The week after Princess Diana died in September 1997, Mary Francis, then an aide to Queen Elizabeth II, returned to Buckingham Palace for the first time since the Paris car crash that had killed the young royal and devastated Britain. “I can remember just being struck by the huge banks of flowers, the huge numbers of people, and almost total silence,” she tells Newsweek. “A very,” Francis pauses, “almost threatening combination.”
If the public outpouring of emotion for the ex-wife of the Prince of Wales was alarming to a backroom functionary in the royal household, it’s hard to imagine how it must have felt to those at the center of the story: Britain’s monarch and her husband Prince Philip; Diana’s ex-husband and Britain’s probable next king Prince Charles; his and Diana’s sons, the princes William and Harry.
In the days after the death, the family had been mercilessly dragged in the media for initially remaining ensconced in mostly private grief at Balmoral, their Scottish residence, rather than leading the public mourning in London.“This was primarily a family that had been struck by a personal tragedy, especially for the grandchildren [of the queen], and so that was the first reaction,” says Francis. “But I think that the family were somewhat slow, perhaps, to recognize the need to step forward in their public role of showing leadership for the country in its grief about the death of the princess.”
Nowadays, Britain’s royal family is seen around the world as a prime example of keeping a traditional institution relevant—of communications acumen and smart branding. But in that week 20 years ago, it was possible to imagine a very different future. Five years earlier, in a speech at the end of 1992, the Queen looked back on what she called an “annus horribilis,” marked by a fire at Windsor Castle (which she mentioned explicitly), and the initial separation of Diana and her son (which she left to the audience to imagine). The intervening years had seen an unending media scrum as tabloid papers fought to publish more and more lurid details about the Prince and Princess of Wales and their separate lives and relationships. Then in 1997, Diana’s passing unleashed a daily barrage of press vitriol.
“For the previous number of years, five plus years, [the royals] had spent their time just basically burying their heads in the sand,” says George Pascoe-Watson, a senior partner at the PR and lobbying firm Portland Communications who at the time was working for Britain’s loudest and most influential tabloid, The Sun. “Princess Diana had by that time split from Prince Charles,” says Francis, “and had set up a sort of rival court in a way, doing things in a much less formal and stuffy way, as it seemed to people.” Before 1997, “there was a recognition I think in Buckingham Palace that the royal family were seen as a bit remote, a bit out of touch with modern life and that changes were needed.” But, Francis says, “[Diana’s] death was the catalyst that kind of demonstrated that this wasn’t just a theoretical exercise.”
When changes came, they were incremental, tactical, and often invisible to the outsider. There was no revolution in the heart of the palace. But a close observer would have noticed stirrings in the near-thousand-year-old institution. One of the more tangible was the creation of a new role, the Communications Secretary, filled for two years from 1998 by a PR professional on secondment from the energy company Centrica, Simon Lewis. “The idea was to have a strategic communications expert in the palace, who wasn’t just focusing on the day to day…
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