5am and the radio told me Diana was dead…

In an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published memoir, Boy in the Ravine, Leigh looks back on the horror, tragedy, mystery and confusion surrounding the death of Diana

News was my lifeblood and because of stress I’d started taking it subliminally.

I had the radio tuned to the World Service throughout the night taking it all in as I half slept. It worked too, I knew about everything in the morning like a vast old fashioned ticker tape machine playing in my brain, ticker tape behind my eyes.

And that’s how the next big story of my career percolated into my head. The news of Diana’s death in a dirty dank Paris underpass broke around 01.15am.

And of course I missed it. Slept through it.

It was actually about 5.30am, four hours after the event, that the news jolted my brain awake and I opened my eyes. All I knew at that moment was that a member of the Royal Family was dead – the Queen or Philip? It couldn’t be any of the younger ones – but any member of the Royals dying was the news of the decade.

Then I heard that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been trapped in the back of a black Mercedes after the crash … she opened her eyes as she lay in the wreckage and watched her lover Dodi Fayed die. A policeman swore he heard th Princess whisper:”My God”.
I felt sick.

****

It was 6.45 when I reached the office at the heart of Birmingham after a 37 mile drive in torrential rain. Most people were there already, many had arrived before 2am and had been putting out special editions through the night and were already preparing early background pages for the first main edition which had been rescheduled for 11am. The place was buzzing and hung heavy in a fug of cigarette and cigar smoke.

The front page headline was already written DIANA DEAD. It was enough. It’s funny isn’t it how two words with just three syllables between them could shock the whole world.

At about 5.30am Buckingham Palace lifted their own news blackout and issued their confirmation. As the story unfolded we all got it stuck in where we could, rewriting PA and Reuters copy, subbing and editing, putting up headline ideas and sifting the wires for photographs. The presses were parked for a couple of hours but the whole building was buzzing, filling the void left after their rolling and thundering had stopped.

We came across what came to be known as The Last Photo, a heart-rending moment captured by a relentless pap.

One of those interminable newsroom rows about the correctness of publishing certain pictures broke out. The pap had taken it moments after the crash and it showed the Princess being given oxygen crunched in the well between the front and back seats.

I argued vociferously for it to be published but the opposition was massive. In fact that particular photo wasn’t published anywhere until nine years later when it appeared in a French magazine called Chi under the headline “World Exclusive: The Last Photo”. The world was furious – but I maintain until this day that it should have been published immediately… this was the horrifying and graphic truth of what had just happened to somebody of immense political and social importance, the most beautiful woman in the world. That picture was real life and it was our job to present real life to the world no matter how shocking or unpalatable.

We are such stuff as news is made on…

****

By 08.15 the news is going by in a rush – Trevor Rees-Jones. Diana’s bodyguard, had been admitted to the same hospital. 08.45 President Chirac’s wife Bernardette paid respects. 09.20 Sir Michael meets Chirac when he arrives at the hospital after assurances were given to Balmoral ‘ that these visits were ‘conducted with the utmost discretion’.

Diana’s butler Paul Burrell and another member of her household were asked to go to the Ritz to collect her personal belongings – ­particularly a dress which could be used for ;the preparation of her body’. But, when they got to the Ritz, they were told all her belongings had already been packed and returned to the UK. It was actually Ambassador’s wife Sylvia Jay who gave one of her own dresses and a pair of shoes for the body of Diana to be laid to rest in.

Later that morning Prince Charles, it was announced, was preparing to fly out to bring his wife’s body home. The wires were bouncing off the walls and the first edition was about to hit the streets.

We took a break. That’s when Joyce called. I walked to the underground car park while I listened to her, she was devastated like it was one of her own family who’d died. She asked me if I would call round to see her on my way home from work. I said yes.

Then it was back to work. 14.00 one of Diana’s friends, the minister of health Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the Medicins Sans Frontières charity, was photographed visiting the hospital. He was weeping.

The big news rolled again as, at 17.00, Charles arrived at the hospital with Diana’s s sisters Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes. They were given a guard of honour on the steps. The paps did a good job and snatched a lot of film of his arrival but we used only one, the Prince looking devastated in the back of a limousine. The official line was that he was ‘clearly very upset’. However, when he was introduced to hospital staff he spent more than 40 minutes talking them before spending only a matter of minutes with his dead wife.

At 18.15 the Royals left with police outriders for Villacoublay airport. At 18.45 ‘the coffin was taken from the hearse by Royal Air Force bearer party and was marched to the aircraft in the presence of Charles and a small party of other dignitaries’ and by 19.00 They Royal party flew home’.

It nagged away at me why everything was happening so quickly and when you analysed all the millions of words and pictures available to the press, it was painfully clear that all we were being allowed to know, and publish, was this – that the Mercedes driver Paul Henri , who was a drunk, died with Dodi at the scene after the car hit a pillar at 70mph. Bodyguard Rees-Jones suffered ­multiple injuries but survived.

I was about to set off for home finally when it was announced that if they wanted to, key members of staff – I was secretly pleased that I was numbered amongst them again – were offered the chance of moving into a nearby hotel until Diana’s funeral was held five days later at Westminster Abbey.

I drove back to the Village of the Damned explaining that I had to ‘nip home’ to make arrangements for my dog. My boss Mike Hughes was a dog lover and agreed.

****

The days in the newsroom became interminably long, copy and pictures, copy and pictures, change pages, features, picture specials, biogs of the Royals, analysis, it never stopped. Food and drink was being constantly delivered into the office. We were all imprisoned by the biggest story most of them had ever worked on.

More than 2.5billion people across the world watched as Prince Charles, William, Harry and Diana’s brother Earl Spencer walked behind the coffin on the four-mile journey from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey. Diana’s casket was simple.

At the service Lord Spencer delivered an address that praised Diana and then turned this tragic emotional world event into a platform for his belief that it was the media that was resposible for her death.

****

It wasn’t until sixteen years later that the concerns most journalists expressed as Diana’s final drama unfolded began to be officially confirmed. The Sunday People – my old happy hunting ground – was handed an official log detailing the hours ­after Princess Diana died in Paris – but only after Whitehall had massively censored it.

The log, typewritten on three tatty foolscap pages, had 65 deletions including any reference to the names Charles, Diana’s sisters Sarah and Jane and France’s then-president Jacques Chirac. And amazingly civil servants had deleted “his” and “her”, claiming they had no choice ­because they had to protect all individuals’ rights to privacy.

All this proved in fact was that authorities had been desperate to maintain a shroud of secrecy over Diana’s death. A six-month inquest into the tragedy ruled only that the princess had been unlawfully killed due to the gross negligence of chauffeur Henri Paul and pursuing paparazzi.

For decades Dodi’s father Mohammad Al-Fayed claimed his son and Diana were killed by the British military at the behest of the Royal Family because they wanted to ensure the couple would never be married. Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, alleged that Prince Philip had instructed MI6 to carry out the hit.

The sad thing is that once again the Press had been muzzled by news black outs, political pressure on editors, the rewriting of history and once again nobody has ever been able to uncover the real truth.

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