Prince Harry lets Princess Diana’s killer off the hook for cash
Tiana Lowe
After throwing his brother, his father, his grandfather, and his sister-in-law under the bus in pursuit of his pathological vendetta, Prince Harry has finally doled out the same shameful treatment to his late mother. During his blockbuster interview with ITV’s Tom Bradby, the fifth-in-line to the British throne stoked conspiracy theories about the car crash that killed Princess Diana in an attempt to advance his war on journalism.
Harry mused that there remain a “lot of things that are unexplained” about Diana’s death, asserting that even a driver who had been drinking could only have lost control of the car driving under the Point d’Alma bridge in Paris if he had been “completely blinded at the wheel.” The implication here is obviously that the paparazzi, aiming flash photography at the car carrying the king’s first wife, are responsible for Diana’s death.
As I have previously written, forensic and medical evidence — litigated across multiple governments and investigations — overwhelmingly confirms that the sole blame for the crash lays with Henri Paul, the chauffeur driving Diana, her bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. Paul, who was on the payroll of Fayed’s father Mohamed, had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit in France, with Prozac and Tiapride in his system. And not only had the inebriated Paul chosen an alternate route instead of the previously planned navigation, but Rees-Jones had also failed to ensure that the mother of the future king was wearing a seat belt in a speeding car that had taken an alternate, unvetted route. Furthermore, Paul was driving at twice the legal speed limit as he crashed the car in that compact tunnel. Contrary to Harry’s claims, a nearly blacked-out junkie driving at some 65 miles per hour in a tiny tunnel could very easily lose control of a car.
What about the paparazzi? The French government ultimately dropped charges against the journalists pursuing Diana, and the French investigation came to the conclusion that Paul was solely at fault. Though a British jury ruled that trailing paparazzi were responsible, in tandem with Paul, for her death, the British inquiry concluded that a flash capable of blinding Paul never actually happened. In fact, the final report from Operation Paget concludes the following:
The motion of the car inside the underpass was the result of the actions and reactions initiated by the driver outside the underpass. If there was a bright light inside the underpass near the Mercedes, and particularly near the thirteenth pillar, it did not cause the crash. The physical evidence of tyre marks, vehicle debris patterns, points of collision from the scene and the marks identified on the Mercedes car supported this view. The view of the approach speed of the Mercedes was supported by the accounts of the witnesses who described the constant, relatively high speed of the Mercedes on its journey from place de la Concorde to the Alma underpass. Thus, if [witness] François Levistre did see the collision near the thirteenth pillar of the underpass, this would in any event be the result of actions already underway outside the underpass. Witnesses spoke of seeing bright flashing lights outside the underpass, but none described a blinding effect. Many eyewitnesses who could have been expected to see such powerful light/flashes made no reference to them.
Princess Diana would still be alive today if not for the alcohol abuse and reckless driving of Henri Paul. For Diana’s own son to discount his life-threatening actions should cause Harry some guilt, but then again, the second son seems willing to say anything to sell another book and stick it to the free press.