She was beautiful, glamorous and wronged. Her compassion touched the lives of millions. No other member of the Royal Family could match her universal appeal. In the words of the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, she was "The People's Princess."

So much for the first hasty draft of history. Since then the revisionists have been at work, and with reason. It's ten years this week since Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris car smash. The British nation has had plenty of time to mull the record, and it's no longer quite so sure about her legacy. The emerging wisdom is more balanced. Of course, the princess had her virtues, but she was as fallible as the rest of us. Her choice of friends was questionable, she was an expert in the dark arts of media manipulation and -- say it softly -- in private life she could be capricious and difficult.

In fact those extraordinary public displays of mourning back in '97 -- the heaped bouquets outside her Kensington Palace home, the ten-hour queues to sign the Book of Condolence -- seem a tad embarrassing now, an aberrant moment when the British forgot their mistrust of overt sentimentality. These days a cover picture of the princess no longer guarantees magazine megasales; visitor numbers at her burial site have tumbled.

The truth is that the public wasn't mourning a character they knew from life. Rather, the princess was the central figure in the much publicized slo-mo drama of the royal marriage, a story more exciting and (and less plausible) than most TV soap operas. What's clear now is that the British are quite happy with a frumpier, old-look monarchy. It's taken only a modest tweaking of the palace PR to restore the Royal Family to favor. The public likes the reassuring picture of a head of state who's above passing fashions, whether in politics or couture. Note the approval for the sympathetic portrayal of a beleaguered monarch in the film "The Queen." The media likes the glamorous; posterity sometimes prefers the dutiful.