‘QUEEN COULD HAVE SAVED DIANA’
EX-BODYGUARD: She’d be alive today if royals had kept her protection team
THE QUEEN has been accused of failing to prevent Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in 1997 by not giving her a royal security team.
SAYS HER FORMER BODYGUARD THE royal family is today dramatically accused of refusing to keep Princess Diana safe during the weeks before her death.
In comments that are set to rock Buckingham Palace, her former bodyguard claimed Diana would be alive today if the Queen had insisted she kept her royal protection.
Ken Wharfe is convinced that her death in a Paris car crash in August 1997 could have been avoided if she had a royal security team.
At the time Diana had just a handful of security provided by lover Dodi Fayed, inset.
In an explosive interview with the Daily Star Sunday, Wharfe said: “There is one person who could have really changed the events of that moment in 1997… or 93 actually.
“That year when I left in the Novem- ber and my colleagues were stood down in the December it meant she was then unprotected.
“The one person who could have insisted she retained her protection was the Queen and Diana would have accepted that no question about it… and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.” On the night she died Diana was in a car with Dodi, her bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones and the Ritz’s head of security Henri Paul, who was driving. They crashed in the Pont de l’Alma road tunnel shortly after midnight when they collided with a pillar at 65mph.
Diana had emergency treatment at Paris’s Pitie Salpetriere Hospital but died within a few hours. Rees-Jones was the only survivor.
Wharfe is convinced Diana would still be here if “she had had the specific protection of Scotland Yard”.
He says the team she had weren’t up to scratch.
And he added: “They were completely inexperienced with a high-profile individual… someone as a global icon as Diana. You need to understand certain things.
“You can’t suddenly drop in any place in the world like Paris and expect it all to work out.
“In a place like Paris, which I’d been to many times with Diana, you need to contact the British Embassy, you need to contact the gendarmerie, you need to contact special operations within the police.”
Ken added: “It was a chaos there was no involvement. Had they spoken to the police? Had they set up a pen? Had they arranged a photo shoot?
“Had they got to a police officer to ride on his motorbike at 20 miles an hour in front of that car?”
In the aftermath of Diana’s death the media paparazzi were blamed, but an 18-month inquiry showed Henri was drunk at the wheel and had caused the crash.
Ken said: “Henri meant a lot within the Fayed dynasty and he was running the show and yet he was completely inept to operate or to conduct an operation of this magnitude involving one of the most famous women in the world who was being pursued by this horde of paparazzi.
“It needed professional expertise and that was lacking.”
Ken speaks about his time working for the princess in a new documentary, Diana: In Her Own Words, which will air on Channel 4 on August 6.