It was rogue BBC journalist Martin Bashir who ended the royal career of Diana’s personal chauffeur Steve Davies. But it would take a quarter of a century before he discovered that, learning the truth by chance from an episode of The Crown.

The driver was frozen out of the Princess’s inner circle at Kensington Palace in late 1995. ‘It happened overnight,’ he says. ‘From driving her everywhere I was banned from the wheel of her car. After the Christmas break I was told she didn’t want me near it, I wasn’t even allowed to wash or hoover it.

‘I was still on her payroll but all I could do was sit in the garage for ten hours a day, my official shift, doing nothing, and then go home. I was heartbroken, humiliated. She shunned me.’

Steve was made redundant in March 1996. He did not know it at the time but he was the collateral damage in Bashir’s corrupt plot to persuade Diana to give the most devastating interview in royal history – her Panorama appearance of November 1995.

In a clandestine meeting with the Princess and her brother Earl Spencer in the September of that year, Bashir had claimed Diana’s friends and close aides were all part of a deep state conspiracy against her. The reporter had specifically named Steve as a spy for a newspaper and warned Diana that her car was being tracked and bugged.

‘The consequence for me was that I was forced out of a job I wanted to be my life’s work,’ Steve says. ‘Royal service is about being trusted and loyal, showing discretion, having a sense of duty. Your reputation, your good name is everything.

‘Martin Bashir robbed me of mine by making those allegations to Diana. I’m not the kind of man who wastes time and energy being bitter or angry, but she died believing I had betrayed her and that’s something I can’t ever forget or forgive.

‘I look at the King today and think “I could be his driver now.” Or I could be driving William and Catherine and their family. Imagine having driven William since he was a little boy going to prep school and then being with him again as the Prince of Wales.’

Instead, Steve was made an outcast from Diana’s household. By February 1996, he was planning to quit but a senior courtier advised him to hold on for a redundancy package. He remembers with sadness the Princess’s chilly farewell when he signed his papers the following month.

‘I was ushered into her drawing room at Kensington Palace. She said, “Bye Steve, thanks for everything,” shook my hand and walked out leaving me standing alone, without having said a word in return. She was glacial.’

He was comforted by – of all people – the then Prince of Wales, now the King, who summoned him to St James’s Palace. Steve had also been one of his drivers before the royal separation.

‘That meeting was a lot longer, he was much nicer, said he’d done everything he could to fit me into his own rota of drivers but it just wasn’t possible,’ he recalls.

Trying to console the chauffeur, Charles told him: ‘I hope you find everything you’re looking for in the future,’ both men knowing Steve’s only wish was to remain a royal driver.

By the time of this ‘redundancy’ – in effect Steve’s dismissal – suspicion was already falling on Bashir and the BBC. Notably, The Mail on Sunday was investigating the tactics used by the reporter to secure his bombshell broadcast.

In it, Diana revealed her struggles with bulimia and post-natal depression, wondered if Charles was fit for the ‘top job’ of King and, referring to his relationship with Camilla, said: ‘There are three of us in this marriage so it was a bit crowded’ .

Today we know the interview was a direct result of the September 19, 1995 meeting in which Bashir confected a conspiracy involving the security services, the media and the palace machine. In it he made his career-ending allegations against Steve.

‘Steve Davies (chauffeur) feeds TODAY newspaper; “Change your chauffeur…”’ was how Earl Spencer – also a victim of Bashir’s vile deception – recorded this particular lie in his contemporaneous notes.

Those notes would first emerge in a damning dossier published by the Daily Mail in November 2020. However, amid the multiple other lurid claims also revealed – Bashir alleged that Charles and royal nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke were having an affair and Prince Edward was being treated for Aids – the fragment of information about the royal chauffeur was barely noticed.

Until, that is, scriptwriters from The Crown picked up on it, seeing how it could be parlayed into a pivotal scene in the Netflix drama. Bashir’s lies about Steve were written into episode 7 of series 5, No Woman’s Land and the following episode, Gunpowder, in which viewers can also see Earl Spencer scribbling ‘D’s driver SD informant’ in his notepad. Steve has never watched The Crown, but his wife’s eldest daughter is a fan and sent her mother a three-minute clip from the show after watching it at her home in the French Alps.

Back in the house he shares with wife Cynthia in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, Steve watched in horror as Bashir (played by Prasanna Puwanarajah) tells Diana (Elizabeth Debicki): ‘People I have been talking to at MI6, contacts I have had for years as an investigative journalist, confirmed to me that your driver Steve Davies is also in on it.’

In shock Diana sits bolt upright and gasps: ‘Steve?’

Bashir expands: ‘A year ago a decision was made by the establishment to mount an all-out attack on you: a concerted effort to tear you down with the ultimate goal of driving you from the country and forcing you to live abroad…’

Steve realised that what was being depicted on screen was Bashir sowing the seeds of his downfall from Diana’s side. He just hadn’t known until The Crown.

‘It was excruciating to watch but solved the mystery for me,’ he says. ‘I had determinedly got on with everything because you only have one life and you have to live it as best you can, but I had never stopped asking why Diana had turned against me.’

Finally in possession of the facts, he sued the BBC for slander, winning an unreserved apology and damages in May this year. At no point prior to that had the corporation told Steve he had been personally named by Bashir, nor apologised to him privately for the devastation caused.

In the High Court, barrister Samuel Rowe for the BBC told the Honourable Mrs Justice Steyn: ‘The BBC accepts the allegation made about the claimant is and was wholly false and should never have been made and that it constitutes an attack on the claimant’s reputation both personally and professionally.

‘The BBC accepts that the allegation was likely to have caused HRH the Princess of Wales to doubt the claimant’s loyalty and professionalism and may well have contributed to the claimant’s redundancy six months later.’

Today the handwritten note which ruined Steve’s royal career and changed the course of his life is officially part of the public record of the Panorama scandal, buried deep in an annex to the Dyson Report, the independent inquiry which published its findings in 2021.

It reveals the true extent of Bashir’s mendacity and manipulation of Diana and the corporate cover-up which followed.

Prince William said in 2021: ‘It brings indescribable sadness to know that the BBC’s failures contributed significantly to her fear, paranoia and isolation that I remember from those final years with her.’ More bluntly, Prince Harry said: ‘Our mother lost her life because of this.’

 ‘It’s a shame Bashir has not been personally held to account for what he did,’ reflects Steve. ‘I know what his life is like now [Bashir is an industry pariah] and he deserves it. Maybe one or two people at the BBC covered it up because in Bashir getting what he wanted from Diana, they got what they wanted too.’

Asked about his reaction, he says: ‘Angry? Yes. Disappointed? Yes. Surprised? No, because the BBC covered up Bashir from the beginning, in 1995, so why stop there? I’m sure they thought that by keeping it quiet, hopefully it would never come up. But they should have said something beforehand. It was in the public domain.’

Steve’s last act of service to the Princess was to give evidence at her inquest in January 1998. ‘I stood up and said that, no, contrary to what that man [Bashir] had led her to believe, the cars I drove for her were not bugged or fitted with tracking devices.’

Twice now he has visited the tunnel in Paris where she died to remember her and make his peace with what happened. ‘Bashir told Diana people like me were spies and sell-outs. In essence he told her I was a traitor, when all along the treachery was his.’

Diana, Princess of Wales emerged from Kensington Palace wearing what would forever be known as her ‘Revenge Dress’, short and tight with a flirty black chiffon train streaming out behind her. It was June 29, 1994. Her chauffeur Steve Davies, now 61, was the first to see this extraordinary metamorphosis from senior royal to sex siren.

‘Ma’am’, he said, stunned, ‘if I wasn’t working tonight, I’d take you out myself.’

Diana let out a peal of laughter and then he drove her to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park where that frock would make its mark in history.

It says a lot about the easy, intimate relationship between the driver and the woman he called ‘The Boss’ that he could tease her like this. But then he was a constant, rock-solid presence during the most vulnerable time of her life; a witness to her turbulent emotions, her desperate search for a new public role and her ultimate descent into paranoia and misery.

He has never talked about his years by the side of the most famous woman in the world. Even after her tragic death in 1997 he remained silent, loyal to her memory and respectful of her sons. Today he speaks for the first time, offering a genuinely new and authoritative voice amid the cacophony of people who speak about Diana.

‘I would have taken a bullet for her, died for her,’ he says. ‘My job was my life, I was always there for her. You couldn’t explain Diana then, just as you can’t explain her now. Her beauty was so much greater in real life than in any photograph, she had such physical presence, she mesmerised people in public. Yet she’d get into the car, her private world, and beg you to tell her a dirty joke or go to sleep like a child with her head on the window. I remember her drenched after doing a walkabout without an umbrella climbing into the back seat and screaming, “I’m soaked, wet through, to my skin, literally dripping…” and then arching an eyebrow and saying “Boys… Stop it now!” because she knew what we were thinking.

‘But sometimes you’d get a different Diana, silent, lost. It was me who drove her to St James’s Palace to meet Prince Charles and Sir John Major [the then Prime Minister] to prepare the announcement of her separation in December 1992. She wasn’t crying, but she was glazed, silent, remote.

‘I was watching her in my rear view mirror and thought it looked as if something in her had broken. As a chauffeur there are boundaries and you don’t cross them. I couldn’t comfort her but it was hard to see, to be just inches from her and feel the full impact of that day.’

In truth, Steve had long since crossed the boundary from mere staff member, at the Princess’s behest. One night as he waited for Diana in the kitchen of Elton John’s Windsor mansion, eating a solo supper of beef stroganoff, he was invited into the living room where Elton was about to give an impromptu concert, playing the piano and singing for Diana and George Michael.

‘Elton popped into the kitchen, said: “Steve, are they looking after you?” and then told me to come through. I eyeballed Diana, asking her silently “What – me as well?” She grinned and mouthed back “Yes! Of course!” So there we were, Diana and I, Elton and George, me stepping out of my world and into hers.

‘Another time she insisted I got out of the car to meet Mother Teresa who was secretly visiting London. With Diana you just never knew what was coming.’

Steve was also by the Princess’s side when another iconic picture was taken, when Diana and her boys went to Alton Towers to ride the roller-coaster and the log flume.

‘I’d picked them up from Stafford station, Diana, William and Harry, plus their friends, and driven them to Alton Towers. Then the message came down, “The Boss wants you to come in too.” So there I was climbing on to Oblivion with Harry, creeping to the top of the ride, waiting for the plunge, and later listening to Harry trying to persuade William to have a go. I wouldn’t say William was scared but even then he was more likely to watch and wait than dive straight in like his little brother. You can still see that today in how they handle their respective lives.

‘Harry was saying “William please, you have to! It’s fantastic!” William said: “I’m only going on if I can sit next to Steve,” so that’s what we did. I was touched but I was the man who took him to school every day. He trusted me. It was the best time, the happiest, for Diana. You can see that from the pictures. ‘The boys were hilarious to work with. Their favourite car was a green Rover with blacked-out windows. They’d stick their tongues out at photographers and pull faces knowing they could not be seen. Diana loved that car for the same reason. She could be invisible in it.’

Steve used to take the young Princes to visit Diana’s sister in Norfolk and then to the beach where he’d kick a ball about with them and their cousins. ‘You are still “the chauffeur” but on those occasions the job becomes intimate in a way that an official engagement can never be.’

He would also drive the Princess to Harrods for private early-morning shopping sprees and her beauty treatments at expensive clinics in London’s upmarket Beauchamp Place.

Whether she was on a royal visit or sneaking off to meet her spiritual healer Simone Simmonds, he was by her side. When she refused to have a protection officer permanently travelling with her, he would become her last line of defence too. ‘I did not carry a weapon, In my line of work we say the car is the weapon,’ he says.

‘But I kept my pistol skills, sharp-shooting with royal policemen at a range near Heathrow, and I would regularly hone my anti-terror driving on an old airfield near Birmingham.

‘You have to be ready to turn and run on country roads and in London traffic, and speed through a terrorist road block. You also have to crash into other cars so you wouldn’t panic in an accident, or if you came under attack. Diana always knew she was safe with me.’

Steve was born in Shropshire into a family which ran a car and minibus rental company, sparking his lifelong love of driving. At 16 he joined the Army, becoming a lance corporal and earning a place on the Army ski team. He built a career in Army transport, driving his commanding officer, qualifying on light tanks and HGVs and becoming a military driving instructor.

Today he works as a chauffeur for a wealthy family and lives with his second wife Cynthia in Dunstable. The couple have five daughters between them.

Back in 1988 when there was a vacancy on the late Queen’s 12-strong team of chauffeurs, he was invited to apply. His first task, he remembers, was driving Her Majesty’s corgis from Buckingham Palace to Windsor in a green Granada estate which had the carpets removed on favour of wipe-clean vinyl flooring. The dogs travelled with their own footman.

In July 1989, he was picked to join the team driving Charles and Diana. His first meeting with Diana was when he took her with William and Harry to their prep school in West London. ‘We played the kind of games all families play on the road, like “can we get back to Kensington Palace without stopping?” Harry was always the competitive one, he would have had his head out of the window if I’d let him, to make sure we were still creeping along.’

As they grew closer, Steve liked to treat the boys, for example buying William the James Bond film Licence To Kill as a birthday gift. In his thank-you letter the little Prince signs off ‘Love from William’.

Then, when the royal couple separated in 1992, the Princess’s private secretary, Patrick Jephson, asked Steve if he would dedicate himself to Diana. He was vastly experienced, personable, and had a blemish-free record – apart from one secret smash in which he rolled a royal Land Rover 360 degrees while driving along a gravel track on the Balmoral estate.

‘I’d driven castle staff out to a house out at Loch Muick to clear up after a shooting lunch. On the way home, I lost control of the Land Rover on the mountain road, we skidded left, then right, and started to roll. We flipped right over onto the roof and then flipped all the way over again so were upright. By the time we came to rest the windscreen had gone, the sunroof had shattered and so had the passenger window, glass was flying and the roof was bouncing off the dashboard because the support struts had collapsed. I had to make sure we were all still alive.

‘One of the staff was catapulted from the back section into the middle seats and had broken her wrist. The woman in the passenger seat was covered in blood, her legs were bright red. My head and wrist were gashed, but it could have been so, so much worse.’

Too remote to seek urgent help, Steve gathered up the remaining wreckage and tried to re-start the Land Rover. ‘I couldn’t believe it still worked. We drove back to Balmoral looking like something out of Mad Max,’ he says, showing the scar he still has on his inner arm. Later, royals including Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Prince Edward and Princess Anne came to inspect the Land Rover, unable to believe it had made the journey down off the mountain.

Shaken and embarrassed, Steve signed up to do a specialist off-road course. But as we know, it did not impact his career since he was the man ultimately entrusted to drive the newly single Diana.

‘She was a wonderful boss,’ he says. ‘I remember being sent to Harrods with another member of her staff, ostensibly to buy a Walkman as a gift for someone else.

‘Over and over I was asked “Steve, which one would you choose?” So I eventually I picked the model I’d have wanted for myself. When we got back from Harrods, Diana gave it to me. It was my birthday and this was my present. She loved her own Walkman so much she wanted me to have one too and this was her ruse to ensure I got the one I liked best.

‘Working for her was a joy,’ he says, ‘a compete joy. I loved her, as everyone did. I had huge respect for her and would have done anything for her. I cannot put into words my grief when she was killed.

‘All I know is that if life had taken a different trajectory, if I’d been driving her that night in Paris, she would still be here today because I would have kept her safe.’

Will Carling pretended to be my friend so he could get close to her 

Diana started to go to the Chelsea Harbour Club to work out. Will Carling the England rugby captain, left with the Princess, was a member, and always seemed to be there at the same time, Steve recalls.

‘He started chatting to me and we’d have breakfast regularly in the cafe together, drinking tea and eating Marmite on toast. We became friends, or so I thought, progressed to playing golf near his place in Kingston upon Thames.

‘I was at his stag do, laser-questing in West London. He even called me a couple of times me from the Rugby World Cup in South Africa and sent a postcard asking “How’s the Boss?’ But I came to realise that it was all about Diana, and that being with me was the guarantee he’d get to see her.

He was newly married at the time and I said to him: “Will, please be careful, don’t get too close…” I’d met his wife Julia and I knew Diana’s effect on men. Did I feel used? Yes. I did. I was pretty naive, thinking I had a friend in Will Carling. What a mug.’

Carling has always denied having an affair with the Princess although he has acknowledged ‘stupidly doing things you shouldn’t do’.

His marriage to Julia ended under the burden of the rumours in 1996.