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| The People's Princess in 1997 (photo from WikiCommons John Mathew Smith &) |
It was nearly a quarter of a century ago but if feels like yesterday. I was just waking up on a sleepy Sunday morning when our son came in to wake us with the terrible news that Diana, Princess of Wales had been killed when the car she was travelling in span out of control in a tunnel under the Seine. The date was 31stAugust 1997. Everybody remembers where they were when they heard the news. Diana had that sort of effect on people.
Researching a possible book recently I came across the old idea that she was murdered. Occasionally people put forward that theory when I was working as a tourist guide, a career that is on hold now if not defunct. One lady from Australia, in particular, was convinced of it, and said ‘we in Oz think she was deliberately killed, Eddie’. It is hard to argue with her degree of certainty but it has to be done. So here goes.
As traffic increased in Britain, the government pushed for road safety on three fronts:
1. Clamping down on rink-driving
2. Wearing seatbelts
3. Enforcing speed limits.
They did not just encourage these habits but made them compulsory by changing the laws. I admit that I have at times driven above the speed limit but we all know – and usually stick to – the rules. Using a mobile phone is also prohibited by law but these were not so common when this particular accident occurred.
And it was an accident. The jury at the inquest decided that after looking at the evidence carefully. That seemed to shut the conspirators up for a time, although there are still plenty of people who agree with the last from Australia. Just go on YouTube and search for 'Death of Diana'. Yet the car se was in broke all three of the rules brought in to make the roads safer.
Diana’s driver Henri Paul was driving with over three times the amount of alcohol allowed under French in his blood. His alcohol level was measured at 175 milligrams per 100 millitres, three and a half times the permitted level of 50 in France. (It is 80 in England, but he was still over twice our limit.) He had also been taking medicines that would have impaired his driving ability.
The Mercedes he was driving - he was not a qualified or experienced limousine driver - was going at over twice the permitted speed permitted in the Port de l'Alma tunnel under the seine, a notorious accident black spot in Paris and lost control of the vehicle as he did so.
If you will forgive the phrase, however, the killer fact was that none of the occupants fastened their seatbelts when they left the Ritz Hotel in the early hours of the morning. Diana’s bodyguard Trevor Rees Jones is the only one who survived, probably saved mainly by the airbag int he front of the car which cushioned the impact. Diana, her boyfriend at the time, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the driver did not. The two men died instantly, while Diana made it to the Hospital Salt Pietre but her injuries were too serious and she died there.
A distinguished consultant pathologist Alan Shepherd is of the opinion that, if she had been wearing her belt, she would have survived the crash. If one good thing came out of that terrible tragedy, it was that it kept the anti-seatbelt crowd quiet for a while. Hardly anybody now says that wearing one is an unnecessary infringement of liberty.
Could she have been deliberately killed? It is not absolutely impossible but it would have shown remarkable powers of prediction to have guessed the route the driver would take after the couple left the Ritz by the back entrance to head for Dodi's flat, to have arranged the accident and to have got clean away without being noticed or photographed by the paparazzi pursuing her.
Moreover, to have known that she would not have buckled up when she got into that car would have taken superhuman powers of deduction or guesswork. If I wanted to kill someone and keep quiet about it, I would probably not choose the middle of Paris to do the deed, especially when there were dozens of photographers hanging around and recording her every move.
A jury did not think so either and, at the inquest into her death ten years after it happened, they blamed the driver and the pursuing paparazzi who were making her life hell. After that most people gave up advancing conspiracy theories, with the exception of Mohammed Al-Fayed, Dodi’s father, who still thinks it was murder.
But the people’s princess is gone now. Everybody who saw her in action said that she had the gift of identifying and offering comfort to the most wounded and vulnerable person in any room she entered. She could have been a great asset to the rather stuffy Windsors but it was not to be. She could not adapt to their way of her life, nor they to hers.
In the end, Diana almost did what Oliver Cromwell did not manage, which was to drive a wedge between the British people and the royal family. Cromwell was committed to getting rid of the monarchy but his republic – or Commonwealth as he preferred to call it – did not outlast him for long and the monarchy returned soon after his death.
In contrast to Cromwell, Diana was a smart woman but one without academic distinction or any particular political programme. She was a people person par excellence, who did a huge amount of good and exuded glamour wherever she went. She was inevitably very popular because of this and poor worthy Charles could not hope to match her. How ironic it was that, owing her position and popularity almost entirely to the existence of the monarchy, she should be the one who almost destroyed the institution.
Some people will continue to believe that she was assassinated. Of course, they had her bumped off, they say. She was too dangerous, too popular, too glamorous. But the conspiracy would have involved too many people, one of whom was bound to spill the beans sooner or later. Sometimes bad stuff just happens, particularly if you do not fasten your seatbelt.
So, who killed the people's princess in the end? Sad to say, it was the people themselves.
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Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
