THE HEART OF THE GRIEVING

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Every so often the public surprises an established class by a great display of public grief for a figure who has died. The funeral takes on the quality of a demonstration. One such occasion was the funeral of Cardinal Manning--an unlikely public hero, you would think, if you read about him today: the old Harrovian Archdeacon of Chichester who converted to Rome and became a man who in his rigid religious orthodoxy was almost more Catholic than the Pope.

But Manning was a political radical, and when the dockers went on strike, causing the possible ruin of themselves and their families as well as disrupting trade on an unparalleled scale in 1889, it was Manning who intervened and eventually settled it. A "toff" had never shown the common touch this way in English public life. And it was to this the public responded. He had the largest crowd at his funeral of any figure in the 19th century--bigger even than Queen Victoria's. People queued and stretched all the way from the Brompton Oratory to Kensal Green.

The novelist Colette was a very different figure. Indeed, her private life was so irregular by Catholic standards that the church forbade her a Catholic funeral in Notre Dame. The French government, sensing a public outcry, responded with the unprecedented gesture of giving sexy, wild, outrageous Colette a state funeral.

Princess Diana's funeral was of this order. Of course it was a spontaneous outburst of grief for a much loved young woman who died too soon and with hideous violence. But if it was also something of a demonstration, it was not necessarily a demonstration of anything except howling grief.

Journalists are paid to have opinions, and so they have tried in the past week to make this demonstration articulate. They have tried to say the crowds that have gathered in London to mourn the Queen of Hearts arrived there, like the followers of Wat Tyler in the Peasants' Revolt, with a list of articulate demands.

One of the ideas that such clever journalists have tried to put into the mind of the mob was that this was some kind of demonstration against the royal family. The monarchy is under threat, say the pundits. The crowds loved Princess Diana's common touch. Unless the Queen can adapt herself and become more like Princess Di, then the monarchy will crumble.

Before Her Majesty starts acting on this idea, we should earnestly advise her to pause and think. Maybe if she exercised each morning at the Chelsea Harbour Club, Her Majesty would rate higher in the popularity polls--but I somehow doubt it. Maybe if the Queen came on telly to say how difficult she had found married life with Prince Philip, she would win many admirers, but again, I rather doubt it. Maybe if she had an affair with an army captain, and then a rugby footballer, and then the son of an Arab shopkeeper, and if she spent her last day on earth in Paris shopping till she dropped, Her Majesty would become an icon. But again, perhaps not.

The point is that no one really wants the royal family to be even remotely like our late beloved Princess Di. We should be horrified and amazed if any member of the official "firm" behaved as Di has done over the past five years. Nor would it be possible, without some constitutional problems, for the Prince of Wales or his sons to adopt good causes in quite the way that Di did.