Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Friends and fans remember Diana
THE anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales was being marked by her friends and fans today — 20 years after she was killed in a car crash.
Diana’s sons the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry have already paid tribute to their mother, visiting the floral tributes and pictures of the princess left at the gates of her former home Kensington Palace.
The brothers toured the site yesterday and laid flowers on behalf of well-wishers who had gathered to see the royals.
William and Harry also met representatives of charities their mother supported and the prince told them how her death was a tragedy for them as well as his family.
The princess was also being remembered at East London’s Mildmay Mission Aids hospital, visited regularly by Diana when it was a hospice caring for HIV patients.
The institution was to hold a remembrance service and past members of staff were to share their memories of Diana as was the hospital’s patron, actress Linda Robson, and dancer Wayne Sleep who famously performed with the princess.
Diana was a woman whose warmth, compassion and empathy for those she met earned her the description the “people’s princess”.
Twenty years may have passed since her death shocked the world but her appeal remains undiminished.
Fans of Diana, who was killed in a Paris car crash on August 31 1997, were gathering at Kensington Palace to mark the anniversary.
William and Harry have spoken candidly about their mother in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of her death, describing the personal anguish they experienced and the grief they still feel.
Harry, interviewed for an ITV documentary about his mother, said: “There’s not a day that William and I don’t wish that she was ... still around.
“And we wonder what kind of a mother she would be now, and what kind of a public role she would have, and what a difference she would be making.”
William echoed his brother’s words in a magazine interview. He said: “I think she would have carried on, really getting stuck into various causes and making change. If you look at some of the issues she focused on, leprosy, Aids, landmines, she went for some tough areas. She would have carried on with that.”