Lady Sarah McCorquodale, eldest sister of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, spoke about her sister in the BBC’s documentary Diana, 7 Days, and questioned why she hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt.
“She was religious in putting on her seatbelt,” said Lady Sarah. “Why didn’t she put it on that night? I’ll never know.”
Lady Sarah also spoke of the anger she felt watching the news coverage of Diana’s car accident and death, and how news presenters were saying that she was expected to live.
“There was a period of about two hours and I was talking obviously to members of my own family and learned that she hadn’t made it,” said Lady Sarah.
“For these two hours, the presenters on every news channel were saying ‘injured but expected to make a full recovery’, and I have no idea why but it made me so angry.”
Lady Sarah accompanied her former brother-in-law Prince Charles and sister Jane Fellowes, Baroness Fellowes, to Paris to retrieve Diana’s body and return her to England. It wasn’t until after Diana’s funeral that she allowed herself to sit down and feel the emotions she’d bottled up over the previous week.
“I think I felt shock, but I don’t think I felt anything else,” she said. “Just love and shock.”
“I don’t think I was capable of feeling anything because I put a barrier up. These are the jobs that have got to be done and just get on with them.”
“There’s time enough afterward to point fingers or whatever else you needed to do.”
Following Diana’s death, Lady Sarah was named co-executor of her will and president of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
Lady Sarah and her brother Charles, Earl Spencer, have both spoken publicly in the past few months about their late sister in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of her death. Diana’s other sister, Jane Fellowes, Baroness Fellowes, hasn’t given any interviews about her sister since her death.
