Tragedy is likely to do more harm to monarchy

For much of her life as a Princess, Diana courted and manipulated the media. She even negotiated her way out of her marriage through the media and, ultimately, the shape of her divorce settlement. She invited a lot of the intrusion that the media imposed. But not all of it. She did not invite or deserve to be photographed in a bikini when she was pregnant. She did not deserve to have transcripts of her private telephone conversations published in the press. She did not invite or deserve to have photographs of her exercising in a London gym. She did not deserve to be hounded down by packs of photographers wherever she went and whatever her distress. And whatever the details of what occurred in Paris on Saturday night before the crash, she did not deserve that.

But what is most stunning about the behaviour of the press in this whole affair is not all that intrusion while she was alive, not even what may have been the chase, which led directly to her death. It was what happened next. Several eyewitnesses have told how up to 15 photographers swarmed around the car, once it had crashed. How, in almost a frenzy, they shot pictures with flashing lights as two men lay dead in the car, she lay dying and another person lay severely injured. How one of the photographers climbed on the crashed bonnet of the car and pressed his camera through the broken windscreen to get her picture. How several of the photographers jostled and impeded people who had gone to the aid of the dead and injured. How not one of them had the decent human instinct to set their cameras aside and help save a human life.

There is something corrupt in an industry that drives people to such callous avarice. These photographers knew they would be hugely financially rewarded for their callousness and that their peers would praise their "professionalism". That institution, the press, does not deserve the protection it enjoys, nor the further protection it claims. There is no public interest served by the infliction of such harm, nor by the infliction of such further harms that would ensue if it were given more licence.

Of course, privacy laws are required - indeed demanded by our Constitution. Of course, they would not stop all such media barbarity but they might curtail it. It should be done.

BUT the significance of Princess Diana goes beyond the media. In his book, On the Eve of the Millennium, Conor Cruise O'Brien suggests that the destabilising of the British monarchy could have disastrous consequences not just for Britain but for Western civilisation. His idea is that society is held together by a very brittle thread, which, if broken, could unravel the quilt of civilisation. It is part of a general apocalyptic vision of the future of humankind. Daft, but perhaps not quite as daft as it first appears.

Another Trinity graduate had a similar idea about 230 years ago. This was Oliver Goldsmith. In Chapter 19 of The Vicar of Wakefield there is a conversation between Dr Primrose and a person whom he assumes is his host but is in fact his host's butler. The butler, clearly, was a splendid fellow.

He told Dr Primrose: "I read all the politics that come out. The Daily, the Public, the Ledger, [ RO] the Chronicle, the London Evening, the Whitehall Evening, the 17 magazines and two reviews and though they hate each other, I love them all. Liberty sir, liberty is Briton's boast and by all my coal mines in Cornwall, in reverence its guardians."

"Then, it is to be hoped," cried (Dr Primrose), "you reverence the King?"

"Yes," returned (the host's butler), "when he does what we would have him; but if he goes on as he has done of late, I'll never trouble myself more with his matters. . ."

When Dr Primrose took issue with this qualified reverence for the King, one of the ladies present and an entertainer berated him for being an enemy of liberty, a friend of tyrants. Dr Primrose replied that he was an avid devotee of liberty and it was precisely for that reason that he had deep reverence for the King. For, he argued, liberty was most threatened by a multitude of tyrants. It was only that system of government which allowed for only one tyrant that best preserved liberty.

"I am then for and would die for monarchy, sacred monarchy; for if there be anything sacred amongst men, it must be the anointed sovereign of his people, and every diminution of his power in war or in peace is an infringement upon the real liberties of the subject."

The British monarchy was again in crisis when The Vicar of Wakefield was written in the early 1760s. George III had come to power and he seemed to threaten the revolutionary settlement of 1689, which had established the supremacy of the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament. But Dr Primrose (and Oliver Goldsmith) believed that "it should be the duty of honest men to assist . . .that sacred power".

That "sacred power" seems to be in need of urgent assistance this week in the wake of the death of Princess Diana. When she joined the British monarchy on her marriage to Prince Charles in July 1981, she offered that institution the prospect of modernisation. With her glamour, her enormous popularity and her communicative brilliance, she could have modernised the monarchy and, thereby, preserved it. Instead, she came to compete with it, making it seem more remote, stuffy and heartless.

Now in her death she is likely to undermine the institution further, for it will be blamed for bringing unhappiness and turmoil to someone now more revered than any of her contemporaries. Furthermore, she and circumstances will have bequeathed to her son, William, the future King, a loathing for the media and a distance from the institution of the monarchy.

The United Kingdom is likely to undergo soon a period of constitutional upheaval more traumatic than anything that has occurred since 1689. The institutional linkage between the monarchy and the Church of England seems unlikely to survive another decade. There has been set in train the break-up of the United Kingdom itself with a form of devolution for Scotland that seems likely to lead to independence. Alone among the parliaments in the United Kingdom, the Scottish parliament will be founded upon a popular referendum and thereby will be invested with a constitutional legitimacy which Westminster lacks. There are other destabilising elements to British society, most notably a multi-culturalism that it has failed to accommodate; the naked racism apparent at football matches is an obvious manifestation of this. The deep division over its membership of the European community is a further cause of instability.

If the symbol of the unity of the United Kingdom, the monarchy, is itself to give way, then the defence of the "sacred power" and the prophecies of apocalypse may appear not quite as daft as at first.