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Diana’s death challenged the Queen and will shape the King

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At ease: Princess Diana during a visit to Shepparton in 1983.

Queen Elizabeth II’s remarkable reign over seven decades has faced many challenges, but few tested the British public’s faith in the royal family’s relevance like the death of Princess Diana.

I arrived in England in my mid-20s on an international adventure a day or two before Princess Diana’s death.

Queen Elizabeth II and Price Phillip view the floral tributes to Diana, Princess of Wales, at London’s Buckingham Palace, following her death on August 31, 1997. Photo: AP

I awoke on the morning of Sunday, August 31, 1997, to saturated media coverage of her and her companion Dodi Al Fayed’s deaths, as well as their driver’s, in Paris earlier that morning.

At the time, I was staying with my brother and his English wife, Derek and Fiona Silby, in the midlands of England.

It quickly became clear that the fateful car accident in the French capital would reverberate much further around the world than the Old Country’s cities and rolling fields.

But what really struck me was how it launched a remarkable outpouring of grief from the British public.

This was grief felt personally for a public figure like I had never seen before in my lifetime.

Diana was known as the “People’s Princess” and had been able to connect with regular members of society like no other in the Royal family in the past, but the level of grief felt, and publicly displayed, still shocked me, and, it undoubtedly surprised the Queen too, who clearly, initially, seemed to fail to grasp it.

It is probably the time in her reign when she was most criticised.

Coincidentally, Derek and Fiona, are visiting Australia now.

“I remember it happening (Princess Diana’s death) because it was a Sunday morning and I got up early and sombre music was being played on the radio and that’s probably what’s happening in England now,” my brother said on Friday morning, hours after the Queen’s death was announced.

“I remember being very upset. It was a shock and it was that she was so young (36),” Fiona said.

“I think it was partly the feeling like, anything, you thought you’d go through life with her in the background.”

In the days that followed Diana’s death, the Queen faced probably the harshest criticism she had received to that point in the 44 years since her coronation in 1953.

As literally millions gathered on the streets of the United Kingdom and other nations around the world, the Queen mostly stayed silent.

An empty flagpole on Buckingham Palace signified the Queen’s persistent presence at Balmoral, the place where she died on Thursday, in Scotland, rather than in the capital, London, which was the focus of the nation’s grief.

“SHOW US YOU CARE”, The Express screamed on its front page above a stony-faced image of Her Majesty.

“WHERE IS OUR QUEEN? WHERE IS HER FLAG?” The Sun begged.

The tabloid reactions were somewhat morbidly ironic given it was paparazzi photographers, known for feeding the tabloids’ sensationalist pages, who chased her car into the underpass where she would meet her end.

After days of silence, on September 5, the Queen addressed the nation from Buckingham Palace.

Her Majesty paid tribute to Diana, describing her as an “exceptional and gifted human being” and of her never losing her capacity to smile and laugh, whether in good times or bad.

“I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others, and especially for her devotion to her two boys,” the Queen said.

It was the start of a kind of modernising of the royal family and a recognition that it had to engage on a more personal level with its people.

I remember travelling down to London for Diana’s funeral and gathering with hundreds of thousands of others in Hyde Park to watch proceedings on giant screens.

Hundreds of thousands of others lined the streets to watch the funeral procession.

“I was surprised about how grief-stricken the nation was,” my sister-in-law Fiona said.

“The grief was raw and the grief was strange for someone we didn’t know.

“People were seriously grieving.

“I remember the sea of flowers and it went on and on and on.”

Year’s later my path would cross with that of the future King Charles III in the outback Australian town of Alice Springs.

Then still Prince Charles, and me still Murray Silby reporter, I would cover his tour of central Australia for the ABC.

During a visit to the School of the Air, and walking just a metre from me, he would quip to me, “Very interesting, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “It is.”

That engagement will have shaped his reign less than the death of his former wife and the controversy that followed, but on that tour I saw a personable, albeit somewhat rustic, figurehead.

It will be interesting watching what approach he brings to the role he has spent 73 years training for, especially given many of his subjects think of the throne as archaic, or that he is simply minding the position until his son William assumes it.