It was, said Buckingham Palace, an accident waiting to happen. Princess Diana's brother was more forthright: "I always believed the press would kill her in the end." There is evidence to support these controversial views. Consider the rollcall of intrusion.
There have been countless high-speed chases through London as she has fought to lose paparazzi. Once she chased two of them down darkened streets into a supermarket car-park so that she could confront them. She beat off another of these stalkers by taking the keys from his motorcycle.
But this is not a one-sided story. While she pleaded for privacy, Princess Diana flagrantly courted publicity. She regularly briefed a favoured reporter from the Daily Mail. She encouraged friends to tell her secrets to Andrew Morton. She had papers tipped off whenever she saw a photo opportunity that put her in a good light.
The relationship between Diana and the British tabloid press was one of serial abuse by both parties. But we must put this in context. She is dead because of this sordid cat-and-mouse game. The press lives on to play more tricks on those whom it first makes famous and then exploits.
That truth is reflected in the swiftness and severity of the backlash against the press. Public and politicians all raged against the evils of newspapers. Most savage by far was Earl Spencer, Princess Diana's brother, who summed up the feelings of hundreds of people who called radio phone-ins throughout the day.
"This is not a time for recriminations," he said. "But I would say that I always believed the press would kill her in the end. But not even I could imagine that they would take such a direct hand in her death as seems to be the case. It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her, encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit of Diana's image, has blood on their hands today."
He was articulating widely-held views aired more emotionally by many members of the British public. In one bitter outburst on BBC TV, a woman screamed at a reporter and a cameraman: "You've done this to her. You're to blame. The media, the papers, all of you."
At the same time, newsagents in London selling special late editions of the Sunday papers devoted to the princess's death reported queues of people desperate for copies. Many hundreds of thousands of extra papers are sure to be sold this morning.
The dilemma for editors and readers could not be stated more starkly. It illustrates the vicious circle between papers and readers, between expectation and fulfilment. Tabloids fed the public appetite, knowing they could attract huge sales by publishing intrusive pictures and stories about the princess. The public berated tabloids for invading Diana's privacy, but lapped up every bit of gossip about her.
It is noticeable that no tabloid editor was available for interview on radio or television yesterday. A BBC World Service producer said that it proved impossible to get anyone at a British tabloid, or indeed at those European magazines which have regularly published pictures of Diana, to speak on or off the record.
The sense of shame (which I, as a former Daily Mirror editor, do not seek to shirk) must be overwhelming among senior tabloid journalists who have lived off Diana for 17 years. The signs of misbehaviour by the paparazzi cannot be ignored.
Calls for privacy laws may be misplaced, and the initial reactions by the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, and the Minister for Media, Culture and Sport, Mr Chris Smith, suggest they think so too. But the public clamour cannot be brushed aside after this tragedy. Once we look back at the record of the press's relationship with the princess, it is possible to see it as inevitable that it would all end badly.
For tabloid editors who face an inexorable erosion of circulations, there was little incentive to give up the pursuit of a woman who guaranteed them extra sales. For the readers, it appeared impossible to kick the Princess Diana habit.
It was undoubtedly true that it was the newspapers which initially played a large part in creating the fairytale image of the beautiful princess. But it was not a difficult job, nor did Diana struggle against it. The public took to her immediately and followed every nuance of the unfolding story of her life with relish.
She was royalty made flesh, an uncommon commoner imbued with the ordinariness of the girl-next-door and the extraordinariness of a woman elevated to the highest family in the land. A shy, gauche figure, she was transformed into a mythologised beauty who gradually assumed an iconic stature. Yet there was the vulnerability too: she was perceived as slightly unstable, an actor in a script she continually rewrote. Her unpredictability only served to intensify the interest in her.
Days before her marriage, when she broke down in tears at a polo match and had to be helped away from photographers, the growing band of royal correspondents realised this was no stiff-upper-lip Windsor playing out one role in public and another in private.
There were tears again early in her marriage when photographers followed her to the shops in Tetbury as she went to buy sweets. In retrospect, that was a relatively innocuous incident, but it prompted Palace action and Queen Elizabeth took the unprecedented step of meeting Fleet Street editors and asking for greater understanding. They agreed to be more circumspect, but the deal did not last long.
On another occasion, the then editor of the Daily Star, the late Lloyd Turner, made a universal declaration: his paper would no longer pursue the royal family. That pledge collapsed as he watched his rivals increase sales on the back of articles and pictures about Diana. From that moment on, no matter the individual desires of editors, it would have been commercial suicide for them to ignore Diana.
Having given the public so much, they found it perpetually slavering for more. Magazines increased sales every time they put the princess on the cover. Book publishers cashed in. Television programmes about the princess won high ratings. Even news bulletins featuring Diana reported high audiences. She was the most famous woman in the world.
Through leaks and whispers, along with straightforward observation, royal reporters gradually came to realise that all was not well with the Wales' marriage. Open season was declared. A mountain of gossip was amassed by papers as a growing band of freelance photographers, an irreverent band of Diana-fixated paparazzi, began to dog her every move. The pressure eventually led in 1990 to her acquiescence in the Andrew Morton book which revealed the true nature of her sham marriage to Prince Charles.
At every subsequent twist in this sad tale - the prince's revelations to Jonathan Dimbleby, the princess's Panorama interview, the saga of the divorce, her relationships with other men, and finally her friendship with Dodi al-Fayed - the paparazzi's activities intensified.
She became the victim of photographers, many of them opportunists without the least skill. Papers opened their arms to these unscrupulous snappers, offering large sums for pictures.
Occasionally, she was able to persuade photographers to stop. When she turned the tables on two of them, Mark Saunders and Glenn Harvey, by chasing them into a carpark, they agreed to stop haunting her. Months later, outside a gym in Earl's Court, she took film away from another, Brendan Beirne, with help from a sympathetic passer-by. He also gave up the job, but there were always more people to take their places.
Though Diana made impassioned pleas for privacy, editors often argued that she sacrificed it by maintaining close relationships with individual members of the press and, through friends, was able to influence others. Instead of remaining aloof from the press, she could not stop herself trying to get her own views across, rebutting what she considered was propaganda from other members of the royal family. She was so determined not to be marginalised. It ensured that the press had good reason, or at least the figment of an excuse, for continuing to focus on her.
In such circumstances it became impossible to separate the public and the private domain. Editors took the view that as the mother of the future king, her personal life was of public interest. The more exotic her behaviour, the more the press (and a prurient public) demanded to know more, culminating in the holiday romance with Dodi alFayed.
The Sunday Mirror paid £250,000 for sneak pictures of the pair. The Sun and the Daily Mail paid a further £100,000 each for second rights. By the time the photographer and the ubiquitous paparazzo-turned-agent Jason Fraser had finished selling the grainy shots to foreign papers and magazines it is thought they had made £3 million.
Given that kind of incentive, it is no wonder that young men on the make were willing to take enormous risks, ignoring French privacy laws and any sense of compassion, to take pictures of the couple.
Despite the wave of public opprobrium towards the press which encouraged these paparazzi, it is unlikely that the British government will rush through any legislation on privacy. It would, after all, be too late for Princess Diana. There is no one who could remotely replace her in the affections of so many people across the world. Anyway, punishment for the papers is at hand: they have lost for ever the woman who could guarantee them sales. Circulations will fall faster now.
Roy Greenslade is media commentator for the Guardian