The Crown: Was Diana paranoid that someone was trying to kill her?

Several scenes in the new season of The Crown depict Diana as being paranoid her phone is bugged

There’s a growing sense of unease in the new season of The Crown.

While viewers know what’s coming – Diana’s fatal car crash won’t appear until season six of the show – it’s hard to watch Diana’s final years play out on screen, albeit fictionally.

In season five of the series, which dropped on 9 November, Diana, Princess of Wales (played by Elizabeth Debicki) is shown to be increasingly paranoid as the Nineties go on.

In recreating the now-infamous Panorama interview, Diana is seemingly convinced to do the interview after being shown forged bank statements by journalist Martin Bashir that suggested two of her senior aides were “spies” and that Diana’s phones were being bugged by security services.

As per The Guardian, the real-life Diana was worried her phones were being tapped towards the end of her life.

Her former private secretary Michael Gibbins added that he detected “disapproval” from the royal family about Diana’s dating life and that he warned her about the “ramifications” of going on holiday with the Al-Fayeds.

Diana holidayed on Mohamed Al-Fayed’s yacht in the summer of 1997, which is where she met Dodi Fayed, her partner who died alongside her in the car crash in Paris in August that year.

“She never expressed that concern [of her phones being tapped] but her actions were such, in terms of changing her telephone number, that it was clear that that was a concern to her, yes,” Gibbins told the inquest into Diana’s death in 2007.

Was Diana paranoid that someone was trying to kill her?

If the Mischon Note is to be believed, then yes. Diana seemingly “predicted” her death two years before it happens in an infamous note written by Victor Mishcon in 1995.

At the time. Mishcon was Diana’s legal advisor and wrote a note during a meeting with the royal on 30 October, 1995.

During the meeting, which also included Diana’s personal secretary Patrick Jephson, Diana allegedly said that efforts would be made to “get rid of her” by April 1996.

Diana added that a source told her this would occur via a car accident that would either end her life or injure her so far as to make her appear “unbalanced”.

Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana in ‘The Crown' (Keith Bernstein/Netflix)

An inquiry into Diana’s death opened in 2004 with the findings released in 2006.

“The most important thing about that report, and the wait-a-minute moment, light shining through the darkness suddenly, was the Mishcon Note. The note had been put in a safe at the New Scotland Yard,”  Michael Mansfield, a lawyer who represented Mohamed Al-Fayed said during Investigating Diana: Death In Paris, a documentary which aired on Channel 4 earlier this year.

The note was reportedly handed to  Sir Paul Condon, former Metropolitan Police commissioner in 1997 and put in a safe.

“The letter was given by Lord Mishcon to my predecessor, Paul Condon, and he put it in his safe,” former Metropolitan Police commissioner John Stevens, who led the inquiry, told the Daily Beast.

“I was only made aware of that when I was made commissioner myself… and I had been made aware that Lord Mishcon had said he hadn’t actually attached much importance to it.”

Diana, Princess of Wales, at Wimbledon in 1995 (Getty Images)

Stevens added that the inquiry looked into each of the 104 allegations surrounding Diana’s death “including probing the origins and credibility of the Mishcon Note”.

“I saw Lord Mishcon about a month before he died, in about the spring of 2005, and he held course to the fact that he thought she [Diana] was paranoid, and he hadn’t held much credence to it. He was her solicitor, and remember, a solicitor has legal obligations to their clients. He was kind enough to make no mistake about it,” Stevens said.

He added that the inquiry concluded with “100 per cent” certainty that there was no conspiracy to “get rid of” or murder Diana, and that her death was an accident.