Princess Diana would now be 61 years old. Her demise was sad, along with the struggle to save her, and some details of the injuries that she suffered and the medical support she obtained, but what now follows is a vital historical account that dispels so many of the malicious myths encircling her death.
On Sunday, August 31 it’s midnight in Paris, and Brigadier Charles Richie, the military attaché at the British Embassy, is walking past the Ritz after a night out when he sees a group of photographers and other spectators by the entrance.
The soldier, who’d once been equerry to Princess Anne, stopped to talk to one of the onlookers. He was then told they’d assembled there because Lady Di was inside the hotel. Ritchie, therefore, became the first British official in the city to learn of her presence there.
He later told the Met’s Paget inquiry that he planned to tell his ambassador, but saw no sense in doing so before the morning.
Diana’s butler Paul Burrell also told Paget that while she was obliged to notify the Home Secretary when she journeyed abroad, in practice she only did so for official visits, and this excursion with Dodi was strictly unofficial.
Ritchie said that he’d noticed two Range Rovers and motorists outside the front of the hotel but thought Diana wouldn’t depart the Ritz again at such a late hour, but that was the wrong assumption.
At 12.01 am, Dodi then pops out of the Imperial Suite and tells his two British bodyguards, Trevor Rees-Jones and Kez Wingfield, that there’d been another change of plan, and that the couple wouldn’t be departing by the Ritz’s front door to travel to his apartment in the cars used earlier in the evening, nor in the company of the two bodyguards and dedicated chauffeurs.
Instead, Dodi tells them, he and Diana would be departing by the back door with the Ritz deputy security manager Henri Paul and be driven by him in another Mercedes.
The bodyguards would be going out the front and act as decoys while the couple and Paul would make their escapes, but the two bodyguards were horrified at the bad plan, and there was a heated discussion during which Dodi tells his men that it had been okayed by MF (Mohamed Al Fayed), his father.
A compromise is reached. Rees-Jones would go with the couple and Paul, but neither bodyguard is happy, but Dodi’s word was final.
At 12.06 am, the couple leaves the Imperial Suite, and with Paul and Rees-Jones, descend to ground level in a service elevator.
Parked outside is the only suitable automobile from the Ritz carpool available, a black three-year-old Mercedes S280.
Rees-Jones gets into the front passenger seat. Diana sits behind him with Dodi behind Paul. None of them is wearing a seatbelt, and they’re only minutes from disaster.
At 12.18 am, the deception has failed dismally as the Mercedes is encircled by paparazzi before they can drive off.
One of the last images of Diana alive is taken here.
Rees-Jones is looking stressed, but the bespectacled Paul is bemused, and according to a witness, as he gets into the car Paul says to the photographers: ‘Don’t try to follow us; in any case, you won’t catch us.’
At 12.20 am, they’re followed along the Rue Cambon to the junction with Rue de Rivoli, where Paul hangs right into the Place de la Concorde. Then they enter the Cours la Reine, which runs along the Seine embankment, accelerating.
Now they’re passing under the approach to Pont Alexandre III but the speeding Mercedes fails to, or can’t take the exit slip road that offers the most direct route to their destination, and so they continue along the river bank, followed by paparazzi, towards the next bridge, the Pont de l’Alma.
At this juncture, a number of disputed factors that launched a myriad of theories and investigations come together.
Near the entry to the tunnel, the speeding Mercedes is in a glancing collision with a white Fiat Uno, but we shall return to that car later on. For now, though, suffice it to say Paul loses control and the two-ton car crashes into the 13th pillar of the tunnel’s central reservation, at an estimated speed of 65mph.
It spins about and comes to rest facing in the opposite direction. The crash kills Dodi and Paul, but Rees-Jones and Diana are critically hurt. Seconds later, off-duty doctor Frederic Mailliez’s Peugeot enters the Alma tunnel from the other direction.
He and his boyfriend Mark were on their way home from a birthday party. They left early because the doctor was on duty in the morning. He said that he witnessed some smoke in the tunnel and he drove slower and slower and then he saw the Mercedes.
Mailliez recalled that smoke was coming from its engine, which was almost cut in two, and the horn was blowing, on and on, but there was nobody around the wreckage.
He stopped his car and rushed across the carriageway where inside the Mercedes two victims were already seemingly dead and two were severely injured but still alive. So, he did an extremely brief assessment, then went back to his car to get what little medical equipment was there.
He said he had a bag valve mask, which he took, then went back inside the Mercedes and attempted to give assistance to the young woman.
He said she was sitting on the floor in the back and he realised then that she was the most beautiful woman and she didn’t have any severe wounds on her face. She wasn’t bleeding then but she was almost unconscious and was having difficulty breathing. So, his goal was to help her breathe more easily.
He said it was a pretty difficult situation for him. He was on his own and had very little equipment. He said she looked okay for the first minutes but the accident was extremely high energy and you always suspect severe internal injuries in that type of situation.
Dr Mailliez then called the emergency services on his mobile phone. Then he went back to work inside the car. He had no idea that the injured woman he was attempting to help was Diana, Princess of Wales. All that mattered was that her pulse was weak and fast, but soon he became aware of the other figures starting to assemble around the wreckage as he worked on her, attempting to fix the respiratory bag onto her face.
Now flashguns of cameras were going off behind him, but often people take photographs in an accident because they’re inquisitive, but at that moment there were a lot of people taking photographs, which surprised him but it didn’t prevent him from doing his work.
He attempted to calm Diana in French because he didn’t know she was a foreigner. Then someone behind him said that the young woman spoke English. So, he began to speak English to her, saying that he was a doctor and that the ambulance was on its way and everything was going to be okay, but he still didn’t know who she was.
At 12.30 am, the first uniformed police officer arrives on the scene, Sebastian Dorzee and he instantly recognises the Princess.
12.32 am and Fire Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon arrives with two vehicles from the Marlar fire and ambulance station. He already knew it would be serious because a full medical team had been sent to the location. He sees the man who’s Trevor Rees-Jones who was extremely agitated, attempting to turn round, mumbling in English. He couldn’t understand him so put a team on him straight away.
The sergeant also sees a figure crouched in the wreckage with another victim. It was Dr Mailliez and Diana who were moving and talking.
Gourmelon’s crew then removes Dodi from the car to try to resuscitate him. He said once he was out he remained with the female passenger, she spoke in English and said ‘Oh my God, what’s happened?’ He said that he could understand that, so he attempted to comfort her and held her hand, and then others took over.
Physically, he could see little wrong with Diana, apart from her shoulder, but said you can’t count on what you see.
His fire service colleague Philippe Boyer then fits her with a cervical collar and a new breathing mask. Then Boyer covers Diana in a metallic isothermal blanket. Her breathing is normal, her pulse fine and quite strong, and it’s looking promising.
It’s now 12.40 am and the first ambulance arrives. It’s in the charge of Doctor Jean-Marc Martino, a specialist in anaesthetics and intensive care treatment. All Parisian ambulances have a doctor as part of their team.
He said he presented himself to him, gave his assessment and went back to his car to go, so he left the location without even knowing who he’d been treating. He and Mark went home, where he began the task of attempting to wash his stained white suit. Without thinking, he’d kept the respiratory mask that he fitted on the woman.
Philippe Massoni, Préfet de Police for Paris, is notified of the collision.
It’s now 12.50-1 am and George Younes, and the duty security officer at the British Embassy in Paris, receives a call, possibly from Nicola Basselier, assistant private secretary to Massoni, telling him of the misfortune.
Younes records it in the Chancery Daily Occurrence Log, but immediately afterwards, Younes receives another call from the duty officer at the Élysée Palace, passing on the same message.
Younes was the first British official to learn that Diana had been in a collision in his city. He documented the details as entry No 3 in that night’s duty log.
It reads: ‘T/C [telephone call] from Mr [unreadable] Permance de Palais Elysee to inform the Embassy that Lady Diana had a serious car accident at tunnel Pont de l’Alma Paris. There is death in her car, she is being taken away to a hospital [unreadable] Paris that still kept secret for instant take all details from here.’ The truncated words and strange syntax perhaps reflect the confusion and enormity of the news.
1 am and Martino tells Gourmelon that they must remove Diana from the car. So, that’s what they did. They took her out and first put her on a wooden board and then onto a mattress filled with air because it prevents the person from moving around, to avoid spine trauma, but when they moved her from the board to the mattress her heart stopped beating.
So, they began heart massage, two of them, and her heart started again almost immediately, but from thereon her treatment was all down to the doctors.
At 1.10 am Younes telephones Keith Shannon, second secretary (technology) and the Embassies on-call duty officer and leaves an answerphone message. Shannon also receives a call shortly after from Philippe Massoni who’s already at the location of the collision.
1.15 am, Keith Shannon telephones Keith Moss, the British Consul General in Paris, and at 1.18 am, Gourmelon helps to put Diana in the ambulance.
Like Mailliez, the fireman doesn’t yet know who he’s been helping until he’s asked if he does by a captain at the scene. Then he’s told who she is, and then he recognises her, but in the moment he didn’t.
His team then clears up and returns to the station. He gives a statement to the police, but he doesn’t talk about his role in the disaster until he speaks a generation later to a newspaper outlet.
Most urgently, Diana’s blood pressure is starting to fall. Martino administers another line of dopamine but fears the symptoms indicate internal injury.
They’ve done all they can at the scene and now must get her to the hospital, which is the subject of debate in the control room.
At 1.30 am, the decision that the Princess should be taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière in the 13th arrondissement is relayed to Martino. At the same time, the hospital’s emergency room team is put on standby to receive her. Keith Moss is informed and sets off for the hospital.
At 1.41 am, the Princess’s blood pressure has stabilised enough for the journey to begin. A slow and steady journey as any jolting, acceleration or deceleration might be fatal. In the tunnel, the ceiling of the Mercedes is cut away so that Rees-Jones can be removed.
At 1.45 am, Moss telephones the Hotel de Charost, the majestic residence of the HM Ambassador on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. His Excellency Sir Michael Jay is woken and notified of the collision.
Buckingham Palace is empty of royals, but it’s still guarded and houses the 24-hour-a-day control room for the police security of all the UK’s royal quarters.
Constable Garry Smith (not his actual name owing to his current sensitive work) is on duty that night. Only a week ago, Diana had posed for a photo with him at her Kensington Palace apartment.
He told her he was organising a major charitable event and she offered to give him public support. He told her that as a member of the Royal Family she couldn’t do that, but she said she wasn’t a member of the Royal Family anymore, and that she could do what she wanted.
Now, over his personal radio, he starts to hear that something major has occurred in Paris involving his friend and supporter the Princess. He leaves his static post for the control room to monitor events.
Chief Superintendent Dai Davis is head of Scotland Yard’s Royalty Protection Squad. He’s sleeping at his house on the outskirts of London when the phone rings, and he’s informed, although a little strained that Dodi was dead and Diana was dying. His instantaneous response was to say ‘Dodi who?’ because he was not completely awake and had been on leave.
Davies goes downstairs and calls back his man at the Palace, and asks if his senior protection office at Balmoral has been informed and if anybody had told Prince Charles or the Queen. All these questions were going through his head. He then gets dressed and drives to his HQ at Buckingham Gate.
It’s now 2 am and the ambulance is nearing the hospital when Diana’s blood pressure drops again. Martino orders the driver to stop while he administers further treatment. He increases the level of dopamine, the prognosis is not good, and others are preparing for the worst.
In his apartment near the hospital Father Yves-Marie Clochard-Bossuet, who volunteered to be duty chaplain that weekend, was woken by the telephone. It’s the head concierge at the hospital.
He was asked to give the address of one of his Anglican colleagues, but he said he didn’t have the name to hand, and that they must have the number of an Anglican priest, but he said that he was not responding and he said that he was sorry, he didn’t know and hung up.
The hospital didn’t clarify why an Anglican clergyman was needed at that hour and the priest didn’t think to ask.
At 2.02-2.03 am the priest’s phone rings again and he was asked if he could come in place of the Anglican priest. He said that he could but questioned why and was told that they couldn’t tell him, and he replied that it was funny that they couldn’t tell him because if he was going to see a person at two in the morning, he would like to know who it was.
The priest starts to believe that the caller might be intoxicated and questions if he’s playing a joke and then he’s told that it’s the Princess of Wales.
Now, Father Clochard-Bossuet truly thinks the concierge is under the influence and hangs up right away, but even so, he’s slightly worried and doesn’t go back to sleep.
At 2.05 am Diana’s blood pressure is stabilised and her ambulance journey continues, and at 2.06 am the ambulance arrives at the hospital at last. The Princess is in a state of traumatic shock. The on-call thoracic surgeon, Dr Bruno Riou, is present and two X-rays are taken, which show that she’s bleeding internally. Diana begins to receive treatment but Dr Riou is pessimistic.
At 2.07 am the priest’s phone rings again and a voice apologises and says that it’s true and says that he’s expected by the British Ambassador who was already there and that it was an extremely serious medical situation, the priest then gets out of bed and dresses.
At around 2.15 am, Michael Cole, a former BBC royal correspondent and now chief spokesman for Mohamed Al Fayed, is sleeping at his home in Woodbridge, Suffolk, when the phone rings. It’s Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News Of The World.
He said that there’d been a crash in Paris and Diana was injured and Dodi had been killed. He asks him for a comment. His newspaper had been one of the most relentless in the pursuit of Diana and Dodi that summer and he said that they made him sick and hung up the phone.
Cole then calls Mohamed Al Fayed at his Surrey estate. He answers but at the same time he was speaking on another line to his helicopter captain, making arrangements to be picked up and flown to Paris. Cole tells him what he’s been told and he just said very calmly he hopes it’s not true and they should pray that it wasn’t true.
2.16-2.21 am, Diana goes into further cardiac arrest. She’s given external cardiac massage and adrenaline, but the fight is being lost, and General surgeon Dr Monsef Dahman is called in to perform a surgical procedure to locate and stop the internal bleeding.
At 2.25 am the grievously injured Rees-Jones is delivered, at last, to the same hospital.
At 2.30 am, Professor Alain Pavie, one of France’s most prominent cardio surgeons, arrives. He has the Princess moved from her stretcher to the surgical theatre. He locates the source of the bleeding. The rapture is sutured and the bleeding is brought under control, but Diana’s heart doesn’t restart. The surgical team now know that there’s no hope. However, they persist in attempts to save her.
The on-duty chaplain is trekking to the hospital and starts to see a lot of vans with TV satellite dishes, and he was like, so this stuff is true, why else would this be happening in the dead of the night in August?
At 3 am (9 am Manila time), Foreign Secretary Robin Cook is in the Philippines and due to depart for Singapore in a couple of hours, but word has come through of the crash in Paris and because of the time difference, he’s the only senior British politician awake, working and with a media entourage.
He’s interviewed in his hotel lobby by print and TV crews. He states that Diana is injured but alive and predicts it will be doubly sad if it appears that the misfortune that has claimed her boyfriend’s life was caused in part by the constant hounding of the Princess and her privacy by photographers.
The British reporters are bussed to the Villamor air base. The RAF VC10 is waiting and keen to go. Foreign Office clerical staff are aboard in a curtained apartment at the rear of the fuselage, but Cook is still delayed.
A massive story is evolving and there’s no template. Uninformed, the reporters remain corralled in the grounded VC10.
It’s now 3-3.30 am, and Colin Tebbutt, Diana’s loyal driver minder, arrives at Diana’s private office in Kensington Palace, from his home in the hamlet of Botany Bay, on the outskirts of North London.
He discovers that her private secretary Michael Gibbins, her butler Paul Burrell and three female secretaries are already there. They’re all watching the rolling TV coverage, which reports that Diana has been injured but is alive.
At 3.30 am, Father Clochard-Bossuet reaches the hospital’s surgical unit. He’s greeted by the hospital director, who introduces him to the British ambassador, Sir Michael Jay who asks him to wait and that he was going to ask him something. The priest does as he’s asked, remaining outside the operating theatre in which France’s best surgeons are fighting to keep Diana alive.
At 4 am, to no avail. Diana’s medical team take the decision to terminate their resuscitation efforts, which for at least an hour, perhaps, have been without any realistic expectancy of success. They’ve depleted the supply of adrenaline. They’ve done all that they can and more, but her injuries have beaten them.
The most well-known, most photoed woman in the world is officially declared dead. Outside the operating theatre, the priest is approached by a member of the medical team who tells him it’s over.
For a while, there’s an official news blackout, but some beyond the emergency room and the official circle start to learn the worst has transpired.
Michael Cole had met Diana’s stepmother Raine, Countess Spencer, at his office that Friday. She told him she was going to Venice for the weekend and gave him the number of the friends with whom she was visiting. So, he called the number in Venice and after some delay because of the lateness of the hour, he got through to Raine. He told her what he knew, that Diana had been injured and he gave her the number for the hospital in Paris.
He waited and in a very quick time, Raine came back to him and said she had talked to the hospital and that they’d told her Princess Diana had not survived, and that, however awful it was that Dodi had been killed, it was much, much worse that Diana was dead.
He said that when she told him it felt like he’d been hit in the solar plexus and that he dropped to his knees and sobbed, and that it was the last time in his life that he’d cried hot tears.
Colin Tebbutts said that they were watching the television and they were broadcasting the footage of Robin Cook saying that Diana was injured but alive when the phone rang. Michael Gibbins answered it and spoke briefly. Then he replaces the receiver, turns the television down and said to them, rather calmly that the Princess was dead.
It was a tremendous shock and it wasn’t easy to take and Diana’s secretaries and Burrell burst into tears.
At Buckingham Gate, Dai Davies, the head of Royal Protection at the Met, is shocked by the news. Now he and his boss Commander Peter Clarke have to respond professionally.
There’s a contingency plan for the demise of every senior royal, but for Diana, no such arrangements were in place.
He calls in Inspector Ken Wharfe, a former long-serving protection officer for Diana. He also orders a French-speaking royal protection officer from Balmoral to Paris.
4.20-4.25 am, Father Clochard-Bossuet is escorted by a nurse to a room on the first floor where he finds a number of dignitaries, including the French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement and Ambassador Jay.
He said the ambassador said to him that they would take him to the room where Diana had been laid and that they asked him to say prayers and to watch over her until an Anglican priest was located.
The priest agrees but it’s too late to perform Extreme Unction, the sacred ritual for the dying, and in any case, Diana was not Catholic, but he said that he would say prayers for the departed.
At 4.25 am on the airfield outside Manila, the RAF VC10 hasn’t moved. It can’t take off for Singapore until the Foreign Secretary boards, so why is he taking so long?
Steve Doughty, the Mail’s diplomatic correspondent, was one of the journalists on the plane. He said that Buckingham Palace had no night duty officer awake and able to deal with overnight business, so was out of the loop.
He said the Foreign Office was in charge of getting Diana news, and it was redirecting all message traffic from Paris to their boss, Robin Cook, in Manila, and it was his understanding at the time that Cook was being told before Downing Street.
Traffic was being fielded by Foreign Office staff in the communications suite at the rear of the VC10. They were isolated from the Press in the main passenger compartment by a thin curtain, but some secrets are too big to keep and a female colleague twitched back the curtain at the back of the plane to reveal a row of female Foreign Office secretaries all in a torrent of tears, and that’s when they knew that Diana was not injured but dead.
The officials on the aircraft didn’t attempt to deny the news, and those journalists with mobile phones that worked in Manila started to contact their editors in London.
At 4.41 am, The Press Association in London broke the news that Diana had died in Paris, but it was yet to be backed by official verification.
Back at the hospital, Father Clochard-Bossuet was taken by the ambassador and a nurse to the room in which Diana was lying, her body shrouded by a sheet.
He said he saw her for the first time there. She was totally intact, with no marks or stains, or makeup. Completely natural, and she was a truly beautiful woman, and it seemed as if you could almost talk to her.
The priest is now alone with Diana. He’d been conscious of the Princess’s holiday movements that summer and hadn’t approved of all those images, the lovers, for a woman who was the mother of a king, that wasn’t conducting herself very well, and he was not sympathetic to her.
However, he’d read her interview in Le Monde newspaper on the Thursday and his view altered. There was a page on her explaining what else she was doing and extremely favourable things, and he thought, well, he was ready to judge, but ultimately she was a good woman, and it was providential that he saw it, given what occurred.
He considers the two young Princes who had yet to be told, and they were going to be woken up and they would be informed that it was all over, and that was the worst thing.
He begins to pray for Diana’s soul, and in the darkness outside the hospital, Interior Minister Chevènement is confirming to the world that the Princess is certainly dead.
But now we should let Diana rest in peace, what occurred was catastrophic, but it happened. We can’t wake her, and still, numerous questions remain unanswered.
There were far too many questions and very few follow-ups, but still, we’re still feasting on her death, so it’s no surprise that Harry still has issues with her death, along with media coverage.
At the end of the day was it fate that killed Diana or was it something else, we will likely never know, although I’m sure some people know more than they’re letting on. However, every time somebody wants to mention something about Diana she will be disinterred in the process, so she will never actually be able to rest in peace.
Newsgroups were the most vicious in their pursuit of the Princess and had been multiple times over the years, and their everyday feeds were horrible reports founded on unknown sources, selective quotes, and pseudo-experts, and she was hunted down whenever she happened to break cover, but it all looks depressingly familiar when you look at other members of the Royal Family.
Everyone wants to hop on the bandwagon when it comes to the Royal Family, whether it’s all rubbish, both past and present, and just for money. What a pathetic indictment of humanity’s ravenous hunger for gossip.
Princess Diana was loved by many throughout the world, and her memory will go on for generations, and we will always be reminded of her through her children and grandchildren.
Enough said now!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 