Bombshell video tapes of Princess Diana spilling top secrets about the Royal Family are still missing to this day.
The “People’s Princess” once spilled all in a series of intimate recordings taken after her split from Prince Charles.
Diana had hired former Coronation Street actor Peter Settelen as a voice coach to practice for future TV interviews.
She had especially taken on the £50-an-hour sessions to prepare for her famous 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir.
In that jaw-dropping interview she would reveal all about the breakdown of her marriage to Charles and the prince’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles.
Diana had let Settelen set up a video camera to record her speech lessons, so they could watch over them to look for improvements.
The lessons saw Diana practice – on camera at her Kensington Palace home at the time – what to say in the Panorama interview about her life and marriage.
In the end the footage lasted a whopping 50 hours, all filmed on 12 clips over 18 months in 1992 and 1993.
But the clips were never meant to be shown in public, and royal courtiers had previously warned Diana that Settelen might one day sell it.
In 2001 police then found seven of the reported 12 tapes during a raid on the home of Diana’s butler Paul Burrell.
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Settelen launched legal action to have them returned to him and then sold them to US network NBC, which broadcast some of the clips in 2004.
In 2007 the BBC then paid £30,000 to use excerpts in a documentary, but the move sparked controversy and the show was shelved.
Ten years later Channel 4 obtained the footage before – for the first time on British television – airing it in “Diana: In Her Own Words”.
But the controversial move was met by fury from Diana’s brother Charles Spencer, who pleaded with Channel 4 to axe the programme.
Diana’s friends also blasted it as “intrusive” and said it would hurt her son’s Princes William and Harry.
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Yet it went ahead, and the tapes that were aired would send shockwaves around the nation as the public watched the late Princess speak candidly about her life.
In the jaw-dropping clips, Diana – who died five years after the recordings were filmed in a horror car crash in Paris – admitted that she and Charles did not have sex for seven years before their split.
She claimed Prince Philip had encouraged Charles to cheat on her, telling him he could always go back to Camilla.
And she recounted how she once went sobbing to the Queen for help saving her marriage, claiming the monarch replied: “I don’t know what you should do. Charles is hopeless.”
In another tape, Diana revealed how she fell "deeply in love" with a royal protection officer – believed to Barry Mannakee who was was sacked amid rumours they slept together before he was killed in a motorbike crash weeks later.
And she said she was driven to bulimia because she did not feel she was good enough for the Royal Family.
But Diana’s series of stunning claims in these clips may be the tip of the iceberg.
It is claimed that although seven tapes were uncovered at Diana’s butler’s home, there were more clips in existence. Five more, to be exact.
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And according to royal biographer Robert Jobson, in his book Charles At Seventy: Thoughts, Hopes and Dreams, the remaining video tapes are missing.
Kevin Sim, who produced the stalled BBC documentary and was also behind the aired Channel 4 documentary, once said: “I believe we’ve got seven tapes.
“There are more, but who knows where they are and what is on them?”
The tapes remain missing to this day, and could hold further royal secrets that the world may now never hear.
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