At half past six on the morning of Sunday 31 August, 1997, I was woken by the telephone. It was the deputy editor of The Scotsman, telling me that Princess Diana had died, and I needed to get up and start working on her obituary. “About 5,000 words should do it,” he said.

This being the era before the internet had got into its stride, I headed immediately for the newspaper’s library, to discover the system had crashed and they could not access their files. Half an hour later I was the first of the day’s customers in Waterstones, buying an armful of biographies.

The rest of that Sunday was a blur of reading and typing, with my editor calling every half hour to find out how I was getting on. I was so focussed on meeting the deadline that the impact of Diana’s death did not hit me until the following day. As I watched footage of mourners gathering at the gates of Buckingham Palace, and the growing bank of bouquets, the enormity of what had happened, and the reverberations that would likely follow, became clear.

That was almost 30 years ago and yet Diana remains as vivid in the public imagination as if it was yesterday. Now, thanks to her brother Charles’s memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, she is dominating the headlines and news schedules as she did when alive. As so often before, her name is being lobbed around as if it were a grenade. It makes you wonder when – if – she will ever be allowed to rest in peace.

With the reheating of grievances, and the settling of old scores, it all feels tediously familiar. We will probably never know whether the king made the heartless comments before Diana’s funeral attributed to him by his former........

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