Prince Harry reveals he reenacted his mother’s last moments.
In the prince’s memoir, Spare, which was leaked early in stores in Spain, he revealed a number of bombshell revelations including his attempt to find closure in the same tunnel his mother died in.
“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…” he began, via People.
Harry had attended the 2007 Rugby World Cup semifinal in Paris at the age of 23. After the driver confirmed the location, the royal requested the driver to speed down the tunnel at “sixty-five miles per hour”.
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“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,” he explained.
Princess Diana died of injuries from the car crash in Paris in 1997, as paparazzi followed the car in an attempt to capture the popular royal.
Recounting the experience, he confessed that it was altogether underwhelming in the end.
“Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. 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,” he continued. “But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”
They emerged from the other side of the tunnel within seconds.
“I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel. I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it,” he recalled.
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He claimed to even attempt to go through the tunnel again, but the second time didn’t produce any results – it in fact left him in more pain than before.
“It had been a very bad idea. 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,” he added. “I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it.”
Other shocking confessions in the book include Harry’s admission he lost his virginity at 17 with an older woman, as well as trying cocaine for the first time in the same year.