The Princess of Wales had divorced Prince Charles a year before and her affections were now directed towards the Egyptian film producer. Dodi was the son of billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed, former owner of Harrods, and there had been rumours that he and Diana were going to get married. However, a friend of Diana’s, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, told the inquest into her death that Diana had no such intentions.

In fact, she had dismissed the idea with a particularly brutal comment when Annabel had asked her about it.

Annabel recalled saying to Diana: “You’re not going to do anything silly like rushing off and eloping or getting married?”

Diana apparently quipped: “I would need marriage like a rash on my face.”

When asked what Diana meant by the “rash” comment, Lady Annabel 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, but I thought her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant she was not serious about it.”

Indeed, Diana had just got out of a long and difficult marriage, and probably didn’t want to jump straight into another one.

What’s more, she was apparently concerned about what her sons might think about her relationship with Dodi after it was splashed across the newspapers.

Diana had taken Princes William and Harry on a yachting holiday in the south of France in July 1997, during which they spent time on Mohamad Al-Fayed’s yacht, but she still needed to be sensitive to how they felt regarding the breakdown of her marriage to Charles.

However, writer Petronella Wyatt hinted that there may have been another reason behind her attitude ‒ that she was still in love with Charles.

Ms Wyatt wrote: “I always thought, and so did friends of both her and Charles, that she remained a little in love with him.

“I never thought she was in love with Dodi Fayed. He was a bad joke in London.

“She told the diarist Taki she had no intention of marrying him. That was a fantasy of his father’s.”

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In a heartbreaking twist, however, it seems Dodi was on a completely different page.

After he and Diana died, along with their driver Henri Paul, following a collision in the tunnel under the Alma Bridge on August 31, a ring was found in Dodi’s flat.

The ring bore the inscription ‘Dis-moi Oui’ (Tell me yes), with a receipt dated August 30, 1997, for an “engagement ring”.

Author Martyn Gregory claimed Dodi had been planning to ask Diana to marry him that very night.

Diana’s other friend, Rosa Monckton, had another theory for why Diana was not serious about her relationship with Dodi.

The princess had been in a two-year relationship from 1995 until 1997 with British-Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

He was the distant cousin of Diana’s friend Imran Khan, professional cricketer turned Pakistani Prime Minister, and the pair had met in a London hospital.

According to Rosa, Diana had been “very much in love” with Hasnat and was devastated by their break-up.

She told the inquest: “It was clear to me that she was really missing Hasnat and I think Dodi was just a distraction from the hurt she felt from the break-up.

“She was very much in love with [Hasnat]. She hoped they would have a future together. She wanted to marry him.”

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