Diana's Bombshell Secrets

She called them her ‘Crown Jewels’ - secret tape recordings documenting the royal scandals the princess kept as insurance against being killed

When Princess Diana died in 1997, her “box of secrets”, containing 10 never-before-seen videotapes and audio cassettes she covertly recorded, disappeared from Kensington Palace – and have never been recovered.

In Diana: Case Solved, authors Dylan Howard and former detective Colin McLaren claim Diana’s lost tapes contained a “record of her knowledge of scandals that could finish Britain’s monarchy” and “stashed them away in a box called the ‘Crown Jewels’”.

They were kept under lock and key in her Kensington Palace apartment along with a signet ring belonging to her former lover James Hewitt and photographs that show her ex-husband Prince Charles romping naked with a male lover, their informants claim.

Trusting butler

“As far-fetched as it sounds, the claims were central to the 2008 inquest into her death when her sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, strenuously denied she destroyed the box of secrets,” the authors say.

“Instead Lady Sarah insisted she gave them to [Diana’s butler] Paul Burrell for safekeeping, adding pointedly, ‘I trusted him then.’ Paul maintains, however, that the papers were taken to the Spencer family seat at Althorp, where they are hidden.”

When questioned under oath about handing over to the butler material so sensitive that it was compared to the contents of the mythical Pandora’s box, Lady Sarah insisted that is exactly what happened.