Diana, the star that time forgot

Five years after her death, it seems as if she belonged to a distant age.

On the evening of August 30 1997, someone I know was in a pub and was told what he considered a decent enough joke about Diana, Princess of Wales, then controversially canoodling on yachts with Dodi Fayed. The jest asked the question: "What's the difference between Princess Diana and a roll of carpet?" and answered: "It can sometimes be quite hard to lay a roll of carpet."

Rising early on the following day, this man took the dog for a walk towards the newsagent and passed a neighbour washing his car. As you do - in this case, as you did - he shared his joke from the local and was astonished when the other man growled: "You bastard!" and lunged towards him with a punch ready. As you'll have guessed, the car-washer had switched on the television news that Sunday morning; the dog-walker hadn't. He didn't know that a car crash in Paris had changed Britain.

It's an important anecdote because it contains one of those bits that history is likely to forget: the way in which Diana went literally overnight from a slag in gags to untouchable icon. It's a measure of the strange mood of that week between the underpass smash and the funeral that I felt it prudent to delete from a piece written then the two paragraphs which now begin this column.

That was contemptible journalistic cowardice, but I'd just heard of a BBC radio presenter being rebuked by an editor for expressing scepticism about a report that Princess Diana's ghost had been seen watching over the signing of her condolence book. If the royal family were thought at the time to be in fear of the people, the media was at least as terrified of committing the number one thought crime in those September days: missing the public mood.

As the fifth anniversary of the princess's death approaches, it seems impossible that either the car-washer, the columnist or the radio editor could have reacted in the way they did. A golden jubilee summer has allowed Diana's ex-mother-in-law - for the first time since 1981 - to achieve parity with her in calls to picture libraries. During the double bank holiday celebrations in the Mall this May, monarchistic fervour seemed entirely to have been transferred from Diana to Elizabeth II. Tabloid editorials accept the possibility of the Prince of Wales marrying Camilla Parker Bowles just 60 months after the pair were being treated by the same papers as more or less accessories to murder.

Next week, the culture secretary will rule on which of two designs for a Diana memorial fountain - one traditional, one modernist - should be built. Next month, Channel 4 screens When She Died, an opera about Diana's death, written for television by composer Jonathan Dove and poet David Harsent. Five years ago, the fountain would have been a news story of fanatical interest to millions and the opera an act of such bad taste as to approach treason. Now both stories seem likely to pass without much fuss.

The Dove/Harsent opera, in fact, now seems rather too sycophantic, being set among the public on the day of her death. Although there are the traditional problems of modern demotic in opera libretti - lines such as "we can't take the car, Doris" sound strange when sung - there are moments of great power: especially from Willard White as a homeless man who sees the events through a TV shop window.

The strangest aspect of When She Died is its effect on the viewer's sense of time. It seems surprising that Blair (seen in news footage) was prime minister then because he still feels like a recent arrival, and yet Diana herself seems to belong to a much more distant age. This forgetting has happened partly because of the fickleness of monarchists and partly because Diana's appeal depended on her immediacy: what she wore and did from day to day. She was often compared to a pop star, but there's no way that her greatest hits - Alton Towers, landmines, Aids hospices - can continue to receive airplay.

If Diana's ex-husband is the biggest beneficiary of Diana amnesia - now able to contemplate a marriage which would once have have ensured a republic - her sons are the greatest losers. Not only has a woman who they knew as both a private and a historical figure now vanished from both realms, but the immediate national grief was the strongest guarantor of their own privacy. As reverential coverage of her goes from the newspapers, it will increasingly be replaced by intrusive reporting of them.

It's good for columnists to reflect on their wrecked predictions. In September 1997, it seemed to me that the royal family would struggle to recover from the loss of their most sympathetic character in circumstances for which they were likely to be blamed. Diana would be Banquo's Ghost at every state occasion, the body under the Buckingham Palace patio. The fact that she has left almost no ghost in public life is a reminder to journalists and historians that we're usually looking at the future from the bottom of a hill rather than the top. If the title had not already been taken, the Diana opera should really have been called: The Diary of One Who Disappeared.