Dianniversary

Today is the tenth anniversary of Diana’s death (her tenth deathday if you like). According to Gordon Brown, this should be a public holiday (Diana Day). And Francis Wheen, on pages 154-5 of How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World, recounts how:

Nine months after the accident, the Mail serialised a book by Rita Rogers, the Derbyshire psychic whose ‘extraordinary powers’ had so impressed Diana and Dodi. She disclosed that at her first meeting with Dodi Fayed the previous summer she immediately had ‘a feeling of danger’: she saw a black Mercedes and a tunnel, and ‘felt there was a connection with France’. Extraordinary indeed: only the most mean-spirited sceptic could have wished for some sort of corroborative evidence, such as a letter from Fayed thanking Rogers for the warning about driving through French tunnels.

Ten years ago I was working nights, so I got the early edition of the Sunday Mirror on the way home, in which Carole Malone wrote that she was sick of hearing about Diana (providing some balance to the supplement, which had lots of pictures of Diana in a bikini on a boat in the tropics). Paradoxically, she must have been very upset by Diana’s death (and not just because it meant that she heard a lot more about her).