Diana showed women we could all do it our way - Christa Ackroyd

Most people awoke that Sunday morning 25 years ago to hear she had already passed. For me, the phone had rung shortly after 2am. It was a close friend tending her newborn son who had turned on the radio to hear of the crash in the underpass in Paris. When she called me, Diana was still alive. When it was announced she had died, it was hard to take in. For the whole world.

Within hours the Calendar newsroom was full. It was also sombre. We took out the black jackets and dark suits that in those days were hung in readiness for such events, never expecting they would next be worn for a young mother in the prime of her life. I was dispatched to Sandringham and later to Althorp, her family home. Villagers wept at the gates as though they had lost one of their own. Indeed they felt they had.

Others were sent to London where their overriding memory is of the sweet smell of flowers that piled up outside both Buckingham and Kensington Palace. There was, throughout the country a sense of disbelief, that later turned to a tidal wave of sadness for all she had been through.

Diana was truly a global icon. She still is. That week before that night in Paris, the newspapers had been crammed with photographs of her with new beau Dodi Fayed.

Never had she looked more beautiful, or dare I say it more in control. The photograph of her posing on the edge of a diving board on a luxury yacht is iconic.

She knew the world was watching and gave the industry that had grown up around her what they wanted. It should have been enough, but with Diana it was never enough. She may have stepped back from public life but interest in her, who she was seeing, what clothes she wore, what her future may hold, had never waned.

They used to say a good photograph of her doubled the circulation of a newspaper or magazine and when the hoard of press whose job it was to follow her captured her in a swimsuit as turquoise as the water beneath her, she knew what she was doing. She had been forced to become a master at it. And I would be lying if I said I too hadn’t pored over those holiday photographs and speculated whether she was simply having fun or whether this relationship was for keeps. We will never know.

Within days her life was ended. Diana was 36 years old when she died. More than two-and-a-half billion people watched her funeral. It was broadcast to 200 countries in 44 languages. Thirty-one million people watched it here at home. But the story didn’t end there. These last few weeks documentary after documentary, newspaper column after newspaper column has either been about her or at least mentioned her name. Books have been written speculating that she was planning to leave Britain and make her home in the States.

The infamous tell all documentary with Martin Bashir has come under intense scrutiny as we discovered – and the BBC now accepts – it was gained in ways every journalist I know will find abhorrent by playing on the insecurities that Andrew Morton’s book had already laid bare. Here was a woman set adrift by the establishment. But she would never have gone away.

In recent months her name has been more frequently associated with the sad rift between her two sons once so close, who have both been vocal about how her death impacted their lives at such a young age. But this week’s column will not be about that. It is not up to me to speculate. Instead I prefer to look at what she gave us as young women, what she taught us about how we feel about ourselves. And how she changed the world for the better

Diana changed our opinions about many things. When she shook hands with a patient dying of Aids, she overnight changed the lives of so many people who until that time had been shunned by society. She took her boys to meet the homeless. And yes invited her favourite members of the press along to see but in doing so showed us that we may live comfortable lives but that there are others who need our help and support no matter how they have got there. She smiled at the press and insisted she was not being political and then instantly changed world politics in her campaign against landmines.

With little or no education, she educated us all. She taught so many women of her age, our age, women like me, that we could do it our way and refuse to accept the game plan mapped out for us largely by men. And she taught herself that she was of value, equal value, in a relationship at a time when many women accepted the word of men.

A lot has happened in the last 25 years. But Diana changed so much in less than that and I have no doubt that had she lived she would have continued to do so while expressing doe-eyed astonishment that people were prepared to listen to her when she knew really they were hanging on her every word. She knew where her power lay, with or without an HRH title. It was in using her strengths as a communicator, often without words, to make people stop and listen, even if they had tuned in only to see what frock she was wearing.

Diana would now have been 61. The tragedy of her death, of the death of anyone taken before their time, is that they never get to finally choose what to do and be exactly who they want to be. Diana packed so much into what was a short life. She had incredible highs and devastating lows. I am sure, in her sixties, she would still have been a revelation, to us and to herself.