![]() We channeled our sorrow in public, and to extremes, as the streets surrounding her Kensington Palace home teemed with flowers. Where once we might have buried our feelings beneath a reflexive reserve, with Diana we felt entitled to let them out into the open. The mourning of Diana marked a sea change in how Britain exhibited its emotions. The seismic shock of her passing caused immense ripples of grief across the country that lasted to her funeral and beyond. Just a few months after Blair took power, Diana–by then divorced from Prince Charles–met her end. It was a generational handover the country went from being governed by the gray patricians of postwar Britain to being led by a new, youthful establishment ready to usher in the 21st century. Its place would be taken by New Labour and Tony Blair, who would become in May 1997 the youngest Prime Minister in almost two centuries. The ruling Conservative Party that gave us Winston Churchill, Harold McMillan and Margaret Thatcher was then coming apart, and the political establishment with it.
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