Diana: Day the people wept for their princess

A midnight car crash in Paris, exactly 20 years ago, had set in motion a chain of events that changed not only the Royal Family but Britain itself.

Yesterday, the skies darkened once more as the sons Diana, Princess of Wales, left behind, marked the anniversary of her death.

Beneath torrential rain, in the grounds of her former home, Kensington Pace, Princes William and Harry looked out on to a memorial space planted in her honour with white flowers.

Outside the gates, well-wishers began leaving floral tributes and pictures of the princess, just as they had two decades earlier.

Time had softened the shock but not the sadness.

It was at 11 on Sunday morning that Tony Blair, the prime minister of 16 months, emerged from 10 Downing Street to confirm the death of the people’s princess, as he called her.

Diana had died at four that morning, three-and-a-half hours after she and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, had set off from the Ritz Hotel, their limousine pursued by paparazzi.

A few hours later, the Kensington Palace grounds were a sea of flowers, and sorrow.

The emotion was still palpable yesterday as William and Harry, accompanied by William’s wife, Kate, the standard-bearers for a new generation of royals, sheltered under umbrellas.

The princes had spoken candidly about their mother on TV. “There’s not a day that William and I don’t wish that she was still around,” Harry said.

He was 12 when his mother died, William 15.

At her funeral, millions wept for them as they walked behind the horse-drawn gun carriage that transported the coffin through London.

“I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances,” Harry said. “I don’t think it would happen today.”

The Queen and Prince Charles had issued only a short statement in the immediate aftermath. The tragedy, and the reaction to it, marked the end of reverence, a wake-up call to the family and the way it conducted its relationship with the nation.

William has said he felt “very angry” about his mother’s death. “I find talking about my mother and keeping her memory alive very important,” he said.

There will be no public service today. The princes chose to mark the date of her birth, not her death, and on July 1 they attended a small, private service to rededicate her grave, on a private island in a lake at her family’s ancestral home at Althorp House, Northamptonshire. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, officiated.

The Diana Award, a charity established to promote the princess’s belief in the positive power of young people, is staging a year-long celebration, and in May, William and Harry appeared at St James’s Palace to present its inaugural Legacy Award.

Diana’s statue will be erected, possibly later this year, in the public gardens of Kensington Palace. The brothers said: “Our mother touched so many lives. We hope the statue will help all those who visit to reflect on her life and her legacy.’’