HOW CLUMSY DODI LED DI TO TRAGEDY BOOK BARES DETAILS OF FATEFUL ROMANCE

Trevor Rees-Jones was the only person to emerge alive from the crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. In an exclusive interview and an excerpt from his book The Bodyguards Story in the next issue of People magazine, Rees-Jones, 32, offers an intimate glimpse into the couples whirlwind romance, the hours leading up to

Trevor Rees-Jones was the only person to emerge alive from the crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed. In an exclusive interview and an excerpt from his book “The Bodyguard’s Story” in the next issue of People magazine, Rees-Jones, 32, offers an intimate glimpse into the couple’s whirlwind romance, the hours leading up to the crash, and his break with Mohamed al-Fayed, his employer and Dodi’s father.

BODYGUARD Trevor Rees-Jones

thought you could almost taste,

how badly Dodi Fayed wanted to impress Princess Diana.

It was the summer of 1997 and the playboy and the princess were enjoying the first days of a sun-soaked vacation at his family’s estate in the south of France.

At the time, Dodi was engaged to American model Kelly Fisher, but she had been shunted aside — hidden away on family boats — while he wooed Di on his father’s luxury yacht.

Rees-Jones saw the princess as “very bubbly, very easygoing” and surprisingly down-to-earth away from the trappings of royal life.

But Dodi, he noticed, believed he had to pull out all the stops for the most famous woman in the world — and the result was a rather clumsy courtship.

After dinner one evening, he took Diana, her sons and the rest of the entourage to a nightclub. He had rented out the whole room — a bold gesture that backfired.

Rees-Jones remembers it as an “empty, tacky little place” where the group sat alone, sipping drinks and taking a few turns on the vacant dance floor.

“It was an embarrassingly sterile environment,” the bodyguard said. “What a way to impress a princess.”

THE next day, Diana laughed along with the others about Dodi “having two left hooves” — but the sometime movie producer must have been doing something right.

Just a few weeks later, he and Diana spent six days alone on the yacht, the Jonikal. Then it was off to Sardinia for a quick break. A third voyage on the yacht soon followed.

The paparazzi were glued to the yacht on this final trip, but Diana managed to remain light-hearted about their presence. Dodi, on the other hand, was “getting uptight” about the scrutiny.

Trevor believed he knew why his boss felt under the gun. “He’s too desperate to have things go smoothly to impress the princess,” he thought at the time.

That drive to impress led to a night that could have been ripped from a Monty Python sketch.

At Dodi’s instructions, the staff set up a beachfront barbecue on an island off Sardinia — complete with a chef in a tall white hat and a butler wearing a black bow tie.

“The butler spread blankets, smoothing away every twig and pebble, and hid three small tables under a damask cloth to create a full-sized dining table, aglow with candles,” the book says.

Rees-Jones sat on some rocks in the distance — amazed as he watched Dodi and Diana sip wine before a blazing bonfire.

“How in the hell has he ever landed this woman?” Rees-Jones wondered.

AFEW days later, on Aug. 30, the lovebirds were off to Paris — to open a new and fateful chapter in their fledgling romance.

From the start, Rees-Jones was worried about security. He felt Dodi had been alarmingly blasé about his and Diana’s safety, even as the spotlight on them burned ever brighter.

On the third yacht trip, Dodi had kept Rees-Jones in the dark about their destination. The bodyguard had tried to call in more security from Mohamed al-Fayed’s headquarters, but was rebuffed.

He’d had no chance to prepare for a move to Paris — and got an unsettling taste of what was to come almost as soon as they arrived in the City of Lights.

Motorcycle paparazzi surrounded their car as they made their way from the airport to al-Fayed’s Ritz hotel. Dodi told his driver, Philippe Dourneau, to step on it and get away from the fotogs.

Once at the hotel, there was a whirlwind of activity: Diana had her hair done, Dodi went to the Repossi jewelry store, then the couple went back to Dodi’s Champs-Elysées apartment to dress for dinner.

They had planned to eat at a restaurant, but changed their minds when they saw the paparazzi massed outside. Instead, they decided to head back to the Ritz — again with no security preparation.

“It was 9:50 p.m. as the car pulled up. Trevor raced to the car’s rear door and opened it, ready to block for the couple as they rushed through the revolving doors and inside,” the book says.

“Dodi paused. The couple didn’t move. It was like a freeze-frame in the movies. What was Dodi bloody doing?”

BY the time Dodi got moving again, the photographers had swarmed all over the car — and he was pointing fingers.

“How the f– did this fiasco happen?” he spat at bodyguard Kez Wingfield. “Why didn’t you have the reception arranged?”

Wingfield tried not to lose his temper.

“You never told us where you were going,” he explained. “If you had, we’d have been able to phone ahead and get it sorted out.”

The experience had badly frayed Diana’s nerves. She and Dodi were in the Ritz restaurant for only a few minutes before she emerged teary-eyed.

“We’ll be eating in, go get yourselves some food,” Dodi told his bodyguards as he and Diana headed into the Imperial Suite.

DOWNSTAIRS, Rees-Jones and Wingfield were joined by Henri Paul, al-Fayed’s assistant head of security at the Ritz.

He was drinking something yellow that they assumed was juice — but was actually the latest in a series of cocktails he downed during the evening, along with two prescription drugs.

Paul left the bodyguards drinking seltzer at the bar. When he turned up again, at around 11:30 p.m., he had a disturbing message.

“The plan’s been changed,” he told them.

“We’ll be leaving from the back, with just one car. Dodi wants me to drive. The other two cars will leave from the front, to divert the paparazzi. He doesn’t want a bodyguard.”

Rees-Jones was stunned.

“You aren’t leaving without security,” he responded. “I’ll be coming.”

THE bodyguard remembers little of what followed.

Looking out the back of the Ritz, he saw a small, light-colored hatchback car. As the Mercedes carrying him, Dodi, Diana and Paul pulled away, the hatchback crossed the road and followed.

Minutes later, the Mercedes was speeding through the Alma Tunnel. It slammed into a white Fiat Uno and a concrete pillar and then spun around and smacked into the wall.

Dodi and Paul were killed instantly. Diana was mortally injured. Rees-Jones, who had smashed his face and chest against the dashboard, suffered massive, gruesome injuries.

It wasn’t until 10 days later that the ex-paratrooper — who underwent 11 hours of surgery to repair his shattered face — learned from his parents that he was the sole survivor.

He pointed to letters on an alphabet chart: D-O-D-I.

“He is dead,” they told him.

Then he spelled out the princess’ name.

“Yes, she’s dead, too.”

HIS recovery was slow and painful, and the process was only made more difficult by the behavior of his employer, al-Fayed.

Immediately after the crash, the mogul had given Wingfield a hint of his theory about what happened.

“I hope the British government is satisfied now,” he told the aghast guard when he learned of Diana’s death.

Soon, it was all he wanted to talk about.

“Every time he talked about the crash, he got quite passionate and upset,” Rees-Jones said. “He waved his arms and went on about conspiracies and told me that he has his own investigation going.”

Rees-Jones was further distressed by al-Fayed’s far-fetched claims about Diana’s last words and her supposed engagement to his son — and he felt the pressure on him mounting.

“His main thing then was to prove this wasn’t an accident,” the guard said of a February 1998 meeting at which al-Fayed complained about the giant holes in his memory.

WITHIN two months, on the advice of a lawyer who said al-Fayed was trying to pin liability for the accident on him, Rees-Jones resigned from the security team.

That decision was vindicated in August, when al-Fayed went public with his allegations that the “incompetent” bodyguards triggered the accident.

Rees-Jones — who now lives in a modest home near his parents and works for a local security firm — calls al-Fayed’s claims “extraordinary.”

But he also admits that a sense of “moral responsibility” still clings to him.

“It’s not so-called survivor’s guilt,” he said. “It’s the fact that I was paid to look after Dodi and his guest, and they died on my shift. I’ve got this hanging over me for the rest of my life.

“A couple of times I felt if I had died instead of them it would have been much easier,” he said.

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