May 10, 2026 • 13 mins
Diana dies in a Paris tunnel, fleeing paparazzi with her new boyfriend Dodi Fayed. Charles flies to Paris to bring her body home. He must tell William and Harry their mother is dead. The nation's grief is overwhelming, the anger at the royal family palpable. Charles walks behind Diana's coffin with his traumatized sons. His guilt about the failed marriage will haunt him forever. The ghost of Diana will shape everything that follows.
While no one truly knows what happens behind closed palace doors, this series uses news sources, on-the-record quotes, and some artistic license to craft this entertainment series. Some moments have been dramatized for storytelling effect. AI narration was used in creation of this series.
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While no one truly knows what happens behind closed palace doors, this series uses news sources, on-the-record quotes, and some artistic license to craft this entertainment series. Some moments have been dramatized for storytelling effect. AI narration was used in creation of this series.
Unlock an ad-free podcast experience with Caloroga Shark Media! Get all our shows on any player you love, hassle free! For Apple users, hit the banner on your Apple podcasts app. For Spotify or other players, visit caloroga.com/plus. No plug-ins needed!
Subscribe now for exclusive shows like 'Palace Intrigue,' and get bonus content from Deep Crown (our exclusive Palace Insider!) Or get 'Daily Comedy News,' and '5 Good News Stories’ with no commercials! Plans start at $4.99 per month, or save 20% with a yearly plan at $49.99. Join today and help support the show!
We now have Merch! FREE SHIPPING! Check out all the products like T-shirts, mugs, bags, jackets and more with logos and slogans from your favorite shows! Did we mention there’s free shipping? Get 10% off with code NewMerch10 Go to Caloroga.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Calaroga Shark Media. The summer of nineteen ninety seven was,
by most visible measures, a good one for Diana. She
was thirty six years old, and, according to those who
knew her, lighter than she had been in years. The
(00:23):
humanitarian work was going well. Her land mine campaign had
taken her to Angola and Bosnia, where photographs of her
walking through minefields in body armor had circled the globe
and applied real pressure on governments to act. She was
planning further campaigns. She had purpose and she had freedom,
and for perhaps the first time in her adult life,
(00:45):
those two things existed simultaneously. She had also that summer
begun spending time with Dodi Fayed, the son of the
Egyptian businessman Mohammed al Fayed, who owned the Ritz hotel
in Paris and the Harrod's department store in London. Dodie
was charming and attentive, and the two had known each
(01:08):
other socially for some time before their relationship deepened. In
the summer of nineteen ninety seven. Photographs of them together
on a yacht in the Mediterranean were published around the world.
Diana appeared relaxed and genuinely happy. The press speculated endlessly
about the seriousness of the relationship. Diana did not comment publicly.
(01:32):
What the photographs also showed was the relentless nature of
the paparazzi pursuit that had defined her life since she
was nineteen years old. Photographers in speedboats, cameras with long
lenses trained on private moments aboard a private vessel, the
machinery of celebrity surveillance that had followed her across two
decades showed no sign of slowing. If anything, the new
(01:57):
relationship had intensified it. Late August, Diana and Dodi were
in Paris. They had been staying at the Ritz, owned
by Dody's father, which offered a degree of privacy that
hotels without that connection could not provide. On the evening
of August thirtieth, they had dinner at the hotel, outside,
photographers gathered. Their movements were being closely followed by photographers
(02:20):
as the evening wore on. Shortly after midnight on August
thirty first, Diana and Dody left the Ritz through a
rear entrance in an attempt to avoid the waiting photographers.
They were accompanied by a bodyguard and driven by Henry Paul.
The hotel's deputy head of security, who had agreed to
drive them that evening. A second car was used as
(02:43):
a decoy at the front of the hotel. The Mercedes
carrying Diana and Dodi entered the Pondillalma tunnel at high speed.
A subsequent French investigation found that Henry Paul had been
drinking and that his blood alcohol level was significantly above
the legal limit. Investigations later concluded that a combination of factors,
(03:05):
including speed and driver impairment, contributed to the crash while
photographers were following the vehicle that night. Official investigations did
not find them solely responsible for what happened inside that tunnel.
Inside the tunnel, the car struck a pillar and then
a wall. The impact was catastrophic. Dodi fayed and Henry
(03:28):
Paul died at the scene. Trevor Rhyse Jones, the bodyguard
in the front seat, survived with serious injuries. He was
the only occupant wearing a seat belt. Diana was alive
when emergency services reached her, but critically injured. She was
treated at the scene for an extended period before being
transported to the Pitty Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Surgeons worked
(03:53):
to save her life for several hours. At four minutes
past four in the morning Paris time, Diana, Princess of
Wales was pronounced dead. She was thirty six years old.
This is Crown and Controversy. King Charles Episode four Diana's death.
(04:29):
At Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, where the royal
family was spending their summer, Charles was woken in the
early hours of the morning with news from Paris. The reports,
at first were incomplete. Diana had been in an accident.
The situation was serious, and then as the hours passed
and the calls continued, the situation became something far worse
(04:51):
than serious. By most accounts, Charles was deeply shaken. Whatever
the complexity of their relationship, whatever the pain of the
years between them, Diana had been the mother of his children,
and she had been young, and she had been alive
only hours before, and now she was not. But before
he could process any of that, he had to do
(05:12):
something that no parents should ever have to do. He
had to wake his sons and tell them that their
mother was dead. William was fifteen, Harry was twelve. What
was said in those rooms at bal morrel in the
early hours of August thirty first has never been fully reported.
It is one of the genuine private moments of this
(05:34):
very public story, shielded even from the accounts and biographies
and documentaries that have dissected almost everything else. What is
known is that both boys were devastated. What is known
is that Harry, by his own later account, did not
fully cry in those first hours, a response he has
(05:55):
since described as a kind of shock that would take
years to work through. What is known is that the
world they woke up to that morning was permanently and
irreversibly different from the one they had gone to sleep in.
Charles flew to Paris that day to accompany Diana's body home.
He traveled with Diana's two sisters, Lady Sarah mccukwdale and
(06:18):
Lady Jane Fellows. The decision for Charles to go personally
to be the one to bring her back was both
a human response and a considered one. It was widely
seen as an acknowledgment of everything that had passed between them,
and of what despite everything, he still owed her memory.
The body was flown back to Britain and taken to
(06:39):
the Chapel Royal at Saint James's Palace, and then in
the days that followed, something unexpected happened, something that caught
the palace entirely off guard and would come to define
the immediate aftermath of Diana's death as much as the
death itself. The British public began to grieve in a
way that the country had not seen before and has
(07:01):
not quite seen since. Flowers appeared outside Kensington Palace within
hours of the news breaking. By the end of the
first day, there were thousands of bouquets. By the end
of the week, the sea of flowers stretched for hundreds
of yards, a vast improvised memorial that grew larger with
(07:25):
every passing hour. People came from across the country and
from abroad. They stood in silence, or they wept openly,
or they left notes, handwritten messages addressed to a woman
they had never met but felt they knew. The scent
of the flowers hung over the whole area. The royal
family remained at Balmoral. This was standard practice. The family
(07:48):
retreated in times of private grief, and grief was considered
within the institution to be a private matter. The flag
above Buckingham Palace flew at its standard position, because Royal
protocol at the time did not call for it to
be lowered for anyone other than the sovereign. The public
(08:08):
did not understand this, or rather, the public understood it
and rejected it. The absence of the royal family from London,
the absence of a flag at half mast, the apparent
silence from the Institution while the nation, convulsed with grief,
began to harden into something that looked from the outside
very much like anger. Newspapers ran front pages demanding to
(08:33):
know where the Queen was, Where was the flag, Where
was the acknowledgment of what had been lost? Letters poured
in phone lines were overwhelmed. The mood outside Buckingham Palace,
where more flowers continued to arrive, shifted from mourning to
something sharper. The Palace, by most accounts, was slow to
(08:54):
read the severity of what was happening. It had procedures
for these situations. Those procedures were being followed. What it
had not fully accounted for was that Diana had not
been an ordinary member of the royal family. In the
public's understanding. She had been something else, entirely, something the
institution had never quite known how to categorize, and her
(09:18):
death had released a wave of public feeling that the
institution's normal procedures were not designed to absorb. It was,
according to those close to the events, Prime Minister Tony
Blair's team that helped communicate to the Palace the urgency
of the situation. Blair had spoken publicly within hours of
(09:38):
Diana's death, calling her the People's Princess, in remarks that
captured the national mood with a precision the Palace had
not managed. His team understood that the public needed to
see something from the institution, some acknowledgment, some visible grief.
The Queen returned to London, she made a live television address,
(10:00):
a rare and significant act from a monarch who had
always kept the camera at a careful distance from her privateself.
She spoke about Diana with warmth and care, in a
rare break from royal protocol. The flag above Buckingham Palace
was lowered to half mast, a gesture that carried enormous
symbolic weight, precisely because it was so unusual. The public responded.
(10:25):
The anger did not disappear entirely, but it softened. The
institution had, at the last possible moment shown that it
understood what had been lost. On September sixth, nineteen ninety seven,
Diana's funeral was held at Westminster Abbey. Two billion people
around the world watched the broadcast. The streets of London
(10:47):
were lined with mourners who had traveled from across Britain
and beyond. The coffin was carried on a gun carriage
through the city, draped with the Royal standard and topped
with white flowers and a card in Harry's handwriting addressed
to his mother. Charles walked behind the coffin. Beside him
were Philip, William, Harry, and Diana's brother, Charles Spencer. The
(11:10):
walk was long, and the cameras were everywhere, and the
grief of the crowd pressed in from both sides. William
was fifteen years old, and he walked the whole way
with a composure that seemed almost impossible for a boy
his age. Harry walked beside him, head down. It was,
by any measure, one of the most watched and most
(11:32):
devastating public moments of the late twentieth century. Charles walked
that route carrying a sense of guilt that many believed
would not lift for a very long time, The awareness
that the public, at least in part, held him responsible
for the unhappiness that had defined Diana's royal years. The
(11:54):
knowledge that his sons had lost their mother, and that
no amount of duty or discipline or institutional procedure could
fix that or make it less. He had waited his
entire life to become king. He had not imagined that
the path there would run through this. Next time. On
(12:21):
Crown and Controversy, King Charles, the nation's grief slowly gives
way to a new question. Can Charles ever rehabilitate his image?
Can Camilla ever become acceptable to a British public that
still mourns Diana? The answer will take years, a carefully
managed campaign, and a very quiet wedding in a Windsor guildhall.
(12:47):
Crown and Controversy is a production of Calaroga Shark Media
executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott. While no one
truly knows what happens behind closed palace door, this series
uses news sources, on the record, quotes, and some artistic
license to craft this entertainment series. Some moments have been
(13:10):
dramatized for storytelling effect where appropriate character perspectives and motivations
are drawn from reported accounts, interviews, and biographical sources. AI
narration was used in the creation of this series. To
keep up with the modern day Royal family, follow our
(13:31):
podcast Pallace Intrigue, a seven day a week, ten minute
update on the Royals.
Calaroga Shark Media. The summer of nineteen ninety seven was,
by most visible measures, a good one for Diana. She
was thirty six years old, and, according to those who
knew her, lighter than she had been in years. The
(00:23):
humanitarian work was going well. Her land mine campaign had
taken her to Angola and Bosnia, where photographs of her
walking through minefields in body armor had circled the globe
and applied real pressure on governments to act. She was
planning further campaigns. She had purpose and she had freedom,
and for perhaps the first time in her adult life,
(00:45):
those two things existed simultaneously. She had also that summer
begun spending time with Dodi Fayed, the son of the
Egyptian businessman Mohammed al Fayed, who owned the Ritz hotel
in Paris and the Harrod's department store in London. Dodie
was charming and attentive, and the two had known each
(01:08):
other socially for some time before their relationship deepened. In
the summer of nineteen ninety seven. Photographs of them together
on a yacht in the Mediterranean were published around the world.
Diana appeared relaxed and genuinely happy. The press speculated endlessly
about the seriousness of the relationship. Diana did not comment publicly.
(01:32):
What the photographs also showed was the relentless nature of
the paparazzi pursuit that had defined her life since she
was nineteen years old. Photographers in speedboats, cameras with long
lenses trained on private moments aboard a private vessel, the
machinery of celebrity surveillance that had followed her across two
decades showed no sign of slowing. If anything, the new
(01:57):
relationship had intensified it. Late August, Diana and Dodi were
in Paris. They had been staying at the Ritz, owned
by Dody's father, which offered a degree of privacy that
hotels without that connection could not provide. On the evening
of August thirtieth, they had dinner at the hotel, outside,
photographers gathered. Their movements were being closely followed by photographers
(02:20):
as the evening wore on. Shortly after midnight on August
thirty first, Diana and Dody left the Ritz through a
rear entrance in an attempt to avoid the waiting photographers.
They were accompanied by a bodyguard and driven by Henry Paul.
The hotel's deputy head of security, who had agreed to
drive them that evening. A second car was used as
(02:43):
a decoy at the front of the hotel. The Mercedes
carrying Diana and Dodi entered the Pondillalma tunnel at high speed.
A subsequent French investigation found that Henry Paul had been
drinking and that his blood alcohol level was significantly above
the legal limit. Investigations later concluded that a combination of factors,
(03:05):
including speed and driver impairment, contributed to the crash while
photographers were following the vehicle that night. Official investigations did
not find them solely responsible for what happened inside that tunnel.
Inside the tunnel, the car struck a pillar and then
a wall. The impact was catastrophic. Dodi fayed and Henry
(03:28):
Paul died at the scene. Trevor Rhyse Jones, the bodyguard
in the front seat, survived with serious injuries. He was
the only occupant wearing a seat belt. Diana was alive
when emergency services reached her, but critically injured. She was
treated at the scene for an extended period before being
transported to the Pitty Salpetriere Hospital in Paris. Surgeons worked
(03:53):
to save her life for several hours. At four minutes
past four in the morning Paris time, Diana, Princess of
Wales was pronounced dead. She was thirty six years old.
This is Crown and Controversy. King Charles Episode four Diana's death.
(04:29):
At Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, where the royal
family was spending their summer, Charles was woken in the
early hours of the morning with news from Paris. The reports,
at first were incomplete. Diana had been in an accident.
The situation was serious, and then as the hours passed
and the calls continued, the situation became something far worse
(04:51):
than serious. By most accounts, Charles was deeply shaken. Whatever
the complexity of their relationship, whatever the pain of the
years between them, Diana had been the mother of his children,
and she had been young, and she had been alive
only hours before, and now she was not. But before
he could process any of that, he had to do
(05:12):
something that no parents should ever have to do. He
had to wake his sons and tell them that their
mother was dead. William was fifteen, Harry was twelve. What
was said in those rooms at bal morrel in the
early hours of August thirty first has never been fully reported.
It is one of the genuine private moments of this
(05:34):
very public story, shielded even from the accounts and biographies
and documentaries that have dissected almost everything else. What is
known is that both boys were devastated. What is known
is that Harry, by his own later account, did not
fully cry in those first hours, a response he has
(05:55):
since described as a kind of shock that would take
years to work through. What is known is that the
world they woke up to that morning was permanently and
irreversibly different from the one they had gone to sleep in.
Charles flew to Paris that day to accompany Diana's body home.
He traveled with Diana's two sisters, Lady Sarah mccukwdale and
(06:18):
Lady Jane Fellows. The decision for Charles to go personally
to be the one to bring her back was both
a human response and a considered one. It was widely
seen as an acknowledgment of everything that had passed between them,
and of what despite everything, he still owed her memory.
The body was flown back to Britain and taken to
(06:39):
the Chapel Royal at Saint James's Palace, and then in
the days that followed, something unexpected happened, something that caught
the palace entirely off guard and would come to define
the immediate aftermath of Diana's death as much as the
death itself. The British public began to grieve in a
way that the country had not seen before and has
(07:01):
not quite seen since. Flowers appeared outside Kensington Palace within
hours of the news breaking. By the end of the
first day, there were thousands of bouquets. By the end
of the week, the sea of flowers stretched for hundreds
of yards, a vast improvised memorial that grew larger with
(07:25):
every passing hour. People came from across the country and
from abroad. They stood in silence, or they wept openly,
or they left notes, handwritten messages addressed to a woman
they had never met but felt they knew. The scent
of the flowers hung over the whole area. The royal
family remained at Balmoral. This was standard practice. The family
(07:48):
retreated in times of private grief, and grief was considered
within the institution to be a private matter. The flag
above Buckingham Palace flew at its standard position, because Royal
protocol at the time did not call for it to
be lowered for anyone other than the sovereign. The public
(08:08):
did not understand this, or rather, the public understood it
and rejected it. The absence of the royal family from London,
the absence of a flag at half mast, the apparent
silence from the Institution while the nation, convulsed with grief,
began to harden into something that looked from the outside
very much like anger. Newspapers ran front pages demanding to
(08:33):
know where the Queen was, Where was the flag, Where
was the acknowledgment of what had been lost? Letters poured
in phone lines were overwhelmed. The mood outside Buckingham Palace,
where more flowers continued to arrive, shifted from mourning to
something sharper. The Palace, by most accounts, was slow to
(08:54):
read the severity of what was happening. It had procedures
for these situations. Those procedures were being followed. What it
had not fully accounted for was that Diana had not
been an ordinary member of the royal family. In the
public's understanding. She had been something else, entirely, something the
institution had never quite known how to categorize, and her
(09:18):
death had released a wave of public feeling that the
institution's normal procedures were not designed to absorb. It was,
according to those close to the events, Prime Minister Tony
Blair's team that helped communicate to the Palace the urgency
of the situation. Blair had spoken publicly within hours of
(09:38):
Diana's death, calling her the People's Princess, in remarks that
captured the national mood with a precision the Palace had
not managed. His team understood that the public needed to
see something from the institution, some acknowledgment, some visible grief.
The Queen returned to London, she made a live television address,
(10:00):
a rare and significant act from a monarch who had
always kept the camera at a careful distance from her privateself.
She spoke about Diana with warmth and care, in a
rare break from royal protocol. The flag above Buckingham Palace
was lowered to half mast, a gesture that carried enormous
symbolic weight, precisely because it was so unusual. The public responded.
(10:25):
The anger did not disappear entirely, but it softened. The
institution had, at the last possible moment shown that it
understood what had been lost. On September sixth, nineteen ninety seven,
Diana's funeral was held at Westminster Abbey. Two billion people
around the world watched the broadcast. The streets of London
(10:47):
were lined with mourners who had traveled from across Britain
and beyond. The coffin was carried on a gun carriage
through the city, draped with the Royal standard and topped
with white flowers and a card in Harry's handwriting addressed
to his mother. Charles walked behind the coffin. Beside him
were Philip, William, Harry, and Diana's brother, Charles Spencer. The
(11:10):
walk was long, and the cameras were everywhere, and the
grief of the crowd pressed in from both sides. William
was fifteen years old, and he walked the whole way
with a composure that seemed almost impossible for a boy
his age. Harry walked beside him, head down. It was,
by any measure, one of the most watched and most
(11:32):
devastating public moments of the late twentieth century. Charles walked
that route carrying a sense of guilt that many believed
would not lift for a very long time, The awareness
that the public, at least in part, held him responsible
for the unhappiness that had defined Diana's royal years. The
(11:54):
knowledge that his sons had lost their mother, and that
no amount of duty or discipline or institutional procedure could
fix that or make it less. He had waited his
entire life to become king. He had not imagined that
the path there would run through this. Next time. On
(12:21):
Crown and Controversy, King Charles, the nation's grief slowly gives
way to a new question. Can Charles ever rehabilitate his image?
Can Camilla ever become acceptable to a British public that
still mourns Diana? The answer will take years, a carefully
managed campaign, and a very quiet wedding in a Windsor guildhall.
(12:47):
Crown and Controversy is a production of Calaroga Shark Media
executive producers Mark Francis and John McDermott. While no one
truly knows what happens behind closed palace door, this series
uses news sources, on the record, quotes, and some artistic
license to craft this entertainment series. Some moments have been
(13:10):
dramatized for storytelling effect where appropriate character perspectives and motivations
are drawn from reported accounts, interviews, and biographical sources. AI
narration was used in the creation of this series. To
keep up with the modern day Royal family, follow our
(13:31):
podcast Pallace Intrigue, a seven day a week, ten minute
update on the Royals.
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