Outwardly, then, Dodi Fayed was the archetypal frivolous playboy, skimming across the surface of life, buying fame and friendship as he bought his five Ferraris, with the reputed $100,000-a-month allowance he received from his father. Yet Diana was able to plumb beneath the shallows of his personality to discover several attributes which may have reminded her of her first love, Prince Charles.
Apart from a mutual love of polo, both men had other striking similarities, living as they did in the shadow of strong, dominating fathers. Those who knew Dodi well say that underneath the veneer of gentlemanly charm and courtesy, qualities which Diana admired in Prince Charles, was a man with sadness in his soul. His sensitivity was attributed to the calamities he had experienced in his life, namely the deaths of his mother, whom he adored, and of several other close relatives. This combination of suffering and sensitivity was attractive to Diana, who reacted with an intuitive reflex when she saw pain in others.
As important as their personal chemistry was Dodi’s relationship with the boys. He rented a disco for two nights so that Diana and her children could dance in private, while those who watched him with William and Harry at La Renaissance bistro in St-Tropez noticed that they seemed at ease in his company. Later on they all drove to an amusement park where they played on the bumper cars.
By now the formality and distance which had characterized their first couple of days together had changed to a smiling intimacy, the couple chatting amicably and easily together. ‘They were relaxed, full of knowing looks and obviously comfortable together,’ observed a crew member. Diana’s verdict, before flying to Milan to join Elton John and other celebrities at the funeral of Gianni Versace, was simple and direct: ‘It was the best holiday of my life.’
As their friendship gathered strength, Mohamed al-Fayed encouraged his son’s budding relationship, unashamedly making clear his ambitions for his eldest son and the world’s most famous woman. ‘I did give them my blessing,’ he said, as the possibility of the linkage between his family dynasty and the upper echelons of British society became tantalizingly close.
All the while Prince Charles’s shadow loomed in the background. In a curious way his decision to ‘come out’ in public with Camilla by hosting her 50th-birthday party seemed to have given Diana permission to be open about her love life as well. Just as her animosity towards Camilla was draining away, so the friendly equilibrium she had reached with Prince Charles, together with the new direction and success of her public life, all pointed one way – Diana was not only beginning to find inner peace but was prepared for the man she so keenly awaited to enter her life. In short, she was ready for romance.
Like a thunderstorm on a peaceful summer’s day, the sudden eruption of this love affair took everyone by surprise. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to elope,’ she told a friend as she flew off in a Harrods jet for a cruise off the Sardinian coast alone with the new man in her life. For the first time since her separation Diana no longer felt the need to hide, to conduct her love affair under cover, viewing with equanimity the news that trailing paparazzi had taken long-range pictures showing the couple hugging and kissing. She told friends that she felt that in Dodi, so warm, affectionate and endlessly attentive, she had at last found a man who appreciated her for herself, and wanted nothing from her but her own happiness.
Even the tearfully televised claims of Kelly Fisher that Dodi had jilted her for Diana, which should have set alarm bells ringing, did little to dim her affections. There were soon further worrying reports from America as Dodi’s former lovers told of his idiosyncrasies, one even claiming that he had threatened her with a gun. Diana was unruffled. All the while shadowy figures, seemingly in the Fayed camp, were providing help to journalists, giving quotes, attributed to ‘friends’, that emphasized the couple’s growing closeness. Dodi’s father could barely contain his glee.
When she flew to Bosnia, once again courtesy of a Harrods jet, on her landmines campaign, the couple kept in touch via their satellite telephones. ‘She laughed and laughed with him,’ said Sandra Mott, who was hostess to the Princess for her three-day visit. As Dodi told his ex-wife Suzanne Gregard: ‘Diana and I are having a romance, a true romance.’ These sentiments were underscored by a change in his character. His long-standing friends noted that Dodi seemed more settled and serious, determined that he and Diana should make their relationship work. ‘I’ll never ever have another girlfriend,’ he told Fayed’s spokesman Michael Cole, who duly released that nugget of conversation.
What had started as a silly-season story was now taken more seriously, a fact underlined when the couple flew in Dodi’s helicopter to see her psychic, Rita Rogers, a key adviser to Diana and the Duchess of York. Her closest friends found it perplexing that she was revealing such intimate aspects of her life to a man she had known for such a short time. While Dodi flew out to Los Angeles to settle the Kelly Fisher fiasco she secretly travelled to the Greek islands with her friend Rosa Monckton, once again courtesy of a Harrods jet. Even though she had not made any decisions about her future it was clear to her friend that for the first time in years Diana was happy, enjoying herself with a man who obviously and publicly cared for her.
Yet Diana felt distinctly unhappy about the way he lavished presents on her. ‘That’s not what I want, Rosa, it makes me uneasy. I don’t want to be bought, I have everything I want. I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.’ It doubtless provoked painful memories of a childhood in which she wanted for nothing materially but everything emotionally.
Whatever anxiety Dodi’s extravagant behaviour may have caused her, the Princess, herself famously generous with her friends, bought her boyfriend a cigar-cutter from Aspreys, the London jewellers, inscribed with the words: ‘With love from Diana’. As a further sign of her affection she gave him a pair of cufflinks which had belonged to her father. ‘She said that she knew that it would give him joy to know they were in such safe and special hands,’ said a Fayed spokesman the day before her funeral.
As whirlwind romances go, this was a tornado. The couple had spent barely a week alone in each other’s company but already the mass media, their appetites fuelled once again by judicious leaks from unnamed sources, were talking about marriage. It was by no means one-sided, Diana’s instinctive caution and disapproval of conspicuous consumption was overwhelmed by Dodi’s obvious affection, his consideration and his sensitivity. With him she didn’t feel lonely any more. ‘Elsa, I adore him. I have never been so happy,’ the Princess told her friend Lady Elsa Bowker. She even called her answering machine from her mobile phone simply to hear his ‘wonderful voice’. On 21 August the couple flew to the Mediterranean where they boarded Fayed’s yacht, the Jonikal, for their second holiday alone that month. Once again, certain journalists obtained details of their approximate arrival and departure times, photographers capturing Diana and Dodi walking across the beach at St-Tropez.
As they larked about on a jet-ski in the bay, Diana swinging her leg over Dodi’s shoulder, the intimacy and warmth of their body language clearly indicated the closeness of their relationship. More importantly, they managed to evade the media to go window shopping in Monte Carlo. Diana was said to be impressed with a diamond ring in the window of Alberto Repossi’s jewellery store in Place Beaumarchais. The ring, a large diamond surrounded by a cluster of smaller stones and valued at £130,000, was from a collection of engagement rings called ‘Tell Me Yes’. ‘That’s the one I want,’ Diana was reported to have said, though those close to her dispute this. It was unclear if the ring symbolized a more lasting union, a signal that yes, at last she had found true peace and happiness. The purchase, or non-purchase, of the ring was at the centre of numerous claims and counter claims at the subsequent official investigations into her death.
While she may have been content, peace was more elusive. As the couple cruised off Portofino, the dark outriders of journalism, the notorious paparazzi, photographed the couple at long range carousing on the deck of
the 195-foot Jonikal. Their intrusions provoked alarm but that did not prevent pictures of the Princess sunbathing on the yacht’s diving platform being published around the world. ‘Just tell me, is it bliss?’ asked Rosa Monckton when she phoned Diana on her mobile phone on 27 August, just days before her death. Her reply said it all: ‘Yes, bliss. Bye-bye.’
She seemed to have it all. Humanitarian success on the world stage, contentment and love in her private life. As she lazed on the deck of the Jonikal, for once the barometer of her heart was set fair. By some curious alchemy the public sensed this transformation, that this lonely, vulnerable and rudderless vessel had at last found a comforting anchor in life, a safe harbour to run to from the perils of the deep.
For a few short days she enjoyed that state of grace in a stormy existence. Then the heavens cracked open – and claimed her.
13
‘The People’s Princess’
To live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die.
Thomas Campbell 1777–1844
Inscription on the gates of Kensington Palace in the days of mourning before the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales
She was at peace now, her face serene, almost angelic. Plainly and elegantly dressed, she looked beautiful. On her wrists were several bracelets, on her fingers a couple of simple rings.
At the very end her butler, Paul Burrell, stayed by her side so that, in the hours before she was taken for her final journey, she would not be alone. As he prayed and shed silent tears beside her coffin which lay in Kensington Palace, the world wept with him, still disbelieving, still uncomprehending of the stark and shocking fact that Diana, Princess of Wales was dead.
Only days before, the public had enjoyed seeing pictures of her relaxing on her Mediterranean holiday with the new man in her life, Dodi Fayed. She seemed at ease with herself, the public fascinated to see that a woman who had suffered so much seemed to have achieved a measure of personal happiness and contentment – at least for a time. Her enthusiastic focus on her humanitarian causes, notably her campaign against landmines, and the sense that she had resolved many of the difficulties that had assailed her since her departure from the royal family, were sources of quiet pleasure for many of her supporters. Earlier that summer, her decision to sell her royal wardrobe at a charity auction in New York was a very public sign that the Princess was about to move on, that her new life, her real life, was just beginning. Indeed, buoyed by the success of the auction, she had written to several girlfriends asking them to return clothes she had given them. Some received her request the morning after her death.
The public sensed this sea change, an awareness which made the suddenness of her death all the more difficult to bear. It was a mood captured by the writer Adam Nicolson: ‘The clutching dragging sadness felt by the world was the knowledge that this long hard struggle, so bravely and in some way blindly fought, like a drowning person struggling for air, for the surface, for the light, should be cut off and shut down by the grim banality of a car crash. It is a disproportionate end to everything that went before. That is why it hurts.’
There was little consolation in the knowledge that the last few days of her life had been truly idyllic, enjoying her second holiday alone with Dodi Fayed cruising off the coast of Sardinia on his father’s yacht Jonikal. They planned to round off their holiday with a night in Paris before Diana flew back to Britain to see her boys. While the trailing paparazzi had been a nuisance, arguing openly with the yacht’s crew, the couple’s departure for Paris was anticipated. None the less, when they arrived at Le Bourget airport outside Paris on a warm Saturday afternoon, paparazzi were waiting as, too, were drivers and security men from the Ritz hotel, owned by Mohamed al-Fayed.
On the way to the five-star hotel they stopped at what was once the Paris home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, another jewel in Fayed’s crown, so that Dodi could show the Princess around the lovingly restored mansion and its magnificent gardens. During that journey from the airport they were trailed by a number of photographers on motorcycles who buzzed her Mercedes in their desire to get snatched pictures of the couple. The bodyguard, Kes Wingfield, travelling in a backup security vehicle together with Henri Paul, who played a fateful part in their deaths, recalls that the Princess, though irritated by the attentions of photographers, had been more concerned lest one of the trailing cameramen should fall and hurt himself, such was the recklessness of their pursuit.
The behaviour of the paparazzi was not the only matter on her mind that fateful afternoon. Once they had arrived at the Ritz the Princess received a phone call from an anxious Prince William who had been asked to appear in a photocall at Eton, where he was due to start his third year. While the Buckingham Palace request was part of the compact between the press and the Palace that, in return for leaving the young princes in peace, the media would be given occasional official photo opportunities, William was worried that there was a danger that his younger brother, Prince Harry, was being overshadowed. It was a concern shared by Diana.
As she had her hair done at the Ritz she doubtless pondered on this conversation, her last with her eldest son. In the meantime, at around 6.30, Dodi visited the nearby jewellery store of Alberto Repossi, which had altered the ‘Tell Me Yes’ ring Diana had chosen while the couple were shopping in Monte Carlo during their Mediterranean cruise. Later that evening they planned to visit Dodi’s splendid apartment on the Champs-Élysées before having supper at Le Benoît restaurant near the Pompidou Centre.
Was it here that Dodi planned to make a declaration of love, present the ring, which was later found in his apartment, and ask for Diana’s hand in marriage? Certainly their last conversations with confidants that night suggested that their brief affair was about to take a significant and perhaps permanent course. Earlier Diana telephoned Richard Kay, a Daily Mail reporter who had got to know her well since her first solo foreign visit to Nepal in 1993. As she talked he got the impression that she was in love with Dodi and he was in love with her. They were, he surmised, ‘blissfully happy’. That same evening Dodi spoke to the Saudi Arabian millionaire, Hassan Yassin, the brother of Dodi’s stepfather, who was staying at the Ritz at the same time, and told him: ‘It’s serious. We’re going to get married.’ Hassan later recalled: ‘I was very happy for him, for both of them.’
At just after 7pm the couple made the short journey to Dodi’s apartment where they stayed for a couple of hours. Again photographers snapped them coming out of the hotel and entering his apartment, where later her tokens of affection, the cigar-cutter and her father’s cufflinks, were found. The presence of lurking photographers made them decide to cancel their restaurant booking and return instead to the Ritz for dinner. When they arrived at 9.50pm, Diana, dressed in a black blazer and white jeans, and Dodi, in a brown suede jacket, looked ill at ease, a mood aggravated by the stares of fellow diners when they sat down for dinner in the hotel’s two-star Espadon restaurant. Instead they returned to the £6,000-a-night Imperial Suite where Diana ate scrambled eggs with asparagus followed by sole. In the meantime Henri Paul, the hotel’s deputy head of security, who had been off duty for three hours, was called in to organize the couple’s return to Dodi’s apartment where they were due to spend the night. Waiting for her in his apartment was a love poem written by Dodi which he had had inscribed on a silver plaque. He had carefully placed it under her pillow. She never saw it.
Meanwhile the gaggle of photographers waiting outside the hotel for the couple to emerge was growing by the hour and from time to time Henri Paul, who knew several by name, went outside to chat and tease them about when the couple would emerge. His boss, Dodi Fayed, had other ideas. According to bodyguard Kes Wingfield, Dodi had come up with a plan to mount an operation which would leave the photographers empty-handed. It was a simple enough plan: decoy cars were to leave from the front of the Ritz and lure the paparazzi away and so allow Dodi and Diana to escape from the rear and return unhindered to his apartment. At 12.20am the Mercedes S280
, containing Diana, Dodi, Henri Paul as driver and another bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, roared away from the rear service entrance of the hotel. While Henri Paul was alleged to have shouted to the handful of paparazzi, ‘Don’t bother following, you won’t catch us’, photographers on foot did manage to snatch shots of the Princess, hiding her face in her arms, as the car left the hotel precincts.
Details of the next few minutes remain murky, with spokesmen from all corners twisting every scrap of available evidence in their attempts to avoid responsibility for the fatal events of that night. What is in no doubt was that the driver, Henri Paul, was drunk, in fact so drunk that he was three times over the legal limit for drinking and driving. He had also taken a mixture of drugs, one an antidepressant, another used to treat alcoholism.
From the amount of alcohol in his bloodstream he was 600 times more likely to have a fatal car crash than if sober. High on drink, drugs and adrenalin, desperate to ensure that Dodi’s decoy ruse worked successfully, Henri Paul drove like a maniac, roaring through a heavily built-up area at reckless speeds. As Dominic Lawson, former editor of the Sunday Telegraph and a friend of the Princess, has observed: ‘Drunk or sober, no chauffeur would travel at over 100 miles per hour in a tunnel with a 30 miles per hour limit, unless ordered to do so by his boss.’
At the Place de la Concorde, Paul was seen by one trailing photographer to have jumped the Mercedes through a red light and to be hurtling towards the Place de l’Alma underpass on the north bank of the Seine at high speed. At around 12.24am the Mercedes, travelling at between 85 to 95 miles an hour, entered the dimly lit tunnel. Henri Paul lost control, the car colliding head-on with an unprotected concrete pillar dividing the carriageways, skidding around and coming to a halt facing the wrong way.
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