Not long after Princess Diana's death, a conference was arranged entitled The Week that Shook the World, a play on the title of John Reed's book on the revolution in Russia that was to shape the 20th century. While there were always those who doubted that the premature death of this single woman would have a sustained impact, in September 1997 they were the minority. Others believed that the unprecedented outbreak of apparent grief was a force with lasting consequences - for the class system and the monarchy at its pinnacle, for media-fuelled celebrity culture and for the way Britain saw itself. A decade on, such ideas seem overblown - a reality that yesterday's anniversary memorial service only underlined.
For Diana's immediate family, of course, her awful death was truly life-changing: her son Harry talked about her yesterday in words that were heart-felt and touching. As well as remembering a woman who by all accounts was warm, those who knew her can take pride in her charity work and her partially successful campaign to restrict the use of landmines. For those who did not know her, however, once the emotional clouds surrounding her death dispelled, she was revealed as someone who had reflected rather than shaped the times through which she lived. Perhaps as a result the commemorations this week are not even a pale shadow of the events 10 years ago.
Where the overspill from Diana's funeral filled Parliament Square, the crowds were thin outside yesterday's Guard's Chapel service. The 1997 sense that the times were changing was stirred when once-loyal tabloids asked the monarch starkly where she was when she was needed. It reached fever pitch at a service where Elton John eclipsed the Windsors, and where Earl Spencer won rare funereal applause for his scarcely coded attack on them. But yesterday there was more decorum, as an establishment guestlist sat through a service with Mozart but little pop. The restoration of the traditional Royal way of doing things may have been hard to envisage a decade ago, but it seems unsurprising now - especially after the popularity of Helen Mirren's sympathetic portrayal last year of the Queen dealing in her traditional manner with the aftermath of Diana's death.
Even if a millennium-old monarchy was never going to change, there were still hopes that the press might. Diana lived her life under an unremitting spotlight, a cruel condition even if it was one that at times she turned to her advantage. When her brother branded her "the most hunted person of the modern age", the resonance was enhanced because she had died as her driver fled the paparazzi. But expectations that John Wakeham's review, launched hours after the fatal accident, might somehow tame the media's ways soon gave way to recognition that celebrity culture was here to stay. And from Big Brother to Heat magazine it has evolved in ways not imagined at the time. The last lingering hopes that enduring lessons had been learned were extinguished by the media surveillance meted out to Kate Middleton when she looked like she was set on a path towards Diana's one-time title of Princess of Wales.
Despite the commemorative pull-outs in some newspapers this week, the anniversary has not provided the country with a shared focal point in the way, for example, that sporting events frequently do. That only makes September 1997's shower of tears and flowers, flowing from people who had never met Diana, all the harder to explain. Collective guilt at the part that a collective obsession had played in her life and in her death may be as good an explanation as any. Maybe the country was acknowledging that its culture needed to change. It may be unsurprising in retrospect that this was not to happen, although it is disappointing nonetheless. The right to privacy is one that Diana was deprived of, but it remains a right that is fundamental.