KEY POINTS:
LONDON - Princess Diana told one of her closest friends just days before she was killed with her lover Dodi al-Fayed that she needed marriage "like a rash on my face," an inquest into their deaths was told on Monday.
Lady Annabel Goldsmith, 73, said she would never
forget those striking words because it was one of the last things Diana said to her before her death in a Paris car crash in 1997.
Because Diana's relationship with Fayed had been splashed all over the newspapers, Goldsmith asked her laughingly: "You are not doing anything silly are you ... You are not doing anything silly like rushing off and eloping or getting married?"
Diana replied: "Annabel, I need marriage like a rash on my face."
But Diana did tell her "she was having the most wonderful time and that she had never been so spoilt."
Asked about the quip about the rash, Goldsmith said: "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 she was - but I thought that her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant, you know, that she was not serious about it."
Dodi's father Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of the Harrods in London, says Diana and his son were killed by security services on the orders of Prince Philip.
He alleges the killing was ordered because the royal family did not want the mother of the future king having a child with his son. He says Diana's body was embalmed to cover up evidence she was expecting a baby.
The inquest was told that French police investigating the crash never once suggested that their deaths were anything but a tragic accident.
Retired Detective Chief Superintendent Jeff Rees, the liaison office between Paris police probing the deaths and Scotland Yard police headquarters in London, said he kept posing that question every time he met French detectives.
He said the answer he got very time "was always an unequivocal 'No.'"
The inquest, expected to last up to six months, was opened after major British and French police investigations, both of which concluded the crash happened because chauffeur, Henri Paul, was drunk and driving too fast.
- REUTERS
