Diana needed Dodi marriage ‘like a rash on my face’

PRINCESS DIANA confided in a close friend, days before the couple died in a car crash, that she needed marriage to Dodi Fayed “like a rash on my face”, her inquest heard yesterday.

Lady Annabel Goldsmith, 73, said she would never forget those words as it was the last thing the princess ever said to her.

Rumours were rife in the press that the princess and Dodi were about to get married and Lady Annabel raised the subject in a conversation with Diana on August 24, 1997.

“It had been splashed all over the papers. I said to her laughably, ‘you are not going to do anything silly are you?’ she told the inquest in central London

“I meant you are not going to do anything silly like rushing off and eloping or getting married and she said ‘I would need marriage like a rash on my face.’

“It was a very Diana expression,” she said.

Lady Annabel said she was in no doubt the princess was having a “wonderful” time with Dodi before they were killed in Paris.

She recalled the princess saying “she had never been so spoiled” but had also suggested marriage was not an option.

Of the rash comment, Lady Annabel told the jury: “I took it to mean that she was not serious about marriage to Dodi. She might have been having a wonderful time with him, I’m sure, but I thought her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant that she was not serious about it.”

Lady Annabel was confident the touching letters from the princess to Dodi heard by the jury last week were genuine. She said: “I always thought that Diana wrote very effusively. Her voice was always very effusive and she wrote very effusive letters.”

In one letter from the princess, beginning “Darling Dodi”, she thanked him for “bringing such joy into this chick’s life”. She had also given him a pair of cherished cufflinks which were a gift from her father.

“She did not offer me any cufflinks but she did write very loving letters,” Lady Annabel commented.

The letters were produced by Harrods boss Mohamed al Fayed, who insists the princess was pregnant and the couple were murdered as they were about to announce their engagement.

But there was no chance that Diana was pregnant when she died, according to Lady Annabel. The hearing was adjourned to today.