Analysis: Echoes of Diana’s death in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle New York ‘car chase’

Analysis: Prince Harry has compared his encounter with paps in New York to “the closest I have ever felt” to understanding how his mother died in 1997.

Analysis: In Prince Harry’s telling, he and his wife Meghan Markle quit the royal family and moved to California to prevent “history repeating itself”.

After all, his adult life had been consumed by what happened in the early hours of August 31, 1997, when Princess Diana died in a car crash after she was chased by the paparazzi.

“My mother was chased to her death while she was in a relationship with someone that wasn’t white,” Harry told Oprah Winfrey two years ago.

“And now look at what’s happened. You want to talk about history repeating itself, they’re not going to stop until (Meghan) dies.”

“I never want to be in that position … I do not want to be a single dad. And I certainly don’t want my children to have a life without a mother or a father.”

Prince William and Prince Harry at their mother’s funeral service. Picture: AFP

“The clicking of cameras and the flashes of the cameras makes my blood boil. It makes me angry and takes me back to what happened to my mum and what I experienced as a kid.”

Those memories resurfaced in Harry’s mind on Tuesday night in New York, in his new home country, during what his spokesman described as a “near catastrophic car chase” at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi”.

According to The Times in London, the Duke of Sussex told friends it was “the closest I have ever felt” to understanding what happened the night his mother died.

The Duke and Duchess had believed the US would be safer for them and their two young children, Archie and Lilibet, and that they would be spared the relentless media attention they attracted in the UK.

Prince Harry and Meghan at the Women of Vision event in New York prior to the paparazzi pursuit. Picture: Getty Images

Of course, that has not stopped them from seeking the spotlight.

Harry’s memoir Spare, which was released in January, drove headline after headline with intimate and startling revelations about the royal family, and he sought to capitalise on that with a publicity tour.

Spare came hot on the heels of the Oprah special, a Netflix documentary and Meghan’s podcast.

Even on the other side of the Atlantic, the unadulterated fame of the Sussexes is all they have to trade on, although Harry has tried to paint this as a conflict because he and Meghan have had to fund their own security after the British government stopped paying the bills.

For the most part, they have been treated differently by the press in the US, where the royal family is considered more of a curious anachronism than an important institution.

Harry and Meghan’s occasional public appearances make news, but nothing like they would in London. That was until what happened in New York.

Royal reporter and King Charles biographer Robert Jobson said: “This will play heavily on the Duke of Sussex’s mind, given what has happened to his mother and the reason why he left England in the first instance.”

Princess Diana spent years being harassed by the paparazzi. Picture: Supplied

He said it was a “terrible catastrophic event”, although he also pointed out that living in Los Angeles was a “strange choice … if you are hellbent on avoiding paparazzi, given it is the paparazzi capital of the world”.

Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams agreed that Harry would “agonise over this”.

“Six cars with blacked out windows on a chase is unacceptable in this day and age,” he said.

“There must be an NYPD investigation and statement issued into this immediately.”

The facts remain sketchy, with the NYPD only saying photographers “made their transport challenging” – a rather less dramatic description than the Sussexes’s spokesman describing a “relentless pursuit” that “resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians and two NYPD officers”.

But by releasing that statement, Harry and Meghan drew obvious parallels to what happened to Diana. If they no longer feel safe on the other side of the world, what will they do now?

Originally published as Analysis: Echoes of Diana’s death in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle New York ‘car chase’