The nineties was a decade in thrall to the tremendous cultural and commercial attractions of celebrity. If, in hindsight, the seventies seem forever marked by memories of the Winter of Discontent, and the eighties by the dominating presence of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the signature cultural moment of the nineties was the extravagant national response to the unexpected death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana embodied the glamour, beauty and charisma associated with celebrity, and enjoyed the capacity to furnish people with dreams that took them outside their workaday existence. Diana's alluring public persona was founded on the fabricated fairy tale princess narrative constructed for her by the Royal Family, a compliant and sometimes complicit media, and by herself. The truth was murkier and far more complex. In the aftermath of her divorce from Prince Charles, just over a year before her death, Diana's personal life (especially her relationship with Dodi Al Fayed, another celebrity, but one whose millionaire playboy lifestyle was far less endearing to the general public) threatened to sully her reputation. In the lead-up to her violent demise, some sections of the media had begun to criticise Diana's indulgent lifestyle with Al Fayed, chiding her performance as mother to her young sons, Princes William and Harry. As Salman Rushdie noted in a 1997 New Yorker essay, her car crash death fused glamour and horror in a manner reminiscent of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash. David Cronenberg's controversial film adaptation had appeared the previous year. The crash almost instantly and totally erased criticism of Diana. The very public national and international outpouring of grief was lengthy and itself newsworthy, an odd moment where a celebrity's fans briefly became the story. The new Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly caught the public mood, and in an impromptu speech outside his local church in Sedgefield declared: