Prince Harry Asked His Driver to Race Through Same Paris Tunnel Where Princess Diana’s Fateful Car Crash Took Place, but Insists There Was ‘No Reason Anyone Should Ever Die Inside It’
Prince Harry dropped several jaw-dropping pieces of information to promote his book Spare in a media blitz that aired on Britain’s ITV, CBS News, and ABC News. Harry revealed a heartbreaking truth bomb regarding how he came to terms with his mother’s death, once asking his Paris driver to take him through the tunnel where Princess Diana met her fate. However, Harry insisted there was “no reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
The Duke of Sussex was just 12 when Princess Diana died in a tragic car accident
Harry was 12 years old, and his brother Prince William, 15, when their mother, Princess Diana, died in a car accident in Paris, France. Diana, Dodi Al-Fayed, Henri Paul, and Trevor Reese Jones entered the Pont de l’Alma tunnel on Aug. 13, 1997, after a paparazzi chase. The Princess of Wales died from her injuries at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital the same evening. Al-Fayed and Paul died at the scene. Reese Jones was the only survivor.
Their car hit the 13th pole of the short underpass. At the bridge’s north end, there is a statue called Flamme de la Liberté, an identical copy of the liberty flame on the Statue of Liberty in New York. The public has adopted this statue as an unofficial memorial to the princess, where people still leave flowers and tributes to memorialize her short but impactful life.
Prince Harry asked his driver to take him through the tunnel where his mother died during his first trip to Paris
Us Weekly excerpted Harry’s wish to follow his mother’s last path in Spare. He instructed his driver to take the same final route as Diana to gain insight into his mother’s heartbreaking death at 36.
“Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal with her boyfriend that August night,” the Duke of Sussex wrote. “Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead and went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”
“Just a straight tunnel. I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway. Inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel,” Harry deduced. He then claimed, “No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
In retrospect, Harry said the idea had been “very bad. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this was uniquely ill-conceived. She’s dead, I thought. My God, she’s really gone for good. I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it.”
Prince Harry asked to be driven at the same speed Diana’s driver raced through the tunnel, 65 mph
Harry told 60 Minutes interviewer Anderson Cooper about his wish to recreate the speed driver Henri Paul propelled Diana, Al-Fayed, and Jones through the tunnel. The 65 mph momentum was more than twice the speed limit allowed, 31 mph.
You told your driver, ‘I want to go to the tunnel where my mom died?'” Cooper asked.
“I wanted to see whether it was possible driving at the speed that Henri Paul was driving that you could lose control of a car and plow into a pillar, killing almost everybody in that car,” Harry explained.
“The same tunnel, the same speed, your mother was going,” Cooper interjected.
“All of it,” Harry said. “Yup. Because William and I had already been told, ‘The event was like a bicycle chain. If you remove one of those chains, the result would not have happened.’ The paparazzi chasing was part of that. But yet, everybody got away with it.”
