In late October 1996, Diana, Princess of Wales, handed a sealed envelope to her butler, Paul Burrell, at Kensington Palace. Handwritten and dated that month, the letter was addressed to Burrell, and she told him to keep it just in case. In it, she wrote that she was in the most dangerous phase of her life. She said someone was planning an accident in her car—brake failure, serious head injury—to clear the path for Charles to marry.
She named the person in her own handwriting. Ten months later, on August 31, 1997, Diana was dead, killed in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. She was 36. The fear she had committed to paper was not new.
In October 1995, she had requested a private meeting with her personal legal adviser, Victor Mishcon. She told him that reliable sources had informed her that efforts would be made to get rid of her, likely by April 1996. The method, she said, would be a staged car accident—brake failure or other means—leaving her either dead or injured badly enough to appear unbalanced. Mishcon typed a contemporaneous note of the meeting and kept it.
After Diana’s death, Mishcon gave that note to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Paul Condon. Condon locked it in a safe at Scotland Yard. The French investigators conducting the primary inquiry into the crash were not told it existed. Diana’s family was not told.
William and Harry were not told. The note sat in the safe for six years. Meanwhile, Burrell kept Diana’s letter for seven years, telling no one. The crash itself was investigated by French authorities, who concluded that the driver, Henri Paul, had been intoxicated, driving at excessive speed, and attempting to evade paparazzi when he struck a pillar.
Paul died at the scene, as did Dodi Fayed. Diana died in a Paris hospital hours later. The official conclusion was accident, not conspiracy. Burrell did not come forward with the letter after Diana’s death.
He kept it while the police took the Mishcon note into custody, while the institution managed the funeral and the public grief, and while he himself became the subject of a criminal investigation. In January 2001, he was arrested on suspicion of stealing hundreds of items from Diana’s estate. The theft trial collapsed in October 2002 after the Queen told advisers she recalled Burrell informing her that he was taking Diana’s possessions for safekeeping. The charges were dropped, and Burrell walked free.
Within a year, he published A Royal Duty. The Daily Mirror serialized it, and Diana’s letter became public. The name of the person she had accused was blacked out in the newspaper. Burrell later said the deleted words could refer to a group or one person, and that he would release names to authorities if there were an inquiry.
Diana’s friend Lucia Flecha de Lima challenged the letter’s authenticity, suggesting Burrell could imitate Diana’s handwriting. Handwriting experts later concluded the letter was consistent with Diana’s own hand. The existence of the Mishcon note emerged in the aftermath of the book’s publication. The note had been held in secrecy at Scotland Yard for years, and its handling became a matter of public scrutiny.
A second page attached to the police record of the September 1997 meeting between Mishcon and Condon appeared at the inquest, supporting the decision to keep the note secret. How that second page came to be attached was never fully resolved. In 2004, Commissioner Lord Stevens launched Operation Paddit, a British inquiry into Diana’s death. The 832-page report, published in December 2006, concluded that Diana had not been murdered.
The crash was caused by Henri Paul’s drunk and drugged driving at excessive speed. The investigation examined both the Mishcon note and the Burrell letter and rejected conspiracy theories. It determined the note should have been passed to the French investigators, but it was not. Diana’s family was not informed, and no one in the institution volunteered its contents.
The palace’s response to the publication of the Burrell letter was to consider legal action and then decline to pursue it. The letter named a person tied to Prince Charles’s household, a woman who later received damages from the BBC after it was revealed that journalist Martin Bashir had shown Diana forged documents, including a falsified bank statement, which had planted suspicions about her. The claim regarding the planned accident, however, was not tied to any forged material. What the letters prove is a matter of documented record.
Diana wrote and spoke of a specific, sustained fear that she would be killed in a car accident. She told her lawyer the same thing she later wrote to her butler. She died in a car accident. The official investigations concluded the accident was not staged.
The fear was real; the cause of death, as determined, was not the plot she feared. What the handling of the documents proves is also a matter of record. The institution that held the Mishcon note locked it in a safe and said nothing for six years. The French investigators were not told.
Her family was not told. Her sons learned of the note’s existence only when it became part of the public record during Operation Paddit. The palace, when the letter appeared in print, chose silence over legal action. Two documents, two warnings, both kept from the public for years.
Diana had written the fear down and handed it to the man she called her rock, telling him to keep it just in case. He kept it, and then he published it. The institution managed the documents it held, regardless of what they said.
The letters themselves remain what they always were: the written record of a woman who was afraid, who died in the way she feared, and whose words outlasted both the silence and the management.