In his 2023 memoir, Spare, Prince Harry opened up about a deeply personal and haunting experience—recreating the final moments of his mother, Princess Diana, an act he later came to regret.
Princess Diana died on August 31, 1997, in the early hours of the morning after a devastating car crash in Paris’ Pont de l’Alma tunnel. She was accompanied by her partner Dodi Fayed, driver Henri Paul, and bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones. Of the group, only Rees-Jones survived, though he suffered serious injuries and the burden of that tragic night remains.
The death of Diana, known lovingly as “the people’s princess,” was met with worldwide sorrow. Her two sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, were just 15 and 12 years old at the time.
While both princes have publicly shared their grief over the years, Harry revealed in Spare that he once took a drastic step in search of emotional closure. In 2007, while in Paris for the Rugby World Cup semi-final, 23-year-old Harry made a personal decision.
As he recounts: “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…”
“I watched his eyes in the rearview, growing large. The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him. Yes, yes. He knew it.”
But simply visiting the site wasn’t enough. Harry asked the driver to go 65 miles per hour—the speed at which Diana’s car was believed to have been traveling at the time of the crash.
“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.”
Harry wasn’t alone during this drive. He was joined by two others, including someone he calls ‘Billy the Rock.’ Harry notes that all involved agreed to keep the incident private. Billy allegedly warned, “if the driver ever revealed to another human that we’d asked him to do this, we’d find him and there would be hell to pay.”
He continues in the memoir: “Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night.
