It only means that we’re just waking up to the extent to which things have already changed.. Exactly 15 years ago, I walked into a place of such horror that – for the first and only night of my life – I suffered ferocious nightmares. The Government may need to do this but the rest of us don’t have to. The need to divide up what’s hot and what’s not, what’s new and what’s old, is reassuring perhaps for those who feel the need a map around the country that they now feel foreign, uncomfortable and embarrassed to be in.The people out on the streets for Diana were exactly the opposite They felt at home, at ease and that they belonged together.

They did not need an official sanctioning and those whose job it is to give it may well feel redundant. Something that was perceived as only going on at the edges has moved inwards and the centre cannot hold because it suddenly appears as one little sub-culture jostling alongside the others for our attention Will that really change things? Yes and no. The image of a still dazed and confused Tory party that can’t quite believe the world in which it now finds itself is immensely cheering. On one level it feels as if this has happened overnight, yet at another we know it’s been years in the making. The sense of looking forward rather than backwards, the celebration of our booming arts industry, the storming of the academy by a new generation of artists, is all nicely upbeat.To gather up all this diversity, all these contradictory elements in the name of a post-modern form of nationalism – based not on allegiance to one’s country but on allegiance to one’s own innate sense of “cool” – is to miss the point. Its legitimacy is overruled every weekend.The devolving of political power, seen as part of New Britain, has also to be seen in the context of cultural devolution – the moving away from the old centres of power to new and unexpected ones.

It’s good to see these old certainties being shaken and stirred. The “all drugs are evil” line is laughable to large numbers of the population It is not so much out of touch as merely irrelevant. Whose culture is it anyway? They are not central to my culture and what we have learnt surely is that the so-called dominant culture was taken completely by surprise at the strength of feeling that Diana’s death provoked.The strength of the dominant official culture is already precarious because it rests on assumptions about the way we live which are no longer tenable. It is the same indifference that I feel reading about the editor of the Telegraph slugging it out with the owner of the Daily Mail; it is the same indifference I feel about internal disputes about the restructuring of a few news shows on the BBC. The assumption that these things are central to the culture should be challenged. What we have witnessed is, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, a new “structure of feeling” that was already present but surfaced as a result of Diana’sdeath. It combines a number of things – some of which coincide with the coming to power of Blair, but many of which don’t.Talking to people in the crowds at the Palace I was struck more by the sense of something ending – something which it is too slick to call Thatcherism – rather than a sense of a new beginning.What we are seeing is not so much revolution but the replacing of the old Establishment by the new.

I was amazed not so much by the hostility to the Royal Family as to the total indifference to it. What I am suggesting, then, is that a culture can shift, a mood can change, new forms can emerge and yet many old structures can stay in place. The mistake is to presume that cultural shifts are somehow less “real” or less “meaningful” than the traditional manifestations of political power. “And we must make other people’s lives better not because of beliefs or ideologies but because you personally will benefit.”Likewise the “feminisation” of society, which recent events are said to have triggered, sits alongside yet more surveys showing that men do as little housework as they ever did, that the glass ceiling remains intact in many professions, and that women still have far less leisure time than men.