For Prince Harry, having his security and his wife’s security removed in 2020 was one of the most significant moments of his life. He understood that the institution was throwing him to the wolves and leaving his family to die. That moment probably triggered something in him about his mother’s death in Paris in 1997. We’ve been told – and Harry has been told – for 25 years that Diana turned away her royal protection, and that Diana’s death was the result of a drunk driver and inadequate private security from the al-Fayed family. But what if… none of that was true? I think that’s one of the things Harry has been questioning since his protection was removed in 2020. Around the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death, there was a rash of stories about everything happening around the night in Paris, including one al-Fayed bodyguard who still claims that Diana was being monitored all summer by British intelligence. There are also still questions about the official story of Diana rejecting her royal protection.

So, will any of those conversations be included in Prince Harry’s Spare? Well, we’ll find out soon enough. One woman, Sue Reid, claims she was interviewed by “researchers” working on Harry’s memoir. Reid wrote a piece for the Mail about the many questions she still has about Diana’s death and what happened in that tunnel.

Former bodyguard Lee Sansum still says Diana had fears she would assassinated: Sansum has recalled how Diana talked to him about fears for her safety after the murder in July 1997 of her friend, the fashion designer Gianni Versace. Although the Italian was killed in a random attack, his death was initially suspected to have been a professional assassination. ‘She confided in me her own fears that she might one day be assassinated, too,’ said Sansum in interviews to promote his new biography, Protecting Diana. ‘She said something like: ‘Do you think they’ll do that to me?’ She was shaking and it was clear from her tone that she really thought they might, whoever ‘they’ might be.’

Sansum believes there were non-paparazzi trailing Diana into the tunnel: Tellingly, the ex-bodyguard outlined his own suspicions that something strange happened in the tunnel. He said: ‘A witness driving a car that was travelling in front of the Mercedes in Paris told Diana’s inquest he saw a high-powered motorbike overtake the car just seconds before the crash. Another witness travelling in the opposite direction saw a second motorbike swerve to avoid smoke and Mercedes wreckage, then carry on out of the tunnel without stopping. The bikes’ riders were never found, and that is no coincidence.’

Henry Paul’s blood-alcohol level: One of my most haunting experiences was interviewing the parents of Henri Paul, the Ritz’s 41-year-old chauffeur, who was, within hours of Diana’s death, being described in French security-service briefings to Paris newspapers as having been ‘drunk as a pig’ that night. The couple, who live in Brittany, told me, with tears in their eyes, that their son was not a heavy drinker: they said he enjoyed only an occasional bottle of beer or a Ricard, a liquorice-flavoured aperitif. They added that, during a meeting at the British Embassy in Paris with Scotland Yard in 2006, they were assured their son was not drunk.

Henri Paul & the carbon monoxide: Forensic reports presented to the inquest later showed that Henri Paul had three times the French limit of alcohol in his blood samples. But, curiously, the same samples also showed a high level of carbon monoxide, the deadly gas found in car exhaust fumes. Could the samples, as some conspiracy theorists suggest, have been swapped with those of a suicide victim? The judge at the inquest said this anomaly was impossible to unravel. Professor Atholl Johnston, a British clinical pharmacologist, said at the inquest in open hearings that no explanation for the carbon monoxide concentrations had been found. ‘It was not a ‘measuring glitch’,’ said Johnston. ‘The most likely possibility is that it isn’t Henri Paul’s blood.’

Is Harry trying to unravel this? Perhaps Prince Harry’s memoir will help to unravel this mystery, as well as all the others surrounding his mother’s death — a death which so many witnesses have suggested was not the ‘tragic accident’ it has been claimed to be. The question many still ask is: could Henri Paul and the paparazzi following the car have been made scapegoats that night to cover up a more sinister plan by the British Establishment to stop Diana’s ‘inappropriate’ romance? My investigations have shown that paparazzi photographers who supposedly hounded Diana to her death were not even in the tunnel at the time of the crash.

[From The Daily Mail]

There’s a lot more, and Reid speaks of one eyewitness who claims that two motorcycles did a complicated maneuver which included flashing a bright light in Henri Paul’s eyes. I remember that from the time – there were widespread reports of a blinding flash just before the crash, reports which have never been explained either way. Anyway, it’s enough to make my blood run cold, I can only imagine how hard it’s been for Harry to try to learn more about what happened to his mother and what the Windsors and the British establishment really did to her. And to see the eerily similar things happen to himself and his wife too.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, WENN, Cover Images.