THE death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in Paris in the early hours of Sunday, August 31, 1997, presented a major challenge to the production departments of some of Britain’s finest Sunday newspaper titles. This was perhaps the biggest story any of the journalists involved had ever encountered.

The British public had been transfixed for weeks by the Danse Macabre that had begun to swirl around star-crossed lovers Diana and Dodi al-Fayed.

I was the sports editor of Scotland on Sunday at the time. The first edition of the paper had been safely put to bed by around 10pm and many of us were making plans to drop in at one of two leaving dos that were happening that night for former colleagues on different newspapers. A small team remained in the building until around 2am to update the later main editions of the paper with any breaking news.

At around 1am, I was returning to the Scotsman’s grand offices on North Bridge to pick up my car and head back to Glasgow and decided to look in on my colleagues, obtain an early copy of the paper and check that the changes I’d asked to be made for the final edition had gone smoothly.

I was surprised to see Mark Douglas-Home, the paper’s deputy editor, on the premises. “Thank God you’re back,” he said. I was startled to see this normally unflappable Old Etonian looking slightly perturbed. “Princess Diana and Dodi have been involved in a serious car accident in Paris. He’s dead and she’s seriously injured,” he told me.

The immediate task was to change up the late editions before 3am. We were in the pre-mobile-phone era and as most of our colleagues were out for the night or asleep we had to handle this massive breaking story with a mere handful of journalists. Then, having produced, in the circumstances, a pretty decent front and two picture-led spreads inside the paper we prepared to lock up for the night. Just at that point though, I caught a press agency newsflash on my computer screen which said simply: “Diana dead!” Now the challenge was a greater one: to produce a new eight-page section on the death of a princess before the distributors’ final cut-off point of 8am.

It was then that I witnessed at closed hand the genius of Ian Bell, the late, great newspaper columnist who was then contributing a column to our sports pages. I knew Ian had been at one of the parties and may even have had a few swalettes. But I knew that to have a piece by him trying to analyse and make sense of the life of Diana would lift the quality of our coverage. I rang his home incessantly and finally woke him at around 5.30am. He was not pleased to hear from me. “Can you give us 1200 words on this, big man,” I asked. “Look, Kevin; no disrespect to the lassie and I’m genuinely sorry to hear about her death but I’m not sure I’m your man for this,”

he said. Ian was an avowed supporter of Scottish independence and a republican to boot but I knew he would bring his customary brilliance at capturing the moment and that he would imbue it with intelligence and a sense of perspective. As we were to discover in the following days, a sense of perspective would largely be missing from the nation’s reaction to Diana’s tragic death.

Ian duly delivered his 1200 words – 1204 actually – just minutes before the deadline and his copy, as always, was as clean as a whistle. Of all the articles written in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death none was wiser or more perceptive than Ian Bell’s. What occurred across the UK between Diana’s death and her funeral the following Saturday was more astonishing than her sad and untimely demise. Britain, it seemed, was engulfed by something approaching mass hysteria. There was atmosphere in the country that you could almost touch. I’d never been aware of it before and haven’t been since. It was more visceral than sadness and just less than menacing. In some areas of the country if you weren’t deemed to be sufficiently mournful or respectful you were at risk of being publicly rebuked.

One former editor of a large London newspaper told me that he and his colleagues, who had worked round the clock during the week to provide detailed daily coverage of Diana’s death, were ordered to leave a restaurant. It transpired that other diners were offended that they seemed too happy and were enjoying themselves rather too much.

He was also startled by a card that had been attached to one of the thousands of flower bouquets piling up in front of Buckingham Palace. “Diana, you were our princess. Dodi, you were our pharaoh.” In Scotland the SFA even cancelled an important World Cup qualifier that had been due to be played on the day of Diana’s funeral.

I even felt sorry for the Queen, forced to bow down to the madness when she would have preferred to comfort Diana’s two young sons in the privacy of her own family, as all of the rest of us would have done if it had been one of our own.

Indeed, it seemed that many people were keen to mourn the death of this woman they had never known and who lived a gilded and opulent existence much more extravagantly than they would a close relative.

Throughout that week-long period it was quite astonishing to observe how important a role in the existence of ordinary UK citizens are the lives and conduct of the British royal family. And I began to realise how easy successive UK governments have found it to exploit this family to convey a sense of national unity in the UK. No matter how bad the unemployment figures are or how many children and their families live in poverty, we will never be more than a year or so between a royal birth or a royal engagement or a royal marriage or a royal illness. It seems, many people in the UK are happy to celebrate these more than they might celebrate similar such landmarks in the lives of their own.

Such knowledge is very valuable for UK governments and the corporations and elites that fund them and the media which acts as their Praetorian guard. For they can play the royal card knowing that it will trump any threat of collective resentment at the inequality stitched into Britain’s soul.