Maureen Freely: Diana has been written out of the royal fairy story

Unacknowledged she may be, but she still preys on their minds. She's the horror they are all running from

So the Palace is pleased. As well it should be. The jubilee was a triumph. The republicans will be counting the cost for years to come. It wasn't just the royals who turned in perfect performances. We, the people, did our bit, too. Together we've written a new script for the monarchy – a nicer, softer, family-friendlier drama that could run and run. But the most amazing thing is not that we've decided this family has a future. It's what we've let them airbrush out of the past.

The gap was there for all to see on Saturday night, and if you missed it there were plenty of other chances not to hear it on Monday and Tuesday. The most telling moment was when we saw the carriage carrying William, Harry, Beatrice and Eugenie. For all the mention that the commentators gave to the children's mothers, you would have thought that they didn't have any.

Were they under instructions, I wonder? If so, you really have to hand it to them. There is so much room for a slip-up when you're reporting on the snail-like movements of pomp and circumstance. There's always the danger that you'll fill a silence by saying the first thing that pops into your mind. But not once did they mention how strange it was to be standing here on The Mall again, watching yet another Windsor extravaganza. Or if they did, it was to allude to the Queen Mother's funeral. No mention of the other funeral, or of the two ill-fated weddings.

All weekend long, the nation's leading clerics and pop stars went along with the charade. In their sweeping celebrations of the 50-year reign, they never quite found time for the annus horribilis or the many even more horrible years that followed. This could be common courtesy. The "poor family" has been through so much, after all. But I still think that it's strange that no one stood up to point out that the Windsors are closer and cosier these days largely thanks to Diana. She's the one who brought the barriers down. She's the one who decided, for better or for worse, to bring the monarchy closer to the people. But sometime this weekend, the people decided it was best not to name names.

Now who could have predicted this strange new plot twist when it was Diana's mourners thronging The Mall. When her briefly righteous brother stood up at her funeral; when the Palace got roasted for not flying the flag at halfmast; when Charles got roasted for failing to give due respect to his children's mother. Half the columnists in the country accused the Windsors of wanting to swallow William and Henry whole, of wanting to distance them from her family, her world and even her view of the world. "How cruel!" they all exclaimed. Well, four years have passed, and the only thing that seems to have changed is that everyone else in the country wants the same thing, too.

How fickle we are. I wonder how many of the royals paused to entertain this unkind thought as they waved their waves. I wonder how they explain the shift of loyalties. I expect that they'll credit their long-suffering but loyal and now vindicated public relations machine, while also giving themselves much credit for a great deal of soul-searching about what the people want out of their monarchs in a rapidly changing Britain.

What we want, it seems, is a real family, the sort of family that does not leave London just because there's a Blitz. We want them to face all the same troubles we do and rise above them, in the way we all hope we do in the end. Most of all, right now, we want them to signify the family that somehow manages to act like a family even after that terrible business the other year when those trollops who married their sons made a mockery of everything they stood for.

Now that is a storyline we can understand. The ravages of divorce are usually counted in household units. Homes are broken, marriages fail, children suffer. But in a country where roughly one in three marriages fails, just about everyone feels the effects of divorce. If it's not your own marriage breaking up, it's your son's or your neighbour's or your oldest childhood friend's. There can't be anyone in the country who has not at some time been drawn into the indignities of someone else's divorce.

So the royal divorces were useful conversation starters. You could vent your grievances about women-who didn't care about their children, while the woman next door could use the same scandal to prove what she'd always thought about feckless men. You could both go home feeling vindicated, knowing exactly what it was that was wrong with the world, but without dragging your own sad story into it, and without naming names.

It is perhaps understandable that it didn't look like this to the Windsors. So perhaps they are also unaware that they are continuing to help us. Because now they are at the next stage of the story, in which the family reasserts itself through reassuring ritual. One of the rituals is deciding who is really a member of the family, and who isn't. In normal broken families, this is a negotiation that never ends, and if you don't believe me, come and pay me a visit sometime.

I'm not as extreme as so many of my friends in America, who think airbrushing exes out of family portraits is "part of the process of letting go". But my albums from my first marriage are well hidden. My only remaining photograph of me with Him is sitting behind a photograph of myself with the new Him. If you ask my older children who belongs to their family, they'll give you a very long list including names I barely know. But – thanks to the latest twist in the latest family feud – only three of the names will also be on the list you'd get if you asked my two younger children.

Whoever you talk to, there will also be at least one family member who has no right to be called family. It's rarely the same person for two people running. In the same breath that they say how important their family is to them, they're redefining the word so that it only includes the ones they like. This might sound like splitting hairs. But if it does, all that that says to me is that you've never tried to organise a post-divorce Christmas, or wedding reception for a couple whose parents have divorced and have now remarried.

In normal mortal families, there's no way to prevent scenes, because there's no way to please everyone. So how refreshing it is to see that in one family at least, it is still possible to have a get-together that lasts a whole weekend without anything going wrong.

If the Windsors achieved this feat by writing Di out of the story, then so be it. They're only human. No family is complete without a family myth. And what are closets for? But they will, I think, come to regret trying to fudge the record.

She's still the woman who pushed them into the 21st century. She's far more powerful in her absence than she would be if she were part of the official picture. Unacknowledged and unthanked she may be, but she still preys on their minds. She's still the horror they're all running from: the people's princess, the wife who almost brought the house down, the ghost in the machine.

mfreely@rosebud.u-net