Death of Diana, Princess of Wales

• 1. Introduction

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  Just after midnight on the 31st of August 1997, a black armoured Mercedes carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, swept into the Pont de l'Alma underpass in Paris. Diana was 36 years old. By dawn she was dead, and so were two of the three men who had been in the car with her.

  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, set off a wave of public grief on a scale few people alive had ever seen. It also set off arguments that lasted for decades. Was the crash a simple accident, the fault of one man, or the end of a chase? Did the people who investigated it tell the full story? And why did her funeral leave Britain's royal family on the defensive? The answers begin a few minutes earlier, at the back door of a Paris hotel.

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• 2. The Rear Exit

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  On Saturday, the 30th of August 1997, a private jet flew Diana from Olbia Airport in Sardinia to Le Bourget Airport in Paris. With her was Dodi Fayed, an Egyptian film producer and the son of the businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed. The couple had spent the previous nine days aboard the family yacht Jonikal, cruising the French and Italian Riviera. Paris was meant to be a one-night stop on the way to London.

  Mohamed Al-Fayed owned the Hôtel Ritz Paris, and he lived in an apartment on Rue Arsène Houssaye. It stood a short distance from the hotel, just off the Champs Elysées. That apartment was the couple's destination, and getting there meant getting past a crowd. Nearly thirty photographers were waiting outside the hotel's front entrance on Place Vendôme.

  The hotel's answer was a decoy. One vehicle left first from the main entrance and drew the photographers after it. At around 00:20 on the 31st of August, Diana and Fayed slipped out through the rear entrance on Rue Cambon instead. Their car was a hired black 1994 armoured Mercedes-Benz S 280. The driver was Henri Paul, the Ritz's deputy head of security, who had been born on the 3rd of July 1956. Trevor Rees-Jones, a member of the Fayed family's personal protection team, sat in the front passenger seat. Diana and Fayed sat in the back.

  The route led across the Place de la Concorde and onto the road beside the Seine, along Cours la Reine and Cours Albert 1er. Ahead lay the Place de l'Alma underpass. Earlier that night Paul had confronted the photographers waiting outside the Ritz, and what those photographers did next would be argued over for years.

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• 3. Minutes in the Tunnel

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  At 00:23, Henri Paul lost control of the Mercedes at the mouth of the Pont de l'Alma underpass. Investigators later estimated its speed at about 105 km/h, more than twice the tunnel's limit of 50 km/h. The car reportedly clipped a white Fiat Uno, veered left across the two-lane carriageway and struck the 13th column supporting the roof head-on. It then spun, hit the stone wall backwards and stopped. The front half was badly smashed, and no guard rail stood in the way to soften the blow.

  Early news reports claimed the car hit the pillar at 190 km/h and that the speedometer needle had jammed at that figure. The estimate was later corrected to somewhere between 95 and 110 km/h.

  The photographers had been driving more slowly and were some distance behind. Witnesses who arrived soon after reported smoke, and some said photographers on motorcycles had swarmed the Mercedes before it entered the tunnel. When the photographers reached the wreck, some tried to open the doors and help the victims, while others took pictures. Police arrived around 00:30, and witnesses said an ambulance followed five minutes later. France Info radio reported that horrified bystanders beat one photographer. Five photographers were arrested on the spot and two more were detained later. Police took about 20 rolls of film and impounded their vehicles.

  Inside the car, Rees-Jones had serious facial injuries and a head contusion, but he was conscious, and the front airbags had worked. Some early reports said he alone had been wearing a seat belt. That was wrong. Later investigations confirmed that no one in the car had been wearing one.

  Diana, in the right rear seat, was critically hurt but also conscious. The damage fell mostly on the right side of her body, which suggests she was sitting sideways at the moment of impact. She had fractured ribs and a fractured arm, a dislocated right collar bone, and swelling and bruising of the brain. Witnesses reported that she murmured "Oh my God" over and over. After police pushed the photographers and other helpers back, she said, "Leave me alone."

  A 2007 Channel 4 documentary, Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel, claimed that the first person to touch her was Frederic Mailliez, an off-duty physician who happened upon the scene. He said she had no visible injuries but was in shock. Rescuers sedated her and removed her from the car at 01:00. She went into cardiac arrest, and external chest compressions started her heart again. She was moved into the ambulance at 01:18. It left at 01:41 and reached the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 02:06.

  Fayed, in the left rear seat, was pronounced dead at the scene soon afterwards. Paul was pronounced dead once he was cut from the wreckage. Both bodies went straight to the Institut Médico-Légal, the Paris mortuary.

  At the hospital, doctors found that the force of the crash had pushed Diana's heart to the right side of her chest. That tore the upper left pulmonary vein and the pericardium. Resuscitation failed, even with internal cardiac massage. She died at 04:00, and the anaesthetist Bruno Riou announced her death at a news conference at 06:00.

  Later that morning, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement visited the hospital. Around 17:00, Prince Charles, her former husband, arrived with her two older sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. With President Jacques Chirac, they thanked the doctors for their efforts. Charles flew back with the body from Vélizy-Villacoublay Air Base to RAF Northolt. There a bearer party from the Queen's Colour Squadron carried the coffin to a hearse, draped in the royal standard with an ermine border. It went on to a mortuary in Hammersmith and Fulham for a post-mortem examination. In London, people had already begun carrying flowers to Buckingham Palace, within an hour of the news.

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• 4. Blame and Verdicts

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  Henri Paul's blood alcohol level was later measured at 180 milligrams per 100 millilitres, which is 3.6 times the legal limit in France. Antidepressants and traces of an anti-psychotic drug were also found in his blood, and they may have deepened his impairment. In 1999, after an 18-month judicial investigation, France concluded that Paul had lost control while intoxicated and at high speed. It held him solely responsible, and none of the photographers was charged.

  Not everyone accepted a one-man explanation. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook remarked that if pursuit by paparazzi had played a part, the tragedy would be "doubly tragic". Diana's younger brother, the Earl Spencer, also blamed the tabloid media.

  Nine photographers who had followed the couple in 1997 were charged with manslaughter in France. France's highest court dropped those charges in 2002. Three others had photographed the aftermath through the open door of the wrecked car. Their pictures were confiscated, and they were tried for invasion of privacy. They were acquitted in 2003. After appeals and a partial retrial, they were convicted in 2006 and ordered to pay a symbolic fine of one euro each, plus the cost of announcing their convictions in three publications.

  The white Fiat Uno remained a loose end. A French investigation concluded that the Mercedes had touched it, but its driver was never conclusively traced. Many believed it was Le Van Thanh, whom French detectives questioned in 1997 and ruled out. Friends and family have noted inconsistencies in his story, and he has since refused interviews. The specific vehicle was never identified.

  Britain held its own examination. The French report ran to 6,000 pages and was never published. Under English law, a sudden or unexplained death requires an inquest, so one opened in London on the 6th of January 2004 under Michael Burgess, the coroner of the Queen's Household. He asked the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, to look into speculation that the deaths were not an accident. The forensic scientist Angela Gallop examined the physical evidence. The resulting police investigation, called Operation Paget, reported in December 2006.

  The inquests into the deaths of Diana and Fayed opened on the 8th of January 2007 under Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. On the 24th of April 2007 she stepped down, saying she lacked the experience to handle an inquest with a jury. Lord Justice Scott Baker took over in June. His list of issues for the jury covered the paparazzi, the tunnel's design and the money found in Paul's bank account. It also asked whether Diana was pregnant, whether she and Fayed were about to announce an engagement, and whether she feared for her life. A jury of six women and five men was sworn in on the 2nd of October 2007.

  Baker began his summing up on the 31st of March 2008. He told the jury there was "not a shred of evidence" that Prince Philip had ordered Diana's death or that the security services had organised it. On the 7th of April 2008, the jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing. It blamed the grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of Paul. It also named alcohol and the lack of a seat belt as contributing factors. Princes William and Harry said they agreed with the verdicts. The inquiry had run for six months and heard 250 witnesses. Its cost exceeded £12.5 million, split between £4.5 million for the inquest and £8 million for the police work, and the media heavily criticised that bill.

  Mohamed Al-Fayed had claimed since February 1998 that the crash was a plot. He later said MI6 had orchestrated it on the instructions of the Royal Family. After the verdict he said he would accept it and abandon his 10-year campaign. Other threads lingered. In January 2006, the Sunday Times reported that British secret service agents who were in Paris that night had been questioned. It was suggested they might have swapped Paul's blood sample, though no evidence for this has appeared. On the 17th of August 2013, Scotland Yard said it was examining a source who alleged that a member of the British military had murdered Diana.

  Prince Harry's memoir later called the summary conclusion of the investigations "simplistic and absurd". He wrote that he and William had planned to ask jointly for the inquiry to be reopened, but were dissuaded by the people who decided such things.

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• 5. Flowers and Funeral

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  All 11,000 light bulbs at Harrods, the department store owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed, were switched off and stayed dark until after the funeral. Books of condolence were opened at St James's Palace and at the British embassy in the United States. Through the night, the Women's Royal Voluntary Service and the Salvation Army gave support to people queuing along the Mall.

  More than one million bouquets piled up at Kensington Palace. At Althorp, the Spencer family estate, officials asked the public to stop bringing flowers because the crowds and the blooms in the surrounding roads threatened public safety. By the 10th of September, the flowers outside Kensington Gardens lay 5 ft deep in places, and the bottom layer had begun to compost. The people queuing to sign the book were quiet and patient. Fresh flowers, teddy bears and bottles of champagne were later given to the sick, the elderly and children. Cards, messages and poems went to Diana's family.

  At first it was unclear that Diana would receive a ceremonial funeral at all, because she had lost the style of Her Royal Highness in her 1996 divorce from Charles. Yet on the 6th of September, Westminster Abbey filled for her service, and an estimated 3 million mourners and onlookers crowded into London. Large screens and speakers carried the ceremony to people outside the Abbey and in Hyde Park. Inside were representatives of the many charities she supported, along with US First Lady Hillary Clinton, French First Lady Bernadette Chirac, the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and Diana's friends George Michael and Elton John.

  John sang a rewritten version of his song "Candle in the Wind", dedicated to her and known as "Goodbye England's Rose". It became the best-selling single since the UK and US singles charts began in the 1950s, with sales above 33 million. Protocol broke down when the guests applauded the speech by Earl Spencer, who sharply criticised the press and indirectly criticised the Royal Family for how they had treated his sister.

  An estimated 31.5 million people watched in Britain. No one can calculate the worldwide audience precisely, but the estimate is around 2.5 billion, and the ceremony was broadcast in 44 languages.

  After the service, a Daimler hearse carried the coffin to Althorp. Mourners threw flowers at the procession along nearly its whole route, and vehicles even stopped on the opposite carriageway of the M1 motorway as it passed. The burial was private, on an island in the middle of a lake called The Oval, within the Pleasure Garden at Althorp. Following royal tradition, the coffin was lined with lead and weighed a quarter of a tonne. Diana wore a black Catherine Walker dress and black tights, and she held a rosary given to her by Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Mother Teresa herself had died the day before the funeral. A visitors' centre opens in the summer months with an exhibition about Diana and a walk around the lake, and its profits go to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

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• 6. The Palace Under Pressure

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  William was 15 and Harry was 12 when their father woke them before dawn to tell them their mother had died. Soon afterwards, the Royal Family's website removed all of its content and showed a black background with a picture of Diana and her dates of birth and death. An online book of condolence was added so the public could post tributes.

  On the Sunday morning, Queen Elizabeth II, Charles, William and Harry all wore black to services at Crathie Kirk near Balmoral Castle. The family later issued a statement saying Charles and his sons were "taking strength from" the public support and were "deeply touched" and "enormously grateful" for it. Princes Andrew and Edward went to meet the mourners outside Kensington Palace as a precaution, to test the public mood. On the road back from church, the Queen and the others stopped to look at flowers and messages left by the public.

  On Friday, the 5th of September, Charles and his sons returned to London and made an unannounced visit to the flowers outside Kensington Palace. The Queen came south from Balmoral with Prince Philip, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, and she agreed to broadcast to the nation on television. She viewed the tributes in front of Buckingham Palace. She also visited the Chapel Royal at St James's Palace, where Diana's body was resting, and met people queuing to sign the condolence books.

  Still, the family faced sharp criticism for sticking to protocol, and their efforts to shield the grieving boys were read as coldness. The sharpest anger followed the refusal to fly the Royal Standard at half-mast over Buckingham Palace. Newspapers carried angry headlines. The Palace's reasoning was that the Royal Standard flies only when the monarch is in residence, and the Queen was in Scotland. The flag also never flies at half-mast, since the monarchy is never vacant and a new monarch succeeds at once. As a compromise, the Union Flag was flown at half-mast as the Queen left for Westminster Abbey on the day of the funeral. That set a precedent, and the Palace has flown the Union Flag since whenever the monarch is away.

  The press also reported a rift between Charles and Sir Robert Fellowes, the Queen's private secretary and Diana's brother-in-law. Charles was said to want a public funeral, while Fellowes backed the Queen's idea of a private one. The Palace issued a statement denying the rumours. Officials also discussed restoring Diana's HRH style after her death, but her family decided that she would not have wanted it, and no formal offer was made. When Downing Street officials suggested that the two princes walk in the funeral procession, Prince Philip reportedly objected. "They've just lost their mother," he said. "You're talking about them as if they are commodities."

  In 2017, Harry said that losing his mother had caused him severe depression and grief, and he later said that what he experienced was very much post-traumatic stress disorder. He recalled that his aunt Lady Sarah McCorquodale brought the boys locks of their mother's hair when she came home from Paris. Years later, he defended his father, saying that Charles was the parent left to them and did his best to keep them protected. William defended his grandmother, saying she had deliberately removed the newspapers so there was nothing in the house to read. Lady Sarah agreed, saying the Queen "did absolutely the right thing."

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• 7. Grief Measured

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  British prime minister Tony Blair said he was "utterly devastated by the death of the Princess". US president Bill Clinton said he and his wife were "profoundly saddened". Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General, said her death had robbed the world of a committed voice for suffering children. German chancellor Helmut Kohl wrote that Diana had also become a victim of brutal competition among some of the media. Boris Yeltsin praised her charity work, and messages also came from Nelson Mandela, John Howard, Jean Chrétien, Jim Bolger and Benjamin Netanyahu. The parliaments of Australia and New Zealand passed motions of condolence, and Canada opened condolence books in its parliament buildings.

  In Oslo, delegates at an international conference to ban landmines paused to honour Diana, who had campaigned hard on the issue. The Ottawa Treaty, a ban on the use of anti-personnel landmines, was adopted in Oslo in September 1997. It was signed by 122 states in Ottawa on the 3rd of December 1997. Her work has been described as influential in the treaty's signing. Landmine victims in Angola and Bosnia held their own services. In Bosnia, a survivor named Jasminko Bjelic, who had met her only three weeks earlier, said, "She was our friend."

  In San Francisco, around 14,000 people marched on the 5th of September to honour her work for AIDS patients. In Los Angeles, more than 2,500 people turned a baseball field into a candle-lit altar at a memorial service organised by an AIDS organisation. In Cairo, people signed a book of condolences at the British embassy, because Dodi Fayed's homeland was Egypt. Prayers were held at the Missionaries of Charity, at Bradford by Christian and Muslim communities, and at the Western Marble Arch Synagogue under Jonathan Sacks. Cardinal Basil Hume presided over a Roman Catholic requiem mass at Westminster Cathedral.

  Researchers later tried to measure the grief. In the four weeks after the funeral, the suicide rate in England and Wales rose by 17 percent, and cases of deliberate self-harm rose by 44.3 percent, compared with the average for the same period in the four previous years. The biggest jump, of over 45 percent, was among women aged 25 to 44, the people most like Diana. Another study found that 50 percent of Britons and 27 percent of Americans were deeply affected, as though someone they knew had died. Counselling services reported more calls from people in distress.

  Other numbers pointed the opposite way. Calls to the police fell by 30 percent, and public order offences dropped 28 percent. Admissions for traumatic injuries fell for at least three months, which may reflect a change in how people drove.

  The Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated that retail sales fell 1 percent that week. Traffic jams in central London as crowds visited the palaces would cost businesses £200 million, or 0.1 percent of gross domestic product for the third quarter of 1997. The centre expected tourism and memorabilia sales to make up the loss in the long run.

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• 8. Backlash and Afterimage

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  As early as 1998, the philosopher Anthony O'Hear called the mourning a defining point in the "sentimentalisation of Britain". The Oasis bandleader Noel Gallagher put it more bluntly: "The woman's dead. Shut up. Get over it." Christopher Hitchens made a 1998 documentary, Princess Diana: The Mourning After. It argued that the British media had built an unchallengeable cult around Diana after attacking her and the monarchy when she separated from Charles. The Independent accused him of exaggerating the censorship of criticism. Private Eye lost a third of its sales after a cover reading "Media to Blame" tried to mock the sudden switch in tone.

  On the tenth anniversary, the journalist Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian described the whole episode as an embarrassing memory. Peter Hitchens, the brother of Christopher, compared Diana's funeral with Winston Churchill's. He found the Churchill crowds more restrained and the Diana crowds "un-English".

  Some cultural analysts disagreed. The sociologist Deborah Steinberg said, "I don't think it was hysteria, the loss of a public figure can be a touchstone for other issues." She noted that many Britons linked Diana with social change rather than with the Royal Family. Carol Wallace of People magazine said the fascination came from a fairy tale that failed to end happily twice, first at the divorce and then at her death.

  Prince Harry gave a different view in the 2021 Apple TV+ series The Me You Can't See. He said he walked along on the day of the funeral showing a tenth of the emotion everyone else showed. In his memoir Spare, he wrote that the wet hands of strangers made him feel guilty for not crying.

  The media turned on itself too. The actor George Clooney criticised several tabloids and photo agencies, and a few tabloids boycotted him in return. In September 1997, US supermarket chains pulled the 9th of September issue of the National Enquirer, which carried the headline "Di Goes Sex Mad". The tabloid Globe apologised for its headline "To Di For". In 2004, the CBS programme 48 Hours showed photographs from the 4,000-page French report, and Buckingham Palace, Tony Blair and Diana's brother condemned the broadcast. In July 2006, the Italian magazine Chi published photographs of Diana in the wreckage.

  The death also changed British news. BBC News quickly built a website for the coverage, and the experience helped its officials see how important online news was becoming. A full BBC online news service launched on the 4th of November 1997, and the rolling channel BBC News 24 followed on the 9th of November.

  The memorials came in stages. Crowds first adopted the Flamme de la Liberté near the tunnel, a monument tied to France's gift of the Statue of Liberty. The Queen opened the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain in Hyde Park in 2004. Her sons unveiled a statue in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace on what would have been her 60th birthday in 2021. In 2002, a BBC poll of the British public ranked her third among the Great Britons, behind Churchill and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Another poll that year named her death the most important event in the country's previous 100 years.

  Filmmakers kept returning to the story. The 2006 film The Queen starred Helen Mirren, and the sixth season of Netflix's The Crown cast Elizabeth Debicki as Diana. In 2022, the documentary series Investigating Diana: Death in Paris let the officers of Operation Paget speak on the record for the first time.

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