She herself longed to reign triumphant against her in-laws as a queen in people’s hearts

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 Caf?own the road there’s a neo-realist painting of the Princess and the caf?wner, 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 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.