If you’ve seen the film The Queen, the award-winning movie which told the story of what happened in the wake of Diana’s death, you’ll know that the royal family didn’t really deal with it very well.
In fact, you could say the Queen appeared to show very little emotion until public pressure led to her doing a live tribute to the Princess of Hearts some days after her death.
Now a new TV documentary has revealed how the Queen actually reacted upon hearing the news of her former daughter-in-law’s death.
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Just minutes after it was confirmed to the palace that Diana had been killed in a tunnel in Paris in the August of 2007, the Queen is said to have responded by saying: “Someone must have greased the brakes.”
The astonishing revelation appears in a new Channel 5 documentary called Diana: 7 Days That Shook The Windsors, which airs tonight.
Among those who appear on the programme are a gaggle of key players from the royal circle who will reveal new details about her death and the funeral.
Can we believe what we hear?
Well, this ‘greased brakes’ claim is similar to what was written about in a book by royal biographer Ingrid Seward that was published in 2015.
“At first it was thought that, though the car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel was serious, Diana had not been killed,” she told the Mail at the time.
“According to one witness present when the Queen heard the initial news, she mused out loud: ‘Someone must have greased the brakes.’
“That astonishing remark reveals something of the extraordinary and complex relationship between her and Diana.”
In the revealing documentary, Anji Hunter, who was the head of government relations for Tony Blair, reveals there was a lot of tension between the palace and Diana’s family in days leading up to the public funeral.
“The most tension in the room always came from Charles Spencer’s people,” Hunter says.
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It is also claimed in the documentary that a 15-year-old Prince William didn’t want to walk behind the cortege.
Apparently he wanted to grieve the loss of his mother in private, not in front of millions of TV viewers and well wishers along the procession.
Diana: 7 Days That Shook The Windsors is on tonight at 9pm on Channel 5.