DIARY
TREVOR McDONALD Ihave perhaps rather sadly reached a stage in my journalistic life when I'm very rarely disturbed at home in the middle of the night or in those dark, incoherent hours of early morning. It was not always thus. Time was when, as diplomatic editor, coups in Africa or assassinations in the Americas invariably necessitated calls to the McDon- ald abode. These days when the phone rings unexpectedly late or very early my first thoughts are that some unthinkable disaster has befallen a member of my far- flung family. It's a peculiar affliction of the mind that it should so instinctively turn to thoughts of disaster. Last Sunday's event was different and infinitely more shocking. The voice at the other end of the line just after six was that of my editor. 'Look,' he said, 'Diana and Dodi have been killed in a car crash in Paris.' My spluttering exclama- tions were neither sensible, nor would they make good family reading. The editor ignored them: 'I'd like you to anchor a spe- cial programme this evening and do the Early Evening News as well. See you as soon as you can get in.' I crept out of bed in more shock and confusion than I've ever known in my life.
Downstairs, I turned on the radio and the television and spent the next hour switching channels, shaking my head in dis- belief and not wanting to believe anything I was watching or hearing. More than any- thing, I wished the news and the bitter taste it gave to a bright morning would go away. Journalists boast about being a tough, hard-bitten, even cynical lot, and we learn to cope with the unexpected. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, somehow man- aged to surpass, in the magnitude of its impact on the senses, even the most widely unexpected. What I found most difficult to take in was the awful, tawdry way in which she had died. All that stuff about the car, crushed and crumpled as though it were made of paper, about opening her up, about ventricles and bleeding, seemed much too cruelly mundane and much too ordinary for someone whose life was so extraordinary. A damned car accident, for God's sake! The death of a princess reduced to a motorway statistic! What an unconscionable waste. Even as all the grue- some details began to emerge, something in me still hoped that it might yet be the hoax of all time, that the stunt was dreamt up by Diana to get her own back on the press she had come to dislike and that at any moment she would reappear to proclaim that rumours of her death had been greatly exaggerated. By the time I reached the office, I knew there was no chance of that. The ITN newsroom on a normal Sun- day morning is usually an oasis of calm. Production teams, much smaller at week- ends, arrive early. The main bulletins are in the late evening. The intervening time is relaxed and unhurried. This Sunday was different: the place was teeming. The first thing that struck me was that everyone felt exactly as I did. My colleagues went about their tasks with brisk efficiency but like me they seemed haunted by mind-numbing incredulity. I had met the Princess several times and had always enjoyed her company. I thought she was stunningly beautiful and that she possessed among others one unusual attribute for someone in public life — she gave you her full attention when she talked to you. And she did talk. 'Now we'll have to have a proper conversation,' she once said to me with a glint of mischief in her eyes, when we were left alone together at a function, as I struggled to initiate some appropriate small talk.
ne of my jobs that Sunday morning 0 was to record an illustrated conversation for our special programme that night with Tim Graham, royal photographer emeritus and one who had become Diana's friend. Tim had brought with him a variety of the pictures he had taken of the Princess over many years, ranging from those apparently blissful days at Highgrove with Prince Charles and 'my two boys', as she called the princes, to one of the last he had been invited to take, on the eve of the auction of her dresses. She looked a million dollars and the picture showed her giggling like a schoolgirl. Looking again at a succession of those images, it occurred to me that Diana had never been given the credit she deserved for her humanitarian work. We talked of the time she touched a leper at a hospital in Nigeria, and the doctor's com- ment about the immeasurable worth of that simple gesture, and about her favourite pic- ture in which she is seen cuddling a desper- ately ill Pakistani child. When she met peo- ple with Aids or saw cancer victims or vic- tims of land-mines she made them feel they were special. She huddles up close and in one picture tenderly places her hand on a young girl's face. At moments like those she came close to representing all that is best about ourselves.
The ITN special programme that evening was the most emotionally draining experience of my professional life. The pic- tures of the two young princes on their way to church with their father were cloaked in despairing pain. And then the coffin arriv- ing from France, draped in the Royal Stan- dard — Diana embraced in death by an establishment about which she became deeply ambivalent. Nothing prepared us for the reaction of ordinary people to the Princess's death, and I suppose Bucking- ham Palace must have been a little sur- prised too. Their decision about a one- minute silence on the day of the funeral seemed an echo of the people's will. And will there ever be another occasion in the life of our country when royal palaces are turned into monuments to a nation's sor- row, and when hundreds of thousands of people queue solemnly for up to eight hours to register their sadness at a princess's death? We were not mourning a saint: Diana's life was strewn with silly mis- takes and grosser misjudgments. She could be manipulative. She sucked up to the press when it suited her and then excoriated their attentions. She was fallible. But aren't we all? For most of her life Diana appeared, despite her glamour, her toughness and superstar status, strangely vulnerable, like a desert flower that blooms for a while before it quickly fades and dies. She was vulnerable and entirely human. That is what makes it possible for us to connect with the rhythm of her life and to feel so profoundly the grief of her untimely pass- ing. Perhaps she was destined never to grow old. May she find whatever peace she sought in the company of the angels.
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