Fayed’s chauffeur Henri Paul had been drinking heavily since his shift had ended – five aperitifs. Even after he had been asked to chauffeur the couple again, he had ordered himself another Ricard Pastis (an aniseed-flavoured spirit) as the waiting paparazzi mobilised their posse of vehicles and motorbikes to chase the black Mercedes. A few minutes later Henri Paul crashed his precious cargo into a pillar in the tunnel of the Pont de l’Alma beside the River Seine.
At 1 a.m. the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Michael Jay, phoned with the news to Sir Robin Janvrin, the Queen’s deputy private secretary, who was up in Scotland with the family on their annual summer holiday in Balmoral. Dodi and Henri Paul had died instantly, and Diana was seriously injured. Janvrin woke both Prince Charles and the Queen at once, and two hours later Charles received another call – the sad news that his ex-wife had also died. Mother and son conferred together in their dressing gowns. The distressed prince could not decide whether to wake William and Harry, but the Queen suggested that the boys should be left to sleep.
‘They’re all going to blame me,’ complained Charles down the phone to his private secretary Stephen Lamport, following a phone call to Camilla in Gloucestershire and an agonised solitary walk on the moors. ‘The world’s going to go completely mad, isn’t it? We’re going to see a reaction that we’ve never seen before. And it could destroy everything. It could destroy the monarchy.’
The hours dragged slowly by until 7.15 a.m. when Charles felt that he could wake his elder son, who told him that he had not slept well. William had had a disturbed night – and then Charles broke the tragic news of the car crash, and of how every effort to save his mother’s life had failed.
William started to cry, embracing his father, while Charles hugged the boy back desperately. As they wept together, William’s first reaction was to think about Harry, and to worry how his younger brother would take the dreadful news. He wanted to go with his father to wake his brother up.
‘One of the hardest things for a parent to have to do,’ Harry later recalled, ‘is to tell your children that your other parent has died … But he was there for us. He was the one out of the two left, and he tried to do his best and to make sure we were protected and looked after. But, you know, he was going through the same grieving process.’
‘The shock is the biggest thing, and I still feel it,’ said William. ‘The trauma of that day has lived with me for twenty years, like a weight … People think shock can’t last that long, but it does.’
When Charles felt that the boys were ready to leave their bedrooms, he told them that their grandparents wanted to see them. Father and sons held hands as they walked slowly down the corridors, a forlorn trio, to the room where the Queen and Prince Philip were waiting. According to the two brothers’ subsequent accounts, neither grandparent gave them a hug …
In London, newspaper editors were frantically trying to recall and reprint their front pages, which had all looked and sounded very clever when the princess was still alive. ‘Troubled Prince William,’ announced a News of the World exclusive on Dodi, ‘will today demand that his mother Princess Diana dump her playboy lover.’ ‘Any publicity is good publicity,’ declared the Sunday Express derisively of Diana’s recent posing on the diving board of the Fayed yacht. ‘She seems to relish her role as a martyr.’
While the British public read such perplexing paper coverage that Sunday morning, as radio and TV reported on flashing ambulances in Paris and Diana’s wincingly shattered car being towed out of the tunnel, there was a similar disconnect inside Balmoral. Charles had called the Queen’s Flight to transport him to France as soon as possible, only to be asked if his journey was strictly necessary. Should the prince be going to Paris at all, since this incident did not involve the death of a ‘royal’ personage?
The Queen, it turned out, did not share the national sentiments that were already being expressed by mourners laying bunches of flowers at the gates of Buckingham Palace and Balmoral. Nor did Prince Philip. The royal couple had long ceased being fans of their ex-daughter-in-law and they certainly did not envisage her body being flown home in special dignity to lie in state. On Her Majesty’s express instructions, her private secretary Robert Fellowes – Diana’s brother-in-law, married to her elder sister Jane – arranged for the body to be sent discreetly to the Fulham Road mortuary used by the royal coroner.
Charles was outraged – both on his own account and for the sake of Diana and his sons. He dived into a bitter slanging match with Fellowes that ended with him shouting at the private secretary, ‘Why don’t you just go and impale yourself on your own flagstaff?’
Charles turned for help to Tony Blair, the energetic young Labour prime minister who had been elected that summer in a landslide. Unlike the Queen and her husband, Blair and his shrewd press spokesman Alastair Campbell had their fingers very firmly on the national pulse. Talking to the cameras summoned to his local church in County Durham, the premier delivered a clever and powerful statement, apparently on the verge of tears.
‘I feel like everyone else in this country today. I am utterly devastated,’ declared the prime minister, speaking reflectively and clearly grieving. He was wearing a dark suit and black tie. ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with Princess Diana’s family, particularly her two sons. Our heart goes out to them …
‘We know how difficult things were for her from time to time … But people everywhere, not just here in Britain, kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked
