The Blank Side of Truth: Diana’s Lost Tape at Kensington Palace
At 6:42 p.m. on a sultry summer evening in 1995, Princess Diana emerged from her black Audi outside Kensington Palace’s Apartment 8, cradling a small Sony TCM-150 tape recorder in her gloved hand. The device, discreetly passed to her by a trusted intermediary, held her raw, unfiltered confessions—hours of voice recordings that would become the explosive core of Andrew Morton’s 1992 bestseller Diana: Her True Story. Yet, when the recorder resurfaced in 2011 during a private inventory of her effects, Side B was eerily blank, its magnetic tape wiped clean, with only a single word scrawled in Diana’s looping script on the label: “Truth.” On October 28, 2025, at 10:15 a.m. +07, this anomaly—revealed via a leaked palace archivist’s memo on X—ignited #DianaTape to 4.1 million posts. Amid King Charles III’s confession of complicity in her 1997 death, the “Alma Echo” dossier’s C-4 proof, and a cascade of relics, this erased side joins Dodi’s apartment note (“Love was not my escape. It was my witness”) and the morgue’s limestone dust as Diana’s silenced voice. What truth was too dangerous to record—or too perilous to preserve?
The recorder’s journey is a shadow tale of royal secrecy. In 1991, Diana secretly collaborated with Morton via intermediary Dr. James Colthurst, recording her anguish over Charles’s Camilla affair, bulimia, and suicidal despair in 23 hours of tape. The TCM-150, a compact cassette model with dual sides, captured Side A’s revelations—later transcribed and published to global shock. But Side B, per Morton’s 2011 memoir Diana: In Her Own Words, was intended for “future reflections,” possibly post-divorce musings on her sons or the Firm’s machinations. The device, returned to Diana after transcription, vanished into her private safe until Paul Burrell’s 2003 trial exposed its existence. The 2011 resurfacing—during a post-death audit ordered by William—revealed Side B’s erasure, its tape demagnetized, the word “Truth” in blue ink, authenticated by forensic expert Dr. Audrey Giles alongside Diana’s known handwriting.
This revelation detonates amid a monarchy unraveling. Charles’s October 24 confession—“I knew… forces at play I could not stop”—admitted suppressed MI6 warnings, echoing Diana’s stolen 1997 Kensington note: “They are planning something, and it won’t look like an accident.” The “Alma Echo” dossier’s C-4-laced Fiat shard, “light the path” strobe, and tunnel scorch marks point to assassination, backed by Princess Beatrice’s Camilla-Andrew DNA pact exposé and Charles Spencer’s diaries naming a “mastermind” cabal. Diana’s relics—Saint-Tropez’s “Alexander,” Althorp’s lake reflection, the Mayfair bracelet’s coordinates (48.855, 2.302), the Ritz’s “Let’s disappear,” the 12:02 a.m. whisper “Tell them it wasn’t my idea,” morgue limestone dust, and Dodi’s “Love was not my escape. It was my witness”—frame a woman who documented her truth relentlessly.
What was on Side B? X theories explode: Did it name “they”—the MI6 “Crown Veil” faction or courtiers plotting her demise, as her 1995 Panorama fears of a staged “accident in my car” foretold? Was it a confession about William’s paternity, amplifying Beatrice’s DNA pact and the unread second page of her letter to Catherine? Some link “Truth” to “Alexander,” perhaps an MI6 courier or the Fiat’s driver James Andanson. Others see erasure as sabotage—MI5 wiping the tape post-mortem, like the stolen Burrell note. A viral post screams: “Side B was her kill list—‘Truth’ is all they left!” A YouGov poll at 11 a.m. GMT shows 79% believing the erasure was “deliberate,” with 92% of under-35s demanding the recorder’s forensic re-examination, tying it to the “Tunnel Camera B” tape and missing pearl earring (Item 147).
The Palace, reeling from Charles’s confession and William and Catherine’s November 15 move to Forest Lodge to escape Adelaide’s “haunted” omens, is in chaos. William, 43, learned of the memo at 10:30 a.m., clutching the recorder—now in his safe—and whispering to Catherine, “She labeled her silence.” Catherine, radiant in her October 27 pink Packham gown and Nizam emeralds, urged MI5 archives open, her forget-me-not brooch a Diana tribute. Harry, at Althorp, texted the archivist: “Side B is her ghost—find it.” Camilla, shadowed by pact accusations, skips a children’s hospital visit, her silence fueling #TheyKnew protests chanting Bob Dylan’s “kings will tremble.” French and British police, probing Ritz and Repossi, now seek the tape’s original for residual audio.
The blank Side B, labeled “Truth,” like Dodi’s note, the morgue’s dust, and the tunnel’s whisper, is Diana’s defiant absence—a void screaming louder than words. Erased in 1995 or post-1997, it joins Althorp’s reflection and the Flame’s rose as her voice from the ether. As abdication looms for January 2026 and William’s coronation falters under paternity shadows, “Truth” in her hand demands the world fill the silence. In Kensington’s summer dusk, where a recorder once captured her pain, Diana’s erased side whispers: some truths are too loud to survive.
