In his memoirs, Spare, Prince Harry spares no significant subject of his life. He notably evokes Dodi Al-Fayed, Diana’s last companion, who died with her in 1997.
Their love story has caused a lot of ink to flow. And for good reason, when Princess Diana and billionaire Dodi Al-Fayed first appeared together in the summer of 1997, the public thought she was still with Hasnat Kahn, a doctor she had fallen in love with for two years. earlier. Yet the princess seemed well and truly in love with this new companion, with whom she had been photographed exchanging a “kiss” on a yacht during a stay in Saint Tropez, a month before her death. A stay to which Prince Harry had also been invited, who has happy memories of it. “We were having a wonderful vacation, just the three of us, staying in the villa of I don’t know which old gentleman. (…) Everything had been divine during these few days in Saint-Tropez. The weather was glorious, the food delicious. Mom was smiling“, he confides.
Far from seeing this new relationship with a bad eye, Harry admits to having thought only of the good of the billionaire. “A rather nice guy, I thought for my part”, he says. At the Palace, it was a different story. Almost taboo, the relationship between Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed was almost passed over in silence. “I understood that Mom was with her new friend“, recalls Harry, before adding:”It was the word everyone used. No boyfriend, no lover. Friend.”
Diana: her last days with Dodi Al-Fayed
At the end of the summer, after a trip to Sardinia, Diana wants to return to London to find her two sons, but Dodi Al-Fayed would have convinced her to first spend a few days in Paris. You know the rest of the story: the couple arrives at the Ritz, whose owner is none other than Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, but the presence of numerous paparazzi annoys them and shortly after midnight, Diana and Dodi AL-Fayed are exfiltrated by the security service who puts them in a Mercedes bound for Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Downside: the paparazzi, on a motorcycle, manage to follow the car, aboard which are the couple, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones and driver Henri Paul. Arriving in the Alma tunnel, the vehicle, launched between 118 and 155 km/h – according to estimates – instead of the regulation 50, ends its race against a pillar. Henri Paul and Dodi Al-Fayed are killed instantly. Diana dies a few hours later at the Salpêtrière. Only Trevor Rees-Jones survives the crash.