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Published on April 11, 2008

 The verdict ought to chasten everyone in the victims' families: their deaths could have been prevented. Some of the richest people on the planet couldn't keep them safe. The conspiracy theories that swirled around the inquest obscured the deadly implications of systems disoriented by hype, hysteria, and more money than sense.

Whether the theories were sustained by any evidence was irrelevant; they roused the collective imagination. The notion that the House of Windsor wanted Diana dead may have seemed excessive - but it was thinkable. The royals have form; they've got a history of topping ex-daughters-in-law, ex-wives, unwelcome suitors, rivals, priests and critics. Millions thought they'd done the dirty on Diana. The reaction was an unwelcome shock to both the royal family and a craven, royalist parliamentary culture.

The popular diagnosis that her marriage was made in hell derived not only from Diana's unprecedented attempt to call a future king to account for his behaviour as a man, but from all the other symptoms that had been allowed by our political culture to go unnoticed: that the royals still lived by the ancient lore of droit de seigneur, patriarchal primogeniture, and anti-Catholic sectarianism, not to mention tax-dodging.

The royal family had depended on daughters-in-law to bring their dull lustre into pleasurable public scrutiny. But then their behaviour towards their daughters-in-law, in life and in death, provoked a swell of republican sentiment and inchoate distaste unseen in Britain for a century. Despite their brittle decorum, the royals are inflamed by visceral jealousy that is personal and political. These people, as I once wrote, have love and hate tattooed on their tiaras.

Paparazzi won't stop

In case you wondered exactly how low in the public's estimation are the people who feed their habit for celebrity photographs, a jury in London has provided the answer. They rank alongside drink-drivers who kill.

More than 10 years after the event, the British public finally gets to hand out the blame for the death of the most famous woman in the world. The paparazzi and the driver are guilty. The passengers who didn't wear a seatbelt are innocent. So will this verdict bring an end to hyper-aggressive photography? Hardly. The interval between Diana's death and the inquest has not seen a falling off in paparazzi pictures.

The one sector of the print media bucking the downward trend in advertising revenue is the celebrity magazine. Diana's death in Paris was almost incidental to this growth. Los Angeles, the biggest celebrity city in the world, managed to keep journalists and photographers at bay until the international market finally broke down the door at the start of the 1990s. Splash, set up by Brits, brought red-top professionalism - or ruthlessness - to Beverly Hills. The money followed. Last month, a Splash photographer, Nick Stern, quit with a troubled conscience over the pursuit of Britney Spears. But the global market for paparazzi pictures is unlikely to be dented by occasional attacks of self-doubt by the photographers themselves, any more than it is by inquest juries. There may be one thing that will change it, and that's stars selling photographic access to their lives.

If the rights money goes high enough, and the deals brokered get enough riders, then it may well begin to squeeze out the paparazzi more effectively than a jury's moral censure. 

 

BEA Campbell & Adrian monck

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