Truth behind Prince Harry’s final birthday present from Diana weeks after tragic death

Prince Harry will no doubt celebrate his 40th birthday tomorrow with his closest relatives and friends.

But one family member who he probably wishes he could be sharing his special day with is his late mother Princess Diana. Harry was just 12 when she died aged just 36 following a car crash in Paris, which left the world in shock.

Just two weeks after her untimely death, Harry officially turned a teenager and celebrated his 13th birthday. At that time, he had just returned to his boarding school, Ludgrove, after the summer holidays and was trying to adjust to his new heartbreaking reality of life without his beloved mum.

In his new memoir Spare, he reveals how he enjoyed a birthday cake and sorbet at the school before being presented with a gift by his aunt, Diana’s sister Sarah McCorquodale. And he says that the gift was an X-box games console that Diana had bought for him before she had died and had been planning to give him on his special day.

He details how he tore off the wrapping paper to reveal the games console and was told how his mum bought it for him. Harry writes: “It was an Xbox. I was happy; I loved video games.”

However, those who have read his memoir have pointed out that the Xbox wasn’t actually available to buy until four years later. Released in 2001, Xbox was Microsoft’s first entry into the world of console electronic gaming, which placed it in direct competition with Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Nintendo’s GameCube.

But as Harry couches in his autobiography: “That’s the story, anyway. It’s appeared in many accounts of my life, as gospel, and I have no idea if it’s true. Pa said Mummy hurt her head, but perhaps I was the one with brain damage? As a defence mechanism, most likely, my memory was no longer recording things quite as it once did.”