Another anniversary of Diana’s death, another scrabble for fresh commemorative material – never easy but particularly challenging now, with the quarter-centenary of the Paris crash arriving so soon after exhaustive searches conducted for what would have been the Princess of Wales’s 60th birthday, last year.
What would the princess look like? That (“still a trendsetter”) was strenuously investigated, along with countless iconic moments and the finer aspects of her legacy (enhanced emotional intelligence in the nation that subsequently fell for Boris Johnson). Her sons’ awkward unveiling of a saintly birthday statue offered further pretexts for a new genre of Diana remembrance, a kind of counterfactual/“what would Jesus do?” hybrid that has yet to be attempted, for some reason, on the late Princess Margaret.
