Why I don’t believe that Diana and Dodi were ever in love

Along with millions worldwide I watched the first four new episodes of netflix’s The Crown, which linger over the final days of the relationship between Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed that led to both their deaths in a Paris tunnel.

Many have commented on the truth or otherwise of their affair — some claiming Diana was planning a new life abroad with Dodi, that he’d proposed marriage, she’d accepted and was pregnant with his child.

To which I can categorically say none of this is true. How do I know? Because a dear friend — so close to Diana he had a long phone call with her from the Ritz hotel in Paris one day before her death — told me so.

My friend met her at the Chelsea Harbour Club gym she frequented in london. She walked down the spiral staircase in her leggings as he walked up — and she coquettishly asked him: ‘What does a girl have to do to get a cup of coffee around here?’

not long afterwards he was being smuggled into her Kensington Palace home in the boot of a car to avoid security. He met the boys. He attended her memorial service at Westminster Abbey by personal invitation.

Despite my questions, he was a gentleman and never revealed how far their relationship had gone. Had he slept with her? no comment. What he did reveal is that in the phone call she told him she was sad and lonely and desperately missing her boys, William and Harry. He added that she planned to cut short her trip and come home.

What’s more, Diana told him there was never, ever, the prospect of longterm love with Dodi. Stung by the emergence of Charles and Camilla’s relationship, she’d wanted to steal the limelight as only she could.

Diana said she hoped it would make Charles and the Royal Family furious and be one in the eye for Camilla. She hoped the stories on the front pages of her cavorting with Dodi might even make her former lover, heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, jealous and rekindle their doomed affair.

She talked to my friend of her plans to come to his secluded estate in the north of England when she returned from what she called ‘this madness’.

Perhaps she was telling him what he wanted to hear, though I don’t believe so. ‘I’ve made my point, I’m coming home,’ she said.

The tragedy is that she never did.