HER CANDLE HAS NOT SURVIVED THE WIND

Graham Turner on why, in the week when

Prince Charles is 50, his wife's memory no longer threatens him

WHEN LADY Susan Hussey, one of the Queen's longest-serving ladies-in-waiting, arrived at Balmoral from London on the Tuesday after Diana's death, she found it hard to convince the royal household of the intensity and magnitude of the grief which was sweeping the capital.

The royal family were not the only ones to be taken aback by the rum- bling avalanche of public sentiment which seemed for a few desper- ate days as if it might rock the monarchy itself. Lord Charteris, the Queen's most experi- enced former secretary, was so alarmed by their lack of response to the public mood that he telephoned her current secretary, Sir Robert Fellowes. His message was stark and simple: 'Peril, peril, peril!'

Outside Buckingham Palace, Kensing- ton Palace and Althorp there were hill- sides made up of nothing but flowers more than 1,300,000 bouquets. Queues of people waited for up to 12 hours to sign the 43 books of condolence which had been opened up and down the country. Each day, cheques poured into Kensing- ton Palace by the hundreds. There were literally millions of letters and cards.

The extravagant tributes on those cards and flowers — 'Diana, Queen of Heav- en', `Dodi and Diana, Together in Heav- en' — alarmed the buttoned-up mandarins who saw them because they seemed to herald a Diana cult which could dog Prince Charles for the rest of his days.

True believers in the sainthood of Diana were everywhere, ready to lambast anyone who dared to question her immaculate per- fection. Those who remained dry-eyed, who muttered to themselves that the tragedy need never have occurred had she stayed at home with her children, did not dare to open their mouths. A deity had passed away and her spirit ruled the earth.

A little more than a year later, what — if anything — is left of it all? The fever of grief abated with astonishing speed. As the year went by, event after event demonstrat- ed all too plainly a precipitous decline in the ardour of public remembrance. The notion of a Diana cult now seems merely preposterous. The candle in the wind is certainly sputtering, if not quite blown out.

In the spring, a whole clutch of celebri- ties on the organising committee for a Bev- erly Hills fund-raising dinner in aid of the Princess Diana Memorial Fund — John Travolta, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore — simply did not turn up. In August, a walk follow- ing the route of her funeral cortege proved to be an embarrassing and costly flop. Fif- teen thousand had been expected, but only 300 put on their walking boots, leaving the club which had organised the event facing a loss of £25,000.

The last straw, for those who felt the need to keep the grieving going, was the first anniversary of Diana's death. Senior courtiers at both Buckingham Palace and St James's had been terrified that the occa- sion would provoke a recrudescence of Dianamania. They had tried, at somewhat fraught meetings beforehand, to identify possible 'flashpoints'. `We were all very ner- vous,' admitted one. 'It was a very tense week for us.'

In the event, they need not have bothered to hold their breath. There were no 'flash- points' of any kind. At least one of the ITV documentaries about the manner of Diana's death was yet another flop.

By that time, they had also stopped wor- rying about the Memorial Fund. In the weeks after Diana's death, they had kicked themselves for allowing such a fund to pass out of royal control. They were terrified of the Spencers and suspicious of some of the people behind the Fund, believing that they harboured republican sympathies. Could it, they fretted, become an instrument with which to beat the royal family by endlessly perpetuating Diana's memory? Could it become a dangerous competitor for Prince Charles's own good works?

Given these fears, the best-case scenario, so far as they were concerned, was that the money in the Fund should be spent rapidly — perhaps in endowing a hospital — and that it should then be closed down. Both they and the Prince were horrified when they realised that the Fund had a continu- ing life of its own, with substantial funded capital behind it. In midsummer this year, they were still contemplating schemes to haul it back into the royal fold, with Prince William as patron or president. By the early autumn, however, all their fears had evaporated. They were no longer, they said, worrying about the Fund. It wasn't a problem. What they really meant was that, in their view, the potency of Diana's memory was fading so fast that it no longer posed any threat to the Prince's own agenda.

The Fund is far from faltering, but its glory days are over. It has £70 million in the bank and intends to distribute up to £5 million a year to causes dear to Diana's heart, but £50 million of its cash mountain has come from the sale of records, CDs, stamps and Bernie Baby teddy bears, none of which will keep on laying such enormous golden eggs. Donations to the Fund, boost- ed by the anniversary, have been 'averaging a more modest £70,000 a month', but a spokeswoman admitted that they are now levelling out' — she did not know the cur- rent figure. The plans for a Diana memorial in Kens- ington Gardens strike an even more dimin- uendo note. Talk of a 2.7-acre, £10-million flower garden and a 300-foot statue van- ished long ago. Now the committee's spokesmen murmur about an avenue of trees and a national network of children's playgrounds, but betray not a flicker of fer- vour or urgency about even these modest 7 specialise in humiliation, I tell the press about them.' offerings. They certainly do not speak the language of cults or shrines. If there is a lower key than theirs, I have not heard it: `The committee are looking at a scaled- down programme . . . no statues or pic- tures . . . no intention of attracting people not already intending to go there . . . it's a strategy of dispersal for those who do go . . . we can scale it up, down or sideways according to what people want . . . we're taking a long-term perspective . . . may not be decided at the next meeting, whenever that might be.'

Diana's grave at Althorp attracted 140,000 visitors in July and August, but even its own publicists suspect that those numbers were considerably inflated by the constant presence of the media. One of the American television crews which came for four days complained of a sense of 'Diana fatigue', to which an Althorp spokeswoman replied, 'Well, you created it!' In her per- sonal opinion, she added, interest could be waning. She expected the coming year to be 'more realistic'. She made it sound, I said, a bit like Ruanda Urundi. When the cameras are rolling, it is a big story. Once they have gone, it scarcely exists.

So, why has the great tidal wave of grief not led to a Diana cult? Are we, perhaps, less cult-prone as a nation than, say, Argentina, which turned Eva Peron into such an idol? The Memorial Fund has cer- tainly had its hiccups. The idea of a god- dess whose signature appears on margarine tubs tarnished both its and Diana's image. The Al Fayed connection has also added no lustre to her reputation even among those who knew nothing of the foul lan- guage and even fouler behaviour with which she sometimes treated the humblest members of her personal staff.

Essentially, though, the waning of Diana is all about the evanescence of celebrity because that, in the end, is how she was cast. The laws of celebrity are cruel and inexorable. No photo-calls, no image. No image, no fame. No fame, no power. Celebrities do not survive undimmed with- out the oxygen of regular publicity. Lord Dacre told me this week that the extrava- gant anguish which attended Diana's pass- ing reminded him of nothing so much as the frenzy of female grief which exploded when Rudolph Valentino died.

What remains is a memory of her extraordinary gift for empathising with individual people, giving them a sense that they had been visited by magic. For the rest, her name embellishes a children's hos- pital in Birmingham, and the loyalty which she attracted will continue, through her Fund, to comfort children wounded by life's tragedies. But it is her husband who is today's man, her son who will be tomor- row's man, while she, sadly, is now very much yesterday's woman.

Graham Turner, 1998