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| Illustration: Sébastien Thibault |
Diana showed that we need emotion,
but it’s had a downside
Matthew d'Ancona
Monday 28 August 2017 06.00 BST
The princess helped put feeling into our politics, but as we’ve seen from Brexit to the rise of Trump, this has too often taken the place of reason
‘I
walked through the crowds in St James’s, and realised this was no longer a country I truly understand.” So a former member of John Major’s cabinet lamented to me 20 years ago this week. As the nation mourned Diana, Princess of Wales, makeshift shrines sprang up all over the country, and a sea of flowers outside Kensington Palace transformed a London park into something closer to Lourdes.
At the time, I wrote that this period of bereavement was Tony Blair’s Falklands war: a terrible event that nonetheless dramatised all he hoped to achieve in his premiership. I recall ministers talking without irony of the transformation of bureaucratic government into the “therapeutic state”. Struggling to keep up, the Tories held a “bonding session” at Eastbourne, at which they were told to embrace “emotional intelligence” and to master a new kind of politics addressed not to the forensic conquest of their opponents but to the anxieties and dreams of the voters.
I was at that gathering. Let us say that not all of the then opposition leader William Hague’s troops welcomed the plan. But some did, intuiting that the party would have to modernise dramatically if it was to win again. In the years following Diana’s death, political discourse became a little more elastic, porous to emotion, and sympathetic to human frailty and vulnerability. And this was emphatically welcome.
Which is not to say, of course, that all harshness was suddenly drained from the system. Wherever you stand on the wisdom of fiscal conservatism, there has been nothing touchy-feely about seven years of austerity.
All the same, the idiom, scope and practice of mainstream debate have changed beyond recognition. Diana’s own sons have done her proud by speaking so openlyabout mental illness and eating disorders, helping to sand away the vile stigma that still clings to these afflictions. Two decades ago it would have been unthinkable that a Tory prime minister would legislate for marriage equality, or initiate laws to entrench transgender rights.
It would be idle to attribute this cultural shift entirely to the influence of a single, deceased member of the royal family. That is not how the mulch of society changes. But the impassioned aftermath of her death was a bold punctuation mark in a new national narrative that favoured disinhibition, empathy and personal candour.
Yet, just as any era does, this one has its own pitfalls and pathologies. It was Arron Banks, the businessman behind the Leave.EU campaign, who correctly explained last year’s referendum outcome: “The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You’ve got to connect with people emotionally.”
What the Brexit camp grasped was the absolute need for emotional resonance – an appeal that would give visceral energy to a choice that might otherwise seem arid and technical. As Britain bobs on a sea of position papers, embarrassingly uncertain of its course once we leave the EU, the slogan “take back control” rings ever more hollow. But it sure did the trick 14 months ago.
No less effectively, Donald Trump communicated a brutal empathy to US voters, basing his claim to the presidency not upon his credentials, decision-making skills or detailed proposals, but on an unchained talent for anger, impatience and the casting of blame. He slammed his fist into the American heart and demanded the electorate’s attention. Emotion eclipsed reason – and look what we all got.
Diana died seven years before Facebook was founded, but the popular global reaction to her death foreshadowed a world in which it became possible to claim a very strong emotional connection with a person you had never met. Digital technology has grafted absolute instantaneity on to the old habits of folklore, heroic legend and the cult of the saints. One can scarcely hold Diana responsible for the Kardashians – but they are conspicuous among her legatees.
The bequest of the “people’s princess” was to help legitimise the role of feeling in the public space. But, like all bequests, it needs to be nurtured with care. What motivated Diana was a sense of responsibility to those who, through sickness or suffering, lacked a voice. When she shook the hand of an Aids patient in 1989 – the year after section 28 was passed, banning local authorities from portraying gay relationships in a positive light, and 12 years before the age of consent was equalised – she made a necessary challenge to pernicious stereotypes. Ditto in her open discussion of bulimia.
But not all feelings are healthy, or honourable, or worthy of amplification. Those who marched through Charlottesville were bursting with emotion: that was the problem. The Islamist radicals who mow down pedestrians are not short of sentiment. We inhabit a world in which institutional restraints are withering, feeling trumps fact, and social media only reinforce our prejudices and instincts.
One need not sign up to every line of Paul Bloom’s recent book Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion to agree with his central contention: “While we are influenced by gut feelings such as empathy, we are not slaves to them.” At least, one hopes not. The central battle in our populist age is between emotion and reason, and our future depends on the balance between the two.
God forbid that we should return to the stiff upper lip and the repression against which Diana fought. She was the queen of the realm of feeling, and encouraged all to roam that terrain without shame. That was a singular achievement, worthy of commemoration. But never forget that this realm has many dark thickets too.
• Matthew d’Ancona is a Guardian columnist
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