Diana_Her True Story_In Her Own Words_25th Anniversary Edition

by Andrew Morton

  The driver and Dodi were killed instantly while the bodyguard, the only occupant wearing a seatbelt, was critically injured, regaining consciousness two weeks later. The Princess was trapped in the well between the front and back seats, fatally injured and unconscious. First on the scene were the pursuing photographers, travelling about 300 metres behind, who said that they heard a bang so loud that they thought Diana had been the victim of an assassin’s bomb.

  A passing French doctor, Frédéric Maillez, administered emergency aid, failing to recognize the barely breathing woman who was, in his words, ‘unconscious, moaning and gesturing in every direction’.

  Once other medical help arrived several of the paparazzi milled around the car taking pictures. A photographer, Romuald Rat, a trained first-aider, opened the rear door, allegedly to check Diana’s pulse, and comforted her in English. Others were less charitable, claiming that the door was opened so that he and his colleagues could take clearer pictures of the bloody scene. What repulsed many, as the first incomplete accounts filtered out, was that the cameramen had failed to comfort the dying Princess or to phone for medical assistance. Initial police reports described a scene of mayhem with ‘camera flashes going off like machine-gun fire around the back right-hand side of the vehicle where the door was open’. The first police on the scene even had to call for reinforcements to deal with the truculent paparazzi, whose actions in pursuing Diana at first indicated that she had literally been hounded to death. Seven photographers were subsequently arrested and placed under formal investigation for manslaughter and for failing to assist the accident victims.

  It is one of the many savage ironies in a life suffused with tragedy that, when she was still married to Prince Charles, one of Diana’s most cherished ambitions was to spend a weekend in Paris without bodyguards or photographers, losing herself in the crowd. Instead, as life slipped from her, with the Mercedes horn mournfully blaring into the night like a macabre ‘Last Post’, her adult life ended as it had begun, in the brazen, staccato embrace of the camera flash. Even in the city of dreams she could not escape her past.

  It took rescue crews an hour to stabilize her and pull her from the mangled wreckage before she was slowly driven to the nearby La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital for emergency surgery. By then it was much too late. She had suffered massive head and chest injuries and although the medical team did everything they could they knew it was a lost cause. At 4am, 3am in London, she was pronounced dead. A post-mortem report indicated that the Princess, who never regained consciousness, was probably dead some 20 minutes after the crash. As her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, said days later: ‘I know the extent of her injuries and I promise everyone that she knew nothing. She did not suffer at all.’ She added: ‘My knowledge comes first hand’, seen as a rebuke to Mohamed al-Fayed who, the night before the funeral, publicized the fact that he had passed on Diana’s alleged last words and instructions to her elder sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, during a meeting at Harrods. Mrs Shand Kydd’s dismissal of the ‘last words’ was backed up by a statement from the first doctor to arrive at the scene of the crash.

  Shortly after the accident the Queen and Prince Charles, who were at Balmoral, were woken by aides and told that Diana had been seriously injured. The Prince listened to radio bulletins all night but did not wake the boys until later in the morning when he told them the awful news. ‘I knew something was wrong, I kept waking up all night,’ Prince William was reported to have said. The news, likewise, was relayed to the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. At 4.41am the world was told the dreadful news in a brief newsflash. ‘Diana, Princess of Wales has died, according to British sources, the Press Association learned this morning.’

  As the nation groped to understand the enormity of its loss, the need to apportion blame was the inevitable handmaiden of its grief. Before it was discovered that the driver was drunk and speeding, it was the notorious paparazzi who were in the dock. Speaking from South Africa, Earl Spencer was the first to point a finger. Visibly angered by the waste of his sister’s life he said: ‘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 went on: ‘Finally the one consolation is that Diana is now in a place where no human being can ever touch her again. I pray that she rests in peace.’

  The Fayed family, too, were moved to action, lawyers acting for the family taking out a civil suit against the photographers who had been arrested at the scene. Their spokesman now denounced their activities. ‘There is no doubt in Mr Fayed’s mind that this tragedy would not have occurred but for the press photographers who have dogged Mr Fayed and the Princess for weeks.’ The paparazzi, he said, behaved like ‘Apache Indians swarming around a Wells Fargo stage-coach firing not arrows but flashlights into the driver’s eyes’. Central to the discussion was whether the paparazzi had caused the crash as a direct result of their actions or obliquely, as a result of their unwelcome presence.

  While the recriminations continued throughout a week that has proved to be a watershed in British history, in the first hours there were the practical matters of organizing Diana’s funeral and the sad task of bringing her body back from France. As a divorced Princess of Wales without a royal title, Palace courtiers were initially confused about her style and status, as unsure about how to treat her in death as in life. Certainly she could not be treated as any private citizen who had been killed abroad. The Queen and the Prince of Wales and their advisers were in full agreement, contrary to some reports, that she must be accorded full royal status.

  Before he and Diana’s sisters flew to Paris, the Prince joined the rest of the royal family, including Princes William and Harry, at Sunday service at Crathie church close to the Balmoral estate. The boys, who had been given the option of attending or not, insisted on taking part in the service. Although this lasted an hour, no mention was made of Diana’s death nor were prayers spoken in remembrance. Instead, the minister stuck to his original sermon about the dubious joys of moving house, replete with jokes by the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly. This was the first of many differences of tone and emphasis between the people and the Palace which at first jarred and then led to open resentment.

  While the royal family were at prayer, Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, was one of a number of royal officials who flew to Paris to organize her homecoming. He carried a small suitcase containing her clothes and make-up, spending a long time preparing the body for the imminent arrival of the Prince of Wales and Diana’s two sisters. When the royal party flew in, late in the afternoon, they were led to the first-floor casualty room where Diana’s coffin lay. Each of the group spent a few minutes alone saying their private farewells, the Prince of Wales remaining with his former wife for 30 minutes. It was clear when they emerged that many tears had been shed.

  On a day when millions of people around the world literally couldn’t or wouldn’t believe that their princess was dead, it was only when the BAe 146 of the Queen’s Flight made its final approach to RAF Northolt at 7pm on Sunday evening, 31 August, that the enormity of her loss began to sink in. Her coffin, draped with the Royal Standard and topped with a single wreath of white lilies from her family, was borne in silence across the tarmac by eight RAF pall-bearers, watched by the Prime Minister and a number of other military and government dignitaries. While her body was taken first to a private mortuary and then to St James’s Palace, the body of her companion, Dodi Fayed, was buried at Brookwood Cemetery in Woking following a service at the Regent’s Park mosque.

  The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who was in close contact with the Queen and Prince Charles, captured the feelings of loss an
d despair when he spoke to the nation earlier in the day from his Sedgefield constituency. Speaking without notes, his voice breaking with emotion, he described Diana as a ‘wonderful and warm human being’.

  ‘She touched the lives of so many others in Britain and throughout the world with joy and with comfort. How difficult things were for her from time to time, I’m sure we can only guess at. But people everywhere, not just here in Britain, kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her, they loved her, they regarded her as one of the people. She was the People’s Princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in all our hearts and memories for ever.’

  While his was the first of many tributes which poured in from world figures, it perfectly captured the mood of the nation in a historic week which saw the British people, with sober intensity and angry dignity, place on trial the ancien régime, notably an elitist, exploitative and male-dominated mass media and an unresponsive monarchy. For a week Britain succumbed to flower power, the scent and sight of millions of bouquets a mute and telling testimony to the love people felt towards a woman who was scorned by the Establishment during her lifetime.

  So it was entirely appropriate when Buckingham Palace announced that her funeral would be ‘a unique service for a unique person’. The posies, the poems, the candles and the cards that were placed at Kensington Palace, Buckingham Palace and elsewhere spoke volumes about the mood of the nation and the state of modern Britain. ‘The royal family never respected you, but the people did’, said one message, as thousands of people, most of whom had never met her, made their way in quiet homage to Kensington Palace to express their grief, their sorrow, their guilt and their regret. Total strangers hugged and comforted each other, others waited patiently to lay their tributes, some prayed silently. When darkness fell, the gardens were bathed in an ethereal glow from the thousands of candles, becoming a place of dignified pilgrimage that Chaucer would have recognized. All were welcome and all came, a rainbow coalition of young and old of every colour and nationality, East Enders and West Enders, refugees, the disabled, the lonely, the curious, and, inevitably, droves of tourists. She was the one person in the land who could connect with those Britons who had been pushed to the edges of society as well as with those who governed it.

  In some way Diana’s life, her vulnerability, her strength, her frailty, her beauty, her compassion and her search for fulfilment, had touched them, inspired them and in the end moved them, perhaps more than anything else in their lives. Not only did she capture the spirit of the age, mirroring society as the monarchy once did, but the manner of her life and death seemed at the time to form part of a religious cycle of sin and redemption, a genuinely good and Christian woman who was martyred for our sins, epitomizing our strange appetite for celebrity. The singer Madonna confessed: ‘As much as I want to blame the press we all have blood on our hands. All of us, even myself, bought these magazines and read them.’ Even the T-shirts hastily printed with the mawkish sentiment: ‘Born a princess, died a saint’ had an accurate sense of the popular mood less than a thousand days before the new millennium.

  Those few days after her death captured for ever the contrast between the Princess and the House of Windsor: her openness, their distance; her affection, their frigidity; her spontaneity, their inflexibility; her glamour, their dullness; her modernity, their stale ritual; her emotional generosity, their aloofness; her rainbow coalition, their court of aristocrats. As the commentator Polly Toynbee wrote: ‘Diana the Difficult was a problem the Palace could tackle but St Diana is something the Palace can never contend with … If some day the monarchy finally draws peacefully to a close, Diana’s ghostly spirit will have played its part.’

  As the royal family spent the week in seclusion at Balmoral, they seemed a troubled clan bewildered by events, retreating from the nation rather than leading them in mourning. While this was a wholly unfair presumption, the nation’s growing irritation with their behaviour was nothing new. During the late 1980s when Britain suffered a series of appalling disasters, notably the Hillsborough football stadium tragedy, the Pan Am aeroplane crash at Lockerbie, and the sinking of the Marchioness pleasure cruiser, the royal family were conspicuous in their absence, preferring to remain on holiday rather than attend memorial services. At that time there was much criticism of them, though it was anger which soon abated. This time the strength of feeling threatened to overwhelm. It was perhaps fortunate that a deer-stalking party, planned for that week on the Balmoral estate, did not go ahead.

  While the church service at Crathie jarred, resentment built up as the Palace appeared more concerned with protocol than the people’s wishes. The public were irritated in a number of small ways; the police at first refused to allow bouquets to be placed outside Buckingham Palace where the Union Flag, unlike those on almost every other public building in Britain, was not even flying at half mast. Those wishing to pay tribute were waiting for up to 12 hours to sign one of the 5 books of condolences at St James’s Palace – these were increased to 43 only after public complaints. More important than the royal family’s inadequate response to the outpouring of public grief was the impression that they were turning their backs on the nation when the nation most needed them. The Queen’s decision to arrive in London on the Saturday morning of the funeral even provoked the historian Lord Blake into criticizing courtiers for sticking too rigidly to the royal rule book. ‘There will never be another Princess Diana,’ he said. The Sun newspaper was characteristically blunt: ‘Where is the Queen when the country needs her? She is 550 miles from London, the focal point of the nation’s grief.’

  For once this was not merely a tabloid rant. In a way that went to the heart of the purpose of a monarchy in a modern democratic state, the people wished to see the Head of State unify and console, taking her position at the centre of the national stage rather than watching from the wings. So there was a ripple of applause among the throng outside Buckingham Palace when it was announced that the Queen would be returning to the capital and would address the nation on the eve of the funeral. ‘Our mother is coming home,’ said one middle-aged man, barely able to contain his tears. The sensitivity, warmth and generosity of the Queen’s tribute, made from the first-floor balcony overlooking the Mall, stilled many carping tongues. She told her TV audience: ‘What I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart. First, I want to pay tribute to Diana, myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, to inspire others with her warmth and kindness. I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others, especially for her devotion to her two boys.’ She went on to explain that at Balmoral that week the royal family had been trying to help Princes William and Harry to come to terms with the ‘devastating loss’ they had suffered.

  The unprecedented decision to allow the Union Flag to fly at half mast over Buckingham Palace after the Queen had left to attend the funeral service, the agreement to double the length of the funeral route, and the walkabouts by the Queen and Prince Philip outside Buckingham Palace and by the Prince of Wales and his children outside Kensington Palace demonstrated that the Sovereign, her heir and the Prime Minister were sensitive to what the Queen called the ‘extraordinary and moving reaction’ to Diana’s death, and had responded to it.

  While the Queen had emerged splendidly from the shadows, it was the presence of Prince William, the standard bearer of Diana’s legacy, who was the true focus of affection. When he joined his father and brother outside the gates of Kensington Palace, this shyly smiling, dignified young man was treated with the kind of genuflecting ecstasy more in keeping with a Papal visit, some women bursting into tears when they kissed his hand.

  This devout mood was reflected in the manner of Diana’s departure. Her funeral was, in sight and sound, more medieval than modern; there was the doleful sound of the tenor bell which tolled every minute as Diana’s coffin, borne on a horse-drawn gun carriage, made its sombre
way from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey; the straining silence of the crowd; the ancient solemnity of the Christian service; and the strewing of flowers along the road as Diana’s body was taken to Althorp where, after a private ceremony, she was laid to rest on an island called the Round Oval in a lake on the family’s ancestral estate.

  Even Earl Spencer’s rapier thrusts at the royal family during his funeral oration, sentiments which drew growls of approval from the crowds outside, were reminiscent of an impudent Earl of Essex daring to challenge Elizabeth I in full view of her Court. The sight of Princes William and Harry following the rumbling gun carriage vividly expressed the intimacy of their loss, revealing the Spencers and the Windsors not as remote, shimmering figures but as two families grieving together.

  While the style was ancient, almost tribal, the substance on that day, 6 September 1997, will be seen by historians as marking the crumbling of the old hierarchical regime and the coming of a more egalitarian era. When the Queen bowed to the Princess’s coffin as it passed Buckingham Palace she was paying obeisance not only to Diana but to everything she represented, values which express so much of modern Britain – ‘The stiff upper lip versus the trembling lower lip’, as one wag put it.

  If Elton John’s emotional rendition of ‘Candle in the Wind’, rewritten to incorporate a tribute to Diana, expressed everyone’s feelings, Earl Spencer gave vent to the nation’s thoughts with a cutting and remorseless honesty. He threw down the gauntlet to the Sovereign and her family as well as the massed ranks of the Fourth Estate, implicitly rebuking the royal family for taking away Diana’s title and for the way they brought up their children. Diana, he said, ‘needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic’, a reference to the fact that the Queen had stripped the Princess of her right to be styled ‘Her Royal Highness’ when she divorced. It was no surprise that when his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Fellowes, then the Queen’s private secretary, transmitted later that day the offer to reinstate her title of honour, her brother turned it down flat.