Minette Martin ( Sunday Telegraph)

To me the most startling and disturbing thing about the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, has been the public response to it. I cannot share this response. It fills me with disquiet.

I watched television with amazement and distaste, and sometimes with anger. At moments I have felt like an alien in my own country. I suspect that there are many people who feel the same. Yet somehow, and this is even more disturbing, it is not permissible to say so.

When I say the public response to Diana’s death I don’t mean simply the spontaneous sadness that almost everyone must feel in one way or another. I mean the public response as it has been distorted and exaggerated and imposed on us by the media and by those who have tried to use Diana’s image for their own ends. From the very first moments we have been crudely manipulated. Immediately after Diana’s death, public figures began to appear on television in a nauseating beauty parade of self-regarding tributes, each using the occasion as a free public relations opportunity.

The outright winner was, of course, Tony Blair. With broken voice and trembling lips, his performance was so hammy that it was, almost, funny; but what is not funny is that this overblown emotional display did him enormous amount of good politically. He was, consciously or not, exploiting the powerful emotions that surround the image of Diana, and also her own well-known insistence on the importance of expressing emotions, to recommend himself.

I hate and fear this kind of manipulation, most of all when it is instinctive, as I believe it is with Mr. Blair. In expressing these feelings, in raising the emotional stakes in this way, he was effectively laying claim to her; and in calling her " the People’s Princess" laying claim to the People as well.

Since then we have heard much too much about " the People". Commentators solemnly discuss what the "People" feel. I cannot imagine what this is based on a few vox pops, possibly chosen by other media people and what the taxi driver said. And then anyone who doesn’t feel as " The People" are supposed to feel is "out of touch", and therefore wrong, not to mention lost in the political and commercial wilderness. One must respond with "the People". The Queen herself has been castigated for failing to understand what " the people" feel and therefore for failing to gratify " the People’s" feelings. " Show us you care" Ma’am" shrieked the tabloids

The Queen was actually forced by what we are supposed to believe is public opinion to come out and show herself, and to display her unhappy grandsons to the curious gaze of " the People". Then she gave an address in which it must have been very difficult for her to speak truly from the heart as she was required. But she had to speak, truly or not. "The People" insisted we were told. "The People" had a right to it. Then " the People" were prepared to "forgive" her, according to one man standing outside Buckingham Palace after her return. I found it sickening,

Who decides, I kept wondering, what, " the People" want, or indeed, who they are? In truth there is no "People", only people. (GW says " Remember Margaret Thatcher’s ‘ there is no such thing as society’ and how she was reviled?") And they feel all kinds of different things.

There is no single response to Diana’s tragedy. There must surely be some – perhaps many – who sympathised with the Queen’s first response: in a very difficult situation there was a great deal of honesty about her silence. It is true that it was poor public relations, but then not everything in life is a matter of public relations, least of all a death in the family. Yet we – even the Queen herself – seem to be conceding to the news machines and the opinion-formers the right to tell us what we feel and what we ought to feel and indeed the right to shape our feelings.

The great altars of flowers and cuddly toys wouldn’t have reached such staggering proportions I believe, if they had not been so widely shown on television with approving comments. Television made laying a bunch of flowers seem like the proper thing to do, to people who hadn’t at first thought of it, and then it became a media event.

In such ways our responses become suspect; it is no longer clear what we truly feel, and so in the end it is decided for us what " the People" feel. Our grief may be shared, but let us not be told how to express it.