What does Diana mean now?

Still the queen of hearts? Five years on, Deborah Orr examines the legacy and lessons of Diana's death

I was not among the 22 million who watched Diana, Princess of Wales make her return to public life, after a two-year withdrawal, in a Panorama interview on 20 November 1995. I was in the Far East, and had to make do with the generous transcript that was printed the next day on the front pages of The Bangkok Times, which is confirmation, if any were needed, of the impact this conversation made across the planet.

I thought she was a fool to have done such a thing: to have invited once again the gaze of the public into her private existence, to have vilified the father of her children in public, to have further antagonised her powerful, loathsome in-laws. No good, for this vulnerable woman, could possibly come from this.

I was only mildly surprised, though, when I came home to discover that for fellow republicans Diana was now a significant hero, a darling of subversion who could be eventually enlisted, apparently, to bring down the House of Windsor.

It didn't make sense to me. Diana was no republican. On the contrary, she still, after all the trauma she had experienced as a Royal, wanted her first-born to be king. She herself longed to reign, triumphant against her in-laws, as a "queen in people's hearts".

When she died so terribly, it seemed for a time in the hysterical grief and anger that marked her passing that at least she'd got that wish. But just five years on from her awful end, what is being mustered in her memory? A tiresomely predictable dispute over the design for her putative fountain, some trouble-stirring, disgruntled remarks to the media from her brother about how little he sees of his nephews, and a bizarre, belated, surely pointless inquest into her death.

Sure, children play in the Peter Pan playground that was extensively remodelled in Diana's memory in Kensington Gardens. It is a happy place, a lovely place, and there should be many more such places, and without a young woman's violent death to prompt them. Diana would most certainly have liked and approved of it. But it is no place for vigils, for wreaths or for reflection.

Likewise, in the Diana Café down the road there's a neo-realist painting of the Princess and the café owner, Mario, on the wall. She ate here often, the staff remember her, and the waiter says that many people come here and ask about her. When pressed about how many, he says that they get enquiries a couple of times each week. Which hardly seems like an ongoing, evolving discussion.

Her fake Greek temple at Althorp, near the island where her body lies, still receives its visitors, but there's no sense of a focused yearly ritual emerging. In fact, there's no sense of a measured assessment of what her life actually meant emerging at all. She was sweet, she was compassionate, she was flawed, she was beautiful, she was wronged. This is all there seems to be. The debate has moved no further on in five years. Even now, no one quite knows exactly how to handle Diana.

It isn't that people no longer think Diana was significant. But when it comes to working out where her importance lay, and what tangible impact she made, there is no concrete consequence to alight upon.

Diana has not "dissolved, like a Disprin" (to use her own words), not in the least. Look at the recent BBC poll of 40,000 people, which sought the 10 Great Britons about whom the corporation should broadcast a documentary series in the autumn. Elizabeth I and Diana were the only women nominated as being of crucial significance to the history of the nation.

It will be interesting to see what the BBC casts this historical significance as being. Some answers would be a public service indeed, because when it comes to actually pinning down the mark Diana left on the world, there's just a miasma of unresolved sympathy and unfocused conviction.

And while in the poll at least the House of Windsor found itself ousted by Diana once again, it appears to have been fulsomely forgiven for its shabby treatment of England's Rose. For in this same year that marks five years from Diana's death, the matriarchs who connived in the arranged marriage of a callow virgin to their next-in-line have been celebrated uncritically, with reverence and enthusiasm, in death and in life. Many of the same flag-wavers must have lined the streets in 1997, at the funeral of the woman whom the royal mother and daughters came to despise, reject, cast out and sabotage.

Perhaps the same crowds will be lining the streets again quite soon, for the Church of England is signalling now that a wedding between Prince Charles and the third person in his former marriage is likely to be accepted by it. Certainly, Diana's children seem to believe that Charles and Camilla deserve to be happy together. Would Diana herself, had she lived, by now have reached her own accommodation with the woman she called "the Rottweiler"? Who can possibly guess? It has always been hazardous, speculating about Diana.

In the weeks and months after Diana's life and death, many commentators drew conclusions about what her life had meant and what her legacy would be. In her book, Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook The Monarchy, Beatrix Campbell offered a trenchantly feminist, republican discourse, non-committal about the effect Diana's life would eventually have on the feminist, republican debate, but clear that there would be some far-reaching reassessments coming from the public and impacting on a resistant Establishment .

"Britain's becalmed parliamentary politics refused to connect either with Diana's dangerous testimony, which exposed the family discourse of the Royals as alien to contemporary culture, or with the republican feeling to which it contributed," Ms Campbell rightly asserted.

What she could not predict was that this exposure of the Royals as "alien to contemporary culture" would be so easily dealt with – a free pop concert at Buckingham Palace was ecstatically received as the highlight of the Queen's jubilee celebrations, and attributed to "the Diana effect". In this respect, Diana's testimony was not dangerous but helpful, a wake-up call to a royalty so out of touch that it was unaware of how anachronistic it had become.

Ms Campbell goes on to argue that the refusal of the Establishment to connect lay in "the estrangement of parliamentary politics from a discourse scornfully described as mere soap opera when it was actually about the way men, women and children live together – one of the great themes of our time".

Again, Ms Campbell is right to an extent. But in this aspect, the net beneficiary of Diana's testimony has ultimately been Charles. Ms Campbell cites a Mori poll published almost a year after Diana had given her interview to Panorama. It "revealed that more than half the electorate no longer felt that Charles commanded respect – and since respect is all that the Royals command, this was clearly a crisis".

Those days are gone. People see in the family arrangements of the heir, in his relationship with Camilla, and her relationship with his sons, a true reflection of "the way men, women and children live together". In a few short years, Charles has become a man negotiating the complexities of a very modern family, instead of one who married not for love, but for atavism. Again, if the public has learned anything from Diana's testimony, it is that modern royals should should seek personal happiness, without worrying in the least about outdated notions of virgin brides.

"By telling her story," Ms Campbell suggested, "Diana did not create republican sentiment, but she did transform the space in which the public could contemplate their feelings about royalty and republicanism, through the filter of her experience as a woman."

So it may have appeared at the time. But that transformed space, or the idea of its existence, closed up very quickly. Already it seems that the lasting legacy of Diana's life has been little more than the one the Windsors always intended – despite everything, she has done what she was selected to do. Diana, her life, her unhappiness, her celebrity, her death, has ultimately strengthened the standing and the future of the House of Windsor. Her presence in the family, troubled as it was, has still gilded that family by association.

As for Ms Campbell's contention that the Establishment was wrong to dismiss Diana's travails as "soap opera", it was not until much later that it became apparent that many of the early assumptions, in the first year after Diana's death, were little more than this. One of the Establishment's great weapons in silencing Diana was that in those flaws that her admirers loved so much, there was always plenty of genuine, damaging, ammunition.

Here is Julie Burchill, who is not usually anyone's fool, writing in the final chapter of her analysis of the Princess – which was commissioned and written within a short time of the Paris car crash – about Diana's final, fatal, romance with Dodi Fayed. "She didn't need us to love her any more; she was beautiful for her lover, and she got the appreciation she needed from him. We were her public, there purely for understanding and caring about the things she showed us, the things that had to be changed. Loved at last, she had transcended mass adoration," Ms Burchill hopefully surmises.

"She had once needed the media, to carry love to and from her and the masses. But now the media needed her; she was their living and their lives. The man who had freed her from her need for the approval of strangers would not be welcomed."

Ms Burchill, a fan of Diana's, was nevertheless usually fairly clear-eyed in her assessments of the "People's Princess". She argues, for example, that Diana's reliance on lies and deceit "made her more, not less, attractive and admirable to women, if not men. Without her scheming ways she would have been too sweet; it was the dash of lemon in the honey which made her a classic female heroine."

Diana never seemed like a classic female heroine to me. Instead, she seemed at times to be, in part at least, like the person the bad old Establishment painted her up as – a woman with an enormous amount of psychological difficulties, and a need for validation and approval that was self-destructive, and destructive of those around her whom she loved, as well as those she hated.

Maybe the ghastly truth is that we like our "classic female heroines" to be driven by their demons. I wanted her to leave her demons behind, and concentrate on using her great gifts of empathy and communication in the worthwhile, satisfying work she did so well. But this, for so many heartbreaking reasons, Diana was unable to do.

When I first read that Diana had started seeing Dodi Fayed, in a piece on The Telegraph's front page in 1997, I thought quite forcefully: "She's really gone and done it now." It wasn't exactly a presentiment of doom. I just felt that this new alliance of Diana's was too tabloid-friendly, too fishy, too contrived possibly to be true. It would clearly lead to more headlines, more traumas, more trouble. It didn't occur to me that love had much to do with it at all.

The trouble that came was cataclysmic, though, and it was a long time before the narrative as it appeared to Ms Burchill and to a hysterical nation – of two lovers hunted and hounded to violent death by the media – was challenged. The story that emerged, some time after Ms Burchill's tribute was written was even sadder and more pitiful than the dreadful one that had appeared on the surface.

Diana had been in love, not for a brief period, but for a couple of years, not with Dodi Fayed, but with the heart surgeon who had wept quietly at her funeral, Hasnat Khan. Although Diana had been photographed by the press as she watched him operate, they had managed to keep their closeness entirely secret. Yet Diana had seen him regularly, and had met with his family in Pakistan and in London. They had even been out and about together. At Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, in central London, Diana had disguised herself in a wig with complete success.

Mr Khan had broken with Diana only weeks before Mr Fayed had appeared on the scene, and the Princess had appealed to Imran Khan, husband of her friend Jemima Goldsmith, to explain to him that a marriage between an English aristocrat and a Pakistani Muslim could be a success. The meeting between the two men was yet to occur when Diana died.

Worse, it was clear that Diana was "on the rebound" with Dodi, parading him as wounded lovers often do, to make the man she wanted jealous. As for the ghastly, intrusive, fatal feeding frenzy, Diana had been co-operating with it, talking to a photographer and a writer, orchestrating the coverage. She had wanted the pictures to be sensational, and for Mr Khan to see them.

This does not excuse the press for their brutish intrusion and their prurient hunts. Nor does it shift culpability to Diana, who merely acted out an age-old lovers' scenario on a stage that was far too big for her and far too voracious. But it is an uncomfortable reminder that Diana was a celebrity as well as a royal.

The word "celebrity" is one we tend to use to denote someone who is in the public eye. But I don't think it is what is really meant by the word. Fame and celebrity are not quite the same things. Fame is passive, a state achieved when renown becomes widespread and names and notable deeds become broadly acknowledged. Celebrity is active, and brings with it an implication that the fame has been sought and courted, as well as received. When the media confers celebrity on a person, it is signalling that it believes itself to have secured a symbiotic relationship.

Diana achieved fame by her ill-advised marriage, but after an initial period of tantalising and attractive bewilderment, she sought celebrity, too. While part of her simply enjoyed the admiration, another powerful aspect of her personality assured her that this celebrity could be harnessed for doing good.

She is by no means the only one. So many celebrities go down this route now that charities find it pretty much impossible to gain any press attention without them. In this way, personal interventions that seem entirely positive in fact traduce the very values they seek to support. The paradoxical links between celebrity and charity had been forged before Diana came along, for good and for ill, but no one else has ever embodied the cruelty of the trade-off in quite the way Diana did.

It has become a fundamental aspect of the deal that democracy makes with royalty that the fame and privilege conferred by birth is justified in the duty of charitable work and official engagement. Diana was keen to do this when she joined the firm, but for her it was embraced not as one of the royal duties, but one of the privileges. That's why she was so good at it, and why she made the rest of the Royals seem ponderous, however sincere their own charitable efforts might be.

The Royals, as a survival technique, understood that their charitable work had to be projected as a duty and as a solemn undertaking, to be used as a shield protecting their privacy. Diana, in her instinctive use of intimate, personal response, instead invited the media and the public in.

By doing so, she made herself vulnerable, and the rest of the family as well. They were jealous, but also threatened. That's part of the reason why she angered and frightened them so. She was weakening an important bulwark from the inside, and eroding the Royal Family's demand that they be celebrated without being celebrities. The spin and the crowd-pleasing that they now indulge in is indeed part of the "Diana effect". Whether in the end they control it all any better than she did remains to be seen.

With Diana's death, that process was arrested, not just because she was no longer around to continue with the challenge, but also because her awful end made all participants in celebrity culture rather more than queasy.

The trouble for republicans is that none of this has anything to do with the country's constitution, while it has everything to do with its popular culture. The lessons that Diana's tragedy has to teach us are as much about the nature of celebrity as they are about the nature of royalty. As yet, we're not ready to learn them. The Princess is dead. Long live Big Brother.