Princess Diana secretly arranged to have tabloid newspapers delivered to her while she was a member of the royal family, according to her longtime hairdresser.

Richard Dalton tells PEOPLE that Diana asked him to “smuggle” the papers in because of restrictions she faced inside the palace. “She wasn’t allowed to see the tabloid newspapers,” he tells PEOPLE.

“One of the hairdressers smuggled them in,” Dalton shares with a laugh. “Did I say that? They were smuggled in, but it’s not to do with me,” he adds jokingly.

“She used to say, ‘Richard, can you bring them in for me?’ ” Dalton recalls the princess asking. “Nobody questioned it because nobody knew. Once I’d got through security and into the pantry, it was all plain sailing from there.”

Dalton, who met Diana for the first time in 1978 and served as her official hairdresser from 1981 to 1990, says the tabloid coverage of the princess often distressed and “annoyed” both him and her.

“I’d be doing her hair, she’d be flipping through the pages [of a tabloid], and she’d go, ‘Ugh,’ ” Dalton recalls, imitating a groan. The princess would “then throw it to the side,” he says.

“Then another one comes along and then [she’d go], ‘Ohhhhhh,’ ” he adds with a sigh.

One of the tabloid rumors that hurt Diana the most centered on the parentage of her youngest son, Prince Harry, according to Dalton.

“They always [went] on about, ‘Is Charles the father of Harry?’” Dalton says of the tabloid speculation surrounding King Charles (then Prince Charles). “Of course he is.”

Tabloids ran countless stories during Diana’s lifetime claiming that Major James Hewitt — with whom Diana began an affair in the years after Harry was born — was her youngest son’s father because both Hewitt and the young prince had red hair.

Dalton, however, knew that red hair was common in Diana’s family, having cut both her sisters’ and brother’s hair.

“Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, when I used to cut his hair, his hair was bright red,” Dalton remembers. “Lady Sarah, also red,” he notes of Diana’s oldest sister. “The Spencers definitely had red hair. But at that time, I wasn’t in a position to actually say, ‘Hello, Charles Spencer’s hair was red.’ “

Dalton has been sharing his memories of the late princess with the encouragement of his friend Renae Plant.

In 2024, the Scottish-born coiffeur published a memoir, It’s All About the Hair — My Decade with Diana, with Plant’s help. As founder of The Princess Diana Museum, she has devoted herself to preserving Diana’s legacy.

Plant tells PEOPLE that the idea to create the museum came to her in the wake of Diana’s death.

“I felt like she was being whitewashed from history really quickly to make way for Camilla,” Plant says, referring to King Charles’ second wife. “I feel like that’s when I got the motivation to really try to honor her life and legacy in a way where no one else seemed to be doing.”

Plant adds that she wrote to Prince William and Prince Harry about her intention to create a museum dedicated to Diana. “They wrote back and said, ‘Thank you,’ and kind of gave me their blessing,” she remembers. “I would not have done it if it weren’t for them knowing that I was honoring their mother.”

Plant launched the virtual Princess Diana Museum in 2019, and the collection — which houses more than 2,700 of Diana’s personal and historical items — is considered one of the largest of its kind in the world.

The collection will make its first physical exhibition in Los Angeles, California, in November 2026. After a six-month stay, it will tour the U.S. before moving on to Canada, parts of Asia, Australia and then Europe. Plant wants the museum to ultimately find a permanent home in the U.K. to honor Diana.