EXCLUSIVE: 'Queen Elizabeth Killed Princess Diana' — Read the Most Brutally Frank Account of Tragic Royals' Final Years in the Words of Her Closest Bodyguard

Ken Wharfe was a Scotland Yard Inspector and Royalty Protection Officer who served as Princess Diana's personal bodyguard from 1987 until he resigned in November 1993 – four years before her life was snuffed out aged 36 in a Paris car smash.

Throughout his more than six years with the Princess, he was responsible for her round-the-clock security at home and abroad. Because he was constantly by her side during public and private engagements, he became one of her closest confidants and has since authored several books about his time in the royal household, such as Diana: Closely Guarded Secret.

Now, on what would have been Diana's 65th birthday, we can reveal his brutally frank assessment of the princess – and his belief the royal family "allowed" her to die by not insisting she maintain her Scotland Yard protection guard when she left The Firm. In his brutally frank interview – which we are printing in full – he also reveals the princess' tantrums and lost loves.

Ken said: "The Queen killed Diana. By that, I mean Queen Elizabeth signed her death warrant by no insisting she keep on her Scotland Yard royal protection squad after she left the royal family. I remember waving Diana off from Kensington Palace in 1993 after she split from Charles and left ‘The Firm', and I pleaded with her to keep her close protection team.

"It was one of the most poignant moments of my life. In 1993 when I left in the November and my colleagues were stood down in the December it meant she was then unprotected.

"I vividly remember telling her: 'Make sure you keep your protection.' She didn't take my advice and four years later she was dead.

"I knew that if she didn't continue to protect herself she would die. And we all know what happened – all because she did not have the proper security.

"The Queen should have been the person to step in and tell Diana the same thing I did. Despite all their differences, Diana listened to and respected the Queen.

"She would have accepted the Queen's advice, no question about it, and then I wouldn't be saying any of this. But nobody did anything. They just let her go. I don't believe in conspiracy theories.

Diana was surrounded by an inept security team when she died and they are also to blame for her death. When she died Diana had only a handful of security provided by lover Dodi. They were completely inexperienced with a high-profile individual and someone as a global icon as Diana.

You need to understand certain things when you're dealing with someone like her. It's totally different than providing protection for a playboy like Dodi.

So, you can't suddenly drop in any place in the world like Paris and expect it all to work out.

In a place like Paris, which I'd been to many times with Diana, you need to contact the British Embassy, you need to contact the gendarmerie, you need to contact special operations within the police.

None of that happened.

It was chaos there was no involvement beyond her security team.

Why didn't they speak to the police? Why didn't they set up a press pen? Why didn't they get a police officer to ride on his motorbike at 20 miles an hour in front of that Mercedes the night she and Dodi died?

The press was blamed, bur Diana's driver was a drunk who used to disguise his boozing by pretending he was drinking pineapple juice.

Henri Paul was constantly drinking a 45 per cent proof French spirit called Pastis. He mixed it with water and people around him always said they thought he was drinking pineapple juice.

I know that if you mix Pastis with water, pineapple juice is the effect you get. I believe that's what he had been drinking when Diana died.

His drunk state, combined with the speed at which he was driving was disastrous. I believe when the Mercedes carrying Diana hit the Pont de l'Alma tunnel it lifted into the air, as there is a nasty lip at the entry to that underpass.

I believe Paul over-steered to try and correct being airborne, resulting in him smashing into the 13th pillar of the tunnel.

Henri meant a lot within the Fayed dynasty and he was running the show and yet he was completely inept to operate or to conduct an operation of this magnitude involving one of the most famous women in the world who was being pursued by this horde of paparazzi.

It needed professional expertise and that was lacking.

Diana's security team on the night she died were a childish disgrace. They should never have let her be driven in that car without her wearing a seat belt.

On behalf of all the professional men and women of the Met's royal protection squad, let me say that neither bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones nor any of the other bodyguards who attended Diana in the two months preceding her death were from our department.

I am still angry beyond words that this team of ‘bodyguards' let her come to harm. She was not the victim of shadowy figures who regarded her as an embarrassment to the Establishment, but of her boyfriend's erratic behavior and her bodyguard's mistakes

Her security team on the night of her death was riding a gravy train provided by Mohamed Al Fayed and they did not take control of their clients.

I would never have let Diana ride in a car without wearing her belt, and it's something we almost had rows about.

Instead, the team let her do what she wanted and you ended up with this calamitous cat and mouse game with the press that night.

Dodi never bothered with seat belts, even though his security should have told him to, and that attitude of letting their clients away with anything proved fatal. Diana may well be alive had she worn her belt.

But it was ineptitude and a pissed driver that killed Diana – not a massive conspiracy to kill her, despite the royals hating her.

Diana lived in fear of car crashes, yet loved speeding in cars. She used to tell me when we drove past crashes: 'That could be us.'

We once even stopped to help out at an accident and I could see she was always obsessed by them. Yet despite her fear she would one day end up in an accident, Diana loved speeding in cars.

I was once a passenger with her when she was doing 85mph. We were pulled over by a traffic cop, and I told Diana I wasn't going to try and use her or my status to get her off.

The officer was amazed with who he had pulled over, and when he turned to me to look for advice I told him he had to do his job and wasn't going to say anything. In the end, she got off with a caution.

There was never anything romantic between Diana and I, but she did confide in me. She was a woman constantly on the look out for a friend – anyone who would listen.

That is why there is no real pattern to her lovers as they were all quite different. She was just drawn to anyone who showed her compassion and gave her an understanding ear.

I think she was fond of me because I wasn't a sycophant and always told her the truth. She used to giggle when I impersonated Charles for example, and we did get very close. It's little wonder in a way as we spent so much time together.

I had joined the Metropolitan Police Service as a special cadet at the age of 17 and after being made Inspector was selected for Scotland Yard's elite Royalty Protection Department. I was first chosen to head up the security for the Queen's grandchildren, Prince William and Prince Harry, who as children called me

'Uncle Ken'. A year later in 1987 I was appointed a Personal Protection Officer to Diana. After hearing many of her secrets and witnessing her lovers come and go, I was by her side as she plotted to escape the royal family. It was a round-the-clock, global job.

She was called Purple 52 when we travelled abroad, but she liked to break up the formality by booking us into hotels as 'Mr and Mrs.'

In the end, it was our intimacy that ended our relationship. Scotland Yard advises all protection officers never to become too close emotionally to their VIP.

Detachment is essential, in order to focus fully on security. With someone as warm, sympathetic, confiding and vulnerable as Diana, this can be difficult to maintain.

In 1986, around the time I became bodyguard to the two young princes, a rumor was circulating in both palace and police circles. It was whispered Diana had become ‘too close' to her protection officer, Sergeant Barry Mannakee – and that a senior member of Charles' staff had found them in a ‘compromising position' on the eve of the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

Nothing was ever proved but, nevertheless, he was summarily discharged for overstepping the invisible mark of propriety between Diana and himself, and assigned to other diplomatic duties. A year later he was dead.

The Queen had been aware of the relationship in the late Seventies between her daughter, Princess Anne, and her police bodyguard, Sergeant Peter Cross, who had also been removed from his job.

The last thing Buckingham Palace wanted was another scandal of this sort, and the rumor was enough to cost Mannakee his posting.

I didn't want the same to happen to me. I knew Diana was not afraid to play off one admirer against another. She enjoyed beguiling more than one man at a time.

By the late 1980s, while deeply involved with James Hewitt, she was also embroiled with another charmer, the car salesman and gin fortune heir James Gilbey. He was obsessed with her, though she never felt the same adoration for him that she had lavished on Hewitt.

When Diana poured out her heart to Gilbey, as she often did to me, she would rage about Charles's affair while oblivious to her own infidelities. It is little wonder the Princess was convinced the ‘Establishment' was ‘out to get her'.

The Princess' infatuation with the married art dealer Oliver Hoare was much more intense than her relationship with Gilbey. I didn't like the man, and though Diana craved his company, Hoare resented my presence.

He probably thought I was spying on him. In fact, I took the view that Scotland Yard didn't need to know of his existence, as long as he presented no security risk.

It is possible Diana chose Hoare because he was also a friend of Camilla and could keep the Princess up to date about her rival. She questioned him constantly, trying to understand what her husband saw in ‘the Rottweiler'.

Hoare spent hours in her private rooms at Kensington Palace.

One night in 1992, at 3.30am, all the smoke alarms went off in Kensington Palace. I raced towards the Princess's apartment but before I reached the door I discovered the source of the false alarm.

Cowering behind a huge plant in the hallway, clutching a cigar, was Oliver Hoare. Diana, who hated the smell of smoke, must have sent him out of the bedroom.

It was not without a twinge of amusement at his expense that I advised him to put it out and go back to bed.

He looked almost pathetic as he gathered himself together and left.

Next morning, I tried to make a joke of the incident, suggesting that Diana and Hoare had been playing cards together in her room – perhaps strip poker. She blushed crossly, and I knew I'd overstepped the mark.