Man who protected Princess for six years says security should have stopped her getting into the Mercedes

The night was oppressively hot, and I lay in my bed at my weekend cottage in Dorset on the verge of sleep, when the silence was broken by the buzz of my pager at 4am. I fumbled around for it in the dark.

A message on the tiny screen demanded that I urgently contact Chief Superintendent Dai Davies of the Royalty And Diplomatic Protection Department.

There was no phone in my cottage, so I threw on some old clothes and walked to the telephone box a few minutes up the road. The sky was already lightening with the early dawn.

‘I’ve got some bad news,’ the Chief Super said without preamble. What he told me next stunned me: the Princess of Wales was dead, killed in a road accident in Paris that night.

‘I’d like you to return to London as soon as you can, to help co-ordinate the funeral arrangements,’ he added. Shocked, almost beyond speech, I said I was on my way, and replaced the receiver.

There have been times, since I left Diana’s side in 1993, when I have questioned whether I was right to resign. This awful moment was the most poignant. The Princess, whom I had guarded for so many years, lay dead in a Paris hospital. 

As I drove towards London, my mind kept returning to the same questions: Could anything have been done to save her? And how could this have happened? For the record, let me make clear that I had complete charge of the Princess’s safety for nearly six years, while her bodyguard in Paris, Trevor Rees-Jones, was at her side for a matter of weeks.

Though terribly injured, he was the sole survivor of the crash that also killed Diana’s lover, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul.

So, on behalf of all the professional men and women of the Met’s protection squad, let me say that neither Rees-Jones nor any of the other bodyguards who attended Diana in the two months preceding her death were from our department.

I am still angry beyond words that this team of ‘bodyguards’ let her come to harm. Our department had the care of her personal safety for some 15 years: Fayed’s crew were in charge of her security for just eight weeks before she died.

Rees-Jones was a former soldier who had not received the training necessary to protect a member of the Royal Family. When he first heard he’d been appointed by the Fayed family to guard Diana in France, he could have informally contacted Scotland Yard for a briefing.

Instead, according to his memoirs, he simply reflected that he was in for ‘a hell of an interesting trip’.

Worryingly, he also bragged he was a ‘good bloke in a fight’. That raises serious questions about his suitability. The ability to acquit oneself well in a brawl is not qualification enough to protect someone like Diana.

Mailonline