PRINCESS Diana penned an explosive letter claiming that Prince Charles was plotting to kill her so he could marry his sons’ nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke, it was revealed last night.
In the note, Diana predicted she would die through “brake failure and serious head injury” – just two years before the fatal car crash in Paris.
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Lord Stevens, a former head of Scotland Yard, told the Daily Mail that he had quizzed Charles over the note during a three-year probe into Diana’s death in 1997.
In the note, Diana said she believed her then-husband was plotting to get rid of her in a staged car crash – paving the way for him to marry his sons’ former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke.
She wrote, Diana wrote: “Camilla is nothing but a decoy so we are being used by the man in every sense of the word.”
At that time, she and Charles were separated, although not divorced.
It comes as:
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- Kate Middleton stunned in a violet dress as she dashed through the rain for the launch of a new research centre
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Diana was reportedly obsessed with the mistaken idea that her husband and Tiggy were having an affair – a false allegation deeply upsetting to the younger nanny.
In the letter, she wrote: “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.”
Now Lord Stevens, the former head of Scotland Yard, has told for the first time how he questioned Prince Charles in December 2005.
The astonishing interview was conducted amid a cloak of secrecy at St James’s Palace as part of a three-year investigation into Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Lord Stevens said the prince was unable to explain why his former wife had written the note in October 1995 before leaving it in the pantry at Kensington Palace for her butler Paul Burrell.
And he told police he had no idea the note even existed until part of it was published by a newspaper.
Two years after the note was written, Diana – then just 36 – as well as her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed and chauffeur Henri Paul were all killed when their Mercedes crashed in a tunnel in Paris.
Lord Stevens has suggested Martin Bashir’s Panorama interview in November 1995 may have preyed on Diana’s vulnerability – and made her fear she was going to be harmed.
“We don’t know what Bashir was saying to Diana,” he told the paper.
“But if he had put the fears in her mind which had caused her to write that note, then that is what caused us to interview Charles.”
The BBC was plunged into crisis last month after it was found senior figures covered up Bashir’s lies as he secured the interview.
The damning probe revealed he forged bank statements and spun tales to win the vulnerable princess’s trust.
‘BASHIR COULD HAVE CAUSED DIANA FEARS’
An independent probe by former judge Lord Dyson concluded then-BBC news and current affairs boss Lord Tony Hall and other executives whitewashed concerns over how Bashir bagged the scoop in 1995.
And Lord Stevens said he deeply regrets that cops didn’t interview the rogue reporter.
“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.”
And he said he never doubted Charles’ statement – adding: “At the end of the day he was incredibly co-operative because he had nothing to hide.”
A coroner said Diana was killed “unlawfully” due to the “grossly negligent driving” of other vehicles and the Mercedes.
Paul was allegedly more than three times the French drink-drive limit and had also been taking an antidepressant drug.
The only survivor of the crash was Diana’s British bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones. He is believed to have been the only passenger wearing a seatbelt.
