Whitney Aug. The Crash in Paris Craig R. The wires had just fired out bulletins saying that Diana had been seriously injured in an automobile accident in Paris and that her escort, Dodi al-Fayed , and their driver had been killed. Could I verify the reports and file a story for the front page? I went to a back office, booted up my computer and began, with the help of what we then quaintly called the library staff in New York, assembling as many clips as I could of articles on Diana that I and other Times correspondents had written.
Whitney: The driver, a hotel employee, had headed west into the tunnel and then lost control and hit one of the concrete pillars dividing the eastbound and westbound lanes. Sarah Lyall , then a London correspondent for The Times, now a writer-at-large: I was at home in London when it happened and I remember there was a kind of delayed reaction in my head, the way there always is when you hear news that does not make sense.
Such was the ubiquitousness of Diana and her love life that everyone knew who Dodi was. And then the news came in, that she had died as well. I remember feeling very upset, even though I was not necessarily a big fan of Diana. She had inserted herself so thoroughly in the culture that it was as if we all knew her. She was always so alive. And so it seemed really shocking that she was dead. Get to Paris. I knew all the tabloids and TV would have all the flights booked so I drove off at high speed down the old Roman road to Dover, onto the car train, and at high speed through northern France.
All the British tabloids β including some which were later to feature in the phone-hacking scandal β had reporters standing outside the hospital gate bemoaning that because the paparazzi were involved it was the end of an era β no more chasing Diana around the Mediterranean on hired boats on expenses.
A British Embassy official came over and said there would be a small pool of journalists going into the hospital to cover the Prince of Wales retrieving the body from President Jacques Chirac. None of the British tabloids trusted each other, so I was selected. Some of the photographers were crying. The Prince of Wales arrived in a convoy of ten vehicles with police outriders to the entrance where Mr.
