Diana's last call RICHARD KAY recalls final conversation

Diana's last call: RICHARD KAY recalls final conversation



The phone calls could come at any time — last thing at night or in the early hours. They could be a brief hello or a conversation lasting for hours — one spanned the best part of an entire day, completely ignoring the domestic rhythms of meals and drinks.

If I didn’t pick up, there would be urgent messages on the answering-machine or pager — no texts in those days — to ring back. Sometimes we would meet. Churches were a favourite, the more out of the way the better. So, too, were the open spaces of London parks. And, of course, we met at home — hers usually, but also in those of close, trusted friends.

But the phone was our principal method of communication. It was how I last spoke to her. Twenty years ago today, I was awoken, like the rest of the world, to the shocking news of Princess Diana’s death. It seemed scarcely credible, because just a few hours earlier she had rung me from Paris.

By rights she should already have been back in London but bad weather had delayed her for 24 hours. She had spoken to me fleetingly from Sardinia where Dodi Fayed’s family Gulfstream jet had been unable to take off.

Diana liked punctuality. She was always on time herself and didn’t like to keep others waiting.

The delay meant she would not arrive back at Kensington Palace until Sunday, when William and Harry were due to join her after their three-and-a-half weeks with Prince Charles and the royals at Balmoral.

The delay was still on her mind on the evening of August 30 when she rang from the Ritz Hotel. According to Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police chief who investigated her death, it was one of the very last phone calls she made.

I was driving and pulled over so we could talk. I told her I was in Knightsbridge, close to Beauchamp Place, one of her best-loved shopping streets. She asked me to look in the window of a boutique at a dress she had seen to see if I liked the colour.



By coincidence it was the same street where, a few years earlier, I had been photographed getting out of her car. At the time, it caused an absurd hue and cry with Diana being accused by courtiers who wanted to marginalise her for unscrupulous behaviour for consorting with the Press.

But by now, divorced and determined to forge a new life for herself, she was beyond the reach of the disapproving Palace.

Our own friendship had grown from the days when I was this newspaper’s royal correspondent, and when covering the ups and downs of the Charles and Diana marriage was full-time work.

We found we had mutual friends and a rapport was formed based in part, but not exclusively, on my journalistic duties. I had written sympathetically at a time when many of her motives were increasingly being questioned.

As the years passed, I became a sounding board for her about other aspects of her royal life, someone she might come to with a problem, but also to exchange gossip or to hear the latest jokes.

I would help her with speeches, suggesting phrases or themes, and also with private letters and others to charities and organisations she was interested in helping.



On one occasion I was charged with discovering the collar size of Lord Deedes.

The veteran journalist and campaigner had accompanied Diana on a landmines trip to Bosnia and she wanted to thank him with half a dozen of his favourite U.S.-made Brooks Brothers shirts. After securing the measurements, Diana got the shirts sent from Washington in a diplomatic bag.

In public, Diana liked to portray herself as empty-headed. It was far from the truth.

She may not have had great academic qualifications, but Diana was curious, and she was fascinated by politics and current affairs and was perhaps the first person I knew who saw through the shiny artifice of Tony Blair.

Similarly, one of her close friends, a much-travelled older man, insists to this day that she could never have made a life with Dodi because, eventually, he would have ‘bored her . . . she needed intellectual stimulation, he couldn’t provide it’.

Someone who perhaps could was a man with whom she’d been previously linked — American hedge fund tycoon Ted Forstmann, who was immensely rich and well-connected. But after her relationship with Dodi began, she told me he had called to say he was going to throw himself off Brooklyn Bridge. ‘Teddy,’ she said simply, ‘was embittered.’