by Dylan Howard
As was so often the case with the Royal Family, the impasse was solved by an irate Duke of Edinburgh. Philip had been vociferously defending and protecting his young grandsons throughout that whole nightmarish week. Unsurprisingly, he told them to get out in the fresh air of the remote bleak beauty of the Highlands, trek, ride, hunt, and walk. Surprisingly to some, he also gently encouraged them to talk, express their grief, and share their emotions.
Away from the boys, he wasn’t afraid to stand up for them, at one point slamming his fist on the table and roaring down the speakerphone to the prime minister’s office in London, arguing that William and Harry were not to be treated as “commodities” at the funeral, according to ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “gatekeeper,” Anji Hunter, who spoke of it in a BBC film about Diana’s funeral. He also emphatically put an end to the dithering over who would walk in line behind the coffin by assuring the boys that if they wanted to, he would walk with them, and if they didn’t want to, they didn’t have to.
The day of the funeral dawned. Over a million people lined the route through London, in a poignant echo of that sunny summer’s day, almost sixteen years ago to the month, when cheering crowds had gathered along a similar route to celebrate a shy young bride and her dashing Prince, as they made their way to Westminster Abbey for the wedding of the decade.
The night before the funeral, Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd, quietly and anonymously picked her way through the people camping along the Mall and in the surrounding royal parks, which had been specially opened for the purpose. Candles flickered and guttered in the soft August evening breeze, fresh after a heavy downpour that afternoon. The air was heavy with the scent of the thousands of bouquets massed along the procession route and by the gates of Kensington and Buckingham Palaces. In that very British way, strangers became friends over shared sandwiches and thermoses of tea.
On the morning of the funeral, London ground to a halt as thousands of people lined the route through the city. Eight members of the Queen’s Welsh Guards carried Diana’s coffin, which was covered with three wreaths of white flowers from her brother and her sons. Five hundred representatives of various charities the Princess had been involved with joined behind them in the funeral cortege. As the coffin passed Buckingham Palace, where members of the Royal Family were waiting outside, the Queen bowed her head.
As the cortege moved slowly from St James’s Palace, the world watched the heartbreaking sight of the two young Princes, who, with remarkable dignity, slowly walked alongside their father, grandfather, and uncle, Charles Spencer. Spencer described the feeling of walking behind Diana’s coffin as the “worst part of the day by a considerable margin.”
He explained, “The feeling, the sort of absolute crashing tidal wave of grief coming at you as you went down this sort of tunnel of deep emotion, it was really harrowing and I still have nightmares about it now. So, there was [my] inner turmoil of thinking, ‘My God this is ghastly,’ but then the point of thinking these two boys are doing this and it must be a million times worse for them. It was truly horrifying, actually. We would walk a hundred yards and hear people sobbing and then walk around a corner and somebody wailing and shouting out messages of love to Diana or William and Harry, and it was a very, very tricky time.”
Unknown to everyone at the time, Charles Spencer was planning a surprise for his address at the funeral.
In paying tribute to his sister, the ninth Earl Spencer angered the Queen with lines like “Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic” and “I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned.”
His words created a sensation. Billions of viewers worldwide caught the stony expressions on the face of the Royals as Spencer’s incendiary speech reached its climax. Spencer later defended himself, saying he understood the Queen believed he had “every right to say whatever he felt.” He saw the eulogy as a chance to “speak for somebody who had no longer got a voice.”
“I don’t feel I said many pointed things,” he told the BBC, twenty years later. “I believe that every word I said was true and it was important for me to be honest. I wasn’t looking to make any jabs at anyone, actually. I was trying to celebrate Diana—and if by doing that it showed up particularly the press, I think, in a bad way, well, they had that coming.”
He also recalled keeping the speech secret to prevent anyone else having a say in it. Well, almost secret, if you discount Diana’s corpse. For Spencer admitted that he read the speech to Diana’s body in St James’s Palace chapel a couple of days before she was buried. “I know people will think I’m some sort of fruitcake but I do remember hearing almost some sort of approval then, and then I realized I had probably got the thoughts in order.”
Four days after his mother’s funeral, Prince William returned to Eton College to find six hundred letters waiting for him. Over half the school had written to him, offering their condolences and with the firm instruction that there was no need to reply. A fellow pupil said: “It was simply a show of solidarity.” William, then fifteen, also had the support of a good friend who had lost his mother several years earlier.
The reaction that greeted Harry at his Berkshire prep school, Ludgrove, was more wary. Staff and pupils were told not to talk about what had happened. No newspapers were allowed, and television was more closely monitored than usual. If Harry, just coming up to the age of thirteen, saw as much as a glimpse of his mother’s face on screen, he would jump up, turn off the television, and leave the room, according to another pupil.
An inquiry in 1999 by the French authorities blamed Paul, concluding that he was incapacitated by a cocktail of alcohol and drugs before losing control of the car while speeding.
However, there has been a continued unwillingness by the public to accept the official version of Diana’s death, even after the tragedy was revisited by the authorities in Britain in a belated 2007 inquest. In his book Diana Inquest: Corruption at Scotland Yard, John Morgan said Diana’s lawyer, Lord Victor Mishcon—who died at age ninety in 2006—told police in 1995 that the Princess expressed her fears to him that she’d be assassinated in a staged car crash.
The British peer allegedly handed his notes about the meeting over to police following his famous client’s death, but they were suppressed for years. It was only when Burrell revealed the existence of Diana’s compelling letter making similar allegations that the British police reluctantly handed the minutes of Lord Mishcon’s meeting over to the French coroner. “I believe Diana cannot rest in peace whilst her killers walk free, and the people who ordered this assassination and the ensuing massive cover-up live in peace,” blasted Morgan.
Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi’s father, has long been convinced that Diana and Dodi were murdered by British security services at the behest of Establishment forces. More specifically, he blames Prince Philip, the Queen’s now-ninety-two-year-old husband, and Prince Charles.
Sixteen years after the accident, significant questions still remain unanswered from that fateful night. Incredibly, it took 101 minutes to get Diana to the hospital after the initial emergency call—a delay Al-Fayed claimed British secret service agents instigated to slash her chances of survival. President Reagan, after all, suffered the same pulmonary tear as Diana in the assassination attempt against him in 1981, yet he was saved and lived until the age of ninety-three.
CASE CLOSED
This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning an “accident” in my car, brake failure and serious head injury, in order to make the path clear for him to marry.
—DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
Written with chilling foresight just ten months before her untimely death in a horrific crash in
a Paris tunnel, Diana put her fears that she was the target of a sinister death plot down on paper as “insurance” for the future.
While there has never been any definite proof that Charles or the Royal Family was involved in the crash that ended Diana’s life, explosive allegations pointed a finger of suspicion at the Queen and shadowy figures behind the crown for ordering an assassination to silence the rebel Princess.
Author John Morgan claimed in Diana Inquest that Her Majesty decided that Diana had become too much of a threat to the British monarchy after divorcing Charles. He also accused Scotland Yard of orchestrating an elaborate cover-up to protect the crown.
The truth, however, is far less sinister.
“Voilà, c’est pour ça je les laisse penser ce qu’ils veulent,” Le Van Thanh, driver of the mysterious white Fiat Uno, told me in the summer of 2019. (“That’s why I let them think what they want.”)
Finding the Fiat Uno was clearly the number-one priority for any serious investigation into Diana’s death. Initially, the search identified photographer James Andanson as the driver. His charred body was later found locked inside his BMW with a bullet hole to the temple. Curiously, his death was ruled a suicide. But was he really the driver? A thorough examination of the moments before Andanson’s death proved that he had marital problems. The conspiracy theories surrounding his death were also unpicked: the deceased was alone in his car, in the countryside, and tipped petrol over his entire body, then set himself alight and burned to death. The fire was so fierce that his head exploded from the heat. Clearly suicide. Further, former homicide detective Colin McLaren, who has studied the case, was able to prove Andanson was on an aircraft hours after Diana’s accident, flying to a photography job. The timelines between takeoff and the Diana accident made it impossible for him to have been at the Pont de l’Alma crash site.
In November 1997, French authorities located another man who had painted his car the color red the day after the crash—the French Vietnamese national, Le Van Thanh—who claimed he was working security at the time of the crash, and as such he was quickly ruled out.
But McLaren tracked down a vital witness, Sabine Dauzonne, who saw a white car emerge from the tunnel that night for the book Diana: Case Solved. McLaren put Sabine under a memory recall session. She remembered seeing a white Fiat Uno leaving the tunnel seconds after the accident, and that it was badly damaged along the driver’s side doors and rear lights.
The driver looked scared and confused and was looking back into the tunnel. She also remembered a large black-and-tan-colored dog with a big collar around its neck, sitting on the backseat. Armed with this, McLaren presented Sabine with pictures of similar young men, and she identified Le Van Thanh as the driver—who also had a guard dog—identical to the one Sabine observed in his car that night.
So why would he respray his car?
Could he be the key to cracking the case?
And why did the French police ignore this vital information?
After eighteen months of supposed investigation, a French judicial inquiry concluded that the crash was nothing more than an accident caused by the reckless driving of Henri Paul, who was highly intoxicated at the time. It was also determined that paparazzi were not near the car at the time of the crash.
British Police would drag their feet until 2004 before beginning Operation Paget, their own investigation into Diana’s death. And still the questions mounted up: an American couple would testify at the inquest but would be dismissed because the French police had combined their statement. The search for the white Fiat Uno was barely mentioned by either the British or French inquiries. What of the ignored evidence, the dismissed witnesses, and, most worrying, the discounting of Le Van Thanh as a person of interest? This seems highly suspicious, so McLaren and I were determined to track down the mysterious Le Van Thanh.
Le Van Thanh has never spoken publicly. The French police had dismissed him as a player in the tragedy owing to an intact taillight (but if he could respray his car, he could surely replace a taillight). Operation Paget barely mentioned the Fiat, and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens claimed the driver would be impossible to track down. In a highly dramatic scene, McLaren and I drove to his home in suburban Paris. Our conversation was an explosive revelation that—in our minds—finally solved the case … and indeed fueled demands for a new inquest to be opened.
Here is an abbreviated transcript of the exchange between Le Van Than, McLaren, and me:
Translator: The idea was to exonerate you and show that you are a victim in all this.
Le Van Thanh: But I am exonerated; I don’t care, to be honest.
Translator: They were just trying to exonerate you in this story. That you didn’t do anything; you’re really a victim (of circumstances).
Le Van Thanh: Yes, but I know I didn’t do anything. That’s why I don’t need to be exonerated, sir.
Translator: You have nothing to say?
Le Van Thanh: Yes, I have nothing to say.
Translator: No one is accusing you here, pay attention. That’s what I’m telling you.
Le Van Thanh: No, but you don’t listen. I know, there’s nothing to worry about.
Translator: It was just to exonerate you through new evidence. They just have a question or two to ask you. Don’t you want to answer them?
Le Van Thanh: No, no.
Translator: Definitely not?
Le Van Thanh: Definitely not.
Translator: He [Colin] says he has read all the police reports and that you are innocent?
Le Van Thanh: But people say otherwise, but that’s okay.
Translator: Yes, he talked to witnesses who you saw that night; and you are completely innocent, and you have nothing to worry about.
Le Van Thanh: I know that, sir. That’s why I don’t even need to talk to them, if they know. I know that. We’re all happy; we all know it. But then again, I don’t mind at all. People can think what they want.
Translator: Yes, no, that’s right. But …
Le Van Thanh: Because you know, you are Vietnamese, I am a Buddhist.
Translator: Yes, I know.
Le Van Thanh: That’s why I let them think what they want.
Translator: Oh, yes.
Le Van Thanh: They imagine everything they can imagine, it’s not my problem.
Translator: Okay. There’s just one thing on his mind, you’re completely innocent, but you repainted your car. That’s what he doesn’t understand. It’s the only thing.
Le Van Thanh: Yes, it is. That was mentioned in the newspaper and so on. You can read it everywhere.
Translator: But what was the story then?
Le Van Thanh: I said it from the beginning.
Translator: And why did you repaint it?
Le Van Thanh: I will not repeat the same thing. Everyone knows that. The police report, they know why I repainted it.
Translator: But then, why was that, what was the reason? That’s right, actually what messed things up. I don’t know if …
Le Van Thanh: When you have no money and you have a damaged old car, what do you do?
Translator: Okay. He just has one last thing to say to you. He’s a really great cop. It’s not a …
Translator: No, there is no problem. There were lots of things that were said to me again.
Translator: We are friends, I would like to tell you something. Are you listening? The English police is coming to see you soon. Because he, there is an English policeman who told him, they want to question you. They will come to see you, because when they asked you to come you didn’t go.
Le Van Thanh: No, but I know they will come. Several times they told me they would come back. Because eventually they told me, “Yes, they will come.” They wanted me to go to England.
Translator: Yes, that’s right.
Le Van Thanh: You know what the French police told me?
Translator: No.
Le Van Thanh: “It’s not the same law as in France; don’t
go there.”
Translator: Oh, it was the French cops who suggested that you shouldn’t go?
Le Van Thanh: Don’t go there. He told me: “Not the same law as in France, don’t go there…don’t go there [to England] it’s the police, which means they don’t agree with each other. It’s the police, which means they don’t agree with each other, in other words.”
Translator: They will come to you. He says, “If you need him, he can testify that you are innocent. Because he’s a former police officer with a proven track record.”
Le Van Thanh: Don’t worry, I will receive them well.
Translator: Are you going to receive them well? [laughs]
Le Van Thanh: Yes, I will receive them well.
Translator: Yes, yes, they are in France, of course. No, no, they can’t do anything anyway.
Le Van Thanh: I will tell them the same thing I told you.
***
“That’s why I let them think what they want.”
Of all the words spoken by Le Van Thanh during our confrontation with him, these are the ones that most haunt me personally. Van Thanh knows he is a pawn. He knows that there are powerful forces capable of destroying his life—and he is not insane.
In this simple line quoted above, Le Van Thanh is telling us that he cannot do other than what he has done. He must allow the public to believe what they will, because the alternative is unthinkably dangerous.
Will he be killed for speaking the truth?
Will his family?