Prince Harry ‘Has to Live With’ One Princess Diana Regret That Still Haunts Him Nearly 30 Years Later
Prince Harry still regrets not talking to Princess Diana for longer during their last phone call. He was only 12 at the time of his mother’s death. “I have spoken very openly about one of my biggest regrets: that last phone call I had with her,” Harry told GQ in an interview published on October 20.
He then explained, “If I’d known it was the last call with her, how different that conversation would’ve been. And I’m the one that has to live with that.” Harry, now 42, spoke to journalist Zach Baron for the magazine’s One More Question series.
In August 1997, Harry and his older brother, Prince William, spoke to Diana at Balmoral in Scotland. The boys wanted to get back to playing with their cousins. Neither knew they were about to have their final conversation with their mother.
“All I wanted to do was go off and run and play with my cousins,” Harry recalled. Now, becoming a father has given him a different view of that final call. The Duke of Sussex shares two children with his wife, Meghan Markle: Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. When Baron pointed out whether parenthood might have changed his perspective, Harry agreed, saying, “Of course, of course.”
“But before I was a parent, that was a bit of guilt and stuff that just really stuck with me. It was heavy. And then yeah, when you become a parent, of course it changes things,” Harry added. William has also spoken about their last conversation with Diana.
In the 2017 documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, he recalled how quickly he and Harry said goodbye. “Harry and I were in a desperate rush to say goodbye, you know ‘see you later’… If I’d known now obviously what was going to happen I wouldn’t have been so blase about it and everything else,” William said.
“That phone call sticks in my mind quite heavily,” he continued. Harry also admitted, “There’s not a day that William and I don’t wish that she was still around.” Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, has also shared his own memories in his memoir, Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.
He recalled seeing Diana on her 36th birthday, on July 1, 1997. “Neither of us had any idea that the other was going to be at the evening,” Spencer wrote. “We had only that brief chat, never to see each other again.” Diana died on August 31, 1997, after a car crash in Paris at the age of 36.
Her companion, Dodi Fayed, and their driver, Henri Paul, also died in the crash. Diana was rushed to Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, but doctors couldn’t save her. A British inquest in 2008 later found that the deaths were caused by grossly negligent driving by Paul and the drivers of the pursuing vehicles.
