Diana--A Closely Guarded Secret (32 page)

I am not sure whether the Princess was shocked, or had been expecting me to resign. I honestly believe that she wanted me to quit, but did not have the strength at that time to ask for my resignation. When I told Colin Trimming, however, he was not convinced I was doing the right thing. He thought that the tension between the Princess and me was a passing phase, one of our cold-war periods that would blow over. But I assured him that I had had enough, and asked him to back my decision. Next day I went to see the Commander, handed in my formal resignation and asked for a transfer. He asked me to stay on for a few more weeks, but I insisted that
this was impossible given the deterioration in my relationship with the Princess.

News of my departure hit the press the next day, leaked to the
Daily Mail; The Sun
and the
Daily Express
also got the tip. One headline read, ‘Diana Loses Her Top Cop’, but I was treated fairly by the newspapers. The journalists I had worked alongside for years knew me, and were shrewd enough not to swallow the official line completely. The reports said that I was much more than her policeman, and interpreted my departure as a decisive moment in the Princess’s story. She had lost, they wrote, not only a protection officer, but also a friend – who now, they asked, was left for her to trust?

There was a brief flurry of publicity, but I answered no calls and made no comments. I was told to take some leave while the Commander arranged a new role for me inside the squad, but I asked for the matter to be resolved as quickly as possible. As a result I was offered a position in charge of visiting foreign royalty and VIPs, and immediately accepted it. Almost at once the tension lifted, and I knew that I had done the right thing.

A few days later, once the dust had settled, I received a call from Colin Trimming. He told me that the Princess had asked to see me because she wanted to give me something. I declined. Colin said that it was my choice and that naturally I did not have to go, but he added that my seeing her would make life easier for everyone in the department, including my team of protection officers, who had been left to pick up the pieces after my sudden departure. I told him that I accepted what he said, but added with, I’m ashamed to say, rather childish gracelessness, that I simply did not want one of her personalised
carriage clocks. Ever the diplomat, he left me to ponder my decision. He knew me as a friend as well as a colleague, and realised that this was neither the time nor the place to push the issue. I was still furious, and my anger was in danger of turning to bitterness.

In the end I relented. A couple of days later I went to the Princess’s apartment for the formal handover of the carriage clock, personalised with her monogram, a ‘D’ surmounted by a coronet. Although it would have been bad manners to refuse this audience, I would have preferred to be anywhere else but with her. Our relationship, once so strong, was now at an end, and both of us knew it.

I could not forget how close we had become, and perhaps I should have made a greater effort to heal the rift between us. At that time, however, I felt she was determined on a course that might end with her destroying herself, although she seemed unable to understand that. Whatever I said or did not say during this meeting would make no difference at all. Few words were spoken, and the Princess could hardly look me in the eye, a sure sign that she was feeling embarrassed or guilty, or was hiding something. I knew that she felt isolated, alone and concerned for her future, and that a part of her wanted to ask me to come back.

‘You’re not happy, are you, Ken?’ she asked, discarding the forced civility of the meeting.

‘No, ma’am, I most certainly am not,’ I said. ‘But most of all, ma’am, I am very concerned for your security’

‘Oh, I am okay, Ken,’ she said. She seemed uncertain whether to remain serious or lapse into her usual giggling manner.

‘Yes, ma’am, you on your own are fine. But it is the position others are placing you in that worries me. These people will not protect you, ma’am – they are only interested in protecting themselves. You know it, and I know it.’

She listened, but said nothing. I am sure now that, deep down, she agreed with what I was saying, but she did not want to admit that I might be right. It was clear to her that I had no intention of returning, and, after my outburst, she was not going to ask me. She did not want to discuss her tangled love life, either, and changed the subject with sublime dexterity. I smiled to myself. She had learned many skills in the time that I had known her, and escaping from potentially embarrassing situations was one of them. She then rather formally thanked me for my loyal service and wished me good luck in my career and my future. I thanked her in return, probably a little too brusquely, turned and walked out of her Kensington Palace apartment for the last time. I did not look back.

Our paths crossed again a few days later, however, something that ultimately led to my receiving a furious letter from the Princess over my decision to sue
The Sun
. I had decided to take action against the newspaper after it sensationalised a chance meeting that I had with the Princess in a London street. Under the headline ‘Di’s Secret Meeting With Cop Pal – Chat in Quiet Lane’, the offending article went on to claim that the Princess had arranged a clandestine get-together with me. Describing me as her ‘emotional stalwart’, the reporter wrongly alleged that this had been an arranged meeting, and that she had wanted to meet me after anti-Diana courtiers had forced me out. None of the allegations were true and, concerned that senior officers
might think that I had abused my position by meeting the Princess on duty time, I decided to act independently to quash
The Sun
’s claims.

What had happened was this. I had been driving with a member of the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection squad, Sergeant Ian Huggett. He did not know where a number of the embassies were, and I had taken him on a tour of them. As we turned into Cadogan Place, Knightsbridge, Ian saw Diana’s black Audi coming towards us. It would have been extremely rude if I had not stopped to speak to her, especially after the animosity that had surrounded my departure. As we drew alongside each other we both stopped our cars and wound down our windows. I asked her how she was. Then, since we were blocking the road, I asked Ian to pull the car over and park. I got out and walked back a few yards to the Princess’s car and leant in through the driver’s window to talk to her. Again I asked her how she was, and she smiled and said that she was fine. The strain that had clouded our last meeting had evaporated. Just then, however, I noticed two photographers approaching on foot, and told her that I thought they were following her. ‘I know, Ken, I can’t shake them off,’ she said.

‘It’s best if you drive off, ma’am,’ I replied. She smiled and, with a wave, pulled out and disappeared into the traffic.

It was to be our last meeting. When the article and photograph appeared in
The Sun
on 25 November, without Diana’s knowledge, I contacted the Police Federation, who instructed solicitors to pursue the matter on my behalf. A few months later, while still waiting for the case to come to court, I received a furious letter from the Princess, who was upset that I had
taken legal action against the newspaper without consulting her first. She added that I had disappointed her, and that she now feared a subpoena forcing her to give evidence. It was, of course, an over-reaction on her part, and in the event, the newspaper settled out of court.

In the strange and sometimes incomprehensible world of royalty, there is little point in trying to link experience with reality, for, like the past, that world really is a foreign country – they do things differently there. As I look back on the years I spent alongside the Princess, I realise, too, that there is no point in bitterness at how they ended, because what happened was inevitable. Indeed, what is surprising, in two individuals both with strong characters, is that our ‘partnership’ lasted as long as it did. Diana demanded so much attention that at times I felt almost stifled. Yet I gave it fully and without question because I believed in her. It is a measure of her extraordinary personality that she could inspire that belief in people and, far more often than not, live up to it.

She was a truly inspirational woman who had the ability to change things for the better. She knew how to lift people from the greyness of normality and make them feel truly special. She did the same with me. Inevitably, when you live and work at such close proximity tempers will flare. I may have been wrong to react in the way I did, and perhaps I too behaved petulantly. Even so, I believe that my leaving her had to happen at some time, and that it was probably appropriate that it happened when it did, as her new life was unfolding before her.

On 4 December 1993, the award-winning columnist of
the
Daily Mail
, Lynda Lee-Potter, wrote a rather flattering piece assessing the impact of my departure upon the Princess. Knowing Diana’s almost obsessive daily dependence on that newspaper, she would have undoubtedly have read it.

‘The departure of her personal bodyguard, Detective Inspector Ken Wharfe, was cataclysmic because he was loyal, shrewd, respectful, good fun and above all full of common sense. He more than anybody kept her in touch with reality and the truth.’

IT WAS AN UNUSUALLY OPPRESSIVE NIGHT, as though the day’s heat had never really dissipated. In my weekend cottage in Dorset, I lay in my bed on the verge of sleep, restless in the warmth and airlessness. For some reason Diana was on my mind. I had been following the unedifying events of her extended summer holiday with increasing concern. The newspapers had been packed with stories and pictures of the Princess and the new man in her life, Dodi Fayed, on holiday together off Sardinia’s Emerald Coast aboard yacht,
Jonikal
, owned by Dodi’s father, Mohamed Fayed.

At about 4 am, the night was suddenly broken by the sound of my pager. Still only half asleep, I fumbled around in the dark, to find that it was vibrating. What on earth was going on? Was Buckingham Palace under siege, or something? The pager message demanded that I contact, urgently, Chief
Superintendent Dai Davies of the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department. There was no telephone in my cottage (for the express reason that this was my retreat, a place free from contact), so I hurriedly threw on some old clothes and walked up to the telephone box a few minutes up the road. The sky was already lightening with the early dawn, and the light in the box seemed pale and feeble. I called Dai, and was put through immediately.

‘I am afraid I’ve got some bad news for you,’ he said, without preamble. His voice sounded strained, although that didn’t register on me until later.

Jokingly, I replied, ‘Well, Dai, I didn’t expect it to be good news at this time of the morning.’

He then told me that the Princess of Wales had been killed in a road accident in Paris. Just that. Stunned, I said nothing. Dai continued, ‘I’d like you to return to London as soon as you can in order to help co-ordinate the funeral arrangements.’

Shocked almost beyond speech, I agreed. Then I replaced the receiver and returned home.

There have been times since I left Diana’s side when I have questioned whether I was right to resign. This awful moment was the most poignant, however. Diana, whom I had guarded for so many years, had fought for life through terrible pain, and now lay dead in a Paris hospital. Over and over, I kept thinking, How on earth could this have happened? And even as I thought, her tragic death, like so much of her remarkable life, was unfolding before the world on television.

I sat in silence for a minute as memories of the good times I
had shared with the Princess flashed through my mind. Dawn was breaking, and in that first silence of morning before the birds begin to greet the day I could almost hear her laugh. My thoughts returned to my youth and the assassination of President Kennedy. People used to talk about where they had been when they heard that he had been killed, something that they would never forget. Now, I thought, the same would be true of the death of the Princess. This time, however, there was no assassin. My mind would not switch off. It kept returning to the same questions: Could anything have been done to save her? Who was to blame?

Some versions of Diana’s life written after her death are based on ignorance or bitterness, or both. Yet if there is one account that has compelled me to put pen to paper, it is Trevor Rees-Jones’s
The Bodyguard’s Story
, subtitled
Diana, the
Crash and the Sole Survivor
. For the record, I had complete charge of the Princess’s protection for nearly six years while Rees-Jones – who, though terribly injured, was the sole survivor of the Paris crash – was at her side for a matter of weeks. So, on behalf of all the professional men and women of the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department of the Metropolitan Police Force, let me say that neither Rees-Jones nor any of the other bodyguards who attended Diana in the months preceding her death were members of our department. Rees-Jones was a former soldier who had not received the training necessary to protect a member of the royal family. And I know perfectly well that if any Scotland Yard Protection officer had been in Paris with her, then Diana would never have got into a car controlled by a drunk
driver and she would be alive today. Not only experience but common sense show this to be so.

When Diana elected to refuse the Queen’s offer to keep her round-the-clock Scotland Yard protection in place, she inadvertently set off the chain of events that led to her death. Diana, like most of the royal family, accepted her police protection officers as a fact of life – we were part of the scenery. She had little idea of the years of training and experience required to do the job effectively.

In the years that have followed her death I have studied the official reports of what happened in the days and hours leading up to the accident. With increasing irritation, not to say incredulity, I have listened to the conspiracy theories promoted by Mohamed Fayed and his advisers and supporters. My view, based on decades of police experience, and in particular of high-profile protection duties, is that Diana’s death was a tragic accident that could and should have been avoided. Her death, and those of two other people, were caused, not by a conspiracy to remove her as an embarrassment to the royal family and the British Establishment, but by a tragic mix of high spirits, overconfidence and human error.

There are several irrefutable facts. It is clear from the findings of the various official reports that the driver, Henri Paul, had drunk far more than was either legal or sensible, while Dodi Fayed’s erratic behaviour, as well as the heightened tension caused by the chasing paparazzi, also contributed to the crash. Yet what amazed me in the aftermath of the accident was that no one properly questioned the role of the Princess’s protection team in Paris. If Scotland Yard had been responsible
for the Princess’s safety that night, rather than the Fayed team, and an accident had still occurred, then there would have been an immediate and full-scale inquiry into how and why the protection failed. Officers involved would have been subjected to rigorous questioning about their actions, and required to justify every action they took preceding the crash. Any perceived failure on their part would have had catastrophic consequences for their careers, up to and including legal – and possibly criminal – proceedings against them.

To reach an intelligent assessment of why the Princess of Wales died, it is inevitable that the role of Rees-Jones has to be examined. The former soldier had been engaged by Mohamed Fayed to protect the Princess and his son. Had the bodyguard been trained by the Metropolitan Police, it would have been his duty to say no to his nominal employer, Dodi Fayed, if he believed the latter’s actions, or anyone else’s, compromised the safety of his principals. Furthermore, if, as he suggests, Dodi Fayed, ordered Henri Paul to drive too fast, Rees-Jones should have countermanded those instructions and ordered Paul to slow down.

The events leading up to the crash in the Alma tunnel are worth dissecting forensically because they expose the sequence of errors that cost Diana her life. To understand the seriousness of those errors, they have to be placed in context. On 30 August, after being spotted by two photographers, Roberto Frezza and Salvo La Fata, who were speeding along the coast in a rubber dinghy, Dodi and Diana decided to cut short their Sardinian cruise. After refusing to pose, they were apparently subjected to foul-mouthed abuse from the photographers, which upset
the Princess. Dodi then made a sudden decision to escape the area and ordered his bodyguards to make arrangements to fly to Paris. A few hours later, he, the Princess and his security team boarded a Harrods Gulfstream jet at Olbia airport, in northern Sardinia, and flew to Paris. The party knew for certain before they left at 1.45 pm that the paparazzi would be waiting for them on arrival at Le Bourget airport. Ninety minutes later they were met there by the deputy head of security for the Ritz Hotel, Paris (another Fayed establishment), forty-one-year-old Henri Paul. By this stage, the security team of Rees-Jones and his partner Kes Wingfield had already made their first serious error. Instead of focusing on the physical safety of Dodi and Diana, they appear to have made protecting the couple from the press their top priority. They could not have been more wrong. The paparazzi, after all, were firing flashguns, not bullets.

A romantic night in Paris was apparently all part of Dodi Fayed’s grand plan. According to his father, there was a $300,000 (£196,000) diamond engagement ring awaiting collection at the Paris jeweller, Repossi, in the Place Vendôme, for Dodi was allegedly intending to ask the Princess to marry him. He had also made plans for the two of them to visit the villa in western Paris formerly owned by the Duke of Windsor, which his father had bought some years earlier. (Ironically, the Duke of Windsor, once, briefly, King Edward VIII until his abdication in 1936, had been Prince Charles’s great-uncle.)

As the Gulfstream touched down at Le Bourget Diana could see from the window by her seat that the paparazzi lay in wait. Rees-Jones led the Princess down the steps, followed by the rest of the party. They left the airport by car, and on this occasion
the security planning was right. Someone had arranged for the party to be escorted to the
autoroute
by French police motorcycle outriders. Within minutes, however, the paparazzi, all on motorcycles themselves, were racing behind them.

As the car carrying Diana and Dodi headed for Paris, pursued by the paparazzi, the driver, Philippe Dourneau, kept a cool head. Sensibly, he refused to try to outpace the motorbikes haring after them, with the result that the photographers’ chase was over in minutes. The paparazzi soon had the pictures of the couple they wanted, and peeled off to have them processed and sent off. With their mission complete, there was no need for them to continue in a potentially dangerous pursuit.

A few minutes later, at around four o’clock, the car pulled into the entrance of the Duke of Windsor’s former villa. The couple wandered around the gardens, and sat and talked on a bench for a while, before taking the first of several fateful decisions. Rather than stay in the villa, which would have made good sense from a security point of view, they called on the security team to make arrangements for them to go to the Ritz. Diana, it appears, wanted to go shopping for presents for Harry’s birthday. As the Princess arrived at the hotel a photographer startled her as he leapt out to take her picture, which both alarmed and upset her. Once inside, she and Dodi retired to the opulent Imperial Suite to freshen up, after which Diana went to the hairdresser and Dodi made some telephone calls.

The Princess later telephoned her sons who were staying at Balmoral with their father and grandparents, and then made a further call to
Daily Mail
reporter Richard Kay, in which
she apparently told him how much she was looking forward to spending a few days with William and Harry before they returned to school early in September. She also told him that she was again planning to quit public life, this time for good. Richard later wrote that Diana had sounded happier than he had ever known her, and added that he believed it possible that one day Dodi Fayed and the Princess would marry.

Outside the hotel, the small crowd of paparazzi stood around waiting for the couple’s next move. The bodyguards had apparently gone for something to eat, but returned in due course. To add to the confusion, Dodi now decided that he wanted to return to his apartment on the Champs-Élysées so that he could change for dinner. They left the hotel by a rear entrance, with Dodi and Diana in one car and Rees-Jones and his partner, Wingfield, following in a Range Rover. If tried and tested security procedures had been followed, however, one of them should have been in the car with the Princess and Dodi.

A scuffle with photographers took place outside as Diana left the building. Emotions were running high on both sides – the photographers desperate to secure yet more lucrative pictures, and Diana and Dodi anxious that they should be left in peace – but on Dodi’s instructions they continued on this unnecessary tour of Paris, knowing that the paparazzi were still hungry for pictures. At this point, if I had been with Diana, I would have intervened and seriously questioned the sense of what they were doing. Yet it appears that no one had considered the easiest and most sensible course – staying at the Ritz for the night until the almost manic mood among the paparazzi had subsided.

To be fair, Rees-Jones and Wingfield were hampered in what they could or could not do by the fact that they were effectively paid employees of the people they were guarding. As I have said before, Scotland Yard police protection officers answer to their senior officers, not their principals. It is an important distinction, for it allows them, if the situation in their view demands it, to ignore or overrule their principals’ decisions. That said, however, there was nothing to stop one of them telephoning the local
gendarmerie
on their own initiative to ask for backup assistance, without necessarily even informing Dodi or Diana.

Diana was clearly in a highly charged emotional state that night. According to most accounts, she was behaving irrationally and at times almost hysterically, her mood alternating between excitement and near panic. It was a situation that I had faced with her on many occasions and at such times I had to use every ounce of diplomacy I possessed. It was not easy, but with patience she could be persuaded to calm down. Dodi, by all accounts a kind and gentle man, was both desperate to please his new love, and concerned for her.

According to his father’s version of events, Dodi had other things on his mind that may explain why he too was acting irrationally. What is clear, however, is that he was losing perspective, with the result that, perhaps in a misguided bid to impress the Princess, he was making rash and ill-conceived decisions.

For Rees-Jones and Wingfield the combination of these two factors – the Princess’s mood swings and Dodi’s constantly changing decisions – must have made their job even more
difficult. In such circumstances firm direction and a cool head were needed.

It was then that the bodyguards needed to take control but, lacking both experience and, as employees, authority, they continued to follow Dodi Fayed’s lead. He, for whatever reason, was shuttling the Princess around Paris, ending this tour with a visit to the Benoit bistro on the rue Saint-Martin, where it has been said he hoped to propose. As they approached the Benoit, however, they saw that it had been staked out by a battery of photographers, who had been tipped off about the couple’s movements. Although in my experience a press presence would normally never have deterred her, they gave up on the bistro and returned to the Ritz, where they were again confronted by paparazzi. Once inside the couple settled down for dinner at L’Espadon, the hotel’s Michelin two-star restaurant, but had no sooner started their meal than they abandoned it, fearing that someone inside was about to take pictures of them, a clear indication of the paranoia that had enveloped them both. They returned to their suite, where they continued their dinner alone.