The Departed Spirit
Tom Nairn on the English Quandary
What was it that departed during the first week of September? Much of the country was not convulsed by grief, although we do not know the proportion that stayed unmoved, or even critical, and perceived the events as a Southern or heartland spectacle. Yet it appears to be true that even among the more detached, many found themselves touched by unsuspected melancholy, strangely coupled to a sense of liberation and change. An inescapable shift was occurring, displayed in unheard of symptoms like the applause in Westminster Abbey, as well as the mountains of flowers and poems.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997
From Keith Flett
The peculiarities of the English which Tom Nairn (LRB, 30 October) focuses on in his post-Diana state of the nation analysis are one thing, but as nothing compared to the peculiarities of Nairn. Thirty years ago Nairn might have reminded us that the 1905 Russian Revolution was led by an even less likely figure than Princess Diana, Father Gapon. It is, however, Nairn’s loose usage of the term ‘revolution’ that rankles. A revolution, even the half-revolution that St Just rightly warned of, must actually change something. If the events around Diana’s death had even resulted in the provision of more cash for schools and hospitals, or had stopped Jack Straw mindlessly implementing Tory immigration laws, then I would have been cheering it on. I can agree with Nairn that the millions who mourned Diana were groping for some kind of change. But he should take his thoughts to some of the foot soldiers of the floral revolution before pronouncing further.
Keith Flett
London N17
From R. V. Ward
Tom Nairn makes heavy weather of the situation arising from the death of Princess Diana. Ever since the Winter of Discontent, public affairs had been conducted in an atmosphere of hatred and malice repugnant to ordinary people, and foreign to the way they go about their everyday affairs. This feeling increased their susceptibility to Diana, whom some saw as a victim of the prevailing malice. Subconsciously they were nurturing an incipient love for her, and the shock of her death brought this to the surface, transformed to a love as irrational and powerful as any one person can feel for another. I experienced it myself, and would have laid flowers had I been living in London, though I had taken no special interest in Diana’s life. I had never felt anything like it before, and do not expect to feel anything like it again. It has not changed my social attitude in any way that I can discover.
R. V. Ward
Holwell, Dorset
From Leonard Pepper
It was good to see grown men crying in the streets and carrying bunches of flowers. For a week the routine of the country was disturbed, which is always welcome. It is probably wise to stop there and not be lured into further speculation. Nairn, however, is summoned onwards. In a pretty conceit he talks about the crowds ‘electing their first president, without bothering to set up a republic first’. In the rest of Europe the passage from monarchy to republic has generally been cataclysmic, and the odds are that if the British monarchy does go, there will have been hard days of some kind leading up to its departure. It is an irresponsible fantasy to suggest that Diana could open the door to a republican future without anything more than a few million flower petals being ruffled. It is equally a fantasy to believe in the Labour Government’s promises of equality without the hardship of a redistribution of wealth, and I liked what Nairn said about Tony Blair appropriating the charisma of Diana. It is just a pity that he has reinforced a presumption which has been flying around since September, to the effect that Britain can be changed by people feeling differently about themselves.
Leonard Pepper
Oxford
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From Walt ‘Bugsy’ O’Brien
If, as a military police clerk and C/I liaison in the US Marines some years back, I were going 80 mph (which is what 121 kph works out to, roughly) through a downtown area with a drunk at the wheel without my seatbelt fastened and hit something really hard and died, I should imagine the traffic cop would have shrugged and called it suicide. Having driven for class-warfare pimps such as American civilian intelligence officials, I can just see the stony stares that young security fellow from the Paras got for reminding Di and Dodi to buckle up, as he was paid to do. Thank God there wasn’t a busload of 15-year-old tourists in their path, coming back from the only night in their ‘little people’s’ lives at the Paris Opera. ‘Candle in the Wind’ is not the appropriate song: better ‘Dead Man’s Curve’ by Jan and Dean. Whatever gave us the idea there was such a thing as ‘little people’ in the first place, if not that era Diana signified and embodied – the Eighties, with its numbing fixation on the lives of the rich and famous and beautiful? Fat chance all this would have happened if she were five feet tall and weighed in at 300 lbs.
The Evil Prince so far has created what? thirty or forty thousand jobs with his Trust, saved London from more Albert Speer-inspired high-rise, turned his back in public on that butchering bastard Idi Amin, and is probably a pretty good CO when he is serving with his regiment. And Tom Nairn is quite wrong about the stiff upper lip being a figment of the imagination (LRB, 30 October). Whether it is a kindergarten teacher like Ms Potts extemporaneously making like Gordon of Khartoum to protect her little charges, or right-minded crowds being trampled by horses for protesting at having to pay to vote (the selfsame issue over which our King, Dr Martin Luther King, was shot: the poll tax), it is a little difficult to think of the English – of whatever ethnicity – as posers or shams when the chips are down. My impression is that the UK is the world’s largest street gang, and when you’re a Jet, you stay a Jet, as the song goes. It is not the Crown’s fault that quiet competence and perseverance have gone out of fashion. Be patient, they are coming back. These new kids are up to the challenge; they have had us as excellent counter-examples. Meanwhile, Nairn’s is the fifty zillionth article I have seen on England’s spiritual death. Either die or get up off the floor and get on with it.
Walt ‘Bugsy’ O’Brien
Barre, Vermont
