Prince Harry recounts driving through the same Paris tunnel where Princess Diana died

He said that while attending the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinal in Paris, he drove the same tunnel where his mother died

By: Lifestyle Desk

New Delhi | January 6, 2023 04:30 PM IST

4 min read

Prince Harry earlier said he wants to have his father and brother back and that he wants “a family, not an institution” (Source: AP)

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Prince Harry’s tell-all autobiography, Spare, is all set to hit global bookstores on January 10. Ahead of the release of the memoir, several excerpts have gone viral, revealing intimate details about the Duke of Sussex’s relationship with other members of the royal family. In one such exclusive passage obtained by People, Harry revealed that he relived his mother Princess Diana’s final moments before her death.

He said that while attending the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinal in Paris, he drove the same tunnel where his mother passed away. “The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light, I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him,” he wrote. He told the driver that he wanted to “go through” the tunnel “at sixty-five miles per hour – to be precise”. Harry revealed, “The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.”

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After the driver agreed, the car weaved “through the traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night”. Talking about the experience, he added, “Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, 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. As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of water orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.”

While Harry thought that the tunnel would be a “treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous”, it was actually “just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel”.

The decision to get through the tunnel turned out to be “a very bad idea”, Harry wrote further. ” I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away.”

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The Duke said that he got the closure he was “pretending” to seek. “I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it. I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead, it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.”

According to Penguin Random House, Spare takes readers “immediately back to one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror”.

“As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.” It added that the book, for the Duke of Sussex, is “his story at last”.

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Prince Harry Princess Diana