I can still remember the shock of watching the news on Sunday, 31 August 1997 and learning that Lady Diana had been in a car crash in Paris. The Beeb’s royal reporter, Nicholas Witchell, had just confirmed that she’d died, and that five French photographers who’d been chasing her had been arrested.
My own feelings that day, though, weren’t so much for the Queen of Hearts, or the two young princes she left behind. Instead, I was preoccupied with a nagging guilt – having been part of a Fleet Street army that had hounded her round London that very summer. Or, as Prince Harry later put it, the ‘pack of dogs’ that drove his mum to an early grave, and who were back to their old tricks this week, chasing him and Megan around New York.
The photographers on motorbikes lasted a little longer, but not much. As a ‘pack of dogs’, we were more chihuahuas than rottweilers
True, my own role in this sorry saga was more farce than tragedy.
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