Diana needed marriage to Dodi ‘like a rash’

Princess Diana told a close friend that she needed marriage to Dodi Fayed "like a rash on my face" just days before the couple died in a car crash, the inquest into the deaths of the couple heard this morning. Lady Annabel Goldsmith said she would never forget those words - it was the last thing the Princess ever said to her. At the time rumours had been rife that the pair were about to get married and Lady Annabel raised the subject when Diana came to stay at her country home.

"It had been splashed all over the papers," she told the jury. "I said to her laughably, 'You are not going to do anything silly are you?' 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."
 
The 73-year-old socialite was a close confidante of Diana, who saw her regularly at Annabel's, the Mayfair nightclub named after her, and at her home at Ormeley Lodge, a Georgian mansion on the edge of Richmond Park. Lady Annabel, who is the mother of socialite Jemima Khan and Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith, said she was in no doubt that the Princess enjoyed her summer with Dodi and recalled the Princess saying "she had never been so spoiled", but that it was clear marriage to Dodi was not an option. ·