In his upcoming memoir, “Spare,” Prince Harry recounts a traumatic incident from his childhood involving himself and his late mother, Princess Diana, and a group of aggressive paparazzi. The Duke of Sussex vividly recalls how his mother was driven to anger and fear for her children’s safety during a drive to his tennis lesson.
Without warning, Princess Diana hit the accelerator and sped off up narrow streets, blasting through red lights and whipping around corners. In the back seat, Harry and his older brother, Prince William, were strapped into their seats and could not see the pursuing photographers on motorbikes and mopeds. “Are they going to kill us, Mummy? Are we going to die?” Harry recalls asking in the memoir.
Finally, after several near misses and fifteen minutes of being chased, Princess Diana pulled over and confronted the paparazzi. “Leave us alone! For God’s sake, I’m with my children, can’t you leave us alone?” she shouted, according to Harry’s account.
Prince Harry also remembers his older brother’s reaction to the incident. “I remembered Willy looking frozen, like a statue, and I remembered the paps just firing and firing and firing, and I remembered feeling such hatred for them and such deep and eternal love for everyone in that car,” he writes.
This incident is just one of many that the Duke of Sussex recounts in his upcoming memoir, set to be released later this year. Princess Diana died tragically in a car accident in 1997, while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris. In recent years, Prince Harry has been a vocal advocate for privacy and has often spoken out against the invasive tactics of the paparazzi.
