Ten years have passed since Diana, Princess of Wales, died and Britain erupted in a febrile convulsion of grief and anger, but in some ways you would hardly know it.

The tabloids are still spinning breathless tales of conspiracy, cover-up and royal squabbling. “Document that proves Diana was pregnant,” said a recent headline in The Daily Express, nicknamed The Diana Express because of its enthusiasm for even the most tenuous news about the princess.

“Charles hijacks Diana memorial,” The Mail reported on Sunday, in an article about fights over the guest list at the anniversary service, which is set for Friday at noon.

The royal family is still fretting and bickering, still seemingly incapable of getting it right. After being attacked for deciding to attend Diana’s service, Prince Charles’s second wife, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, abruptly announced last weekend that she would stay away after all so as not to “divert attention from the purpose of the occasion”.

And people are still arguing, as they did in that odd, volatile time a decade ago, over Diana’s significance, in life and in death. Was she a naive innocent or a sophisticated schemer? Was Diana an extraordinary woman whose “lifetime of service touched the lives of millions,” or a “devious moron” desperate for attention, as the feminist author Germaine Greer recently described her?

Also, did her talent for drawing people into the dysfunctional minutiae of her life, and the un-British paroxysms of anguish that followed her death, change the psyche of a nation known for making repression a virtue?

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