BANG!
You don’t see the car crash that killed Princess Diana in the new, and final series of The Crown.
But you hear it.
The opening sequence shows a black Mercedes speeding past a Frenchman walking his dog down into the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, before viewers hear a loud deadly smash.
Seconds later, pursuing paparazzi on motorbikes screech to a halt, and some of them shamefully race to take photographs of the smouldering wreckage rather than help those trapped inside.
Watching this brief but intense scene brought back incredibly vivid memories for me.
I was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time, and this was to rapidly become the biggest and most stressful news story of my entire career running newspapers.
It was also a personally very emotional one because in the last 18 months of Diana’s life, we’d developed a surprisingly friendly relationship and I’d seen at first-hand what a mesmerising, magical, mercurial, and sometimes maddening character she was.
Her tragic sudden death at just 36 shocked the world, and the public pathway to that accident can be charted back to a phone call I made to…
Read the full article here
