Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana - How The Queen bore scars of tragic crash for the rest of her life

Paul and his boss, Dodi Fayed, were killed instantly. Alongside Mr Fayed on the rear seat, his lover Diana, Princess of Wales, had suffered massive chest and internal injuries. She was rushed to the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital, where for more than three hours doctors fought a losing battle to save her.

At 4am, Diana was pronounced dead. She was 36.

Her death sent shockwaves around the world. Diana had become an icon of the age, whose beauty, compassion, vulnerability and troubled personal life had made her an object of almost obsessive fascination. The reaction to her death was overwhelming. Britain saw an unprecedented outpouring of public grief, as millions took her death personally.

Diana’s death was the greatest crisis for her family the Queen ever faced. She badly misjudged the public mood, and the Royal Family appeared unmoved by the tragedy. As a sea of flowers built up around Buckingham Palace, and young and old flocked to London to sign books of condolence, the Queen refused to have the Union Jack lowered to half mast, and became the target of an angry backlash.

She and the rest of the family did not return to London from Balmoral, and over the following four days the monarch’s apparent aloofness sent the already fragile popularity of the Royal Family plummeting. Diana had wrong-footed the Queen in death, just as she had in life.

For the previous five years, since her acrimonious separation from Charles, the Queen had failed to grasp Diana’s impact on both the monarchy and public opinion. To millions, she was the caring, human face of royalty, unafraid to embrace AIDS sufferers or champion the victims of landmines, a princess for a modern world who was in tune with ordinary people.

In contrast, the Queen seemed stuffy and inflexible, more concerned with custom and ceremony than with the lives of her subjects, the head of a cold-hearted monarchy that froze out a vibrant young princess and made her desperately unhappy because of its indifference to her troubles.

The public stereotypes of Diana and her mother-in-law were distortions of the truth. The Queen had been woken at 2am on August 31 and informed that Diana was gravely injured. Two hours later, she was told of her death.

She was deeply upset. Her relationship with Diana had deteriorated badly since the split with Charles, and she worried about how effortlessly the glamorous princess with the common touch upstaged her. But until that had happened, the Queen had been immensely fond of Diana, and spent a great deal of time with her son’s young wife.

But the Queen failed to grasp that Diana had changed the way that royalty must go about its business. A new, more relaxed relationship had been forged with the public, and the old ways were no longer good enough.

Her behaviour in the days after Diana’s death bore the hallmarks of her father’s upbringing, and of the Queen Mother’s view of how the family should conduct itself. To be seen grieving in public was undignified, and so the family withdrew behind the gates of Balmoral to mourn in private.

The decision to remain out of sight was prompted by another concern - for Diana’s sons, William and Harry. In the privacy of Balmoral, the boys could be comforted over the loss of their mother.

But the clamour outside could not be ignored. The degree of the Queen’s indecision and bewilderment over how to handle the public anger at the Royal Family was later revealed by courtiers, who said she asked repeatedly of those around her: “What are we to do?”

The answer came from the newly-elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair. He had been in office for only three months, after a campaign in which the electorate’s trust had been won by the masterly use of spin. All the public relations that had been deployed on behalf of New Labour were now used to salvage the Royal Family’s shattered image.

The premier who had not been born when the Queen succeeded to the throne proved to be her wisest adviser during the Diana crisis.

At his prompting, the Royal Family took the initiative, first issuing a statement saying they were hurt at the suggestion they were indifferent to the princess’s death, and reinforcing that by an appearance at the gates of Balmoral to look at bouquets left there.

The Union Flag at Buckingham Palace was lowered to half-mast, and the following day, the Queen and Philip arrived back in London to meet the crowds outside the palace gates. She also broadcast live to the nation, on the eve of Diana’s funeral.

Dressed in black, she looked strained and upset as she faced the camera with the huge crowd milling about the palace gates visible in the background.

Her message was frank and personal. “What I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart. First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself. She was an exceptional and gifted human being. In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.

“I admired her and respected her.”

She went on to emphasise that the welfare of William and Harry was uppermost in her mind. “We have all been trying to help William and Harry come to terms with the devastating loss that they and the rest of us have suffered.

“No one who knew Diana will ever forget her. Millions of others who never met her but felt they knew her will remember her. I hope that tomorrow we can all - wherever we are - join in expressing our grief of Diana’s loss and gratitude for her all too short life. May those who died rest in peace. And may we, each and every one of us, thank God for someone who made many, many people happy.”

Her words, and the obvious sincerity the tribute she paid Diana, took the heat out of the public anger towards the Royal Family, but the day of the funeral was another ordeal for her.

More than a million people packed the route that Diana’s coffin took from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, followed by Philip, Charles, William, Harry, and her brother, Charles Spencer. Inside the abbey, cameras were not allowed to photograph or film the royal mourners. Away from the public’s gaze, the grief broke.

The Queen’s face was a mask of sadness, Philip fought back tears and the Queen Mother discreetly wiped her eyes. Charles, too, dabbed at his eyes as his sons both wept for their mother.

A heavy air of sorrow hung inside the abbey, and in the midst of it, the Queen had to endure what amounted to a rebuke from Earl Spencer, whose eulogy to the “extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana” drew loud applause from both the congregation and those massed outside.

He said her “blood family” would ensure that her sons were not “simply immersed by duty and tradition”, and appeared to vent considerable bitterness at the Royal Family’s treatment of Diana, saying: “She needed no Royal title to generate her particular brand of magic.”

Throughout, the Queen sat stony-faced, staring straight ahead during what must have been an excruciating episode for her.

After Diana was laid to rest at the Spencer family home, Althorp, the Queen concentrated on rebuilding her family’s shattered reputation. Over the next few years, a rethink of the manner in which senior royals conducted themselves, allied to careful media management, ensured that the House of Windsor had an easier time.

But then, in her Golden Jubilee year, the Queen was to find that Diana could still cause her heartache from beyond the grave.

Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, had been charged with stealing vast quantities of her personal possessions, including clothes, jewellery, photographs of her sons, and letters. Charles and William were told by police that Burrell had been selling these mementos.

At his trial at the Old Bailey, deeply embarrassing allegations were aired - that Burrell had smuggled lovers into Kensington Palace, that Philip had written to Diana calling her “a trollop” and that the princess had been hurt and traumatised by her treatment at the hands of the Royal Family.

And then, suddenly, the trial collapsed, Burrell walked free without a stain on his character and the Queen found herself at the centre of questions that went to the very heart of her role as sovereign. She had mentioned in passing to Charles that Burrell had told her in the days after Diana’s death that he was removing some of her possessions for safe-keeping, and she had acquiesced.

Charles was appalled and immediately contacted the police. If the monarch had agreed to Burrell taking the items, he was innocent and had endured 18 months during which the allegation that he was a thief had hung over him.

The storm that exploded around the Queen’s head was almost as bad as that of the early 1990s, when her very future was questioned. Why had she not spoken up earlier about Burrell, and saved the taxpayer a £2m legal bill? Had she been prepared to remain silent and see an innocent man convicted of theft?

No answers to the questions were forthcoming, as she opted for silence on the affair and decided to ride the storm out. The Burrell trial must have brought memories of the best and worst times with Diana flooding back.

They had first met at Balmoral in the autumn of 1979, when the 18-year-old Diana was out walking. The Queen knew she was a member of the Spencer family, and greeted her with the words: “Oh, Diana, isn’t it? How nice to see you.” Diana had, in fact, made her interest in Prince Charles clear by then, and quickly became a favourite in royal circles.

Her shyness and innocence appealed to the older royals, and by the time Charles reciprocated her attentions, the Queen had decided she was eminently suitable to become the wife of the future King, telling intimates: “She is one of us.”

Once Charles and Diana were married, the Queen tried - though on her own terms - to make the young princess feel welcome.

She presented her with emeralds and pearls that had once belonged to George V’s wife, Queen Mary, and invited her to dinner. Theirs was a friendship of sorts, though a stilted one, partly because Diana, barely out of her teens, found the atmosphere in the Royal household stifling.

But as Diana realised that her husband loved another woman and sank into depression and a serious eating disorder, the Queen found herself taking on a counselling role for which she was ill-equipped.

Diana began calling at Buckingham Palace with increasing frequency, at first to ask for advice, but later simply to pour out her heart. These sessions left the Queen drained and confused, and she came to dread Diana’s visits.

On one occasion, she told a courtier: “I had her for an hour and she cried non-stop.”

The advice that she had to offer - that duty and the responsibilities of royalty took precedence over all other things - were of no use to Diana. As she did when there was friction among her own children, the Queen eventually withdrew and began seeing less of Diana.

Once the embarrassing and damaging separation from Charles took place, she sided with her son and heir, which she saw as her duty. By then, Philip and the Queen Mother were also hostile to the princess, because they perceived her as a threat to the family, and the relationship between Diana and the most senior royals was permanently soured.

That was to be the beginning of the road to the tragedy in Paris. The Queen weathered the turbulence that Diana caused within the House of Windsor, but she bore its scars for the rest of her life.