IN death, as in life, Diana, Princess of Wales, has symbolised the conflicting imperatives of a shallow age. Her deification began long before that fatal car crash, but its dreadful news sparked flagrant hypocrisy in certain quarters as some of her most virulent critics suddenly discovered the media potency of grief.

So, over the decade, the litanies of "sainthood" have continued. But in a sense Diana's death wasn't the end but a beginning. In terms of drama, her manipulated haunting of the House of Windsor might outrun The Mousetrap.

From the start the media defined Diana, and during her 16 public years, it often seemed she needed its feverish attention to prove her existence to herself. Despite the pleas for privacy there were coquettish leaks to favoured news hounds about where she would be on certain days if they wanted " a nice picture". As she told us ruefully in that Panorama interview of November 1995, the Princess of Wales was the media's "best selling item".

The candour of that interview was ground-breaking, an indication of how Britain's social mores were shifting. Here was the not-yet-divorced wife of the heir to the throne, referring to Camilla Parker-Bowles and the intolerable menage a trois which, from the start, had afflicted her union with Charles: "Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded."

Hearing that from Diana's lips, the public could forgive her own admission of adultery. She was a woman wronged, wanly beautiful, damaged, and painfully thin.

Did Diana change Britain? No. But more than any other royal or public figure, she sensed changes in the country, and placed herself in the vanguard of its journey from buttoned-up nation to one wanting to "let it all hang out". In once stuffy Britain, feelings were in the ascendant while reserve was dismissed as a character flaw.

In that climate Diana's natural empathy with victims, crowds and starry people became her surest weapon against a family so out of step with the public mood, it didn't appear to understand the meaning of compassion and inclusiveness.

No pope or politician, no sovereign or president, no sports hero or Hollywood dreamboat could command the recognition factor of Diana. In an Aids clinic, land-mined battleground, or impoverished African village, she was instantly familiar. And while we measured every word, every inch of weight gained or lost, every cellulite pucker behind the knee, this princess warmed victimhood with a celebrity glow.

She danced. She worked out, fell under the often flaky spell of New Age diet gurus, and lost her heart to dim but opportunist men. But her instinctive, sensational way with clothes did more for the British fashion industry than the Windsors ever could.

Deference was dying long before Diana. In 1957, Lord Altrincham wrote in a small-circulation magazine that the monarchy "lamentably failed to live with the times". He was publicly humiliated and excrement was pushed through his letterbox.

That year, the broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge observed that society's "nonsensical adulation" of the Windsors had turned them into actors in a soap opera. Muggeridge, a fearsome polemicist, was the first to use that phrase of the royals. His letterbox was fouled, his house vandalised, his life threatened, and his contracts with newspapers and the BBC ripped up. He was spat on in the street, and he received messages expressing pleasure at the death of his son in an accident. Royalist worship clearly contained a primal rage which, 40 years later, would turn on Buckingham Palace because of its frigid response to the death of Diana.

Apart from Princess Margaret, the royals had been frumpishly out of touch with the raciness of Swinging Britain in the egalitarian Sixties. But then, with the Queen Mother's encouragement, Lady Diana Spencer passed through the portals of insufferable protocol as consort to Prince Charles. In Diana, the Crown had found not just the required sexual innocent but a needed symbol of modernity. What it eventually got was the virgin who refused to be sacrificial, whose popularity almost brought rebellion to its gates. That wretched marriage was perhaps the Queen Mother's only public mistake.

If Diana's life didn't change Britain, her death certainly did. In that week before her funeral, much of England seemed foreign. Day and night the grief in London was almost Mediterranean, even Middle Eastern, in its intensity.

Amid the powerful symbolism of the funeral procession there was the vision of an old imperial state, fraying at the edges, being forced to change by the popular will, but with the pomp and circumstance intact. The sound of horses, the rasp of the gun-carriage on asphalt, the occasional extravagant sob from the crowd: these only heightened the engulfing stillness. The Princess of Wales once said she would not go quietly: the silence wreathing her last journey was thunderous.

Yet the royal faces seemed those of a family gripped in the harsh armour of restraint. If they had been going to the scaffold, the Windsors would not have looked any different.

The funeral millions proved that Britain had irrevocably altered. The masses were polyglot and multi-national. For many, Diana's last romance with Dodi al Fayed - fleeting and wilfully dangerous - was emblematic of this altered state. On the eve of her marriage, Toxteth and Brixton burned with the rage of inequality and neglected minorities. Now the fabric of mourning was woven peaceably from many over-lapping ethnic strands.

When the Queen left the palace for the abbey, in the demanded lowering of the Union flag to half-mast, the monarch was making her third concession to the people. The first had been the family's belated return from Balmoral. The second was her address to the nation, with its dignified, unprecedented humility.

And today, another sign of change: the woman who was the truly hated figure in this tragic story, Camilla Parker-Bowles is a duchess, married to the prince who always called her the love of his life. By and large the public has forgiven both of them, through either indifference or a generosity of spirit which the tabloids, with their Hate-Camilla campaign, never anticipated.

The gaffe of inviting Camilla to today's memorial service was perhaps an honest attempt to demonstrate inclusiveness. But letting in the daylight on an institution defined by chilly formality will never be simple. The Queen, despite her good intentions to absorb the lessons from a deceased life, may adapt but she will never change.

As guests gather for Diana's memorial service in the Guards' Chapel at Wellington Barracks, many will remember the words of the Dean of Westminster Abbey, who, 10 years ago, counselled that we should use the funeral rites to "let the dead go". But in a godless age, a goddess may never be allowed to rest in peace.

Order of service
Music: The introit
Hymn: Be thou my vision
The bidding: The Rev Patrick Irwin, Chaplain to the Household Division
Anthem
Reading by Prince William
Hymn: The Lord's My Shepherd
Reading by Lady Sarah McCorquodale
Anthem
Reading by Prince Henry
Hymn: Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer
Address: Richard Chartres, Bishop of London
Anthem
Prayers
Anthem
Hymn: I vow to Thee, My Country
Blessing
National Anthem
Music: Bach's Orchestral Suite No 3 in D