Princess Diana’s Hidden Face

Having spent vast tracts of my youth poring over reports of her every move while she was alive, it was lost interest in Diana, Princess of Wales — and any conspiracy theories attached to her life and death — pretty much the moment she was buried.


As the stories emerged of her less-than-honest, less-than-sane, less-than-always-likeable approach to life, I think people began to feel a bit cheated — and a bit foolish for having mourned her as vociferously as they did.

But I must admit the Diana inquiry has thrown me. Lord Stevens’s long-awaited report released last week tried to lay those conspiracy theories to rest once and for all. He delivered his conclusions with a great fanfare of certainty: the death of the princess was “a tragic accident”.

Once again I was hooked on Diana. But this time not for the clichéd speculation about paparazzi and pregnancy. I was gripped by the picture of her that emerged from her friends — some of whom have never spoken publicly about the princess they knew so well.

The endless loony-toon carping by Mohamed al-Fayed about the relationship of his son Dodi with Diana has led us down a blind alley for years. In fact, according to Stevens’s inquiry, the real love of her life was not Dodi but a little-known doctor from the Royal London hospital.

She had met Hasnat Khan, a softly spoken Pakistani heart surgeon, in 1995 while visiting a friend at the hospital. At the height of their affair, she had kept a picture of him on her bedside table and had introduced him to the princes.

Far from being a friendless, haunted pariah, driven half mad by the evil machinations of the royal family and MI5, Diana had a grounded circle of confidantes who kept their counsel to the last — it took an official inquiry to hear their, real, version of events.

Through the testimony of her elder sister, Lady Sarah McCorquodale, and close friend Jemima Khan, we learn that Diana did seriously consider converting to Islam — but not in order to marry Dodi Fayed. It was Dr Khan she had in mind and after tidying up his tiny Chelsea flat she would read back to him what she had spent the day learning about his religion.

This was no whim. When Diana visited Jemima, then living in Pakistan, ostensibly to support Imran Khan’s cancer charity, she was really there to pay her respects to Hasnat’s family, particularly his all-important mother. McCorquodale, who describes herself as the princess’s “top confidante”, tells us that Diana had no plans whatsoever to marry Dodi — he was a summer fling, a bit of fun, perhaps a distraction from the anguish of realising things could never work out with Khan.>