Former Met chief interviewed Prince Charles over alleged plot to kill Diana

<span>Photograph: Reuters</span> — Photograph: Reuters

The former Metropolitan police chief John Stevens has disclosed that he questioned Prince Charles over allegations that he had plotted to kill Diana, Princess of Wales.

Charles was interviewed as a witness in 2005, during a three-year investigation into Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997, the Daily Mail reported.

He was questioned about a note that his former wife had written in 1995 predicting that she would die through “brake failure and serious head injury” in order for Charles to marry his sons’ former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. False rumours were circulating at the time that the prince and Legge-Bourke were having an affair.

The note, which was handed to her butler, Paul Burrell, read: “I am sitting here at my desk today in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head high.

“This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. My husband is planning an accident in my car. Brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for him to marry Tiggy.

“Camilla is nothing but a decoy so we are being used by the man in every sense of the word.”

The Daily Mail reported that Lord Stevens read the note to Charles at a meeting at St James’s Palace in London, and then asked him: “Why do you think the princess wrote this note, sir?”

Charles replied: “I did not know anything about [the note] until it was published in the media.” The Mirror had published part of the note following a deal with Burrell in 2003.

Stevens asked: “You didn’t discuss this note with her, sir?” to which Charles responded: “No, I did not know it existed.”

Stevens also asked: “Do you know why the princess had these feelings, sir?” and Charles replied: “No, I don’t.”

The Prince of Wales was not interviewed as a suspect.

The uncensored version of the note was not made public until 2007 in evidence heard at Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed’s inquest.

The jury returned a narrative verdict in 2008 of unlawful killing as result of “grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes” in which they were travelling.

Stevens said his team had found no other evidence during his investigation, codenamed Operation Paget, to support the scenario suggested in Diana’s note.

The note was written around the time that Diana gave her Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. An inquiry conducted by the former supreme court judge John Dyson found last month that Bashir had engaged in “deceitful behaviour” by commissioning fake bank statements to secure the interview.

Stevens expressed regret that he and his officers had not interviewed Bashir. “If there’d been an allegation then that Bashir had produced allegedly fake documents to Princess Diana, which is a criminal offence, we’d have investigated it,” he said.

“My goodness me, we would have done. But this has only come out recently, which is unfortunate.

“If we’d known at the time of Paget we would certainly, certainly have gone and seen him and interviewed him. And it would have been part and parcel of the inquiry to get to the bottom of it.”

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