On Saturday 6th September 1997, at 12 noon precisely,
Britain fell silent.
Together the country was remembering the life of Diana, Princess of Wales,
following one of the most astonishing weeks in modern British history.
The death of Diana was one of the greatest stories of the second half
of the 20th century. It was a story that galvanised the world.
In just a few days,
the nation was brought to the edge of a collective nervous breakdown.
As grief turned into anger, the royal family became the target.
They're the most cold people on this earth.
It's the first time I'd felt,
ooh, I wonder if this is what a civil war feels like.
I wonder if this is how it is before it kicks off.
Now, 20 years on, key players speak about that week for the very first time.
Diana's closest confidants, who were with her after her death.
I noticed that the hair of the Princess was moving
and just for that...
massive minuscule of a second, was she alive?
And members of Tony Blair's inner circle.
I can remember Prince Philip's voice.
You know, he was saying, "You're talking about these boys, you know,
"who've lost their mother." I mean, it was an extraordinary moment.
We reveal the story behind the biggest Royal crisis in half a century.
I actually think that they've been totally unfair,
to someone who, after all, has given her life to our country.
Don't cry. I'm not going to cry.
And how, faced with disaster, the Queen fought back.
The Queen knew if she lost the affection of the public,
then their days really were numbered.
Diana always had a mobile phone in her handbag, so I rang her phone
and it rang and rang and rang, and I thought this very strange,
because she always answers her phone.
I had a call from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta.
A deep voice at the other end said,
"Can you tell me about the crash in Paris?"
And I said, "What crash?"
Just after midnight, on Sunday 31st August 1997,
Princess Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed, were involved in a
catastrophic car accident in Paris.
Early reports confirmed that Dodi and the driver had been killed instantly.
Diana was rushed to hospital, where she was taken into emergency surgery.
News of the accident began to reach Diana's staff
at her home in Kensington Palace.
I was in bed. The phone went and I was going to have
a good night's sleep, because I was picking
Her Royal Highness up that morning.
It was one of my colleagues.
He said, "Just sit on the edge of the bed. Be prepared."
On holiday at her Scottish estate in Balmoral,
Queen Elizabeth was woken by her private secretary.
She came out of the bedroom, I remember somebody telling me,
and she was sort of clutching a hot water bottle.
You know, it's cold there, even in the summer, and the Queen's first
reaction was someone had greased the brakes.
At the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris,
Diana was given cardiac massage for two hours,
as doctors tried desperately to save her life.
But her injuries were too severe.
At 3am British Standard Time, Diana, Princess of Wales,
was pronounced dead.
She was 36 years old.
Tonight's accident is a terrible tragedy.
The death of the Princess of Wales fills us all with deep shock
and with deep grief.
Prince Charles was with his sons William and Harry at Balmoral.
The British Ambassador in Paris informed him
before anyone else of Diana's death.
When Prince Charles learned of her death, he was absolutely
distraught. I mean, he fell apart, completely fell apart.
He knew instantly that this was going to be a terrible thing,
that this was going to be... He will be blamed,
that they would be blamed for the death of Diana.
At the same time,
Diana's sisters broke the news to their mother Frances Shand Kydd.
Diana had been due to return home to London that day.
Everybody was just horror-struck really, just...
the minute before I'd got a car to go and meet her.
That night she'd rung, and she'd gone now.
I experienced a...
a whole...
..extraordinary cocktail of emotions,
and 20 years later, I still feel them.
It wasn't just those close to Diana who were left stunned.
News spread rapidly across Britain.
REPORTER: And a newsflash,
and I'm sorry to have to be the one to tell you this,
but Diana, the Princess of Wales, has died.
There's very little I can say at that moment.
I ran downstairs and I put on the telly and I started watching it, and
my husband came in and my kids came in, and I was, you know,
you were mesmerised by it. It was a totally shocking event.
On what would normally have been a quiet Sunday morning,
the national grid registered a record power surge
as tens of thousands of kettles and televisions were switched on
at the same time.
Typical British reaction is you make a cup of tea to console yourself and
then sit in front of the television.
Just the most awful news
and the shock for all of us,
every single person in this country, will be immense.
Diana's death was our JFK.
It was our moment of real shock at a cataclysmic, unexpected tragedy.
In an attempt to calm people's emotions,
broadcasters played the national anthem every hour.
It's still dark here at Buckingham Palace,
a single light is burning in one of the upstairs windows.
When the royal family will return here we don't know.
When we will get a statement from them we're not able to say.
At the moment, Buckingham Palace remains dark and silent.
But the Palace couldn't stay quiet for long.
The impact of Diana's death would be bigger than anyone could have predicted.
Faced with a tidal wave of national grief,
the Queen was about to encounter the biggest challenge of her lifetime.
Everything kicked off and it became
a very, very strange week to be alive.
At their estate in the Scottish countryside,
the royal family was reeling from the shock of Princess Diana's death.
They released a brief statement saying,
"The Queen and the Prince of Wales are deeply shocked and distressed by this terrible news."
Right from the get go, the Queen's view was the boys are the priority
and the decision the Queen and Charles took was that
they wouldn't wake William and Harry to tell them that night.
They would wait until they woke up in the morning and tell them then.
But that was about all they agreed upon.
Soon it became clear that Charles and the Queen had entirely different
views about how to deal with Diana's death.
Charles took the decision that he was going to go to Paris to bring back Diana's body.
In many ways, that was a very surprising and brave move, because he was a divorced
husband, he was an ex-husband, he had no legitimate right to be there,
if you like, beyond being the father of her sons.
Charles wanted to take the Royal flight to Paris,
but the Queen wouldn't agree to it.
There was a lot of tension between Charles and the Queen,
because the Queen's attitude was this was his ex-wife who just died,
that she was the kind of warring ex-wife actually of their son.
Diana was no longer a Royal Highness.
Following her divorce the previous year, the Queen had stripped her of her HRH title.
But Charles knew that his ex-wife was adored by the public.
From the very beginning,
he understood that if the royal family reacted in the wrong way,
people would blame them for her death.
Charles is said to have said, "Well, what would you have?
"That she came back in the back of a Harrods van?"
Finally Charles won the argument.
There really was a moment when it looked like he was gonna have to fly commercial to Paris and, you know,
get a taxi at the airport, which would have been incredible.
The irony is Charles fought for Diana
more than he'd ever fought for her in her lifetime.
He really did.
The time had come to wake William and Harry,
and tell them the tragic news.
Harry begged to come to Paris with his father,
but Charles decided not to put his son through the ordeal.
Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, was at his home in South Africa.
He was the first family member to make a televised statement.
This is not a time for recriminations but for sadness.
However I would say that I always believed the press would kill her in the end.
It would appear that every proprietor and editor of every publication
that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her,
encouraging greedy and ruthless individuals to risk everything in pursuit
of Diana's image, has blood on his hands today.
OK, here he is. Here he is.
Here he is.
Tony Blair was at his home constituency in County Durham.
He had only been Prime Minister for four months
and this was his first major crisis.
I went on the phone to Tony, he was up in Sedgefield
and he absolutely clocked it straight away.
There was a phrase he used to use sometimes,
"My God this is enormous doings." You know,
this is really big stuff here and we've got to just, you know,
be absolutely wise and sensible and focused.
I feel like...
everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated.
The people everywhere, not just here in Britain, everywhere,
they kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her, they loved her...
..they regarded her as one of the people.
She was the people's princess.
And that's how she will...
stay, how she will remain...
..in our hearts and in our memories forever.
In describing her as the people's princess, he was actually spot on.
People watching that...
hastily delivered eulogy would be going,
"Yes, she was, that's what she was."
Diana had a unique ability to relate to ordinary people,
to cut across dividing lines of race and class.
She did have a radar for whoever was in the room who seemed to be
left out, or lonely, or in need,
and she would zero straight over to that person.
Particularly amongst women,
here was someone that they empathised with enormously,
that had her problems with bulimia, that had her unresolved love life,
that had her difficult childhood,
and that somehow she was coming on through it and really being strong.
Diana's modern, human approach made her extraordinarily popular.
But it was in stark contrast to the formal way that the Queen and Prince
Charles did business, and they found it difficult to compete.
Whatever she did was popular,
that it was almost a sense of jealousy, you know,
"Why am I not like that?"
I witnessed this thousands and thousands of times.
Following her messy divorce,
Diana was seen as a great danger to the royal family.
Charles and the Queen cut her adrift.
Now they had little idea
how to deal with the consequences of her death.
Faced with tragedy, the family decided to do as they had always done.
It was a Sunday morning, so they would go to church.
The Queen Mother and Duke of York in the leading car,
followed by Prince Charles,
Princes William and Harry sitting either side of him.
The Queen dressed in black, with the Duke of Edinburgh, followed.
The first thing we saw of the boys was when they were going to the church
for Sunday service. People were saying, "How could they?"
"These boys have just lost their mother and they're going to church?"
At the royal family's request,
there was no mention of Diana at the day's service.
A lot of people found it extraordinary that at that time,
no mention was made of her passing.
That, I think, did ring a bell all over the country.
Many people believed that the royal family was treating Diana just as
they had done when she was alive - with cold detachment.
But the Queen was convinced that any reference to Diana would be
heartbreaking for William and Harry.
So great was her desire to protect her grandchildren,
that she ordered all TVs and radios in Balmoral to be moved or hidden.
Prince Harry actually asked his father,
"Is it true that Mummy's dead?"
Because none of them... The children couldn't understand why everything was
as normal except that a couple of hours before, they'd been told that their mother had died.
500 miles away, in London,
there were signs that something extraordinary was beginning to happen.
I think the first bunch of flowers were laid against the railings of
Buckingham Palace around about five o'clock in the morning.
And people were surprised, I was surprised.
SOBBING
Within hours, the trickle of mourners had become a steady stream.
In Paris, two of Diana's members of staff arrived
at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital,
where the Princess had died just ten hours earlier.
In life, they had been among her closest confidants.
In death, it now fell to them to look after her.
I was a mess.
Colin guided me through
the airport and onto the plane.
I don't even remember the airplane journey.
Paul was very, very upset. I was upset inside.
There was lots of things to do.
There was no way I was going to break down or anything there.
I was going to try and arrange things, see what was going on.
French police had cleared out the emergency wards
and were insisting that Diana's body be kept under their protection,
in a private room on the first floor of the hospital.
I honestly thought entering that room, looking at her,
she's not really dead, this is just joke, it's just a very silly joke,
so now you can wake up.
I then was getting worried about the room, which was very, very hot.
And we looked up above the Princess's bed and people were actually...
on roofs trying to take photographs, not knowing where the room was.
So quickly we called in some blankets
and I was standing on a chair and we did put blankets up at the windows,
which of course made the room twice as hot.
Diana's body had to be looked after in the heat of the Paris summer,
so Colin Tebbutt placed fans around the room to keep her cool.
I noticed that the hair of the Princess was moving...
which was the fans that I'd put in the room.
And...having been on top of everything,
until that time, I had to turn away
and have just 30 seconds to myself
on a personal emotional moment, because, I don't know,
I thought, good God. You know, you look at someone, if their hair moves... And just for that...
massive minuscule of a second, was she alive?
Which was a silly thing to think.
Having flown to Paris on the royal flight,
Prince Charles rushed to the hospital,
accompanied by Diana's two sisters Jane and Sarah.
He was met by the President of France, Jacques Chirac.
The Prince of Wales arrived completely out of it.
He was devastated.
This was a woman whom he loved in his way, many years ago.
We were standing outside the door,
the Prince came up to me and thanked me for coming.
The Prince asked if there were any members of the clergy there and Paul
went and got the two vicars, and then the Prince...
the two sisters and the vicars went into the room,
and the door was shut.
Prince Charles later said that it was the worst experience of his life.
Prayers were held over Diana's body,
before the Princess was taken from the hospital.
In a break with royal protocol,
Charles agreed that her coffin should be draped with the Royal Standard.
I was quite delighted to see that the Royal Standard was placed over the coffin.
I thought that was very fitting and a very nice thing to happen.
This was a sign that, in death,
Charles wanted to treat his ex-wife as a princess.
16 hours after Diana's death,
the royal flight touched down at RAF Northolt, West London.
The Princess of Wales was home.
In front of the world's media,
Diana's body was taken from the plane.
NEWSCASTER: The saddest duty that has ever been performed at RAF Northolt.
I had told the photographers
that there were to be no motorised cameras,
just single shot, and you really could have heard a pin drop.
Not a word was said amongst us.
It's hard to put into words how a bunch of really hard-nosed
photojournalists, who have been with this lady
and covered some pretty hairy events around the world,
and there we were in total shock, if you like, thinking, there she is.
It's something you don't forget, you can't forget it.
Diana's coffin had to be taken to central London.
On the 15-mile journey,
her escort was confronted by something astonishing.
The hearse left RAF Northolt and I got in my car and followed it down.
And I was absolutely flabbergasted at how cars had stopped on the
westbound carriageway of the M40,
and people got out and stood alongside
the central reservation barrier.
People, people, people. Absolutely, frighteningly amazing.
But this was only a hint of what was to come.
As the public came to terms with Diana's death,
Britain would find itself in the midst of a collective nervous breakdown.
24 hours after Princess Diana's death, Britain was in turmoil.
In central London, 6,000 people an hour were now streaming to the
Royal palaces to pay their respects.
We came out of the back of Downing Street and we walked up the Mall and
it was palpable immediately.
You know, you could smell it, you could see it,
you could hear it.
There were hundreds of people carrying the flowers,
so we were completely gobsmacked.
Diana's body had been taken to lie in state at St James's Palace.
When books of condolence were set up at the palace,
it rapidly became a magnet to the thousands who wanted to pay their respects.
Grief is often followed by anger
and beneath the tears, a simmering resentment was already building.
The public believed that Diana had been killed by the paparazzi,
so they were blaming the press.
SOBBING: You helped to kill her. I helped to kill her?
Not you, but your profession. My profession?
You've never bought a newspaper?
I don't buy them when they're sordid.
Don't you think that what you're doing is wrong?
You've lost a lovely person for nothing. You're horrible!
I hope you're really proud of yourselves.
I went down to see what was happening.
There had been reports of people being
jostled and journalists asking questions and people saying,
"It's all your bloody fault," and, you know,
"How dare you come down here?" And, "What do you think you're doing?"
So there was quite a lot of that around
and I felt the mood was quite ugly.
If there was no money... If there was no money in the photographs,
they wouldn't have been after her in the tunnel.
I was on my own and somebody comes up, digs me in the back,
and she started swearing, and saying, you know, "You killed her,"
and I...
I-I... I couldn't speak.
So I kept walking and she kept walking, screaming, shouting, and then this girl shouted out,
"You're all to blame! You're as bad!"
And you felt, God, let's get out of there as quick as you can.
In life, Diana had had a close relationship with the press.
She loved the camera and the camera loved her.
She was a very clever woman and she used the press extremely well.
She would say, "Come and photograph me here."
She would give information to certain journalists, not give it to others.
She did what, you know, we now associate as fairly classic political spin.
Diana became the most photographed woman in the world,
but following years of extreme press attention,
she grew to hate certain sections of the media.
The real issue she had was with photographers.
She told me that one or two of them called her a whore, erm...
a tart.
They would say things to deliberately provoke her,
because they knew if they got a crying picture or an angry
picture, then they might have more success in selling it.
Now the public believed that this aggressive press attention had led
directly to her death.
Meanwhile, behind a growing wall of flowers,
isolated from the grieving public, the palace was in crisis.
Stunned by the levels of public grief,
the Spencers and the royal family had decided that Diana would have to
have a royal funeral.
But there was no plan in place.
The royal household is ready for most deaths,
but not of young people.
They were ready for Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother to die,
but the royal household wasn't expecting Diana, Princess of Wales, to die.
There was no rule book to go to, there was no precedent,
there was no tradition, there was nothing that fitted
the royal game plan.
Diana's funeral would have to be organised from scratch
in just five days.
To tackle the mammoth task, the palace assembled a team of experts.
That morning, they met for the first time in Buckingham Palace.
That was my first time ever in Buckingham Palace actually.
We went into this enormous room
and there were all the Buckingham Palace officials,
and then there the representatives from each of the palaces as well as
other people, and we were the sort of Downing Street contingent.
There was KP, which was Kensington Palace,
which sat on that side of the table.
Diana's private secretary was there. KP was the Spencer family.
Her lady-in-waiting was there.
There was JP, which was St James's Palace,
which was the headquarters of Prince Charles.
I was there with a colleague from the press office.
Sir Paul Condon, the Head of the Met.
There was a permanent secretary from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Presided over by the Lord chamberlain, Lord Airlie,
so it was all, sort of, incredibly formal,
and right in the middle of this table was this enormous wooden box.
The box was a speakerphone, a direct line to royal advisors in Balmoral.
The room was packed with important people
and each faction had their own view about how the funeral should be run.
But for the time being,
the funeral team were united by one aim -
to help heal a nation in deep shock.
It was clear to everyone that the grieving public would have to be
involved as much as possible.
My colleague suggested to have the charities walk behind
the gun carriage rather than a military procession.
I suggested that we had speakers along the route
and a screen in Hyde Park that people could hear and watch the service.
The people's princess,
although I don't think the phrase was ever used in those meetings,
but there was definitely a sense of that and everybody got that.
There was a real sense that this was going to be a slightly different funeral,
that this was going to be an inclusive affair.
Royal funerals usually took place at Windsor castle.
This time, Prince Charles and Tony Blair decided that it should be at Westminster Abbey,
allowing as many people as possible to pay their respects.
But this posed a problem.
With an abbey to fill,
organisers had to find 2,000 guests in five days
and they had no idea who to invite.
The controller rather surprised me by saying, "Who do we ask?
"I mean, at the moment, I'm not sure we can fill the abbey."
Which, with hindsight, is quite funny.
And I can remember saying, "Well, if you get hold of a guest list
"for the Princess's Christmas drinks in Christmas 1995,
"invite everybody on that guest list
"and you won't have missed out anybody important."
For the moment, the funeral team were united,
but with so many competing voices around the table,
it wouldn't be long before cracks began to appear.
Two days after Diana's death, London was now the epicentre of the biggest
outpouring of public grief in British history.
When she was alive, Diana had had a unique ability to reach out to people.
Now these people - tens of thousands of them -
had come to pay their respects.
People began to pile on trains and come into London
just to be there, just to be standing there,
looking at these flowers and being part of this
enormous national grieving event.
She was the queen of people's hearts. Absolutely irreplaceable, we all loved her.
We didn't realise how much we loved her till we lost her.
You just can't say any more.
I was overwhelmed with grief.
I decided I'm just going to go to central London
and just be part of that crowd.
And what was so comforting was I was one of a million people
and we were all united in this grief.
Diana's death touched a raw nerve across the country.
Church attendances increased dramatically as people sought comfort
and there were record numbers of calls to suicide helplines.
I'd never seen anything like it in my life and I thought these are
the Brits, these are the sort of tight-lipped Brits,
sort of, you know, weeping and wailing like banshees.
I mean, it was quite an astonishing sight.
This unprecedented eruption of grief came as a huge shock.
For some, it was impossible to understand why there was so much public anguish.
As the response kicked in, I remember very quickly feeling disgust
for all the people who were going to Kensington Palace with toys
and with presents and with gifts and weeping.
I wouldn't be so hard now - I was much, much younger then
and I like to think I'd be more compassionate, but at the time, I just remember,
you're projecting all this love onto somebody you didn't know.
There were people who felt, after,
you know, a decade of her being on the front,
middle and all other pages of all newspapers and magazines,
that they did know her,
and that they were intimately connected with her life.
I was looking at your bouquets there.
Would you read what you've said on the card?
What I've said on the card?
"It's not just what you've done for us, that makes us love you so.
"It's all the joy of who you are, the friend we've come to know."
Sad.
I remember a phone-in where a man literally said that
he was so upset, he'd never cried so much.
His wife had died from cancer, but he'd never been this upset and
I think that was the moment I thought, "You just have got to stop this. This is absolutelymad."
Police were now predicting that 2 million people would descend on
central London for Diana's funeral, making it the biggest in British history.
And with just four days to go,
the planning meetings were becoming fraught.
The most tension in the room at those meetings always came from the
Charles Spencer people. When I say tensions,
it was sort of slightly raised voice type of tension or, you know,
stiffening of the body.
Every detail of the funeral had to be agreed upon by both the Spencers and the royal family,
but they couldn't see eye to eye.
There was more bitterness in the Spencer side and confusion,
and a sense that they had...
They didn't really know what to think or feel,
because Diana was a very problematic issue in their own family.
Towards the end of her life,
Diana's relationship with her brother Charles had broken down.
To escape media attention,
Diana had asked to live in a cottage on the family estate at Althorp,
but he had refused.
He felt the press would just decamp from London and move up to Althorp
and he didn't want the press interfering with the smooth running of Althorp,
so they fell out and they weren't speaking at the time of her death.
This made the tragedy of Diana's death even harder for the Spencers to bear.
Earl Spencer wanted to make sure that after death,
Diana would again be part of the family.
It was almost like the tug-of-war, you know, she's ours, she's ours.
Spencer saying, "But you've thrown her out,
"you took away her HRH and now you want her back? She's ours."
So there was a lot of animosity.
Charles Spencer wanted to walk behind Diana's coffin
in the funeral procession, but royal advisors weren't happy.
The royal family did not want the focus
to be solely on Charles Spencer
walking behind the coffin.
They thought that that would... That wouldn't be right.
That somehow it would set the Spencers apart from the royal family.
Although Charles had divorced Diana,
he was adamant that he too should walk behind the coffin
and the funeral team wanted to go one step further.
They believed that William and Harry, aged just 15 and 12,
should join their father in the procession.
Diana was their mother and William is one day going to be King and,
therefore, he needed to be seen to be taking a role in mourning the loss of his mother.
And Harry by default, as the spare, should to be seen as well
and it was a lot to ask of them.
But Prince William was refusing to take part.
He just didn't want to be seen grieving in public.
He felt it was a private event,
he was mourning his beloved Mummy
and he didn't like the media attention.
He probably felt that the media had had a hand in his mother's death.
He didn't want to perform.
The funeral team set up a telephone conference with Balmoral to try to
persuade the reluctant prince.
I can remember -
it sort of sends a tingle up my back actually even thinking about -
is we were talking about this and then from the box,
this huge big wooden box on the table, the voice of Balmoral,
came Prince Philip's voice.
And we hadn't really heard it before I don't think.
And it was anguished.
He was saying, "These are the boys here.
"You're talking about these boys, who've they've lost their mother."
I mean, it was an extraordinary moment and you did think,
you know, that sort of brought it back to me.
My God there's a bit of suffering going on up there.
The Queen and Prince Philip were doing everything they could
to protect the young princes,
but this wouldn't satisfy a nation in mourning.
Soon a growing public anger would focus on the royal family,
plunging them into their biggest crisis since the abdication.
Three days after Princess Diana's death,
the carpet of flowers at Kensington Palace
now stretched more than 50ft
and queues for the books of condolence were 11 hours long.
But as the flower mountains got bigger and the queues grew longer,
the mood in the crowd had shifted.
That's the thing I most recall actually, is the speed in which it,
it turned from those sort of tears
and, this trauma
to anger against the royal family.
Bunkered down in Balmoral,
the royal family had not appeared or said a word in three days.
I think it's disgraceful that they're not here in residence.
She hasn't said anything the Queen, and as for Prince Charles,
well, I think there's not a lot he can say, really, is there?
Prince Charles had been unfaithful to Diana during their marriage,
and following their divorce she had been abandoned by the royal family.
I think they treated her terrible, absolutely shocking.
I don't think, I don't think they're...
They're the most cold people on this earth.
The crowd began to focus their anger on one conspicuous issue.
Above every major building in London,
there was a Union Jack flying at half mast.
But at Buckingham Palace, the flagpole was bare.
I think they must be very, very cold-hearted,
not to have a flag up.
I think it's a disgrace on the whole royal family.
Throughout history, the Union Jack had never been flown over the Palace.
Royal protocol dictated that the only flag flown was the Royal Standard.
And that was only when the Queen was in residence.
It's actually an in and out sign,
it goes up when the Queen is there and comes down when she is away,
but this became a symbol of royal callousness.
42,000 people rang the Sun newspaper,
demanding that the royal family do away with protocol and fly
the Union Jack, at half mast, over the Palace.
But the Queen was sticking resolutely to tradition.
No flag would fly.
On hindsight, yes, we should have been more forceful,
the Lord Chamberlain should have been more forceful,
the Private Secretary should have been more forceful
or somebody should have just done it. I really am upset..
I can't understand the Queen doing it, really. No.
Everything people like about the Queen - which is she is careful,
and she is cautious, and she is not emotional and that she is not
impulsive. She is steadfast, that's what she is.
Everything they always liked about her,
they realised that week they didn't like so much that particular week because they
wanted her to run down to London and give everybody a cuddle.
Faced with a rising tide of public anger,
courtiers in London were now seriously concerned that the Queen was losing
touch with her people.
There were battles going on, there was no doubt about it.
Messages were being relayed to try encourage the Queen to engage more.
They wanted the Queen to come down to London as soon as possible.
But the Queen and her immediate family were still resistant to that.
Unlike the Queen, Tony Blair was an expert judge of public mood.
He intervened to try to persuade her to act.
Tony was talking to the Queen and just saying, "Look, you know,
"things are getting a little bit hot down here."
Blair later claimed that he asked the Queen to show her vulnerable side.
But Her Majesty wasn't budging.
It's not stubbornness it's just she's been around a lot longer than
everybody else that's working for her.
And she's not going to be pushed by an agenda,
by a media agenda that well,
somebody famous has died so it's got to happen now.
The Queen was adamant that her rightful place was at Balmoral,
with her grieving grandchildren.
Since Diana's death, the family had rallied round the young princes.
Every day, Prince Philip would take them walking,
fishing and horse riding - anything to take their minds off the tragedy.
What the Royal family pulled around was the fact that here were two
young boys who had lost their mum, and
I don't think there's a human being alive who doesn't respond to that
as being an important thing to do.
It was actually the first time in her whole long reign that the Queen
was thinking of family before she was thinking of her people.
And for that we should really admire her,
because her whole attention and thoughts were for these children,
she wasn't thinking about how this was going to, quote,
be played on the media.
The following morning, the press took aim at the Queen.
Earlier in the week, the newspapers were being blamed for Diana's death.
Now, they attacked the royal family.
In this case I think it was conflation of public desire
and the press being very quick to get the attention away
from themselves and onto someone else.
It's the first time I'd felt,
"Ooh, I wonder if this is what a civil war feels like,
"I wonder if this is how it is before it kicks off."
In the face of such sustained criticism,
Prince Charles was now deeply concerned.
As he had predicted,
the royal family were now being directly blamed for Diana's death.
He still believed it was his duty to walk in the funeral procession behind
Diana's coffin. But he was increasingly worried for his own safety.
The Prince of Wales was convinced that he was going to be the focus of
the anger, that he was the real target of the anger,
he thought that he might have been attacked, actually physically attacked.
In response, the Metropolitan Police drafted in a team of mounted officers to guard the
funeral procession.
One of the protection officers said there's just one
area where we can't cover the angle that Prince Charles would be walking
at. And they asked me if I could move slightly to my right
in Parliament Square so that I was covering Prince Charles.
Of course at the time I went, "Yeah, that's fine, no problem," but remember thinking
after, "So what you're asking me to do is if somebody wanted to try and
"assassinate Prince Charles they would have to shoot me first!"
So, you know, at the time you just go, "Yeah that's fine."
But you do think a bit afterwards, "What did I just agree to?"
Charles was anxious not only for his own safety,
but for the future of the monarchy.
He was now convinced that the Queen had to act,
so he joined forces with the Prime Minister.
Tony Blair spoke to Prince Charles and implored Charles to talk to his
mother to try and, sort of, break the logjam.
Under extreme pressure from the media, her people,
her Government and her own son, the Queen responded.
It finally became clear to her, out of self-preservation,
for which, you know, she's known, that
this was something bigger, and more important,
than her own personal feelings.
Firstly, she asked her press officer to break with protocol and appear on
television to defend the royal family.
The Queen has asked me to say that the royal family have been hurt by
suggestions that they are indifferent to the country's sorrow at the
tragic death of the Princess of Wales.
Prince William and Prince Harry themselves want to be with their father
and their grandparents at this time, in the quiet haven of Balmoral.
As their grandmother, the Queen is helping the Princes
to come to terms with their loss as they prepare themselves
for the public ordeal of mourning their mother with the
nation on Saturday.
Following the statement, the Palace announced a series of astonishing steps.
For the first time in history, the Union Jack would fly at half mast,
over the Palace.
The royal family would return to London on Friday,
a day earlier than planned, to meet the grieving public.
And most remarkably, the Queen would address the nation, on television.
It would be her first live broadcast in 50 years.
This was a truly unprecedented climb-down by an institution that had
always resisted change.
It was very hard for the Queen to do what she had to do, yielding,
if you like, to public pressure.
She knew better than anyone that if she lost,
or the royal family lost the affection of the public then their
days really were numbered.
To gauge the public reaction, Princes Andrew and Edward were asked to walk
amongst the crowds on the Mall -
the first Royal public appearance in four days.
No-one knew which way it would go, there was real anger.
The moment they were seen, this sort of relief started,
people just wanted to talk to these Princes about their former sister in law.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
That evening, the Queen, Philip, Charles,
William, and Harry, stepped outside the Balmoral gates for the first
time since Sunday, to look at the tributes that had been laid to Diana.
Finally, the world saw them as they were -
a family united in grief.
CAMERA SHUTTERS CLICK
Faced with the biggest crisis in half a century, the Queen,
and the Royal family, had fought back.
But tensions were still running high.
In less than 24 hours,
the Queen would return to London to face the vast crowds.
And she had little idea how they would react.
Good afternoon, we're breaking into your regular ITV schedules to bring
you a special programme on the return of the Royal family to London
for the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales.
Five days after Diana's death, the royal family had finally bowed to intense public
pressure to share openly in the nation's grief.
REPORTER: It was a grim-faced Prince of Wales who drove his two sons out
of the grounds to begin the journey to London.
The Queen, with Princess Margaret, left a short time afterwards.
They were driven by the Duke of Edinburgh.
A family together mourning a family loss.
Princes Charles, William and Harry boarded the royal plane at Aberdeen Airport.
Normally, it is forbidden for two future Kings to fly on the same plane.
But the boys were desperate to be with their father,
and the Queen gave them special permission.
With less than 24 hours to go until Diana's funeral,
organisers were working round the clock to make sure London was prepared.
2 million people were now expected to line the streets for the funeral.
To accommodate the vast crowds,
funeral organisers had quadrupled the length of the procession route.
It would now stretch from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey -
4 and a half miles through central London,
twice the length of Churchill's funeral procession.
The police were horrified by this because they just didn't think
they'd have the manpower to block off all the roads
and ensure public safety, if you like.
In response, the Metropolitan Police mounted the biggest security operation
ever seen in Britain.
35,000 officers were needed on the streets for the funeral,
so all police leave was cancelled, and extra
manpower called in from surrounding forces.
It was one of those military exercises where you keep having to
change the map board, because the amount of territory is
needed to be bigger and bigger and bigger.
And more territory, more police, more security implications,
more whatever is required.
Huge screens were set up in Hyde Park and Regent's Park,
with room for 100,000 people.
It was an incredible organisational feat,
the logistics and the security, I mean there were so many
things to...to work out.
Meanwhile, last minute rehearsals were taking place at Westminster Abbey.
Diana's Royal coffin was lined with lead and weighed 50st.
To get used to the weight,
her pallbearers had to practise with a dummy version.
We got told we are going to try and simulate the weight
with a curb stone.
We thought, "cor blimey," unsure if it was one or two curbstones
but it was heavy! So we managed to get the coffin on our shoulders and start walking round.
This was the first time we actually got a feel for the cathedral floor. It's marble,
and it was like an ice skating rink because you're wearing
metal studs. We went up and down, up and down, up and down,
getting a feel of the actual marble itself.
It did put a bit of a reality check,
if something did happen it's going to happen there.
3 hours after leaving Balmoral, Charles,
William and Harry arrived in central London.
The young Princes hadn't yet had a chance to experience the staggering
response to their mother's death.
So at their request, they made a detour to Kensington Palace,
to look at the hundreds of thousand of tributes that had been left for her.
It was so juxtaposed with this behind Palace gates
approach that we'd seen earlier in the week,
with no visibility of the Royals at all.
And suddenly here they are in plain sight for everyone to see at this
moment of untold grief and upset.
Charles! Thank you so much. Thank you.
Harry, William! I'm so sorry.
William!
Thank you so much, thank you.
Thank you very much.
William!
'It was a very moving occasion. Both boys behaved with fantastic dignity.'
They were by turns interested and sad and
humbled, I think, by what they saw.
And also they kept it together,
because what everyone prayed for above all was that the occasion
didn't overwhelm them and they didn't break down.
And they didn't.
WOMAN: Your mum was a wonderful woman.
I know she was, thank you very much. She was greatly loved. God bless you, darling.
APPLAUSE
They all said, "Thank you very much for coming,"
William said, "Thank you so much for the flowers,
"and I'll lay them, thank you ever so much."
I shook his hand, then I got all tearful and I couldn't say anything.
2 miles across London,
the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were heading for Buckingham Palace.
They had little idea how they would be received by the vast crowds.
So much bitterness had been written in newspapers.
So there was a certain amount of apprehension from the Queen as to how she would be greeted.
REPORTER: There for the first time the Queen,
witnessing for herself the flowers. I think the car is going to stop.
The car has stopped and Her Majesty is going to get out,
she is going to look for herself at
some of the thousands upon thousands of floral tributes.
LIGHT APPLAUSE
The Queen and Prince Philip left their car to a muted response.
The attitude of the crowd was unpleasant and it was something which I have
never, ever seen before in any Royal occasion, ever.
You know, usually when the Queen goes by.
People clap, people cheer, people wave.
They don't just stand there.
I was waving my flowers and,
and she came over and asked me if she wanted me to go and put them
down with all the rest of the flowers.
And I said, "No, they're for you ma'am."
.. It had been drummed into me to call her ma'am, mustn't forget to call her ma'am.
She'd held my hand at this point, she was shaking.
She sort of questioned me, like, "Are you sure?"
And I was like, "I think you deserve them,
"I think you've done the right thing staying with your grandsons."
I think I actually said, "You know if my mum had just died,
"I'd want my grandma with me." I actually think perhaps what Kate
said struck home and people realised that perhaps
they'd been totally unfair to someone who after all has
given her life to our country. Don't cry. I'm not going to cry
but you know, that's what, that's what I believe.
Ma'am, take care of the boys. Deepest sympathy, ma'am.
PHILIP: That's what we've been doing.
Sorry? That's what we've been doing. I know you have.
Courtiers had had little idea how the crowds would react.
Now they - and the Queen - could breathe a sigh of relief.
APPLAUSE
When the Queen was leaving the enclosure to go back into the palace,
she walked towards me and she had a look on her face as if to say,
you know, "Was that OK?" And I just nodded.
3 hours later, every television channel interrupted
their normal broadcasting and cut to Buckingham Palace.
The Queen was about to deliver her first live televised address
in half a century.
Since last Sunday's dreadful news, we have seen,
throughout Britain and around the world,
an overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana's death.
We have all been trying in our different ways to cope.
So what I say to you now, as your Queen and as a grandmother,
I say from my heart.
First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself.
She was an exceptional and gifted human being.
I admired and respected her - for her energy and commitment to others,
and especially for her devotion to her two boys.
I for one believe that there are lessons to be drawn from her life and from the
extraordinary and moving reaction to her death.
I hope that tomorrow we can all, wherever we are,
join in expressing our grief at Diana's loss,
and gratitude for her all-too-short life.
I thought it was amazing because it was delivered faultlessly and with some degree
of, I felt, empathy.
She wasn't a remote figure, she genuinely was saying what she felt.
I'm sure she found it excruciatingly difficult to give that address.
I thought that really showed the Queen as somebody who did listen and
was willing to adapt and change her behaviour.
I thought she said everything she should have said.
I can't think that she left anything out at all.
She sounded very sincere and she looked as though she was very moved.
And I think that will satisfy everyone.
The Queen had bowed to public pressure as never before.
And she had helped heal the rift between crown and country.
Later that evening, Diana was taken home to Kensington Palace,
where she would spend one last night.
REPORTER: Behind a coffin shrouded in the Royal Standard and
adorned by a spray of her favourite white lilies, drove her two sons,
Princes William and Harry, bringing their mother back home.
SHOUTS FROM CROWD
WOMAN: Bye, Diana, darling!
Bye, darling!
Bye, baby!
It was quite an extraordinary occasion actually and there was a lot of people
crying, but it was also quite uplifting too in many ways because
you could, you felt this woman really did reach out.
The boys said a final, private farewell to their mother, before Paul Burrell -
Diana's butler for over a decade - kept a solitary all night vigil over her body.
I'd asked the policeman to bring in flowers from outside,
and I decorated the room and lit all the candles,
and I pulled a chair up, and I sat with her.
It may sound silly now 20 years later but I just wanted to have a
last conversation
and tell her about all the people that had been ringing and all the
people that had left messages and all the people that had expressed their love
for her. I thought that was important.
That night, Diana's mother, Frances Shand Kydd, paid her own
personal tribute to her daughter.
Diana's mother told me that she found the whole experience
of the mourning extremely moving.
It really did touch her and she told me that she spent hours walking
the streets among the people who had come to mourn her daughter.
With the funeral now just 12 hours away, 30,000 people
bedded down on the streets with a further 500 on a specially
adapted train in Paddington Station.
After 6 days of intense public grief,
London was ready for the biggest funeral in British history.
The morning of Princess Diana's funeral - the
culmination of one the most remarkable weeks in modern British history.
The events of the past few days had shaken the monarchy, and the nation, to its core.
Now, the funeral would be a chance for both to grieve together.
The service was to take place at Westminster Abbey.
2,000 guests had been invited,
and many started queuing from the early morning.
I remember rushing out into the garden and picking roses
and wrapping them in cooking foil and taking them with me.
Not the most elegant bouquet you ever saw
but I just wanted some sort of tribute,
and arrived at Westminster Abbey and just put them there.
Across Britain, 33 million people tuned in to watch,
with a further 2 and a half billion around the world -
the biggest global audience in television history.
PRESENTER: That's Whitehall, cenotaph at the end.
People just waiting silently.
In London, more than a million people had now crowded onto the procession route,
with tens of thousands in Hyde Park and Regent's Park.
As a sign of respect, the police had imposed a no-fly zone across London,
giving the city a sense of calm.
Then, with the time drawing close, a deeper hush descended.
The silence. I mean, you really could hear a bee buzzing.
There were no planes overhead, there was no traffic, there was nothing.
At Kensington Palace,
Diana's pallbearers were preparing for the funeral procession.
Princess Diana's coffin come out and we put it onto the gun carriage then.
And to see that, that was, that really put a lump in your throat.
And you're just thinking, "Whoa, I can't believe I'm doing this.
"I can't believe I got chosen for this."
BELL TOLLS
At 9.08 am, the great tenor bell at Westminster Abbey began to toll.
I still remember the bell.
And then, I had an earpiece in and they just said, "Right, time to go."
BELL TOLLS
When we went through the gates, as soon as we got onto the road, there was this,
the best way to describe it really is wailing.
SOBBING FROM CROWD
PRESENTER: You can hear the tears in the crowd, it was inevitable.
SOBBING AND WAILING
This woman screamed, "Diana, we love you!"
and it was like cutting through butter, it was,
the scream was - it was cutting through you something serious.
And to hear that, and the emotion behind it, I certainly
got affected by it.
WOMAN SOBS, BELL TOLLS
The Westminster bell tolled every minute, signalling the
procession's slow progress towards the Abbey.
On the coffin was a wreath from William and Harry,
along with a handwritten card that read simply, "Mummy".
That brought it home to people that this wasn't this massive celebrity,
this wasn't this Princess.
It was Mummy, it was a little boy's mother.
It was deeply, deeply moving and an unforgettable image of the day.
PRESENTER: And the cortege now goes through Apsley Gate.
This is an historic moment because only the Monarch has ever ridden
through Apsley Gate.
You could just hear the hobnail boots hitting the surface of the road,
you could hear the wheels turning, you could hear the horses' hooves.
You couldn't hear any birds.
It's almost as if the birds knew what was happening and kept away.
It was quite eerie but it was very moving.
With the cortege approaching, the Queen and the Royal family came out of Buckingham
Palace to stand at the West Gate.
PRESENTER: This is an extraordinary view we are seeing here.
We've never, as far as I'm aware, seen the royal family standing like
this at the gates of Buckingham Palace.
Anything is possible today.
Myself at the front and a colleague of mine at the back had ear pieces in.
We were told unexpectedly that the Queen walked out of Buckingham Palace
which nobody had planned for, nobody knew she was going to do.
So there was a great deal of chatter in my ear,
people panicking all over the place because the Queen
suddenly decided that she was going to come out and pay her respects.
Then, the world witnessed a small but hugely significant moment.
In another break with Royal tradition, as Diana's coffin passed,
the Queen bowed.
It's respect and the Queen does respect.
Something like that would come naturally and nobody would have to tell her to do that.
It's something that would be inherent in her make-up.
As the cortege snaked through London, Westminster Abbey was filling
with guests. Diana had been the most famous woman in the world,
and celebrities, royalty and heads of state were all on the guest list.
Then, the family of Diana's boyfriend, Dodi, entered the Abbey.
I remember sitting there and the Al-Fayeds came in,
and there was a kind of, respectful gasp, you know,
in recognition that he'd also lost a son in this terrible accident.
As the procession drew close to St James's Palace,
the world witnessed another totally unexpected moment.
Princes Charles, William and Harry emerged from their home to walk behind Diana's coffin.
They were joined by the Duke of Edinburgh and Earl Spencer.
I don't think I knew until that moment
that both the boys were going to do it.
Again it just puts a tingle my spine,
And I just, you know, I just thought, "My God," you know, "how brave."
For days, Prince William had refused outright to walk in the
procession. But on the morning of the funeral, he agreed.
It took Prince Philip to persuade William to do it in the end
and he put a grandfatherly arm around him and said,
"Look, if I come too, will you do it?"
PRESENTER: Whose heart can not go out to those boys today?
Who can avoid a choke in the throat at the sight of them?
BELL TOLLS
Prince Charles felt it was his duty to walk in the procession,
but he knew that he remained deeply unpopular in the wake of Diana's
death. Both he and the police were concerned about the public reaction
when he appeared. Alert to any potential threat,
the Metropolitan Police had placed plainclothes officers amongst the
crowds, with marksmen watching from nearby rooftops.
When we got to St James's Palace,
I remember somebody shouting out, "You didn't deserve her,"
and I remember being slightly worried then, whoever said that, are they walking towards him?
I can't turn around,
I have to look straight ahead and keep the horses moving in a straight
line. So there was a sense then at the time,
"Is something happening behind me?"
But I just kept going, really, hoping that it was a one-off.
And as we moved away, luckily there was no other similar comments.
PRESENTER: An almost intolerable moment as the two boys,
the two Princes, as take their place behind their mother's coffin.
Pretty daunting to be walking behind a gun carriage, their mother's on the gun carriage.
And they are being watched by tens of thousands of people along the route,
and millions on television.
And it was quite a tough experience for them
and they carried it off with such aplomb, it's unbelievable.
I was incredibility impressed.
I mean I lost my father when I was 12 so I was their age,
so I remember what it felt like
and to be able to have done that in
such, in what I thought was such a dignified fashion, I thought was sort of quite...quite amazing.
The Princes were joined behind the coffin by 533 workers from
Diana's charities.
As the Queen made her way to the Abbey,
for the first time in history, the Union Jack was raised above Buckingham Palace,
before being lowered to half mast.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
The will of the people had trumped centuries of tradition.
Then, Diana's family entered Westminster Abbey
and the congregation stood.
They were followed ten minutes later by the Queen and the Queen Mother.
BELL TOLLS
1 hour and 47 minutes after leaving Kensington Palace,
the cortege arrived precisely on time.
Now, Diana's pallbearers had to undertake the most important job of
their lives. We'd just done four and a half miles,
we're trying to wake our arms up, we knew what was gonna happen now,
we had to pick up the coffin.
Emotionally, I think we blocked a lot of that out.
I think we're here now, let's get it done now and to our best.
PRESENTER: The coffin, lined with lead, so heavy,
and the eyes of the world are on these men.
BELL TOLLS
We waited. And there was complete silence.
And then we saw the coffin beginning to come in,
and I think that was when it became real.
And I just think of it now, and
the roses on the back that had come from the children.
It was unbearable, it was unbearable.
CHOIR SINGS
Slowly, deliberately, Diana's pallbearers walked
her coffin down the long nave of Westminster Abbey.
You could feel with the studs that you were slipping all the time.
Every step you take, you could go.
And you had to concentrate on what you were doing because it only takes
a second, one lapse and something serious could have happened.
Out of respect,
the television cameras didn't film the royal family, or the Spencers.
ALL SING
To make the funeral as inclusive as possible,
the hymns had been printed in the day's newspapers.
People were actually able to sing along in the hymns.
And we were able to really feel that everyone was involved even though
millions were not present in the Abbey.
Then, Earl Spencer stood to deliver his sister's
eulogy. The congregation, and the millions watching outside,
had no idea what was to come.
Everything was fine until Earl Spencer stepped into the pulpit -
and I thought that was going to be OK,
I thought it was going to be just the same as we've heard before.
EARL SPENCER: Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty,
of style, of beauty.
a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden.
and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title
to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.
It sounded to me like a speech where nobody had advised him,
nobody had drafted it for him, it was not, you know,
the formal speech on a formal occasion, it came straight from his heart.
She talked endlessly of getting away from England,
mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the
newspapers. She would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting
her beloved boys, William and Harry, from a similar fate
and I do this here, Diana, on your behalf.
And beyond that, on behalf of your mother and sisters,
I pledge that we, your blood family,
will do all we can to continue the imaginative and loving way in which
you were steering these two exceptional young men,
so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but
can sing openly as you planned.
He basically he looked over, you know, to a pew full of his in-laws
and had a go at them from the box in the middle of a funeral of his
sister. Well, you know, questionable...
He was saying that they hadn't,
hadn't looked after her and they were inappropriate
to bring up her children. It was very strong stuff.
I think the emotional impact of the speech was so great that we just sat
and took it in.
And then the sound came.
DISTANT APPLAUSE
I didn't realise it was people clapping outside, it sounded like
pebbles rattling on the roof of the abbey,
and it was coming closer and closer.
It was quite put up the hairs on the back of your neck.
APPLAUSE
That wonderful sound like the sea, rolling in
through the doors of the abbey and then rolling up the
aisles of the abbey. And we all joined, we all joined.
I don't know who didn't but we did.
But many people felt the eulogy was totally inappropriate.
I thought, "No, don't! Don't applaud him."
Look at the Queen! The Queen's horrified by what he's just said.
Nobody addresses the Queen of England in that way. Nobody.
You would have been beheaded for that a couple of centuries before.
I was very angry that Diana's brother could stand up and say what he did say.
Because in attacking the Royal family,
he was attacking his nephews, William and Harry.
And he talked about blood relatives.
Well, he's had nothing to do with their upbringing
and they very rarely see him,
so what was actually said on the day was sheer hypocrisy.
Was it strategically sensible? Possibly not.
Did it make enemies for him? Probably.
But for the general public, it lanced a boil.
It made us feel, "Thank heavens,
"somebody is saying she should've been protected."
CHOIR SINGS
Diana's funeral had been a bittersweet farewell
to the People's Princess.
I was quite sure that she would have approved
of the turnout and the solemnity...
and the beauty of this great ceremony.
In just six days,
the Royal Establishment had pulled off an astonishing feat of planning.
It was completely brilliant because it was done so efficiently,
so effectively and so, sort of...
in such a dignified fashion that it reminded people why they liked the
royal family, because it's part of an establishment that does this
at moments of crisis.
CHOIR SINGS
I felt really moved at the end when there's this huge chord,
it suddenly was over,
we could see the brilliant blue sky out of the west door
and it was then that we had a minute's silence
in memory of Princess Diana.
The drama was so telling.
And it was almost unbearable.
Diana's funeral was over,
but she had one final journey to make.
CHURCH BELLS RING
Diana's funeral had been a fitting end to an extraordinary week.
By delivering such a spectacle,
the royal family had helped repair their damaged relationship
with the public.
But Diana had one final journey to make.
The Princess was to be buried at her family's estate in Northamptonshire,
77 miles from Westminster Abbey.
Charles, William and Harry left to take the royal train,
along with the Spencer family.
Diana's coffin would be driven all the way there,
giving the public a chance to say a final farewell.
For the entire journey,
the hearse would be escorted by eight police motorcyclists.
All the riders had known Diana.
We would quite often go to Kensington Palace
and she'd be there in her tracksuit and her slippers or whatever,
with the two boys looking at the bikes
and we'd just chat.
You could talk to her as if you were talking to a member of your family.
She was just lovely - she was lovely.
APPLAUSE
PRESENTER: And more applause, quite extraordinary,
I've never witnessed that in this country at a funeral.
It's as if the people want to say something,
and this is the best way to express their feelings.
As the cortege left central London,
it became clear the police had underestimated
how many people would want to pay their respects.
PRESENTER: Look at the crowd, they're pressing around the cortege.
The police aren't there to hold them back.
It really doesn't matter.
Suddenly we found roads completely blocked with...
with people who generally wanted to wish her well
and throw flowers on the car, etc.
But I was getting a little bit concerned
about the amount of people.
PRESENTER: Almost hemmed in by the crowds here.
It's almost as if they don't want her to go, isn't it?
They want to press forward and see her, but slow down, slow down. Yes.
We were driving through a sea of flowers being thrown in the air,
it was like a mist in front of you.
When you're concentrating on the guy in front
and you get hit on the head with a bunch of flowers,
from a motorcycling point of view, it was a complete pain.
I think it's fantastic that people wanted to do that,
and if it had just been one of two bunches of flowers
it wouldn't have been so bad
but it was a continual barrage of flowers
that were wrapped in cellophane
and when they hit you on the head, you know it.
Of course a lot of those got stuck on the windscreen
and started building up and up and up,
reducing the vision from the driver's seat from the hearse,
so he couldn't see where he was going.
So the message came back to me saying that we needed to stop
to clear the windscreen.
The hearse was forced to make an unscheduled stop,
on the northbound carriageway of the M1.
The guy in the front of the hearse got out,
took a great big armful of flowers.
I was slightly concerned that he would just walk
to the side of the road and drop them,
but he didn't, he took them and put them down
and got back in the hearse and off we went.
As the hearse made its way to Northamptonshire,
thousands of people lined the motorway.
Just cars abandoned all over the place
and people standing by the central reservation to see us go past.
Totally surreal.
Never seen anything like it.
PRESENTER: Not something which is usually allowed by the police.
But still people on the motorway, paying their final respects.
The hearse finally arrived at the Spencer Estate at Althorp,
an hour later than expected.
When the coffin arrived at the house,
the Royal Standard was replaced with the Spencer flag,
before Earl Spencer announced "Diana is home."
I realised at that point that they were truly
claiming back their sister.
"She's a Spencer now", he said.
Diana was buried on a small island in the middle of a lake.
Her family chose the spot to allow her the seclusion and privacy
that she was denied during her life.
This is the private funeral bit.
This is what the family wanted,
we didn't want hordes of press or other people appearing on the scene.
Colin Tebbutt and Paul Burrell were the only non-family members
invited to the intimate, private ceremony.
We followed the coffin down to the lake,
and across the pontoon which they'd built, onto the island.
The sunlight was coming through the trees
and the coffin was being lowered into the hole.
And a few prayers were said,
and I just stood there rooted to the spot.
People threw earth onto the coffin...
..and then we left.
It was as simple and as lovely as that.
Thousands of the flowers that had been left at the gates
were laid out for her.
To this day, Diana has no headstone.
If there if is one lesson from that week it is that
Diana's memory means an awful lot to a great many people,
just as much today as it did then.
20 years later, Diana's legacy lives on,
especially through her two sons.
You want a kiss, do you?
Oh, no! See?
'They're their mother's sons.'
People see her channelled through those two princes.
The events of that extraordinary week
also left their mark on the Queen.
She proved that, when pushed,
she was prepared to bow to the public
and act against centuries of tradition.
Out of tragedy,
the royal family began to forge a new relationship with the public,
a relationship which still survives today.
It was an enormous scare for the royal family who...
basically, I mean, in the subsequent decades,
has sharpened up its act no end.
The Queen and Charles have both learnt from Diana,
to interact more with a public that so nearly turned on them.
They understood afterwards that they did have to be more inclusive,
that they did have to open up,
that they did have to show they were part of the modern world.
But for Diana that would have never happened.
Now, the Queen is more popular than ever, as her stoicism,
her restraint and her lifetime of service
have all come to be appreciated again.
The royal family endures and, if anything,
it's stronger than ever.
And today, when the Queen is not in Buckingham Palace,
the Union Jack always flies overhead,
a clear reminder of seven days that shook the world.
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