THE MAN PRINCESS DIANA TRULY LOVED — AND WHY SHE COULDN’T KEEP HIM

She was born on the 1st of July 1961 at Parkhouse on the royal estate of Sandringham in the flat green county of Norfolk.

Parkhouse was not a grand mansion in its own right.

It was a large, comfortable 10-bedroom countryhouse of golden Norfolk stone, rented from the queen by Diana’s father, Viccount Olthorp, who had earlier served as an equary to both King George V 6th and Queen Elizabeth II.

It sat quite literally in the shadow of Sandringham House itself, some way down a private drive.

The royal family lived effectively next door.

That geography matters because from the moment of her birth, Diana Francis Spencer belonged to that peculiar English aristocratic world which lived beside and around and slightly beneath the house of Windsor.

Her grandmother Ruth, Lady Foy, was a personal friend and lady in waiting to the Queen Mother.

The two families exchanged Christmas presents. The royal children came for tea and in the summers small blonde Diana in her cotton frogs played with two small blonde boys named Andrew and Edward on the lawns of Sandringham.

Her father Johnny Elthorp was warm, easily wounded and rather sentimental.

Her mother Francis was beautiful and highly strung.

And by the time Diana was 6 years old, the marriage between them had fallen apart in the most public and painful way that an English aristocratic marriage could fall apart.

In the 1960s, Francis left. That is the short version.

The longer version, which appears in every serious biography of Diana, is that Francis at the age of 31 had fallen in love with a wallpaper heir named Peter Shand Kid.

And in the summer of 1967, she left Park House to be with him, taking the two younger children, Diana and her little brother Charles, up to London for what everyone, including Diana, was told would be a temporary arrangement.

It was not temporary. There was a bitter custody battle.

In 1969, in a courtroom in London, Francis loSt. She lost above all because her own mother, Diana’s grandmother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, gave evidence against her.

Evidence in favor of her son-in-law, Diana’s father.

It was by every account a devastating betrayal within the family, and Diana’s mother, from that day onwards, was permitted to see her children only at weekends and in the holidays.

Diana was seven when the case was settled.

Her brother Charles, who would later, as Earl Spencer, deliver the most famous funeral address of the 20th century, was three, and their two elder sisters, Sarah and Jane, were already away at boarding school.

I want you to pause with me for a moment on that small girl in that large house.

Because everything that would come later in this story has its root in her.

Her governnesses in later years remembered a child who was quiet, who was watchful, who loved animals almost obsessively.

She had guinea pigs, hamsters, and a rather badly behaved cat called Marmalade, and who in the evenings sometimes stood at the top of the great staircase of Park House and listened for the sound of her mother’s car on the gravel drive.

The car, of course, did not come.

Her mother, by then, was living with Mr.

Shand Kid in a farmhouse on the west coast of Scotland, 500 m away.

Andrew Morton in his book from 1992, which as we shall see was in fact secretly written with Diana’s own corporation, records that she remembered all her life the sound of her little brother crying in the dark, calling out for his mother and remembered walking down the corridor in her night dress to try to comfort him.

She was six, he was two. That is where this story starts.

Not with a tiara, not with a wedding dress, but with a small girl walking in the dark along the corridor of a large empty house trying to comfort a smaller child.

She was sent at the age of nine to a boarding preparatory school called Riddlesworth Hall and then at 13 to West Heath school in Kent.

She was not by any measure an academic child.

She failed all five of her Ole examinations twice.

She did however win the school prize for helpfulness and she taught herself to play the piano rather well and she developed the two things which would define her adult life.

Both of which she seems to have taught herself largely alone.

The first was a deep apparently instinctive kindness towards people who were suffering.

At school she volunteered to visit an elderly woman in the local town every week.

She read to her. She made her cups of tea.

She held her hand. Nobody asked her to do it.

Nobody, so far as we can tell, praised her for it.

She simply did it week after week for 2 years.

The second thing she taught herself was ballet.

She was at 5′ 10 by the time she was fully grown, far too tall to be a professional ballerina.

That dream had to be abandoned early.

But she never lost the love of movement, of music, of dancing in the way she had first danced as a very small child in the drawing room at Park House.

Remember that please because it is going to matter later in a spectacular way at the Royal Opera House in Coven Garden in December of 1985.

In 1975, the Spencer family’s whole world was rearranged.

Her grandfather, the seventh Earl Spencer, died.

Her father inherited the title and above all, Elthorp House, that vast imposing 500year-old family seat set in 550 acres of Northamptonshire Parkland.

Diana, aged 14, moved out of the friendly Norfolk house of her childhood and into a great echoing stately home with more than a 100 rooms, most of them full of portraits of Spencer ancestors staring down from the walls.

She hated it. She wrote in a letter that Elthorp fell to her like a museum.

And within a year, her father, the new Earl, remarried.

His second wife was Rain, the flamboyant daughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Kartland.

Diana and her siblings, by every account, did not warm to their new stepmother, whom they nicknamed rather unkindly acid rain.

It was a difficult, unhappy adolescence in which the one warm figure of her father was suddenly, in her own eyes, taken from her.

She left school at 16 with no qualifications.

>> >> She was sent for a year to a Swiss finishing school from which she came home early homesick and unsettled and then at 17 she moved to London.

Her mother bought her a flat in Colhern Court in Earls Court.

She shared it with three girlfriends. She took a series of the sort of jobs that unqualified young women of her class took in 1978 and 1979.

She cleaned her sister’s flat for a pound an hour.

She worked briefly as a nanny for an American family in Belgravia and most famously she took a part-time job as a nursery school assistant at the Young England kindergarten in Pimlo.

She was according to everyone who worked with her there extremely good with small children.

Naturally effortlessly good. And it was during those Coleharned court years when she was still only a shy teenager driving a little red Austin Metro around London that she began quietly to catch the attention of the family who lived next door to her at Sandringham.

The first serious contact was through her elder sister Sarah.

Sarah Spencer, four years older than Diana, had briefly dated the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, during 1977 and part of 1978.

It was not a romantic match of great weight on either side, but it did mean that in November of 1977 at a shooting weekend at All Thorp in a field called No Bottle Wood, Sarah introduced her 16-year-old younger sister to the 29-year-old heir to the throne.

Diana would later say in the tapes she made in secret for Andrew Morton that she thought at the time that Charles seemed, and I quote, sad.

What Charles thought of her is less clear, though he did in later years remark that he remembered a giggly, cheerful, jolly, and above all completely unspoiled 16-year-old.

Nothing happened at that stage. She was, after all, still a school girl.

But 3 years later, in the summer of 1980, everything changed.

The Prince of Wales was, by the standards of the British establishment of 1980, in serious trouble.

He was 31 years old. He was unmarried and there was a growing increasingly urgent view within the palace, within the government and within a large section of the British press that this was becoming a national problem.

The heir to the throne in the traditional view needed a wife.

He needed more particularly an heir. And according to the strict unwritten and by then rather antique rules of the Church of England and the palace, he needed a wife who could pass a set of tests which had by 1980 narrowed the field of eligible young women in Britain to approximately well nobody.

She had to be young. She had to be by preference of aristocratic background.

She had to be a Protestant. She had to be in the ugly old language of the time of unblenmished reputation which meant in practice that she had to be someone with no serious romantic history in her paSt. In 1980 in swinging late7s London this was a very short list indeed and Diana Spencer at 19 ticked every single box.

They met properly again in the summer of 1980.

Charles was staying with friends near Pworth in West Sussex.

Diana had been invited to the same house party.

According to her later account to Andrew Morton, they sat together on a bail of hay after a polo match and she said something to him.

The exact wording varies between different sources, so I will not pretend to reconstruct the conversation for you word for word.

But the gist of it was that she told him she thought he had looked lonely at the funeral of his beloved great uncle, Lord Mountbatton, the year before, that she thought he needed someone to look after him.

Charles was by all accounts extremely moved.

He had adored Mount Batton. The provisional IRA had murdered the elderly man with a bomb on his fishing boat in Ireland in August of 1979, and Charles had been in mourning ever since.

Here was a beautiful, softly spoken, blue-eyed 19-year-old with no scandalous past from an aristocratic family the Windsor had known for generations, telling him sincerely that she saw his sadness.

He asked to see her again. There followed one of the shortest courtships in modern royal history.

Between that hay bill in the summer of 1980 and the announcement of their engagement on the 24th of February 1981, they saw each other in person.

According to Diana’s own late account, on approximately 13 occasions, 13 dates.

Some of those dates were on the royal yacht.

Some of them were at Belmoral.

Some were at Sandringham at Christmas. >> >> He never in the modern sense of the phrase took her out for dinner.

He was 32 years old. She was 19.

And in that gap of 13 years, and in the still greater gap of temperament between them lay the whole tragedy of the marriage that was about to follow.

Because Charles was a man who liked long philosophical books and organic gardening and painting watercolors and long thoughtful conversations with older men.

And Diana was a teenage girl who liked Juran, Juran, Neil Diamond, and dancing to pop music in her flat in Cohern Court with her three flatmates.

They did not, in any modern sense of the word, know each other.

The engagement was announced by Buckingham Palace on the morning of the 24th of February, 1981.

Diana appeared for a photograph on the lawn at Buckingham Palace in a blue suit, wearing an enormous sapphire and diamond engagement ring, which she had chosen that same week from a tray of options presented by the royal jeweler Garrett.

The ring cost at that time £28,500.

It is incidentally the same ring now worn by Catherine, Princess of Wales, the wife of Diana’s elder son, William, who gave it to her on the day of his own proposal in October of 2010.

That morning, on the 24th of February, 1981, a young television reporter for ITN put a question to the newly engaged couple.

He asked them whether they were in love.

Diana answered at once brightly and clearly.

Of course, she said. Charles paused. He looked, according to those who watched the footage back later, briefly uncomfortable.

And then he said in a phrase which has been quoted against him for the rest of his natural life, I quote, “Whatever in love means.” You have to understand what those four words did to the young woman standing next to him who was 19 years old and who had according to every friend of hers from that period spent the last 6 months genuinely, unironically and completely convinced that she was in love with the Prince of Wales.

Those four words landed like a slap.

She did not in the moment understand what he meant.

She thought it was perhaps an odd sort of joke.

It was decades later that she came to understand or believe she understood what Charles had really been saying that morning.

And what he had been saying that morning was this.

He was in love with somebody else.

Her name of course was Camila. Camila Parker BS, born Camila Shand, was at that time 33 years old, married since 1973 to an army officer named Andrew Parker BS and living in a farmhouse in Glsters with two small children.

She had first met Charles in the early 1970s when they were both in their 20s and they had had by every reliable account a genuine and mutual love affair before her marriage.

When she had chosen to marry Andrew Parker BS rather than wait for Charles who was at the time off serving in the Royal Navy.

Charles had been according to his own biographer heartbroken.

By later accounts the emotional attachment between them never entirely disappeared.

Now I want to be careful here because for many years particularly in the years after Diana’s death a certain version of this story circulated in the press which painted Camila as a straightforward villain and it is a version of the story which is not on the whole supported by the evidence as the evidence now allows us to understand it.

What is true is that Charles and Camila had a deep long-standing friendship and at various points more than a friendship.

What is also true is that in 1981 on the eve of his marriage to Diana, Charles was still very much in Camila’s life.

Whether the physical affair was active in that specific period is disputed between different biographers.

What is not disputed is that Diana knew or suspected that this other woman existed.

2 days before the wedding, Diana came across in Charles’s office at Buckingham Palace a package.

Inside it was a gold bracelet. On the bracelet were the two entwined initials G and F.

Diana would later say again on the Morton tapes that the initials stood for Glattis and Fred, which were, according to her, the private nicknames Charles and Camila used for one another.

>> >> The bracelet, Diana understood, was a farewell gift from Charles to Camila before the wedding.

Whether the bracelet was in fact exactly what Diana believed it to be, again, some biographers are more cautious about this.

The effect on the 19-year-old bride to be was catastrophic.

She confided in her two elder sisters that she did not want to go through with the marriage.

She told them she thought it was, in her own words, as later recalled, a mistake.

And her sisters, according to Andrew Morton’s account, said to her the sentence which perhaps more than any other sentence sums up the whole trap she was walking into.

They said roughly, “Your face is on the tea towels, duck.” Duck being her family nickname.

It’s too late to chicken out now.

They meant it kindly. They meant it, one supposes, half as a joke.

But they were not on the essentials wrong.

The invitations had gone out. >> >> The dress was finished.

Commemorative china had already been manufactured and shipped in vast quantities.

The tea towels quite literally had been printed.

She was at 19 a global commercial product.

She went through with it. On the morning of the 29th of July 1981, at 11:00 British summertime, Lady Diana Spencer left Clarence house in a glass coach for the journey to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The dress had been designed by David and Elizabeth Emmanuel.

It was made of ivory silk tea and antique lace.

Its strain at 25 ft was the longest ever worn by a royal bride in the modern history of the British monarchy.

It had famously arrived at the cathedral rather crumpled and had to be smoothed out on the steps.

She walked up the aisle on the arm of her father.

Earl Spencer, weakened by a serious stroke some years earlier, could barely climb the steps.

She held him up more than he held her.

At the altar, in front of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in front of the Queen, in front of an estimated 750 million television viewers around the world, she made two very small verbal slips in the vows.

She got Charles’s names in the wrong order.

Philip Charles Arthur George instead of Charles Phillip Arthur George.

It was a small slip. Nobody minded.

Everybody in fact thought it was rather sweet.

She was by every metric that mattered to Buckingham Palace that day perfect.

She was also, though almost nobody watching that morning could have guessed it, already suffering from a serious and by then rapidly worsening eating disorder called bulimia nervosa.

In the 5 months between the engagement announcement in February and the wedding at the end of July, her waist had shrunk by more than 5 in.

The Emanuals had had to take the dress in over and over again in successive fittings.

In a home video her brother Charles later recorded, she is seen glancing down at her own waist and murmuring half in wonder that she can now put both her hands entirely around it.

She was 19 years old. She had married that morning into one of the oldest and most famous royal families in Europe.

She had married that morning a man who 5 months earlier when asked on television whether they were in love had answered with that famously uncertain phrase about whatever in love meant.

And though she did not yet know it, she had also married that morning into a triangle.

There would in the long strange marriage that lay ahead of her always be three people in it.

She said it herself to the world 14 years later on live television.

But before we get to that, we have to look at what happened next.

At the honeymoon, at the birth of a future king, at the tours of Australia, and at the strange, slow unraveling that turned the shy nursery school teacher of 1980 into the most famous, most photographed, and most unhappy woman on the planet by the middle of the decade.

Stay with me because the story is only just beginning.

The honeymoon began in the traditional royal manor at Broadlands, the country estate in Hampshire which had belonged to Charles’s beloved greatuncle, Lord Mountbatton.

It was the same house in which Charles’s own parents, the Queen and Prince Philillip, had begun their honeymoon in 1947.

There was a great deal of family history in those walls.

There were also, and this is not a small point, a very great many photographs of Mount Batton on every table and every wall.

And Charles, we are told, spent a good deal of the first days of his marriage reading alone in the library.

He was reading above all the works of Sir Ldens Fondost, the South African writer and philosopher who had become a kind of spiritual mentor to him in the late ‘7s.

Diana, according to her later account to Andrew Morton, was rather bewildered.

She had expected, one supposes, the sort of honeymoon that a 19-year-old imagines.

Long walks, shared meals, long conversations.

Whatever it was, young brides in 1981 imagined honeymoons were meant to be.

Instead, her husband spent long stretches of each day silent, reading, and thinking.

After a few days at Broadlands, they flew out to join the royal yacht Bratannia in Gibralar for a two-week cruise around the Mediterranean.

And it was on board Britannia, according to Diana herself in the Morton material, that she came one evening upon two photographs.

They fell out, she said, from her husband’s diary.

They were photographs of Camila. Whether the exact detail is precisely as she remembered it, biographers differ on this.

The essential emotional truth of that Mediterranean fortnite is not really disputed by anyone.

The young bride began to understand that her husband’s heart was at least in part elsewhere.

Her bulimia, which had been serious in the weeks before the wedding, became on board Britannia worse.

She was later frank about it.

She spoke of eating whole bowls of ice cream and then making herself sick, sometimes four or five times a day.

She was 19. She was, by any reasonable measure, unwell, and she was almost entirely alone.

They returned to Britain in the middle of August and traveled up to Belmoral, the royal family’s private estate in the Scottish Highlands for the rest of the summer.

And it was at Belmoral over those long gray Scottish weeks that Diana had her first sustained encounter with what her life was really going to be like from now on.

Days of shooting and stalking and long silent picnics on the moors, formal dinners in the evening, back pipes at breakfaSt. A family which however affectionate individually communicated with each other in a code of illusion and reserve that a warm-hearted teenager from Northamptonshire simply did not speak.

And there was one enormous consolation which for Diana would in the end redeemed the whole nightmare.

She was by early September of 1981 pregnant.

Prince William Arthur Philip Louie was born at 3 minutes past 9 in the evening on the 21st of June 1982 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, London.

He weighed 7 lb 1/2 oz. He was the first heir to the British throne to be born in a hospital rather than at home in a royal palace.

That in itself was a small quiet revolution in the way the modern monarchy did its business and it had been at Diana’s insistence.

The pregnancy had been extremely hard. She was violently unwell in the early months.

There was one incident in the January of that year, which she herself described later in the tapes made for Andrew Morton, in which she said she had thrown herself down a wooden staircase at Sandingham while pregnant.

She said she had done it in a moment of desperate unhappiness, aware that Charles was going out riding and hoping in some way to make him stop and pay attention.

The palace at the time described the incident publicly as a fall.

It is important to say clearly that this account rests almost entirely on Diana’s own later testimony to Morton and that there are no independent witnesses.

What is not disputed is that she was throughout the pregnancy deeply unhappy and unwell and that the marriage by January of 1982 was already in serious trouble.

But William was born safely. He was by all accounts a big healthy baby with his mother’s blue eyes and Diana adored him from the first moment.

She insisted on breastfeeding him herself, which was by the standards of previous royal generations unusual.

She insisted on choosing his nannies herself.

And she insisted above all on being a hands-on, kissing, cuddling, physically affectionate mother in a way that the Windsores of the previous three generations brought up in the stiffer style of Eduwardian child rearing simply had not been.

2 years and 2 months later on the 15th of September 1984 at 20 minutes past 4 in the afternoon again at St. Mary’s Paddington her second son was born.

Henry Charles Albert David always known from the first day as Harry weighed 6 lb 14 oz.

He had unusually for a Windsor a striking head of red hair.

And I want at this point to deal directly with something which has been said and repeated particularly on the internet for many years and which is not true.

It has sometimes been suggested on the basis of Harry’s red hair that his biological father was not Prince Charles but a British army officer named James Huitt with whom Diana was later to have an affair.

Let us look at the facts. Harry was born in September of 1984.

Diana did not meet James Huitt on any account before the summer of 1986.

That is nearly 2 years after Harry was born.

Huitt himself has said more than once and very clearly that he could not possibly be Harry’s father, that he had not met Diana at the time of Harry’s conception, and that the entire suggestion is a cruel piece of nonsense.

On this one point, everyone from the palace to the man himself is in agreement.

It is a piece of tabloid mischief which has caused a great deal of pain to a young man who lost his mother at the age of 12 and it needs to be calmly and clearly put to reSt. Harry is his father’s son and in temperament red hair or no red hair he is unmistakably a Spencer on his mother’s side.

By the time of Harry’s birth in 1984, however, the marriage of his parents was in private already deeply damaged.

Diana would later say in her own words to a different interviewer in 1995 that the last time she and Charles were properly emotionally close was in the weeks before Harry was born.

She said Charles had wanted a girl.

When Harry was born a boy, she remembered him saying something like, “Oh, it’s a boy.” and oh, he’s even got red hair.

And she said in that quiet Kensington Palace drawing room in front of the television cameras that something in her closed off in that moment that never opened again.

Publicly, however, the fairy tale was at this point entering its greatest, most dazzling public phase.

Between 1983 and roughly 1986, the Prince and Princess of Wales became together the most famous couple on the surface of the earth.

They toured Australia and New Zealand in the spring of 1983, taking baby William with them, again unheard of in previous royal generations, to take an infant heir on a long overseas tour and again at Diana’s insistence.

The crowds in Sydney and Melbourne and Oakland were vast beyond anything the Australian or New Zealand authorities had ever prepared for.

200,000 people, 300,000 people, 400,000 people at a single walkabout.

And it was on that Australian tour that Charles, who was after all a highly intelligent and quite sensitive man, began to notice something which was going to gnore at him for the rest of the marriage.

When he and Diana got out of a car together at a public appearance, the crowd on his side would groan with disappointment.

The crowd on her side would cheer.

She was at 21, 22, 23, becoming a global superstar.

He was becoming the man she had come with.

The imbalance was difficult for him and friends and biographers would later describe how deeply the reversal of attention strained an already fragile marriage.

By the middle of the decade, the photographs told a story you could read without any captions at all.

There they are at a polo match.

She is looking at the ground. He is looking at the horses.

There they are at a state banquet.

She is talking to the man on her right.

He is talking to the woman on his left.

There they are on a beach in the Bahamas.

She is standing with her arms folded.

He is 15 ft away walking in the opposite direction.

Something in the phrase of a British newspaper of the time was rotten in the state of the Wales’s.

And it was in December of 1985 at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden that Diana did something which in a way was her first great public act of independence.

She had a friend, a professional ballet dancer named Wayne Sleep.

Between them, without telling Charles, they had rehearsed in secret a dance to the song Uptown Girl by Billy Joe.

The routine lasted only a few minutes.

No public film of the original performance is known to survive.

What remains are photographs, recollections, and the extraordinary memory of having seen a princess suddenly step out of the royal box and into the language of popular culture.

At the Christmas Gala performance at the Royal Opera House in front of an audience which included the Prince of Wales, the curtain rose quite unexpectedly to reveal the Princess of Wales in a silvery satin dress in stocked feet at the front of the stage dancing a fully choreographed pop routine quite well with the compact athletic professional dancer Wayne Sleep whose height made the visual contrast between them all the more memorable.

The audience, according to every account we have, went for a moment briefly wild.

There were, by wayne’s later recollection, multiple curtain calls.

Charles, in the royal box, did not, according to those who saw his face, look delighted.

He looked, if you must know, embarrassed.

She was in his view and he later made this explicit in a much quoted semi-authorized biography by Jonathan Dimbleby published in 1994 becoming a spectacle.

She was upstaging him. She was behaving in his private view in a way which was not entirely dignified for a future queen.

Looking back now across the decades, you and I may look at that story and think it is charming.

A young mother of two in a marriage that was already breaking decided to dance in front of her husband at Christmas at the opera house to a Billy Joel pop song in stocking feet.

It is in a way one of the last completely happy public moments of her life.

But at the time at Kensington Palace it did not go down well and from about that Christmas of 1985 onwards in private the marriage began to enter its final stages.

Both of them by the late 1980s were being unfaithful to each other.

That is not gossip. It is the settled conclusion of every serious biographer of both parties and it was later effectively admitted on television by both of them in turn.

Charles would later say that his physical relationship with Camila Parker Balls resumed in 1986 after he believed his marriage to Diana had irretrievably broken down.

Camila by then was living in a farmhouse in Wiltshire.

Her own marriage to Andrew Parker Balls had long had its own complications and infidelities within their country circle in the west of England.

Charles and Camila’s renewed closeness gradually became less of a secret, even while the wider public still saw only the formal photographs and official appearances.

Diana in the summer of that same year met a young officer in the lifeguards, one of the two mounted regiments of the household cavalry at a party in London.

He was at the time a lieutenant.

His name was James Huitt. He was tall, red-haired, hence later the tabloid mischief we spoke of a moment ago, a serving cavalry officer, and he offered to teach her and later her two small sons to ride horses again.

>> >> She had in her teens been thrown from a pony and had lost her nerve.

Now at 25, she wanted to get it back so that she could ride with William and Harry.

The riding lessons became over the course of the following months a love affair.

It lasted on and off for approximately 5 years and it was on her own eventual admission the great and tender emotional refuge of her middle 20s.

She has said in her own words in 1995, and I quote, “Yes, I adored him.

Yes, I was in love with him.” 25 years later, in a recorded interview in 2017, one of her closest friends said that James Huitt was quite possibly the only man Diana ever fully, romantically, and physically loved.

Both affairs, Charles’s and Diana’s, were at that stage private.

Both couples in public still went to the state banquetss and to the polo matches and to the church services at San Ringham on Christmas morning.

The country still in the main believed the fairy tale.

That however was about to end. Between 1992 and 1995, over the course of just 3 and 1/2 years, the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales was going to be pulled apart in public in front of the entire world through a series of leaks, tapes, books, and interviews which have no real equivalent in the history of the modern monarchy.

There is no other way to put it.

What happened between 1992 and 1995 is one of the most extraordinary, self-inflicted, mutually assured, emotional demolition jobs in the history of any European royal family.

It started in effect in the summer of 1992 with a book.

The book was called Diana, her true story.

It was written by a British journalist called Andrew Morton.

Newspaper extracts began appearing on the 7th of June 1992, and the book itself was published later that month.

By the time it reached the shops, it had already landed like a bomb.

Morton’s book was extraordinary because it presented for the first time in unflinching detail Diana’s own version of her marriage, her unhappiness, her bulimia, her episodes of what the book called self harm, including her account of having thrown herself down the stairs at Sandingham while pregnant with William.

Her belief from the very beginning that Charles had always been in love with Camila Parker BS.

Her sense that the palace as an institution had never really tried to understand her or help her.

Buckingham Palace on the day of publication denounced the book.

They said in the traditional formula that it was riddled with inaccuracies and that Diana had had nothing to do with it.

Andrew Morton for his part and Diana herself in every public appearance denied any connection between them.

She had not, they said, cooperated. That was not true.

And Morton had sitting in his safe in his house in West London the evidence that it was not true.

He had a series of cassette tapes on those tapes recorded through an intermediary, a friend of Diana’s named James Colthurst, who had gone into Kensington Palace with a small tape recorder in his bag.

Over the course of many afternoons in 1991 and 1992, Diana herself in her own voice had answered Morton’s questions one by one.

Sitting on the floor of her sitting room at Kensington Palace, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, sometimes furious, she had over many hours given her whole life story into a small microphone.

Morton had in effect written the book from her dictation.

Only after her death in 1997 did he confirm this publicly and released the transcripts.

But even in the summer of 1992, in the immediate aftermath of publication, everybody in Britain who had been paying attention understood what had really happened.

This was not a rogue biographer piecing together gossip.

This was the Princess of Wales from inside the walls of Kensington Palace telling her side of the story to the whole country.

The country on the whole believed her.

The palace was in shock. The queen, according to biographers who spoke to those close to her, was appalled, not so much by the content of the book, though that was hard enough, but by what she saw as the extraordinary breach of family discipline.

This was not, in the Windsor tradition, how one did things.

Charles, for his part, was furious. And then, just when everyone thought the summer of 1992 had already given the country its biggest royal scandal in a generation, the second bomb dropped.

In late August of 1992, the Sun newspaper began in serialized form to publish the transcript of a private intimate telephone conversation between the Princess of Wales and a wealthy British businessman named James Gilby.

The conversation had taken place, it turned out, on New Year’s Eve of 1989, nearly 3 years earlier.

It had somehow been intercepted and recorded by a radio scanner enthusiast in the north of England and the tape had made its way by a route which has never been entirely clarified to Fleet Street.

The transcript was in places embarrassing. Diana and Gilby spoke intimately.

He called her at various points Squidgy or Squid, hence the immediate British tabloid nickname for the whole affair, which was in the mode of Fleet Street of the time, Squidgy Gate.

Squeegee gate was damaging enough, but then came the third bomb.

In January of 1993, a rival newspaper published a transcript of a private telephone call, again apparently intercepted by an amateur radio operator, this time from December of 1989.

This time, the two voices on the recording were Prince Charles and Camila Parker BS.

Their conversation at points was intimate and in one particular passage which shall not be quoted in full here but which every British newspaper of the time delighted in printing extremely embarrassing to the future king.

It was immediately christened again in the Fleet Street tradition of not letting anybody’s dignity get in the way of a good pun.

Camila Gate. Now the country had both sides of the story on tape.

It knew that Diana had been on intimate terms with James Gilby.

And it knew that Charles had been on intimate terms with Camila.

The tea towels of 1981, the ones her sisters had joked about, were 12 years later in an extremely dark drawer.

On the 9th of December 1992, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, John Major, rose in the House of Commons and made a formal announcement.

The Prince and Princess of Wales, he said, had agreed to separate.

They had, he insisted, no plans to divorce, and the separation would have no constitutional implications.

Both of them would continue to participate in the upbringing of the two young princes.

Both would continue to carry out public duties.

The line of succession would not be affected, and so on.

Nobody in Britain or beyond believe the reassurances for a second.

When two people separate publicly with an announcement in the House of Commons, they are in every meaningful sense on their way to a divorce.

It was only a matter of when.

The Queen watching all this from Buckingham Palace is said to have described 1992 in a speech she gave that November at the Guild Hall in London as her annus horis, her horrible year.

She was not exaggerating. >> >> Three of her four children had been in serious marital trouble that same year.

Windsor Castle itself had burned in a catastrophic fire on the 20th of November.

And now in December, her eldest son and his wife had formerly separated.

But the greatest single act of this whole drama, the act which changed everything, which the entire British establishment from Buckingham Palace to Fleet Street would replay in their minds again and again for the next 30 years was still to come.

And it would come in November of 1995 in a small drawing room at Kensington Palace in front of a single television camera with an interviewer whose methods we now know were profoundly dishoneSt. We are about to walk into the most famous, most controversial, most consequential television interview in the history of the modern British monarchy.

Stay with me because everything you thought you knew about that interview and about the man who conducted it has in the last 5 years been rewritten by official inquiry.

The interview took place on the 5th of November 1995 in a small drawing room at Kensington Palace.

It was broadcast on BBC 1 in a special edition of the current affairs program Panorama on the evening of Monday the 20th of November 1995.

It was watched on that single Monday evening by an audience of 22.8 million people in the United Kingdom alone.

To this day, it remains one of the most watched news programs in the entire history of British television.

The interviewer was a young, ambitious BBC journalist called Martin Bashier.

He was 32 years old. He had up to that point no particular reputation for royal reporting.

What he had, however, and what nobody outside a small circle of the BBC knew at the time was a plan.

Now I want to pause here because what we now know about how that interview came about is genuinely important.

It was not properly known in full until 2021 and it changes in a very serious way how we should look at the whole business.

In November of 2020, the BBC, under pressure from Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, commissioned an independent inquiry into how Martin Basher had secured the Panorama interview 25 years earlier.

The inquiry was led by a very senior British judge, Lord Dyson, a former master of the roles.

Lord Dyson’s report was published in May of 2021, and its findings were devastating.

Lord Dyson found that in order to persuade Diana to agree to the interview, Martin Basher had commissioned a graphic designer at the BBC to produce fake bank statements.

Those forged documents purported to show suspicious payments involving people around Earl Spencer and Bashier accompanied them with other false and invented claims suggesting that people close to Diana could not be trusted and that she was being watched.

He showed the material to Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother, in 1995.

Earl Spencer, understandably alarmed, introduced Bashier to his sister.

Bashier then used the documents in those additional false claims to exploit Diana’s already existing anxieties and to gain her truSt. Lord Dyson found that Bashier had acted in serious breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and that the BBC’s own internal investigation at the time in 1996 had been, in his words, woefully ineffective.

The BBC in 2021 formally apologized to William, to Harry, to Earl Spencer, and to the memory of Diana.

Prince William in an unusually emotional public statement said that his mother had been failed not just by a rogue reporter but by the leaders at the BBC who looked the other way.

I say all this now before we look at what she actually said in that interview because it matters.

Diana walked into that drawing room in November of 1995 believing things which were not true.

She believed her staff were spying on her.

She believed her enemies inside the palace were plotting against her.

Some of what she said in that interview was shaped by fears that had been deliberately, dishonestly stoked in her by the young man sitting opposite her with a microphone.

That is not conspiracy theory. That is the finding of an official British judicial inquiry.

And yet, even knowing all of that, even factoring in the fake documents and the manipulation and the failure of the BBC, the interview she gave that November evening still stands decades later as one of the most extraordinary pieces of public confession ever recorded.

Because what she said in it, she plainly meant.

Many of the central experiences she described, the loneliness, the bulimia, the breakdown of the marriage, the existence of other relationships are supported by evidence from beyond that interview.

Other individual claims must still be judged separately and with care.

She wore a plain dark suit and a white blouse.

Her hair was short. Her eye makeup, memorably, was heavier and darker than usual.

Fashion writers at the time read it as part of the wounded, almost stark visual impression she made on camera, though we cannot know with certainty how consciously that effect had been planned.

She sat on an armchair facing Bashier.

She spoke slowly and carefully. She had rehearsed, according to her friends, some of what she wanted to say for weeks.

She confirmed in that interview that she had suffered for years from bulimia.

She confirmed that she had at moments been so unhappy in her marriage that she had hurt herself.

She confirmed that she had had an affair with James Huitt.

And she said in a phrase that made the newspapers of every country the next morning, “Yes, I adored him.

Yes, I was in love with him.” And then in the sentence which more than any other has come to stand for the entire collapse of the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales, Bashier asked her a very simple question.

He asked her whether she thought Camila Parker BS had been a factor in the breakdown of her marriage and she answered very quietly, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” That sentence, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” has across the decades become a piece of the English language.

It is quoted at dinner tables. It is quoted in filMs. It is quoted in songs.

It is arguably the single most famous sentence ever spoken by a member of the British royal family in the whole of the 20th century.

She went further. She said she doubted whether her husband Charles would ever, in her phrase, adapt to being king.

She said she saw a role for herself in the future as, and I quote, a queen of people’s hearts.

She said she wanted above all to go on being the mother of William and Harry and to go on doing charity work and to be in her own phrase useful.

According to biographers who spoke to her friends afterwards, Diana went back to her private flat inside Kensington Palace after the broadcast that night.

The details of the evening, what she wore, exactly where she said, what precisely she said are things I cannot honestly reconstruct for you because I have not seen them established in a single reliable source.

What is not disputed is that she watched the country’s reaction come in over the following hours and days.

And that reaction was in the main extraordinarily sympathetic to her.

Buckingham Palace, however, was not sympathetic. Buckingham Palace was on the whole appalled.

Within a month, the queen herself intervened.

On the 20th of December 1995, her majesty wrote a private letter to both her son Charles and her daughter-in-law Diana.

In the letter, the contents of which were later widely reported in the British press, the Queen said, in [clears throat] effect that after careful thought and having consulted the prime minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury, she had come to the conclusion that an early divorce was in the best interests of everybody and above all in the best interests of the two boys.

She asked them both formally to proceed with divorce proceedings.

Diana at first resisted. So did Charles briefly.

But by the spring of 1996, the negotiations were underway.

And on the 28th of August 1996, in the high court in London, the marriage of Charles Phillip Arthur George Mountbatton Windsor and Diana Francis Spencer was formally legally dissolved.

The financial settlement gave Diana a lump sum of approximately £17 million.

She kept her apartment at Kensington Palace.

She kept the right to use royal jets and royal cars for certain journeys.

She kept the title Diana, Princess of Wales, but she loSt. And this was the loss that hurt her most and which she spoke of more than once in the last 12 months of her life.

The style her royal highness. You may think that is a small thing.

It is not. In the peculiar internal grammar of the British monarchy, it is a very great thing.

It meant that from that August afternoon in 1996 onwards, Diana no longer shared the formal rank carried by the style her royal highness.

In the rigid etiquette of the court, members of the royal family who retained that style ranked ahead of her, and even her own sons in constitutional and ceremonial terms occupied a position she no longer shared.

She would be, in the phrase of one of her biographers, an outsider looking in at her own children’s inheritance.

She minded that. She minded it deeply.

And it made her, in the year that followed, more determined than ever to build for herself a new life outside the walls of the palace of her own choosing on her own terMs. And she had in that final year of her life extraordinary energy for the task.

She reduced the number of charities she worked with, cutting down from more than 100 to a core group of six.

She threw herself in particular into a campaign against the use of anti-personnel landmines, which at that point were killing and maming approximately 26,000 civilians a year around the world, most of them children in poor countries decades after the wars in which the mines had been laid.

In January of 1997, in a decision which stunned the British political establishment, Diana traveled to Angola, one of the most heavily mined countries on Earth, and walked in a flack jacket and a plastic visor along a marked lane through a minefield being cleared near Huambo.

The route had been prepared and checked by specialist demining teams, but the surrounding ground was genuinely mined.

Photographs of that walk went round the world in a matter of hours.

She was at that moment one of the most famous women on the planet, deliberately placing herself inside the visual reality of a minefield on camera to force the world to look at what she wanted the world to look at.

The British government of the day, which was at that point still headed by the conservatives under John Major, was privately furious.

One junior defense minister described her publicly as, and I quote, “a loose cannon.” Diana, on being told of the remark, is said to have laughed and said, “Well, I hope I go off with a bang.” She traveled on that summer of 1997 to Bosnia to visit landmine victims there as well.

3 months after her death in December of 1997, the Ottawa Treaty banning the use, production, and stockpiling of anti-personnel mines was signed by 122 countries.

Diana did not create the international campaign against landmines, and the diplomatic process was already moving before she entered it.

What she did was give that campaign a level of global attention almost no politician or activist could have generated so quickly.

Campaigners and diplomats have repeatedly credited her involvement with adding extraordinary public pressure and political momentum to the movement that produced the treaty.

She also quietly and famously worked with people dying of AIDS at a moment in the mid 1980s and early 1990s when a great deal of the world was terrified of even touching them.

In April of 1987 at the Middle Sex Hospital in London, she had opened a specialist ward devoted to patients with AIDS.

And in front of the world’s cameras, she had shaken the unglloved hand of a man being treated there.

It sounds like nothing today. It was at the time an enormous culturally seismic gesture.

Every AI age charity in Britain and much of the world dates a large part of the changed public attitude to that decade in part to that single handshake in that London hospital ward.

She went on doing that sort of work quietly and steadily for the rest of her life.

She also in her private life was trying at last to build something like happiness for herself.

In September of 1995, some months before the Panorama interview, she had begun what was on every serious account the deepest and most stable romantic relationship of her adult life.

He was a Pakistanibborn heart surgeon at the Royal Brmpton Hospital in London called Dr. Haznat Khn.

He was by every account brilliant, private, serious and completely uninterested in fame.

She according to her closest friends was completely quietly and privately in love with him.

She met members of his family and later traveled to Pakistan taking seriously the possibility that their relationship might one day lead to marriage.

She thought about what it might mean to build part of a life there.

It is now generally accepted by many serious biographers of her final years that Hashnat Khan was the man she most seriously considered marrying and that the great tragedy of the last two years of her life was not that she failed to find love but that the man she founded with quite reasonably did not want to live the rest of his life inside her particular kind of fame.

By the summer of 1997 that relationship had after a long sad slow struggle come to an end.

He simply in the end could not face what she was professionally in the eyes of the world and she for her part could not become something else.

It was in every sense the wrong summer to be a lonely 36-year-old woman looking for a distraction because on the 14th of July 1997 in the south of France at a private villa in Sanrope owned by an Egyptian-born businessman named Muhammad Alied, Diana together with her two sons William and Harry arrived for what was meant to be a 10-day summer holiday.

Muhammad Alfa was at that point the owner of Herod’s department store in London and of the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

He was one of the wealthiest men in Britain.

He had known Diana socially for some years largely through her family.

He also had a son. The son was called Immad Muhammad Alfaed known to everyone as Dodi.

He was 42 years old. He was a film producer of moderate reputation.

He had served as an executive producer on the film Chariots of Fire, which had won the Oscar for best picture in 1982.

He was known in London as a man about town.

He was engaged at that moment in the summer of 1997 to an American model called Kelly Fiser, though that engagement was already, according to later court testimony, running into some difficulty.

And on that villa in Crope, over the course of two long, sunny, heavily photographed weeks in the middle of July 1997, Diana and Dodie began, according to every account, to become close.

Now, I want to be careful with what I say about the summer of 1997 because a great deal of what has been written about the 6 weeks between the 14th of July and the 31st of August in 1997 has been written by people with a strong emotional or financial interest in a particular version of events.

Muhammad Alfet in the years after his son’s death made a series of increasingly serious and increasingly public claims about what had happened.

He claimed that Diana and Dodie had been engaged.

He claimed that Diana had been pregnant.

He claimed that the two of them had been murdered by the British establishment on the direct orders of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Phillip, to prevent Diana marrying a Muslim.

Every single one of these claims has been examined at length by both British and French authorities.

Every single one of these claims has been formally rejected.

The French investigation, which lasted 18 months and ran to some 6,000 pages, concluded in 1999 that the crash, which killed Diana and Dodi and their driver, Ari was an accident caused primarily by the intoxication and excessive speed of the driver.

A subsequent British inquiry known as Operation Padet was ordered under the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, later Lord Stevens, and continued after he left that office.

It reported in December of 2006, ran to more than 800 pages, and cost approximately 3.5 million pounds of public money.

Operation Padget considered every one of Muhammad Alfiad’s specific allegations.

It rejected all of them. It concluded that Diana had not been pregnant, that she and Dodi had not been engaged, and that there was no evidence whatsoever of any plot by the British establishment, the security services, or the royal family to have her killed.

Then in 2007 and 2008, there was a full formal inquest held before a jury at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, presided over by Lord Justice Scott Baker.

That inquest, after 6 months of evidence, returned by a majority of 9 to2, a verdict of unlawful killing.

The jury concluded that the deaths had been caused by the grossly negligent driving of Ali Paul and by the grossly negligent driving of the pursuing vehicles with Paul’s alcohol impairment and the failure of Diana and Dodie to wear seat belts among the contributing factors.

It was not in the legal verdict of that British jury murder.

It was not in the legal verdict of that British jury any kind of conspiracy.

I lay out all of that now in detail because I do not want anybody watching this to be left at the end wondering on the question of what killed Diana, Princess of Wales.

There is not almost three decades on a serious evidential basis for the conspiracy theories that have grown around her death.

There is a very great deal of noise on the internet, but the French investigation, Operation Padget, and the British inquest found no credible evidence of a plot.

What they found was a tragic avoidable chain of human decisions.

An impaired driver, extreme speed, a dangerous pursuit, and passengers who were not wearing seat belts.

Which brings us to the last few days of her life.

After the holiday in Sanrope ended in late July, Diana went briefly back to London to see her sons off to Belmoro, where they would spend the second half of August with their father and the rest of the royal family.

Then on the 22nd of August, she flew out to join Dodi Alfet on his father’s yacht, the Johnny, for a second Mediterranean cruise.

This time just the two of them off the coasts of Sardinia and Corsica.

It was during that second cruise that the photograph, which the world would come to call the kiss, was taken.

It was a long lens photograph taken from the shore of Diana and Dodie in swimwear in an intimate embrace on the deck of the yacht.

It was sold when the photographer got it back to shore for a sum reported at the time as around a million pounds, the highest price ever paid up to that point for a single celebrity photograph.

It was published on the front pages of the world’s newspapers on Sunday the 10th of August 1997.

Every newspaper in the world, every magazine, every television bulletin, every gossip column ran with it.

Diana seeing the coverage was, according to her friends, alarmed.

She had wanted a private summer. She had wanted quietly to think about what her future looked like now that her relationship with Hosnat Khan was over.

>> >> She was, according to those closest to her, not in the summer of 1997, in love with Dodi Alfet.

She was, on the balance of everything her friends have said since, fond of him, grateful to him, entertained by him, but she was not on the point of proposing to spend her life with him.

She did not, however, returned to London on the 27th of August for a final lunch with Richard Kay, as some later retellings have suggested.

The documentary record gives us a different and in some ways more poignant sequence.

Diana and Dodie were still aboard the Yonikal on their second cruise which ran from the 21st to the 30th of AuguSt. During those last days, she spoke by telephone with several friends among them Rosa Monton, Lucia Fletcher De Lima, Paul Burl, her sister Sarah and Annabelle Goldsmith.

On the 30th of August while traveling towards Paris and then after arriving there she also spoke by telephone with the journalist Richard Kay one of the last people outside the traveling party known to have had a conversation with her.

Those calls matter because they give us something more reliable than the mythology that later attached itself to her final hours.

People who spoke to her described a woman still making plans, still talking about the future, still thinking about her sons and about the shape of the life she wanted after the extraordinary upheavalss of the previous years.

She was not speaking like someone who believed her life was about to end.

Nor is there reliable evidence that she was secretly preparing to announce an engagement that weekend.

She was 36 years old. She was, in the phrase used by more than one person who knew her in those last months, internationally famous beyond any ordinary scale and profoundly tired of what that fame demanded from her.

On Saturday the 30th of August 1997, at the end of the second Mediterranean cruise, Diana and Dodie flew from Sardinia to Libour airport in Paris.

Paris was intended to be a stop on the way back to London.

From that moment onwards, the story enters minute by minute, the last 12 hours of her life.

And what happened in those 12 hours has at this point been reconstructed by investigators in far greater detail than any of us watching this would probably want to know.

But we are going to look at it calmly so that when I tell you what happened in that tunnel, you will know from the settled findings of the two investigations what actually took place.

And you will know when we get to the end why the whole world on the morning of Sunday the 31st of August 1997 woke up crying.

The private jet carrying Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Alfaed touched down at Labour airport on the northern edge of Paris at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon of Saturday the 30th of August 1997.

It was a bright, warm late summer afternoon.

There were photographers waiting at the airport.

There had been photographers waiting at every airport, on every runway, on every stretch of Mediterranean coast, at every restaurant in every hotel for the entire 6 weeks.

She was by that point a moving center of a small permanent feral crowd of men on motorcycles with long lenses, and there was, so far as anyone could see, no escape from it.

From Liujer, Diana and Dodie were driven by a Mercedes limousine together with Dod’s personal bodyguard Trevor Ree Jones into the center of Paris.

They stopped briefly at the Villa Windsor, the former residence of the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which Muhammad Alfed had leased for many years, a stop which in the years afterwards Muhammad Alfed would try to build into part of his particular narrative about the couple’s supposed engagement.

What is certain is that they were there for less than half an hour and that no engagement on the evidence gathered by operation page and by the French investigation was announced or agreed.

They then drove on to the Ritz hotel on the plus vond which Muhammad Alfet also owned.

They spent part of the afternoon at the Ritz.

They rested. She had her hair done.

In the early evening, they left the hotel and drove to Dod’s private apartment on the Ru Arsen Usay just off the Shaniz where they changed for the evening.

The plan originally had been to have dinner at a fashionable restaurant on the left bank called Shibinoa.

But by the time they left the apartment, the photographers had gathered outside in such numbers, and the pursuit through the streets had become so ugly that they abandoned the restaurant plan altogether and decided instead to go back to the Ritz and to eat in the hotel’s grand main restaurant, Lebadon.

They arrived at the Ritz for the second time at approximately 9:50 in the evening.

And it was at this point, according to the settled findings of Operation Padet and the later inquest, that the fatal decisions of the night began to be made.

The dining room was crowded. Other guests were staring.

Diana was becoming visibly uncomfortable. So, she and Dodie got up halfway through their meal and moved instead to a private suite on the first floor to finish their dinner alone.

Outside the hotel on the Pl Vonom, a growing crowd of photographers tipped off by hotel staff or by radio scanners was gathering in wait.

By half midnight, there were more than 30 of them stationed at the front door of the hotel, ready to give chase on their motorcycles the moment Diana and Dodi tried to leave.

At around this time, Dodi Alfaed, in an attempt to shake off the pursuit, came up with what he seems to have thought was a clever plan.

Two of the couple’s cars, their usual Mercedes limousine and a Range Rover would leave empty of Diana and Dodie from the front of the hotel on the plus fond as decoys.

Diana and Dodie themselves together with Trevor Ree Jones would slip out of the back of the hotel on the Rambon in a completely different car and that different car would be driven not by their usual driver but by an offduty employee of the hotel whom Dodi had personally requested for the job.

That offduty employee was called Enri Paul.

He was 41 years old. He was the acting head of security at the Ritz and he was on the night of the 30th to the 31st of August 1997, according to the toxicology tests performed on his body afterwards and confirmed at every stage of the subsequent investigations seriously dangerously drunk.

His blood alcohol level when it was measured was approximately 1.75 g per liter.

that is more than three times the French legal limit for driving.

Toxicology also found prescription medication in his system, including drugs used in the treatment of depression and alcohol dependence.

The combination was medically significant. Investigators examined witness accounts of his movements and drinking that evening, but the exact sequence of what he consumed, where, and in what quantity was less simple than the early newspaper story suggested.

And he was at that point being asked to drive the most famous woman in the world at high speed through the streets of Paris in the middle of the night with a pack of motorcycles chasing him.

Nobody in the small group that gathered by the back door of the Ritz on the route Gon that night, so far as we know, understood how impaired he was.

He functioned on the security footage of that final quarter of an hour well enough, chatting, joking with the paparazzi, apparently perfectly steady on his feet, but his blood was full of alcohol.

And on that basis alone, the whole of what followed was in the settled legal verdict of the British inquest of 2008, an unlawful killing.

Just after midnight at around 12:20 in the morning of Sunday the 31st of August 1997, the black Mercedes S-Class, registration number 688 LTV75, pulled out of the back of the Ritz on the Rambo.

In the front, Ari was driving. Trevor Jones was in the front passenger seat.

In the back, Dodie Alfette sat on the left behind Trevor Jones and Diana, Princess of Wales, sat on the right behind Ari Paul.

For years, it was widely repeated that Trevor Ree Jones, the only survivor, had been the only person wearing a seat belt.

The later forensic work assembled by Operation Padet, did not support that story.

Its conclusion was that none of the four occupants was wearing a seat belt at the moment of impact.

The British inquest treated the failure of Diana and Dodie to wear seat belts as a factor that contributed to their deaths.

That does not allow us to say with mathematical certainty exactly what injuries Diana would have suffered had she been restrained.

Trauma medicine rarely gives us that kind of certainty after the fact, but the medical and accident evidence was clear on the essential point.

A seat belt would have materially improved her chances of surviving a crash that was terrible as it was not automatically unservivable for every occupant.

She was not belted in. The Mercedes accelerated away from the Rukamong, closely pursued by a group of paparazzi on motorcycles and in cars.

It moved down towards the plus de la concord and then instead of taking the direct route to Dod’s apartment which would have gone up the shel turned right along the river onto the express carriageway of the Kur Len which runs along the north bank of the Sen.

That road at that point in Paris has a legal speed limit of 50 km an hour.

It passes under a series of short road tunnels.

One of those tunnels lies directly beneath the plus deala at the northern end of the bridge which crosses the sand towards the left bank.

The tunnel is short. It is about 200 m long.

The road surface within it dips downwards on entry and rises upwards on exit in a shallow curve.

On the left hand side of the tunnel, unprotected by any crash barrier, stand a line of stoneclad concrete pillars spaced along the central reservation.

The Mercedes entered the tunnel at approximately 12:23 in the morning.

The estimates given by accident reconstruction experts both to the French investigation and to operation Padet suggest that on the approach to the tunnel, Enri Paul had accelerated to a speed of somewhere in the region of 155 kmh, more than three times the legal limit.

The precise speed at the moment of impact has been the subject of expert debate.

But the settled figure accepted by both investigations is that the Mercedes was still traveling at approximately 100 km/h at the point at which it hit the pillar.

On the entry to the dip at high speed, the car appears to have made contact glancingly with a slower vehicle in front of it, a small white Fiat Uno, whose exact identity has never been fully established and which is one of the small remaining loose ends of the case.

That contact was slight. It did not by itself cause the crash.

What caused the crash was that Enrio, drunk, speeding, and startled lost control of the steering.

The Mercedes veered to the left. It struck the 13th pillar of the central reservation headon at close to 100 km an hour.

It then spun around, hit the tunnel wall on the right, and came to a stop, facing back the way it had come in the middle of the tunnel.

Its front end catastrophically deformed, its engine block driven back into the passenger compartment, its horn jammed on in one continuous howling note that echoed against the tunnel walls.

The impact, on any modern measure of car safety, was catastrophic.

Dodie Alfaed and Henri Paul were killed effectively instantly.

>> >> Trevor Ree Jones in the front passenger seat with his seat belt on and with the additional protection of the front airbag was terribly injured but alive.

And Diana, Princess of Wales in the back seat behind Henri Paul was thrown violently across the interior of the car.

She came to rest still just conscious in the rear passenger footwell with severe internal injuries.

The most serious of which, as the autopsy would later establish, was a partial tearing of the pulmonary vein where it enters the left atrium of the heart.

She was at that moment still alive, but the clock from the moment of that impact was running against her and it was running very faSt. The first person to reach the wreckage within seconds of the crash was not a police officer and it was not a paramedic.

>> >> It was one of the pursuing photographers, then another, and then another.

By the time the first emergency services began to arrive, at least seven photographers were around the car.

Several of them, according to the later investigation, took photographs before offering any assistance.

One of them appears to have opened a rear door of the car.

Some of them shown the flashes of their cameras directly onto the semi-conscious woman lying in the back.

Now, I want to be very careful in the language I use here because I do not want to reduce this moment almost three decades on to a caricature of villain.

Some of those photographers did later help.

Some of them shouted for ambulances. One of them, according to his own subsequent testimony, held Diana’s hand and spoke to her softly in French while they waited for the emergency services.

Others, however, on the settled findings of the French investigation, behaved in that tunnel in a way which was so contemptable and so degrading of a dying human being that no serious account of what happened that night can pass over it without saying so plainly.

The French police arrived at the scene at approximately 12:30.

The first emergency doctor, an anesthetist named Dr. Frederick Mayer, who happened by chance to be driving past on the opposite carriageway, had already arrived a few minutes before that and had begun to give Diana basic emergency airway support.

The Samu, the French Mobile Emergency Medical Service, arrived shortly afterwards.

It took them approximately an hour to extricate Diana from the wreckage.

She suffered a cardiac arrest inside the tunnel.

She was resuscitated at the scene. She was placed in an ambulance.

Now I need to say something here about the French system of prehosp medical care because it is different from the British or the American system and this difference has been a source of debate on and off for 30 years.

The French approach in serious trauma cases is to bring intensive care to the patient to stabilize them fully at the scene and to transport them then slowly and carefully to hospital.

The Anglo-American approach is what is sometimes called scoop and run to get the patient into an operating theater as fast as physically possible on the basis that trauma surgery not onseene resuscitation is what saves lives with certain kinds of internal injuries.

The French team on scene followed the French protocol.

They stabilized Diana at length in the tunnel and in the ambulance and then drove her slowly to the PTA Petriè hospital on the left bank of the Sen, arriving at approximately 2:00 in the morning.

The journey, ordinarily a matter of 10 minutes at that time of night, took nearly 40.

The ambulance stopped at one point for further resuscitation.

Would a faster transfer to hospital have saved her?

That is a question which was examined at very considerable length by Operation Padet and by the 2008 inqueSt. The medical experts consulted on balance concluded that even a faster transfer would not have saved her given the specific nature and location of her chest injury.

The tear in the pulmonary vein was on the medical evidence one of the very few internal injuries which is almost always fatal in a road accident regardless of hospital speed.

But other experts have argued that a British style scoop and run response might at least have given her a fighting chance.

This is one of the questions on which honest qualified people continue to disagree and I want to note it here rather than pretend there is a single settled answer.

What is settled is what happened next.

Diana was brought into the PTA Petri at approximately 2:00 in the morning.

She underwent on the operating table an emergency thoracictomy, an opening of the chest wall in the hope of repairing the vessel and restoring circulation.

The surgeons worked on her for approximately 2 hours.

Her heart was massaged directly by hand.

She was given, according to the medical records, several liters of transfused blood.

At every stage, she was in and out of cardiac arreSt. At around 4:00 in the morning of Sunday the 31st of August 1997, the medical team at the Pierre Saletriè pronounced her dead.

She was 36 years old. The news reached Balmoral in the Scottish Highlands in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The royal family were all there together.

The Queen, Prince Philillip, Prince Charles, and most importantly, William, then 15 years old, and Harry, then just short of his 13th birthday.

Prince Charles woke his mother firSt. Together, the Queen and the Prince of Wales made a decision about how to tell the boys.

They chose, according to biographers who have spoken since, to those close to the family, to let them sleep as long as possible.

William, according to his own later recollection, said that he woke up before he was told, sensing, in his own words, that something was terribly wrong.

Charles told them, he held them, and then, in a decision which has since been the subject of a great deal of historical discussion.

The royal family remained at Balmoral for the whole of that Sunday and for the following days.

They attended the local parish church at Kathy on Sunday morning.

The minister, according to a later account, made no mention of Diana from the pulpit at the service, a detail which when it emerged caused considerable offense in Britain.

The Queen and Prince Philip took the two boys walking on the estate and in the Queen’s judgment kept them together in privacy as a family at what she believed was the right thing to do for two young grieving children.

The country, however, was in the meantime entering a state which nobody in Britain at the time had ever seen before and which nobody has really seen since.

In front of the gates of Kensington Palace in London, from the Sunday morning onwards, a sea of flowers began to grow.

By the middle of the week, the pile of flowers in front of Kensington Palace was, according to contemporary photographs, more than 5 ft deep and stretched back nearly 100 yard from the gates.

Estimates given at the time suggested that between 10 and 15,000 tons of cut flowers were laid in the course of that single week at Kensington Palace, at Buckingham Palace, at St. James’s Palace, and at various other sites around London.

Cues of ordinary people wanting to sign books of condolence stretched for hours.

Some people queued for 8 hours or more in silence just to write a few words in a book.

There was also in the middle of that grief a growing public anger.

Anger at the paparazzi whose photographs of the crashed car were being sold around the world even as the flowers piled up.

Anger at the tabloid press in general which many people felt had hounded Diana to her death.

And increasingly over the course of that first week, anger at the royal family itself.

Anger that no flag was flying at half mast over Buckingham Palace.

Anger that the Queen and the Prince of Wales were still hidden away at Bmor Moral.

Anger that no member of the royal family had appeared in public to speak to the grieving country.

The Daily Mail on the Thursday morning of that week ran a front page headline demanding in enormous capitals, “Show us you care.” The Sun ran another asking, “Where is our queen?

Where’s her flag? Behind the walls of Bmor Moral, the 71-year-old monarch was being asked by her own prime minister and by her own advisers to do something which cut against every instinct in her Edwwardian upbringing.

She was being asked to come south.

She was being asked to appear. She was being asked to break with two centuries of royal protocol and fly a flag at half mast over a private residence in London, a residence over which by tradition only the personal royal standard flew and only when the monarch was in personal residence and never at half mast at all because the sovereign is legally never dead, only replaced immediately by the next sovereign.

She was being asked in the crudest possible summary to swallow every rule she had lived by for 45 years on the throne and to serve the grief of her people.

And in the end, on the Thursday and Friday of that terrible week, she did.

On Friday the 5th of September 1997, the royal family flew down from Balmoral to London.

That evening at 6:00, Her Majesty the Queen made a live television broadcast from a room in Buckingham Palace in which she spoke warmly and directly for the first time since Diana’s death.

She spoke of Diana, in her words, as an exceptional and gifted human being.

She said that she spoke in that address both as your queen and as a grandmother.

It was by any measure one of the most personal and difficult public statements of her entire 70-year reign, and it landed.

Overnight the mood of the country shifted.

The queen had come. The flag had been lowered over Buckingham Palace.

The family had bowed to the crowd.

The next morning, on the 6th of September, 1997, in front of the world, the country said goodbye.

And I want to spend the last part of our story tonight together in Westminster Abbey.

Because what happened in the abbey that morning, what William and Harry did, what Elton John did, and above all, what Diana’s brother did is in its way as extraordinary a piece of English history as anything else in this entire sad, luminous 36-year life.

Stay with me. We are nearly at the end.

The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, took place on Saturday, the 6th of September, 1997 at Westminster Abbey in London.

It began formally with the removal of her coffin from the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace at 9:08 in the morning.

Her coffin draped in the royal standard, a small but significant detail which had been personally authorized by the queen and which technically Diana as no longer a full member of the royal family was not automatically entitled to was placed on a gun carriage of the king’s troop royal horse artillery.

It was then drawn slowly through the streets of London on a route which passed Buckingham Palace went down the mall and along Whiteall to the west door of the abbey.

At Buckingham Palace, the royal family were waiting.

The Queen, Prince Philillip, and standing behind them five figures on foot who would then walk together the last mile of the procession behind the gun carriage.

Those five figures were Prince Charles on the left, Prince Harry aged 12 in the center left, Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother Charles, aged 33, in the middle, Prince William, aged 15, in the center right, and Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh on the right.

That five-fold walk behind the coffin has in the years since become one of the most photographed and most discussed images in the history of the modern British royal family.

William and Harry did not originally want to walk.

That has been said by both of them publicly in the years since.

Prince Harry, in a documentary made for the 20th anniversary of his mother’s death, said in his own words that no child should be asked to walk behind their mother’s coffin in front of a crowd of millions and a global television audience.

William has said the same. Neither of them, they have both said, has ever quite forgiven the adult world for asking them to do it.

Their grandfather, Prince Phillip, according to accounts which emerged much later, was the one who tipped the balance.

He is reported to have said to William on the telephone from Balmoral in the days before the funeral something to the effect of if I walk will you walk with me and on that basis William and Harry agreed.

That specific exchange has been reported by biographers who spoke to those close to the family.

There is no on thereord source for the exact words.

So I presented here as widely reported but not as a verbatim quotation.

The atmosphere in the streets of London that morning is to anyone who lived through it still difficult to describe.

Later estimates suggested that between 1 million and 1 half million people lined the route of the procession in central London alone.

The city was according to every account of the day almost completely silent.

The only sound on the video and audio recordings that survive is the sound of the hor’s hooves and the wheels of the gun carriage on the road.

And from time to time, a single voice or a wave of low weeping rising from the crowds behind the barriers.

On top of the coffin, in a small white envelope tucked into the flowers, was a card.

On the card, in a child’s handwriting, was one word.

It read, “Mommy.” It had been placed there by Prince Harry.

2 and a half billion people around the world watched what happened next.

Inside Westminster Abbey, the great complicated funeral service began just after 11:00 in the morning.

Prime Ministers, presidents, kings, queens, and film stars filled the pews.

Among the 2,000 invited guests were Nelson Mandela, who had personally known Diana, Hillary Clinton representing the United States, and from the world of Diana’s own personal charity work, hundreds of quiet, ordinary people from British homelessness charities, from HIV and AIDS organizations, from landmine survivor groups.

It was at Diana’s family’s insistence that kind of guest list, not just the powerful, the people whose lives she had actually touched.

There were two moments in particular of that service which have entered the permanent memory of the English-speaking world.

The first was the moment when Elton John, sitting at the piano to the left of the coffin, performed a rewritten version of his 1973 song Candle in the Wind.

He had rewritten the lyrics in collaboration with his songwriting partner Bernie Tolin in the days following Diana’s death.

The song originally written about the American film actress Marilyn Monroe was reworked with new opening words, “Goodbye England’s Rose and adapted specifically to be a farewell to Diana.” He sang it in Westminster Abbey live in front of the coffin, in front of the royal family, and in front of two and a half billion people around the world.

It is the only time he has ever performed that version of that song in public in his entire career.

He has said since that he will never perform it again.

>> >> The single recorded release of the song, which was rushed out the following week, went on to become the bestselling single of all time in the United Kingdom and one of the top three best-selling singles ever released worldwide.

All the profits from that record, at Elton John’s insistence, went to a memorial fund set up in Diana’s name to continue the charity work she had done in her lifetime.

The single generated tens of millions of pounds for the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

The fund itself through that income and many other donations, grants, and investments went on over the years to distribute far larger sums to charitable causes.

The second and even more extraordinary moment came a few minutes later.

It came when Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, stepped up to the pulpit to deliver the eulogy for his sister.

Charles Spencer was 33 years old that morning.

He was a man who by his own later admission had had a complicated relationship with his sister in the last year of her life.

He was by that point largely living abroad in South Africa.

He had sitting in the pews in front of him the sitting British prime minister, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales, and most importantly his two young nephews, William and Harry.

And he stood at that pullpit and delivered a eulogy which almost three decades later remains one of the most remembered and audacious pieces of public speaking associated with the modern monarchy.

He praised his sister with love and with wit.

He described her in a phrase which has been quoted a thousand times since as and I quote the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty.

He said she was, and I quote again, a symbol of selfless humanity across the world, a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality.

And then, having praised her, he turned calmly and delivered an attack, not on Charles specifically, not on the queen specifically, but on the whole institution, which in his view had failed his sister.

He said of the two boys sitting in the front row that he pledged on behalf of the Spencer family, and I quote, “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.

Their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition.” To anyone in that abbey with a working understanding of English, and there were rather a lot of such people, the meaning was unmistakable.

He was saying at his sister’s funeral in front of the whole royal family that Diana had felt her boy’s souls were at risk of being smothered by the institution of the monarchy and that the Spencers from now on would fight to prevent that.

And then when he had finished, something happened in Westminster Abbey, which is very likely without precedent in the thousand-year history of that building.

From outside the west door, where enormous crowds had gathered around loudspeakers to hear the service, there came a wave of applause.

Applause outside a funeral at a royal ceremonial occasion in front of the sovereign.

That applause washed in through the open west doors along the nave and in the moments that followed was picked up hesitantly at first and then wholeheartedly by the congregation inside.

The applause moved forwards through the abbey row by row until according to those present even some of the members of the royal family in the front row joined in.

It was a moment of very English, very controlled, but nonetheless completely unmistakable emotional revolution.

The country was in that moment publicly siding with the woman on the coffin and with her brother in the pulpit, over the institution she had married into.

After the service, her coffin was taken by road over the course of the afternoon north out of London up the M1 motorway to Elorp, the family estate in Northamptonshire where she had grown up.

All along the route right up the motorway, thousands of people stood in the fields and on the bridges throwing flowers onto the Cortez as it passed.

The tarmac of the motorway in some places was reported to be so covered in flowers that the hearse had to slow to walking pace.

She was buried that evening at Orthorp on a small wooded island in the middle of an ornamental lake called the Round Oval.

Only her immediate family were present at the burial.

William and Harry, together with their father, their uncle, and their maternal grandmother watched her coffin lowered into the ground on that quiet island, out of sight of the world in the county in which she had come of age.

She rests there still. The years that followed.

Well, this is where the story stops being about Diana in the strict sense and starts being about the world she left behind.

So, I want in the last few minutes we have together to say plainly what she changed.

Because what she changed matters more in the long run than what killed her.

She changed first the emotional and physical relationship between the modern British royal family and the ordinary public.

She did not invent royal compassion and she was not literally the first royal ever to touch or comfort a stranger.

What she did was make warmth itself part of the public language of royalty.

Embracing people, hugging children, showing tears, sitting at hospital bedsides, and holding the hands of people whom much of society was frightened even to approach.

every royal since and this now includes Katherine, Princess of Wales, and Megan, Duchess of Sussex, and Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, and for that matter, Diana’s own two sons.

Every one of them has in some sense worked in the emotional territory that Diana opened up.

The whole modern idea of what a working member of the British royal family is for and how they behave in public was rewritten essentially by a shy nursery school teacher in the 18 years between the summer of 1980 and the summer of 1997.

She changed the world’s understanding of certain diseases.

In particular, she was one of a small number of famous people whose personal physical willingness to touch people with HIV and AIDS at a moment of enormous public fear about that disease made a measurable difference to how those patients were treated by their societies.

Doctors and researchers of that period have said on the record that in Britain in the early 1990s, patients with AIDS were sometimes refused care by dentists, refused kisses by their own family members, forced to eat of separate plates.

In one week in April of 1987, Diana walked into a hospital, took off her gloves, and shook the hand of a dying man.

Nurses and doctors have said since that they saw the effect of that gesture on their own working lives within months.

She changed the public conversation around landmines.

The Ottawa treaty signed in December of 1997 banned the use, production, stockpiling, and transfer of anti-personnel mines for the states that joined it.

And the treaty has since attracted well over 160 parties.

Diana did not invent the campaign and she did not negotiate the treaty.

What she did in the last year of her life was give the issue a human face and a level of world attention that campaigners had struggled for years to achieve.

Her involvement became one of the most visible accelerants of public support for a process already being driven by activists, diplomats, mine clearance organizations, survivors and governments.

She changed above all the way in which the two young men who lost their mother that summer have grown up to see the world.

William and Harry have both spoken publicly and at length about how their mother’s example and her death and the manner of her death have shaped their working priorities.

William has taken up the cause of mental health, of homelessness, of environmental protection.

Hari, whose more complicated public journey is a matter of its own long conversation, has worked on veterans welfare, on HIV and AIDS charity, on mental health awareness, and in ways that are still being written about on the relationship between the modern royal family and the modern press.

Whatever any of us thinks about the choices they have each made in their adult lives, it is impossible not to see in both brothers the emotional inheritance of the mother who kissed them at the school gates and hugged them in public.

She also, and this is a much darker legacy, changed the entire relationship between the world’s press and its most famous people.

In the years after her death, arguments about privacy, harassment, and press responsibility intensified across Europe.

Codes of practice were rewritten and tightened.

Courts and legislators wrestled more seriously with the balance between privacy and publication.

And editors became far more conscious of the human cost of relentless pursuit.

The changes did not come from one death alone, and they did not arrive overnight.

But Diana’s death became an unavoidable reference point in every serious debate about how far photographers and newspapers should be permitted to go.

>> >> It is worth saying plainly that if you have ever taken a photograph on your phone, uploaded it to the internet, watched the celebrity beounded by a crowd of camera carriers outside a restaurant, or wondered where the boundary lies between public interest and public curiosity, you are living, whether you know it or not, in a world whose ground rules were significantly redrawn in the years after 1997 in direct response to what happened to her.

And finally, of course, there is the more difficult question of what her life changed in Charles.

It is easy in a story like this one to reduce him to the villain of the piece, and I do not intend to do that.

He is now King Charles III. His second marriage to Camila, now Queen Camila, endured through years in which public hostility towards both of them was intense, and over time, the British public’s view of that relationship changed profoundly.

None of that erases the pain of the first marriage.

Nor does the pain of the first marriage require us to flatten Charles, Camila, or Diana into the simple roles that the tabloids once assigned them.

The more human truth is more uncomfortable.

Three adults bound by love, duty, history, jealousy, and public expectation hurt one another and lived with the consequences.

The tunnel at the plast in Paris is still there.

It is still an ordinary tunnel on an ordinary Paris road along the north bank of the Sen.

Above it on the surface of the Plaza de Lalma sits a large gold covered sculpture called the flame of liberty.

That sculpture was actually placed there in 1989, 8 years before Diana’s death, as a gift to Paris from an association of Anglo-American donors, and originally had nothing to do with her at all.

But in the days and weeks after her death, the base of that sculpture was so covered in flowers and cards and photographs and personal messages from all over the world that it became in effect and has remained ever since an unofficial public memorial to her memory.

Visitors still leave flowers there. They still leave messages.

They still almost three decades on come.

At allp in Northamptonshire, her brother Charles has kept the estate open for part of each summer to visitors who wish to pay their respects at the small memorial he had built to her memory.

Her sons come when they wish to the island in the lake.

Beyond that, and rightly so, the family says very little about what happens there.

And in the gardens of Kensington Palace, where she lived for so many years, there is a bronze statue of her unveiled by William and Harry together on the 1st of July, 2021, on what would have been her 60th birthday.

It shows her standing with three children, a composition intended to evoke both her own maternal life and the wider generations of children touched by her public work.

William and Harry have appeared together on other public occasions since, including during the morning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, so the unveiling was not their last appearance side by side.

But the image of that morning still carries its own weight.

The two boys who had walked behind her coffin at 12 and 15, now grown men, stood together on the lawn at Kensington and unveiled a statue of a woman who, if she had lived, would by then have known her grandchildren.

Watched her sons build adult lives of their own and entered an age she never had the chance to reach.

She did not live. She was 36 years old when she died.

She was at that age younger than most of the people watching this now and very likely younger than most of the people who first fell in love with her on the day she walked up the aisle at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1981.

She was a young woman who had had in her 36 years a difficult childhood, a fairy tale wedding, a broken marriage, two adored sons, several serious love affairs, one dazzling second act as an independent public campaigner, and one appalling avoidable death.

She was not a saint. She said so herself more than once.

>> >> She was on her own admission jealous, insecure, sometimes manipulative, sometimes disloyal and often in her private life unhappy.

She was also, and this is the part that has lasted, extraordinarily brave, extraordinarily warm, and extraordinarily gifted at seeing in the person in front of her, whoever that person happened to be, exactly what they needed to be seen.

That gift is very rare. It is rare in ordinary people.

It is almost impossibly rare in famous ones and in a young woman who for the last 17 years of her life was being photographed and analyzed and quoted and pursued every single day of her existence.

It’s survival in her right up to that lunch in Kensington with Richard Kay 4 days before she died is in the end the thing about her that I find most extraordinary.

She wanted in her own last words to that friend to write one more chapter in England and then to step back and to be in her own quiet phrase useful.

She did not get to write that chapter.

But she was and remains useful.

She is useful to every hospice worker who thinks for a moment of holding a dying man’s hand.

She is useful to every mother who thinks for a moment that hugging her children in public is more important than dignity.

She is useful to every young woman who thinks for a moment that she does not have to stay in a marriage that is destroying her.

And she is useful to us tonight sitting here together almost three decades on because she reminds us of something very simple and very difficult and very English about grief and about kindness and about what a human life is finally for.

I hope this has been worth your time.

If it has, I would be honored if you would consider staying with this channel a little longer.

We do a great many of these long, careful looks at the lives of extraordinary people, and I promise you the next one will be worth the wait.

But for tonight, thank you. Thank you for sitting with me on this long journey from that small girl on the top of the staircase at Parkhouse, listening for a car that did not come back, all the way to the island in the lake at All Thorp, where she rests now at last in peace.

Good night. Sleep well and be kind to somebody tomorrow.

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