He will go over the heads of the activists which in this case are

He will go over the heads of the “activists”, which, in this case, are the institutions or vested interests that prove inimical to change, to the broad mass of the people for their support The taste of the masses can be fickle In the remoter past, it has been deeply anti-royal. But the growl of workers’ approval mixed with applause which I heard after the broadcast of the Queen’s address among men employed on construction work at the Palace of Westminster, suggests that Mr Blair is pitching it perfectly.And with the mob on his side, the opportunities are practically limitless. Calvin Coolidge once said that “the only difference between a mob and a trained army is organisation” New Labour has shown that it has the organisational skills. Already, on the Mall last week, the out-of-towners clutching their flowers in the condolence queue were calling themselves “Diana’s Army”. Pamela Methley, aged 65, of Ilford, Essex, told the Times: “Diana’s Army has forced the Royal Family to retreat”. For Diana, you could equally read Mr Blair.The first big test of New Labour’s surge of support will come this week and next, in the referendums on devolution in Scotland and Wales.

Ministers, champing at the bit to get back on the campaign trail today, find it difficult to work out how the Diana week will play on the doorstep “We haven’t a clue,” confesses one middle-ranking minister. Privately, they hope that the image of Mr Blair and his Government, as the good guys who did what Princess Diana would have wished, will bolster the faltering “yes” vote north of the border on the second question in the referendum about tax-raising powers for a Scottish parliament. The devolution strategists still believe that they will get a double “yes” in Scotland, creating a bandwagon effect in Wales a week later.Beyond that, what endless vistas stretch out for the People’s Party, who brought you the People’s Budget, and now the People’s Funeral! The People’s House of Lords is promised already, with abolition of voting rights for hereditary peers. What would go better with that than a People’s Monarchy, attuned to New Labour’s vision of the 21st century? The only problem is that all this has happened so quickly and so unexpectedly that nobody knows quite what it would look like.. Flash photographs, long lenses, fast bikes, satellite transmission – we think of press intrusion as something quintessentially modern. But although the technology may belong to the last 30 years, the phenomenon itself is over two centuries old. It was created by the simultaneous birth of the gutter press in the 1740s and the rise to stardom of actors and actresses on the London stage.

The singers, actresses, and actors of the mid-18th century were the nation’s first pop-stars and national celebrities, and although they actually met their public no more often than their modern counterparts, the people, through prints, popular biographies, and stories in the press, felt that they knew and understood them. “The public very well knows that my life has not been a private one; that I have been employed in their service,” wrote the wily old actor Colley Cibber in 1740. He was disingenuous, knowing that, far from being slaves of their fans, actors nurtured their stardom, feeding stories to growing numbers of periodicals and writing sensational autobiographies.
Encouraged by the success of this new gossip, reporters began to pay and be rewarded for scraps of scandal. By the 1750s they had turned their attentions to a new set of public players: the aristocracy. It was more risky to expose aristocrats than actors, but by then a new way of thinking about character and personality – “sensibility” as it was called – had swept through the reading public.

Sensibility stressed the importance of feeling and domestic behaviour in the understanding of character. It appealed particularly to women and justified a new interest in the private lives of public figures, legitimising the fascination that readers already had for scandal and romance. Editors, then as now, and gesturing to this new theory, could piously claim that exposing the private activities of those in court or government was in the public interest, well aware that in fact romance and scandal sold newspapers.Henceforth no aristocrats, particularly if they were also politicians, courtiers, gamblers, or womanisers, were safe. The pursuing photographers insist that by the time he had entered the Cours Albert Premier, half- a-mile away, they had been scattered 100 or 200 yards behind A number of witnesses backed up their story. He turned on to the faster roads along the right bank of the Seine heading west, very rapidly indeed.