The retelling of Diana’s story has revealed the Britain we once were | Zoe Williams

Sincerity, solemnity, respect: after the initial tumult of Diana Spencer’s death died down, the breast-beating and the wreath-laying, those were the traits that defined her public memory. This was the tone that shaped the news, and which has become her chronicle – a beatific figure, complicated by beauty and circumstance (but in the best way), who occupied the nation’s heart. She stole it. We loved her.

If the week immediately after her death was unforgettable for its mass hysteria, the lasting peculiarity of her life is that unanimity. There is only one way in which she is allowed to be remembered. It is almost as if a child had died, or a saint.

In preparation for the 20th anniversary of Diana’s death, on 31 August, documentary makers raced to produce the definitive portrait. ITV’s Diana: Our Mother, Her Life and Legacy, featured reserved and curiously unenlightening interviews with Princes William and Harry. ABC’s The Story of Diana was notable only for the involvement of Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer. Channel 4’s Diana: In Her Own Words generated not much interest beyond the ethics of broadcasting what were putatively private tapes, whose intimacy was not intended for public consumption.

The far more interesting story of Diana’s death as a moment in our cultural history is in the forthcoming BBC drama Diana & I. Because whether her death changed Britain or merely cracked open changes that had already happened but gone unremarked, there is no question that this was a different country after it. I interviewed Simon Curtis, who conceived the drama (written by Jeremy Brock). As he put it: “I so remember that week as a vivid moment in time, where you think, ‘Ah, so this is the country I live in now.’ That was the end of the cliche that Britain is the stiff-upper-lip country, with everyone wailing all over the place. There was a real feeling of revolution in the air.”

That week always goes by the shorthand “mass outpouring of grief”, which was true but doesn’t convey the anger in the air. It is extraordinary to think of it now, but there was a huge amount of fury felt towards the Queen.

She didn’t leave Balmoral fast enough to come to London. As a result there was no flag flying over Buckingham Palace, since she wasn’t in residence, and so it couldn’t fly at half-mast. But there wouldn’t have been one anyway. It would only do so if the monarch had died, and since monarchical succession is instantaneous, the monarch is never dead. This all looked pretty straightforward to the Queen, I imagine. She has rules about this kind of thing. But the bitter outrage was incredible.

I was working at the London Evening Standard at the time, on Kensington High Street, watching the steady procession of people on their way to weep near Kensington Palace. Brian Sewell, the late columnist and art critic, turned around a piece the day after Diana died, saying things about her that were really not unusual, even if rarely spoken: that she traduced the dignity of the aristocracy, chose luxury over duty, bling over value (he probably didn’t use the word bling), emotional incontinence over reserve, that she lacked the modesty and self-abnegation that made high privilege bearable, ending on the misogynist crescendo that she was nothing more than a “brood mare”.

Of course it didn’t make it into the paper, but the image I have much more clearly than the Queen’s limousine or the rows of garage flowers is of a features editor holding Sewell’s foolscap by its very corner, as though it were so dangerous and contaminated that it shouldn’t even be found in the building. I thought she might burn it.

Cynicism was banned in that period, and even scepticism was a bit dodgy. The view that this was a sad bereavement for two children but there was no great lesson to be learned except that you should always wear a seatbelt was utterly heretical. The consensus from the media was bizarre.

The political impact is hard to quantify but undeniable: Tony Blair’s “people’s princess” speech turned him into a presidential figure, shepherding the nation through its tumult because he understood it in a way that its ancient institutions – the royal family – no longer did. There was a sense of a nation in adolescent rebellion, with the royals as parents, Blair as the new boyfriend – you don’t understand who we really are, and you never have; only he understands us.

A private poll by the Labour party at the end of that September put his approval ratings at an astronomical 93%, making him the most popular politician in British history. Again, the unanimity was eerie – Diana was the queen of hearts; Blair was the king.

It was either the beginning, or just the first outward sign, of global emotional contagion, the collective loss of restraint reaching across borders and institutions. Two Slovakian tourists were sentenced to a month in prison for stealing teddy bears and flowers from Westminster Abbey. These were items left on the street, so there was space, legally, to ask what the distinction is between “stealing” and “picking up”. Nevertheless, according to the Slovakian government, the theft was “despicable and unforgivable”. CNN reported at the time: “In a demonstration of the country’s mood, Piras [the offender] was punched in the face on his way out of the court by a bystander, who called the late princess ‘queen of everybody’s hearts’.” What exactly do you call that mood, where you demonstrate the depth of your affection by punching a stranger in the face over the theft of a bear?

There were three elements of Diana that came to stand for an altered Britain: Diana as a mother; Diana as a beauty and beacon of human charity (these two things were related – the impact of her work with HIV/Aids victims in particular was all around the imagery of her touch); Diana as the endpoint of emotional openness.

“Whatever people thought of Diana,” Curtis remembers, “it was utterly clear what a devoted mother she was.” Again, it used to be taken as read that mothers love their children. The roar of 1997 was that this wasn’t good enough. We didn’t want maternal love taken as read. We wanted it named and honoured. Diana’s status as a great beauty collided with her charitable acts, as if she were a counterpoint to the world’s ugliness – the landmines, the famines – and you could read it in her face. It was a new immaturity, a longing for a fairytale simplicity where beauty is goodness – in contrast to Prince Charles’s charity work: all institutions and trusts, the unphotogenic business of making a small, practical difference.

Finally, Diana’s personal revelations, about her eating disorder, her cold marriage, were retrospectively idealised, as if any feeling, once spoken, was elevated by its honesty. Again, the casualty was restraint – which was now, by definition, inauthentic.

The interesting counterfactual is not what Diana would have been like, had she lived, but what the culture would have looked like. Was the loss of restraint momentary or permanent? Did we ever retrieve our scepticism, about privilege or beauty or fame or consensus or emotionality? Did it make us more open or more self-indulgent, or neither, or both?

The retelling of that week and that life, even at its most banal, casts one powerfully back to a time when there were things that were never said – and how different it was never to say them.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist