Princess Diana & Jimmy Savile: A Timeline
A candid account of the verifiable dates & facts that surround the newly surfaced letter from Princess Diana to Jimmy Savile
In my previous article, “The Princess & The Pedophile”, I raise some lofty questions based on my findings, and there are a lot of moving parts to synthesize together. Based on the inflammatory and charged subject matter, it is not difficult to imagine readers with a healthy skepticism dismissing this story and writing it off before they’ve even fully grasped and parsed out all the relevant details. Here I will present a straightforward timeline of events that I believe will make clear that the questions raised are warranted and justified.
September 19th, 1995:
-Martin Bashir meets with Princess Diana for the first time. In the Dyson Report regarding Bashir’s unethical methods of obtaining the Panorama interview with Princess Diana, Lord Dyson states “I am satisfied that, by the time of the meeting, Princess Diana had paranoid fears about various things, including that she was being spied on and in danger of her life” and that “Mr. Bashir would have little difficulty in playing on her fears and paranoia.”
September 29th, 1995:
-Last documented sighting of Princess Diana driving her Audi (according to the extensive digitized archives at Newspapers.com - I welcome archival evidence of any later reference). According to the Paget Report, she told Hasnat Khan that she stopped driving the car when the brakes failed which she thought was due to tampering.
October 10th, 1995:
-Princess Diana writes letter to Jimmy Savile.
-Princess Diana makes two identifiable jokes in the letter: “You may just have noticed that I am still alive too” and “I am due to return to Broadmoor (temporarily!)” The subject of these two jokes are that she is neither dead nor unbalanced.
October 30th, 1995:
-Princess Diana meets with her lawyer Lord Mishcon, and tells him “that ‘reliable sources’ (whom she did not wish to name) had informed her that by April 1996, whether in an accident in her car such as a pre-prepared brake failure or by other means, efforts would be made if not to get rid of her, then at least to see that she was so injured or damaged as to be declared unbalanced.”
-First documented sighting of Princess Diana driving her BMW (according to the extensive digitized archives at Newspapers.com - I welcome archival evidence of any earlier reference). According to the Paget Report, she told Hasnat Khan that she switched to the BMW after her Audi’s brakes failed which she thought was due to tampering.
November 5th, 1995:
-Diana sneaks Martin Bashir and film crew into Kensington Palace to secretly conduct the Panorama Interview.
November 14th, 1995:
-Princess Diana attends the opening ceremony for a new ward at Broadmoor Mental Hospital. 30 minutes after arriving, news breaks that she has conducted her tell-all Panorama interview with Martin Bashir and it is due to air the following week. Princess Diana reportedly controlled the timing of this announcement despite the BBC’s hesitancy to keep it under wraps.
November 20th, 1995:
-Princess Diana’s Panorama interview airs with the following quotes:
Bashir: “Do you think Mrs. Parker-Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage?”
Diana: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”
Diana: “I found myself being more and more involved with people who were rejected by society - with, I'd say, drug addicts, alcoholism, battered this, battered that - and I found an affinity there. And I respected very much the honesty I found on that level with people I met, because in hospices, for instance, when people are dying they're much more open and more vulnerable, and much more real than other people. And I appreciated that.”
Diana: “I'm a great believer that you should always confuse the enemy.”
Bashir: “Who was the enemy?”
Diana: “Well, the enemy was my husband’s department”
Diana: “People's agendas changed overnight. I was now separated wife of the Prince of Wales, I was a problem, I was a liability (seen as), and how are we going to deal with her? This hasn't happened before.”
Bashir: “Who was asking those questions?”
Diana: “People around me, people in this environment, and ...”
Bashir: “The royal household?”
Diana: “People in my environment, yes, yes.”
Bashir: “And they began to see you as a problem?”
Diana: “Yes, very much so, uh,uh.”
Bashir: “How did that show itself?”
Diana: “By visits abroad being blocked, by things that had come naturally my way being stopped, letters going, that got lost, and various things.”
Bashir: “So despite the fact that your interest was always to continue with your duties, you found that your duties were being held from you?”
Diana: “Yes. Everything changed after we separated, and life became very difficult then for me.”
Bashir: “Who was behind that change?”
Diana: “Well, my husband's side were very busy stopping me.”
Note: [It is also worth mentioning that in the Panorama interview, Diana notes that letters were being intercepted. She would’ve known that there was always a chance that her letter to Savile was private correspondence that ran the risk of going public (as it now has) in the same way that any savvy internet user today knows the same thing about emails. This would encourage subtlety when referencing inflammatory subjects.]
Other relevant details:
-On an indeterminate day in October 1995, Princess Diana wrote a letter to her butler Paul Burrell that read: “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 [Legg-Bourke]” Note: Diana expressed to her lawyer Lord Mishcon that she also thought there was a plot to “put aside” Camilla Parker-Bowles. “Camilla was not really Charles's lover, but a decoy for his real favourite, the nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke.”
-In a recorded conversation with James Gilbey, Princess Diana refers to Jimmy Savile as a mentor to Prince Charles. Savile also reportedly served as a type of marriage counselor between Charles and Diana.
-Royal Correspondent Richard Kay has said the following about Princess Diana’s relationship with Jimmy Savile:
“[Savile] inserted himself into their marriage in the way that he was someone who made himself available. And Charles liked having him around.
He would turn up, Diana told me, at Kensington Palace, where she lived, uninvited and would manage to persuade the police on the, on the gate, who never let anyone in without an invitation, to walk in.
She said he would sort of come and say, ‘Well, I'm just here just to check up on you,’” Kay continued.
“And she said that Charles used to sort of quip, that if there was a problem that needed sorting out, they'll get Jim to do it because 'Jim'll fix it'. I think she found it slightly unnerving.”
The royal correspondent noted Savile would “walk in and drift around Diana's apartment”.
He would also “kiss the hands of the secretaries” and “rub his lips” up their arms.
“This is something he even carried out on Princess Diana," added Kay.
“He licked Princess Diana's hand and she recoiled from that. As she told me, it was something very creepy."
Synthesis:
It is clear that Princess Diana’s paranoia existed before meeting with Martin Bashir on September 19th, which then would have been exasperated by Bashir’s deception, lies, and forged documents. According to Hasnat Khan, she switched from driving her Audi to a BMW upon the brakes failing which she thought was due to tampering. The last documented sighting of her driving that Audi (according to the extensive archives on Newspapers.com) was September 29th, just 11 days before her letter to Savile. Regardless of how the brake failure happened, it would’ve elevated her paranoia even higher than after her meeting with Bashir. In her letter to Paul Burrell, Diana described October of 1995 as the most dangerous phase of her life. Then on October 10th she writes to Jimmy Savile of all people -who she has described as Charles’ mentor, who would show up to Kensington Palace unannounced to keep tabs on her, who would lick her arms to her disgust- to say that he might just be noticing that she is still alive and that she doesn’t need to be admitted to Broadmoor mental hospital as a patient. Which fits perfectly with the fact that she expressed to her lawyer on October 30th that her husband was plotting to either kill or incapacitate her.
This isn’t to say that her paranoia was justified. On some level we know it was artificially and wrongly inflated by Bashir’s lies and we don’t ultimately know what actually caused her brakes to fail. But what is important about this story is that she at least seemed to view Savile as an insidious figure involved in this plot she had in her head. And if we grant that the evidence of her paranoia towards Savile is clear enough, then the rest of that October 10th letter needs to be read with that antagonistic context.
The rest of the letter is about her upcoming trip to Broadmoor Hospital, where Jimmy Savile was running rampant and abusing patients. Diana emphasizes that she has a vested interest in the hospital and isn’t just a passer-by. She evokes the concept of negative media attention and talks about “fostering public understanding” regarding Broadmoor. Then just 30 minutes after she shows up to Broadmoor Hospital that day, news dropped that she had conducted her “tell-all” interview and that it was due to air. She reportedly controlled the timing of this announcement, and she chose to do so during this planned trip to Broadmoor.
During this time period, the relationship between Diana and Charles had been described as a propaganda war. In the Panorama interview, Diana likened the relationship to her husband’s side as like a chess game or a poker game. There was no doubt about the fact that doing this interview was a monumental move, and that the announcement of the interview would cause uproar. Diana knew that the relentless attention of the press was both a burden to bear and a weapon to wield. In the interview, Diana quoted Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and said that she was a great believer in “confusing the enemy” and that the enemy was her husband’s side. She was clearly thinking in a strategic and calculated way, and she chose to release the announcement of this “tell-all” interview while she was visiting Broadmoor Hospital. If she knew what Savile was doing at Broadmoor, that timing would certainly confuse the enemy.
Conclusion:
There are other details that I go over in my original piece “The Princess & The Pedophile” that I will abstain from addressing here as not to be too redundant. If this is your first exposure to this story and my findings then please go read the original piece and/or watch my video on the subject. A few extra data points & analysis have been fleshed out in a follow up piece as I continue with this story.
Quite plainly, there is enough compelling evidence to entertain the fact that Princess Diana thought that Jimmy Savile was involved in the brake failure she experienced and the plot that she at least thought was being hatched. There isn’t quite a smoking gun, but this is not a fanciful interpretation of the facts. Questions and further investigation are warranted. And if Diana truly did have this notion in her head about Savile, then it has disturbing implications about what Diana could’ve known about the disgusting ongoings at Broadmoor, based on the contents of the rest of the letter and that she chose to have the bombshell “tell-all” interview announced while she was at the mental hospital where Savile preyed.
In my mind, it would be deluded to bend over backwards and fully dismiss this story rather than give it an honest appraisal.
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