“My dear son, mum has had a car accident,” Charles told him gently. “There have been complications. Mum has been seriously injured and has been taken to hospital, my dear son.”
Harry has since spoken about how surreal that moment felt, a memory etched into his mind forever.
Diana had been travelling with her boyfriend, Dodi al-Fayed, when their car crashed into a pillar in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. Both Diana and Al-Fayed were killed, along with driver Henri Paul. The princess’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the sole survivor.
For the Queen, Brown explained, protecting her grandsons was her foremost concern: “For her, the only important thing was to protect Harry and William from the loss of their mother.”
It was a decision that spoke volumes about the monarch’s instinct as both sovereign and grandmother—shielding two young boys from the weight of a tragedy the rest of the world was already mourning.
