A Tory backlash against Princess Diana over her landmines campaign prompted her to make the fatal decision to delay returning to Britain before her death, a respected former aide has revealed.
Diana’s ex-driver and minder Colin Tebbutt said a row over her call for the mines to be banned convinced the princess to stay in Paris with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed longer than she originally planned.
That set in motion a chain of events that resulted in her dying with Dodi and their chauffeur Henri Paul in a horrific crash in a tunnel on August 31, 1997. The revelation by Mr Tebbutt is made in part two of the Daily Mail’s landmark series investigating the princess’s death.
He said she would not have been in the French capital on the night she died if it had not been for criticism from Tory politicians.
Diana, 36, had been expected to arrive back in London on August 28, 1997, but she made an 11th hour decision to extend her trip by three days after the controversy over landmines.
Mr Tebbutt said: ‘She didn’t come back on the Thursday as scheduled because the Tories were having a go at her again over landmines. She was accused of using the campaign to boost her own image, which was nasty and upset her. So she contacted us and said she didn’t want all the hassle that would be waiting for her in the UK. She would return at the weekend instead.
‘If she had come back that Thursday…maybe we’d all be alive still today.’
The row had started the previous January when Diana visited Angola and called for an immediate international ban on landmines.
But Conservative defence minister Earl Howe described her as a ‘loose cannon’ who is ‘ill-informed on the issue of anti-personnel landmines’.
Fellow Tory Peter Viggers accused her of ignoring ‘sophisticated arguments’ and conducting a debate on the level of French actress Brigitte Bardot in defence of cats.
The row erupted again in late August 1997 during her holiday in the Mediterranean with Dodi, 42, after she gave an interview to a French newspaper. Diana was asked about the UK’s policy on landmines, whose abolition was ‘so dear to her heart’.
She reportedly replied: ‘The former one was so hopeless’ – a reference to the Tory Government which lost power in May 1997. She said she believed Tony Blair’s new Labour administration was ‘going to do terrific work’.
Mr Tebbutt said this prompted further Tory criticism which made her delay her return.
Full details of Diana’s last mobile phone conversation before she died are also revealed today. It was with her close friend Richard Kay, of the Daily Mail.
Mr Kay said: ‘She was a little agitated. Her plans had gone awry. She was anxious to get home to see her boys.’
On Saturday, in the first part of our Last Days of Diana series – accompanied by a Mail+ podcast series launched today – a former head of Scotland Yard revealed how he was forced to question Prince Charles as a witness over fantastical allegations of a plot to murder Diana.
Countdown to catastrophe: The real reason Princess Diana was in Paris, and the truth about her feelings for Dodi Fayed… it’s all laid bare in landmark series
Next month, she would have turned 60. Now, for a landmark series and podcast that re-examines Diana’s last days, the Mail has spoken to a host of crucial eyewitnesses.
On Saturday, we revealed the moment Prince Charles was quizzed by a former head of Scotland Yard over fantastical claims of a plot to kill her — while the doctor who battled to save her life shared his story.
Today, we turn back the clock to her final summer… and a countdown to tragedy.
A little before 1.30am, British Summer Time, August 31, 1997. In a cottage in the hamlet of Botany Bay, a bedside telephone begins to ring. Urgently, insistently. You can be sure it will ring until someone answers.
Most of Britain is asleep and Botany Bay, on the rural fringes of North London, is no different. But setting aside the late hour, this is no ordinary telephone call.
Presently, a woman stirs and lifts the receiver. The man at the other end of the line is a police officer who works in royal protection. The woman’s partner who is asleep beside her also used to be a member of the Royal Family’s armed security team.
But since the start of the previous year Colin Tebbutt has been the civilian chauffeur and bodyguard — the ‘driver-minder’ in the parlance of his profession — to the most famous woman in the world.
The policeman, a constable, apologises and asks to speak to Tebbutt. He is calling Botany Bay from the switchboard at Balmoral Castle in Royal Deeside, 500 miles to the north.
Tonight, Her Majesty is in residence, as usual at this time of year, along with the Duke of Edinburgh and other members of the Royal Family including the Prince of Wales and his two children, the Princes William and Harry. The boys’ mother is not at Balmoral.
Since the previous August when her divorce from Charles was finalised, Diana, Princess of Wales, is no longer permitted to style herself Her Royal Highness. Officially, she is no longer a member of the Royal Family.
But Diana has not faded into obscurity. She continues to be a fixture on front pages around the world and particularly so in recent weeks, during which she has enjoyed a series of holidays in France and on the Mediterranean with her surprise new boyfriend Dodi Fayed, playboy son of the multi-millionaire owner of Harrods, Mohamed Al Fayed. Tebbutt, a single-minded former Royal Marine who grew up only five miles from Diana’s family seat at Althorp and chafed – still chafes – at his boss being stripped of the HRH honorific, had waved goodbye to the Princess nine days earlier.
The circumstances of that departure serve to illustrate her exotic but hunted existence. In order to evade being spotted by the ever-attentive paparazzi, Diana’s last minutes before she left the capital – which would prove to be her last minutes alive in London – were spent concealed in a scruffy Volvo, parked in a timber merchant’s yard in Lombard Road, Battersea.
Since then, she has been under the protection of the Al Fayed family’s security team. Tebbutt had expected to see her back in London and safe in his charge that Thursday.
But at the last moment the re-ignition of a political controversy had apparently convinced her to change her plans. Events have now spun out of his or anyone else’s control.
‘Colin, turn on the television and listen to me,’ the policeman at Balmoral is telling the bodyguard as he tries to clear his brain of sleep. ‘Something terrible has happened in Paris.’
Tebbutt is about to be launched — quite literally — into the heart of a maelstrom. But in being woken — or alerted — at this hour, and later directed to get to Paris as fast as he could go, he is not alone.
In a number of other homes across Britain, in Paris, Venice and as far away as the Philippines where the new day has already dawned — other telephones, military and diplomatic satellite communications systems, as well as the high-tech security operations room in the basement of the Al Fayeds’ HQ in Park Lane, Mayfair, are all unexpectedly in frantic use, as we shall see.
The summer of 1997 is one of the warmest on record. It is also witnessing new extremes of interest — particularly by the international paparazzi — in the life and loves of the recently single Princess.
Her serious and carefully guarded two-year relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan has just ended. As fond as he is of Diana, Mr Khan loathes the attention that comes with dating an international superstar.
Dodi Fayed, who has ambitions to be a Hollywood mogul, is more tolerant. And his flamboyant and even more ambitious father is only too anxious to encourage such an intimacy.
July 11: Diana and her sons, William and Harry, fly to the South of France as guests of Al Fayed senior.
They are to stay at his 30-bedroom villa near St Tropez and cruise aboard the Egyptian’s 63-metre superyacht Jonikal. Accompanying her on this trip are at least two police personal protection officers (PPOs).
But they are only present because of the two young Princes. Diana dispensed with her own PPOs in late 1993 after her separation from Charles.
She suspected her bodyguards of spying on her for the Palace.
This suspicion has grown into a heightened ‘paranoia’ fuelled, there is little doubt, by false allegations and faked evidence of an Establishment plot against Diana, presented to the Spencer family by the BBC journalist Martin Bashir, in order to secure his sensational 1995 Panorama interview.
July 14, midday: The Princess approaches and berates a boatload of photographers who have been following her while she is on the Jonikal.
She is reported to have told them: ‘You will get a big surprise with the next thing I do,’ an enigmatic prediction she later denies to friends having made.
She is also photographed in a swimsuit showing what will be described (erroneously) as a ‘baby bump’.
Diana has not yet met Dodi this summer. But within hours he too will arrive on the Cote d’Azur, where he is supposed to be holidaying with the American actress Kelly Fisher, aboard a different superyacht.
At least that is what Ms Fisher expects to happen. She is also under the impression that she and Dodi are engaged and have a marital home ready in Paradise Cove, Malibu.
Yet in high summer in this high-rental part of the world such romantic understandings often melt in the noonday sun.
By the time Diana and the Princes return to London, the charming Dodi has made an impression on her. Enough for Diana to agree to spend a weekend in Paris with him later in the month.
July 20: Diana leaves France the same day as French freelance photographer Jean-Paul ‘James’ Andanson joins the yacht Yahaoho off St Tropez.
This vessel is one of the paparazzi flotilla which every summer cruises up and down the coast in the wake of A-list celebrities at play. Andanson has missed the chance of the biggest prize — Diana — this time. But their paths will cross before too long.
July 31: Diana is back in the South of France — without the Princes or police protection — for another break aboard the Jonikal. Now she is alone with Dodi. Their romance is progressing.
The French holiday month is about to begin. Paris will empty of those citizens who can afford to spend August in the country or by the sea.
Also leaving the capital are a number of rings from the collection of celebrity jeweller Alberto Repossi. Until now, they have been on display at his flagship store on Place Vendome — Paris’s premier luxury retail address. He also has a concession in the Al Fayed-owned Ritz hotel, 200 metres away.
Now the rings are heading for Repossi’s sister store in Monte Carlo, where they will remain for the rest of the month. Or until they are bought by a passing playboy with a girlfriend he wants to impress — or even marry. The baubles are following the money.
August 4: And there is a lot of money to be made on France’s south coast this summer. Today, the paparazzo Mario Brenna secures an iconic first image of Diana kissing Dodi on the deck of the Jonikal.
It will be published in the Sunday Mirror and earn Brenna an estimated $250,000.
Diana could have avoided providing Brenna with the golden shot. Perhaps, in the romantic moment, her guard has simply slipped. Or maybe she wants the world to see her now as an independent woman, embarking on a new life.
Whatever the reason, the appetite for candid shots of this burgeoning romance does not diminish.
August 22: Diana has returned from a cruise around Greece with her friend Rosa Monckton. During the holiday — again trailed by paparazzi — she tells Monckton that Dodi has apparently found a ring he wants to give her.
Diana is not happy about the prospect and says she does not intend to wear it on her engagement finger.
Today, she is to fly back to the South of France with him for another cruise aboard the Jonikal. But Colin Tebbutt must first get her to the rendezvous with the Harrods helicopter at Battersea heliport without being seen by the paparazzi.
‘There are four gates at Kensington Palace and the photographers were at every one of them every day, waiting, watching,’ he recalls.
‘It was cat and mouse all the time. I always had a plan, but sometimes I wouldn’t know where we were going until she got in the car and told me. No GPS then, but I knew London like the back of my hand. If we were to get to Battersea unseen, we would have to do a bit of planning. So I got this antique, battered old Volvo, which you wouldn’t look at twice in the street.
‘When we were ready I sent her regular car out by one gate and a second decoy car out by another to draw off the paparazzi. Then I got the boss to get in the back of the Volvo and covered her with a blanket and hung up two of my suits (to block) the rear windows. We drove out of the entrance by the Israeli embassy and there wasn’t a soul to be seen.’
The plan has worked — so far. ‘We drove to Battersea via the back streets and all was fine until the final run-in when I saw two guys by the heliport who I identified as spotters for the paparazzi,’ he says. ‘Not waiting for us in particular, perhaps, but there nevertheless.’
Tebbutt and Diana are on time. Dodi and his entourage are not. Nor is the helicopter. ‘So I tell her, ‘Ma’am I think we should leave.’
She agreed, and I drove to a nearby wood yard and parked up. We sat there for 20 minutes, with her on the phone the whole time.
‘Then Fayed [and his entourage] came past in two Range Rovers with motorcycle outriders. I left it a minute or two, then followed them into the heliport.’
There is now an exchange of views about time-keeping between the irritated Tebbutt — in flat cap and bomber jacket — and the suited Fayed security team.
‘They said they were running on ‘Dodi time, as usual’,’ Tebbutt recalls. I said that was all very well, but this was Princess Diana they’d kept waiting.’ His final words to his boss before she boards the helicopter are: ‘Take care, Ma’am, stay safe. See you soon.’
She is due to return the following Thursday, August 28.
As expected, the paparazzi flotilla is waiting off St Tropez and tracks the Jonikal to Portofino in Italy. Among the seaborne photographers is James Andanson.
Thursday, August 28
Diana’s life beyond the Royal Family is not wholly devoted to hedonism. She has found a campaign that is close to her heart. But it has also brought her into unexpected conflict with the (former) Conservative administration of John Major.
The saga begins in January with a landmark trip to Angola as a guest of the International Red Cross and patron of The Halo Trust, a charity devoted to landmine clearance in former war zones.
Diana meets young civilian victims and wears protective gear as she walks through a cleared path in one of the south-west African country’s many minefields. The resulting photographs are among the most famous ever taken of her.
