destined to change the country in profound ways—Mar-
garet Thatcher and Lady Diana Spencer.
Lady Thatcher made it clear from the first that she was in the
business of changing the nation. Lady Diana Spencer was a bird of
a very different feather—a shy girl who had failed all her o-levels
twice and had no interest in politics. She was brought onto the na-
tional stage for the sole purpose of producing (male) heirs to the
throne. Yet the country is still living with her political legacy as
surely as it is with Lady Thatcher’s.
Princess Diana’s genius was to mix two of the most profound
forces of modern politics—emotion and anti-elitism—into a pow-
erful populist cocktail. She was one of the modern masters of the
politics of emotion, feeling the people’s pain just as they felt hers.
She repeatedly outmanoeuvred Prince Charles during the long
“War of the Waleses” because she was willing to bare her soul in
public. Her interview with Martin Bashir of the bbcin November
1995 is now the focus of controversy, as her brother, Earl Spencer,
claims that it was obtained under false pretences, using forged
documents. Whatever the reason for giving it, the interview was a
masterclass in emotional manipulation. At one pivotal moment
Princess Diana acknowledged that she would never be queen but
hoped that she would be “queen of people’s hearts”.
The princess used her mastery of the politics of feeling to turn
herself into a champion of the people against the powerful—the
“people’s princess” in Tony Blair’s phrase. She patronised charities
that helped marginalised folk such as hivpatients, and kept com-
pany with pop stars and celebrities rather than with the usual royal
waxworks. The most memorable music at her funeral was not an
historic hymn but a song by Elton John, adapted for her but origi-
nally written about another icon-turned-victim, Marilyn Monroe.
Her anti-elitism was directed not at the monarchy’s wealth—
she happily lived in Kensington Palace and received a £17m ($23m)
divorce settlement plus £400,000 a year—but at its stunted emo-tional state. The traditional deal to which royals signed up allowed
them to behave as they liked in private—kings have almost always
had mistresses because they marry for reasons of dynasty not
compatibility—so long as they behaved with decorum in public.
Princess Diana regarded this as humbug.
She succeeded in reconciling the most jarring of opposites. De-
spite being a top-tier aristocrat (her family, the Spencers, looked
down on the Windsors as German carpetbaggers) she was univer-
sally known as “Di”. Her death in a car crash won her a spectacular
posthumous victory against the royal court. It produced the great-
est outburst of public lacrymation Britain has ever seen and led to
widespread demands that the royals should display more emo-
tion, as if the damp cheek had replaced the stiff upper lip as the de-
finition of Britishness. “What would really do the monarchy good,
and show that they had grasped the lesson of Diana’s popularity,”
an editorial in the Independent thundered, “would be for the Queen
and the Prince of Wales to break down, cry and hug one another on
the steps of the Abbey this Saturday.”
Since her death, her emotional populism has threaded through
politics. Tony Blair presented himself as the people’s prime minis-
ter. He championed “Cool Britannia”, surrounded himself with
pop stars and urged his staff to “call me Tony”. The next Conserva-
tive prime minister, “Call me Dave” Cameron—a distant relation of
Princess Diana’s—adopted this combination of compassion-sig-
nalling (hugging hoodies instead of cracking down on juvenile de-
linquents) and studied informality (chillaxing and kitchen sup-
pers replacing previous Tory premiers’ stiffness).
Both men were too responsible to let emotional populism in-
terfere with the affairs of state. Domestic and foreign policy
choices continued to be conducted according to the icy dictates of
reason and evidence. Brexiteers, by contrast, followed the Diana-
script. They appealed to the heart rather than the head; to win their
arguments they used feelings of patriotism and resentment rather
than facts about trade flows. They denounced the elites for trying
to frustrate the wisdom of the people in much the same way as Di-
anaphiles had denounced the Palace for ignoring the people’s
emotions. They turned on the nation’s core institutions—Parlia-
ment, the civil service, the Supreme Court—when they suspected
attempts to frustrate their wishes. They succeeded in defeating the
establishment in much the same way as Princess Diana had, by
claiming to stand for emotion rather than reason and the people
rather than the elite. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has recon-
ciled the opposites he embodies just as she did. A card-carrying
member of the metropolitan elite, he has managed to sell himself
as a man of the people. As she was Di, so he is Boris.
The first series of “The Crown” shows a young Queen Elizabeth
studying Walter Bagehot’s “The English Constitution” under the
guidance of Sir Henry Marten, the vice-provost of Eton, who kept a
pet raven in a cage and addressed the young princess as “gentle-
men”. Bagehot’s great work distinguishes between the dignified
branch of the constitution (the monarchy) and the efficient branch
(elected politicians). Implicit in that distinction is Bagehot’s per-
ception that emotions pose a dangerous threat to the proper con-
duct of politics. The monarchy provides a controlled outlet for
them, thus enabling responsible people to get on with the difficult
task of running the country.
By using people’s feelings as the fuel for her astonishing career,
Princess Diana broke that safety valve. Britain will be living with
the consequences of the emotional populism that she helped to re-
lease for years to come. 7Bagehot A populist in the palace
How Princess Di shaped politics