Princess Diana’s loyal driver Colin Tebbutt reveals how morbid strangers snuck into hospital to stare and bow at her corpse
A STREAM of gawping strangers walked in to stare at Princess Diana as she lay lifeless in a Paris hospital room — then bowed to her corpse, The Sun can reveal.
Diana’s loyal driver Colin Tebbutt told last night how his first task after arriving at the city’s Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital was to stop the parade of ghouls.
Colin, now 77, was the first member of Di’s staff to arrive from London — just hours after her death on August 31, 1997.
Describing the horror for the first time, he said he was stunned to see the Princess, 36, in a bed with just her head on view.
Colin said: “She wasn’t in a mortuary, she was in a bedroom in bed covered in an enormous amount of blankets.
“The place appeared to be in turmoil. My first job was to stop people coming in and bowing.
“People, government ministers, you name it. I didn’t know who they were. Anybody that was calling in at the hospital. They didn’t say anything — they were just bowing and walking out.
“It was wrong. I knew why they were there, but it had to stop.”
Yet before he could bar the door, Colin says ex-French President Jacques Chirac walked in.
Colin, of Chichester, West Sussex, was Di’s driver and security expert for over two years, but did not travel abroad with her.
The loyal driver had only waved goodbye to the woman he called The Boss just ten days before the tragic accident.
But seeing the lifeless body of the world’s most famous woman was not what shocked him.
As he gazed at her, Colin knew he must make the Princess of Wales beautiful — for her sisters and for ex-husband Prince Charles, who were arriving that afternoon to escort her body home.
Diana was killed 20 years ago next week as her car crashed in a Paris tunnel when it was driven at high speed by a man who did not share Colin’s strict rules about never getting behind the wheel with even a drop of booze in his blood.
In a corridor at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, undertakers sat outside her room with orders not to enter.
Tradition dictates that only the royal undertakers from London can deal with the death of a member of the monarch’s family.
Diana’s face was barely marked but several hours spent in the stiflingly hot hospital room had taken its toll.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Colin told how he desperately wanted Diana in death to be restored to her beauty in life.
So he took the brave decision to invite a French undertaker to make up her face before the Prince arrived.
Colin says: “When I returned, she looked 100 per cent better but it was one of the hottest days of the year and the room was like a furnace.”
Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, then attended to her hair.
Colin, 77, says: “He did her hair nicely then he put a rosary on the bed.
“Then, to my horror, I saw people climbing about on roofs.
"They were some distance away but that was a blow. There were no blinds so I ordered some blankets to be brought and hung them at the windows.
“Then, as the room was getting hotter with the blankets, I asked for some fans. I switched them on and as I turned round, her hair and eyelashes were moving.
“Just for that moment I thought, ‘My God, she is alive!’ I was in shock. That was when it came home to me.
“I turned round and returned to normal but it was a horrible moment.
For a moment I though, My God she is alive!
Driver Colin on seeing Diana's corpse made-up
“None of us sat with her that afternoon. She was in the room at peace, with guards outside.”
In the room next door, Colin set up communications with London, making arrangements for the arrival of Prince Charles and Diana’s sisters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes.
Then his mobile phone rang. It was his eldest son, Gareth, who was stunned to hear his father’s voice.
Colin recalls: “He said, ‘Dad? You’re dead. I just got up and you’re dead.’
“The news back in the UK was saying that the driver with Diana was dead, so my family automatically thought I was dead.
“I told him, ‘‘I’m so sorry, Gareth. Get on to your brothers, your sister, get on to everybody and tell them I’m fine.’ That was quite a shock.”
Colin, a former inspector in the Royal Protection team, worked for the Princess for more than two years after her marriage breakdown.
On the day she died — August 31, 1997 — he had been due to pick her up from London’s Battersea Heliport and take her to see her sons.
But in the early hours of the morning, Colin and the Princess’s small staff gathered at Kensington Palace to be told she was dead.
He says: “I was sad, of course, but being a protection officer I was planning ahead — what are we going to do? Where is she? We needed to be there.”
Wearing a black tie borrowed from a policeman, Colin and Paul Burrell, one of three butlers at Kensington Palace, caught the first BA flight to Paris.
Hired with a 'coo-ee!'
COLIN TEBBUTT landed his job with Princess Diana two years earlier when, as he walked across the yard at Kensington Palace, a voice called out: “Coo-ee!”
Leaning out of a window, the recently-separated royal asked him: “What are you doing?”
Colin replied: “Not a lot.”
She added: “Are you still available? I’m looking for a driver/ minder sort of thing – would you like to come and see me?”
Colin, from Chichester, West Sussex, says: “ I thought, ‘The most beautiful woman in the world is talking to me in the yard’.
“I went in to see her with the Private Secretary. I was captivated.”
Diana was building up her staff and Colin was happy to work for her but wanted to be freelance and not part of the Palace staff.
He says: “So I mumbled out a ridiculously low price to which she said, ‘Oh wonderful, can you start tomorrow?’ I was actually paid a little bit more than I’d asked for.”
For the occasional engagements where back-up was needed, Colin used two former protection officers.
He says: “I rang both my guys and told them we’d got a new client – the Princess of Wales.
“I told them the rate of pay wasn’t great, then came an amazing reply – ‘We’d do that for nothing’.”
Colin dismisses all the conspiracy theories about Diana’s death, saying: “It was an accident – you will never convince me any other way.
“It would have been totally different if she had been in London. I had a team of two – we would have been always there.”
And he adds: “In my opinion she was enjoying life – and life was good working with her.”
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They were taken straight to the British embassy, where Colin told Paul: “They are expecting major- generals and lords and ladies, not the security driver and a butler.”
From there, they were taken to the hospital, where Colin recalls: “To me, as an ex-police officer, bodies are in mortuaries. But I was taken to the Consul General and he said, ‘Would you like to see Her Royal Highness?’
“We walked into a room and to my amazement, there was the Boss in a bed.
“My next move was to stop people coming in and bowing, which was happening. We knew why, but we didn’t want all that.”
Suddenly down the corridor came a coffin carried on the shoulders of the royal undertakers, led by a man in a beautiful morning suit.
Colin says: “I grabbed him and explained how we’d had the funeral directors in and I thought they had done a good job.
“I said it was my decision but I’d like him to check everything was fine. He went in the room, came out a couple of minutes later and said, ‘No problem.’ It was an enormous relief.”
As Diana’s sisters and Charles entered the room, Colin went off in search of a clergyman.
He says: “One of the Buckingham Palace officials asked me, ‘How are you getting home?’
“I didn’t know. I had no money on me. Then he said, ‘You won’t be coming on the royal plane.’
“I used to fly those planes — you could seat 100 people if they had enough seats — so I said, ‘With a world of respect to you, sir, I’m the first guy here that saw the Princess so I think you have got to keep a continuity, going back to London.’
And when the Prince came out he said, ‘Thank you’ to me again and, ‘Of course you will be coming with me on the plane.’”
In France, as Diana’s body was taken to Villacoublay military airfield for her journey home, people in the streets applauded.
But as her coffin made its way down the A40 from RAF Northolt to a mortuary in Fulham, West London, there were no cars on the road and total silence from the stunned crowds, who threw flowers from bridges as the hearse passed.
Colin says: “You could see the sadness — it was quite amazing.”
Colin Tebbutt did not ask for nor receive any payment for this article.