Wow! I finally got my copy of Spare, the controversial memoir of Prince Harry. It was sent to me from the U.K. by my son Taiwo. Oh, what a book! As I leaf through the pages of this much-anticipated book, I come across where the Prince writes about his first-ever visit to Paris and his decision to visit the tunnel where his mother died in a car crash while being pursued by the paparazzi.
It was during 2007 Rugby World Cup and England was in the semi-final. “No one had predicted that,” Prince Harry writes. “No one had believed England was any good this time round, and now they were on the verge of winning it all. Millions of Britons were swept away with rugby fever, including me.
“So when I was invited to attend the semi-final, that October, I didn’t hesitate. I say yes immediately.”
“The semi-final was being held that year in Paris—a city I’d never visited,” he continues. “The World Cup provided me with a driver, and on my first night in the City of Light I asked him if he knew the tunnel where my mother…
“I watched his eyes in the rear-view, growing large. He was Irish, with a kindly, open face, and I could easily discern his thoughts: What the feck? I didn’t sign on this.
“The tunnel is called Pont de l’Alma, I told him.”
Luckily, the driver knew the place. Harry told him he wanted to go down the tunnel at sixty-five miles per hour—“The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported.”
The driver was sworn to an oath of secrecy that if he “ever revealed to another human that we’d asked him to do this, we’d find him and there would be hell to pay.”
The driver nodded and the zoomed off.
“Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel. We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course. But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it. As the car entered the tunnel I leaned forward, watched the light change to a kind of watery orange, watched the concrete pillars flicker past. I counted them, counted my heartbeats, and in a few seconds we emerged from the other side.
“I sat back. Quietly I said: Is that all of it? It’s …nothing. Just a straight tunnel.
“I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
So fast was the journey through the tunnel that Prince Harry, like Oliver Twist wanted more. He told the driver he has to go through the tunnel again! So they went through again.
Harry had thought that driving through the tunnel would be the end of his pain and grief for the mother he had lost but it wasn’t.
“I thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux,” he writes.
“It was close to one o’clock in the morning. The driver dropped me and Billy at a bar, where I drank and drank. Some mates were there, and I drank with them, and tried to pick fights with several. When the pub threw us out, when Billy the Rock escorted me back to the hotel, I tried to pick a fight with him too. I growled at him, swung on him, slapped his head.
“He barely reacted. He just frowned like an ultra-patient parent. I slapped him again. I loved him, but I was determined to hurt him. He’d seen me like this before. Once, maybe twice. I heard him say to another bodyguard: He’s harmful tonight.
“Oh, you want to see a handful? Here you go, here’s a handful. Somehow, Billy and the other bodyguard got me up to my room, poured me onto my bed. But after they left, I popped right up again.
“I looked around the room. The sun was just coming up. I stepped outside into the hall. There was a bodyguard on a chair beside the door, but he was sound asleep. I tiptoed past, got into the lift, left the hotel.
“Of all the rules in my life, this was considered the most inviolate. Never leave your bodyguards. Never wander off by yourself, anywhere, but especially not in a foreign city.
“I walked along the Seine. I squinted at the Champs-Elysees in the distance. I stood next to some big Ferris wheel. I went past little book stalls, past people drinking coffee, eating croissants. I was smoking, keeping my gaze unfocused. I have a dim recollection of a few people recognizing me, and staring, but thankfully, this was before the age of smartphones. No one stopped me to take a photo.
“Later, after I’d had a sleep, I rang Willy, told him about my night. None of it came as news to him. Turned out, he’d driven the tunnel too. He was coming to Paris for the rugby final. We decided to do it together.
“Afterwards, we talked about the crash, for the first time ever. We talked about the recent inquest. A joke, we both agreed. The final report was an insult. Fanciful, riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes. It raised more questions than it answered.
“After all these years, we said, and all that money—how? Above all, the summary conclusion, that Mummy’s driver was drunk and thereby the sole cause of the crash, was convenient and absurd. Even if the man had been drinking, even if he was shit-faced, he wouldn’t have had any trouble navigating that short tunnel.”
Prince Harry and Prince William end the chapter with some unanswered questions: Why were the paps (paparazzi) not more roundly blamed for their mother’s death? Why were they not in gaol? Who sent them? And why are they not in gaol? They wanted to hold a press conference to reopen the inquiry of their mother’s death, but “we were talked out of it by the powers that be.”
