Harry’s anger there was ‘no justice’ for Diana: ‘They photographed her dying in the backseat of that car’

Prince Harry said he did not process Princess Diana’s death because he felt so angry at what had happened, and that there was ‘no justice’ for her.

In the opening episode of The Me You Can’t See, a new documentary series that aims to break down the stigmas around mental health issues, Harry and Oprah Winfrey – the executive producers of the series – discuss how he dealt with his mother’s passing.

He said it is “without question” that the members of the public likely processed her death before he did.

Princess Diana died in a car accident in Paris in 1997, when Harry was 12 years old. An inquest into her death concluded she was unlawfully killed due to “gross negligence” of her driver, Henri Paul, who had been drinking, and the paparazzi who were following her car at the time of the crash.

“I was so angry with what happened to her and the fact that there was no justice at all. Nothing came from that. The same people who chased her into the tunnel photographed her dying in the backseat of that car,” he recalled.

Harry told Winfrey that at the time, he didn’t want to think about his mother.

“Because if I think about her, then it’s going to bring up the fact that I can’t bring her back and it’s just going to make me sad, what’s the point in thinking about something sad, what’s the point in thinking about someone that you’ve lost and you’re never going to get back again? And I just decided not to talk about it,” he said.

When asked whether anyone around him discussed Diana’s death, he said: “No one was talking about it.”

“After that period of however many years it was of just head in the sand, fingers in the ears, just crack on,” he said.

He told Winfrey that whenever he was asked whether he was okay, he would say “fine, never happy, never sad, just fine - fine was the easy answer.”

“But I was just all over the place mentally, every time I put a suit and tie on, having to do the role and go look and the mirror and say ‘right let’s go’, before I even left the house I was pouring with sweat ... I was in fight or flight mode,” he continued.

Earlier in the conversation, he recalled a separate occasion where he and Prince William were in the car, with their mother driving, and being chased by paparazzi.

“She was always unable to drive because of tears. There was no protection,” he said, adding that he felt helpless.

“Being a guy, but being too young to be able to help a woman, in this case, your mother, and that happened every single day. Every single day until the day she died,” he said.

In the second episode of the series, Harry said the involvement of the paparazzi in his mother’s death has stayed with him, and now both the clicking and flashing of cameras makes his “blood boil”.

“The clicking of cameras and flashes of cameras makes my blood boil, it makes me angry, it takes me back to what happened to my mum and what I experienced when I was a kid,” he said.