I still have questions about my mother’s death, admits Harry
Prince reveals he looked at secret government file and saw photographs of Diana’s final moments
PRINCE HARRY has claimed that “a lot of things are unexplained” about his mother’s death 26 years on, as he revealed new details about the Royal family’s response to the tragedy.
The Prince said he still had questions about the reason Princess Diana’s driver lost control of the Mercedes in which she was travelling when she was killed in Paris in 1997. Conspiracy theories about the accident in the Alma tunnel have raged ever since, the most outlandish of them a suggestion by Mohamed Fayed, whose son Dodi also died in the crash, that Prince Philip ordered the security services to assassinate the couple.
The Prince, who reveals in his book, Spare, that he asked to be driven at speed through the same tunnel, said it was “almost physically impossible to lose control of a vehicle unless you are completely blinded at the wheel”.
The Prince said he did not see any point in opening another inquiry “at this stage” as he also revealed that he was shown pictures from the official police report at his own request.
Speaking to ITV’S Tom Bradby for Prince Harry: The Interview, the Duke of Sussex said he decided to be driven through the Alma tunnel in 2007 because “there were still so many question marks that were unanswered, especially from the inquest”. He said he believed that if the paparazzi had not been following his mother’s car the “end result” would have been different. He told Bradby: “There’s a lot of things that are unexplained. I’ve been asked before whether I want to open up another inquiry. I don’t really see the point at this stage.”
The Princess’s car crashed into a pillar in the middle of the tunnel as it was being driven at more than twice the speed limit by a Ritz Hotel security boss who was more than three times over the drinkdrive limit. After being driven through the tunnel at the same speed – 65mph – the Prince concluded that “there was no danger of anybody losing control even after a drink or a couple of drinks, almost physically impossible to lose control of a vehicle unless you are completely blinded at the wheel”.
He said he had been driving his own car when “I would have paparazzi literally jump on the bonnet of the car and I couldn’t see anything,” and “you assume your mother’s driver was experiencing [the same thing] at the time” it made it hard for him to understand how “some people” came to the conclusions they did about what happened. He added: “The people that were predominantly responsible for it, all got away with it.”
Prince Harry describes in his book how he demanded to see a secret government file on the investigation, and was handed it by his private secretary Jamie Lowther-pinkerton. “At last I came to the photos of Mummy,” he says, and was appalled to see the reflections of photographers’ flashguns and even reflections of the paparazzi themselves in many of the pictures, taking photographs rather than trying to help the car’s occupants.
He told Bradby: “To this day, I will remain eternally grateful for Jamie for showing me what he believed I needed to see, but removing the stuff that he knew I didn’t need to see.
“I don’t know where I’d be now if I saw the stuff that I wanted to see, that I demanded to see. He took out the more, I guess descriptive photographs. I saw the back of her blonde hair... slumped on the back of the seat. There were other photographs that would probably show my mother’s face and blood – those I assume were the ones that Jamie removed.
“I was looking for evidence that it actually happened; that it was true. But I was also looking for something to hurt, because I was still pretty numb to the whole thing. That was my body, my nervous system, just kind of shut down and said, like, let’s not go there.”
The Prince describes the moment his father came into his bedroom at Balmoral and sat on the end of his bed to tell him: “I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”
He told Bradby: “Sitting in that sunken bed at Balmoral Castle, I took myself back to that moment and tried to remember as much as possible. My father coming in in his dressing gown and sharing that news with me… and the compassion that I have for him as a parent having to sit with that for many, many hours, ringing up friends of his, trying to work out ‘how the hell do I break this to my two sons?’ And I never want to be in that position.”
He said part of the reason he had moved his family to California was because: “I never want to be in that position… I don’t want history to repeat itself. I do not want to be a single dad.”
The Duke said he had “lost” many childhood memories from before his mother died, and that like other people who had experienced loss he had “an inability to be able to like drag the memories back over” which he regarded as a defence mechanism.
He says he suffered “post traumatic stress injury” more than post traumatic stress disorder because he does not have a disorder, and spent years pretending his mother was hiding, rather than dead. He would see her in dreams and say: “Mummy is that you?”
There was “absolutely no way” he would have allowed William to walk behind their mother’s coffin at her funeral on his own, he said. “And there’s absolutely no way that he would let me do that by myself if it was a role reversal.”
He said that when they walked the same route behind Queen Elizabeth II’S coffin he and his brother joked that “at least we know the way”.
In an interview for the CBS show 60 Minutes, he said that fighting in Afghanistan, and particularly flying an Apache helicopter, had been his “calling” and that after the trauma of losing his mother: “I felt healing from that weirdly.”
He also said the only time he had cried about his mother’s death was at her burial, and that he had never cried about it since, despite trying to force himself to.
He said: “I was constantly trying to find a way to cry, even sitting on my sofa and going over as many memories as I could muster up about my Mum. And sometimes I watched videos online of my Mum.” He said he was hoping to cry but “I couldn’t”.