Princess Diana dismissed talk that she planned to wed Dodi Fayed days before the couple's fatal car crash, saying she wanted marriage "like a rash on the face," one of her long-term friends said Monday. Lady Annabel Goldsmith added she did not think Diana was pregnant when she died, as claimed by Dodi's father Mohamed al-Fayed.
Al-Fayed, the millionaire owner of Harrods department store, says the couple were killed as part of a British establishment plot. Referring to suggestions that Dodi and Diana were to marry, Goldsmith told their inquest at London's High Court: "It had been splashed all over the papers. 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.'" And she added: "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."
Goldsmith, referring to conversations with Diana during a trip by the princess to the 73-year-old's country home, said there was no chance that Diana was pregnant when she died. "I would say impossible. There was a reason for that (belief)," she said, adding that something had happened during her visit.
Although she did not elaborate, another friend of Diana, Rosa Monckton, said last week that Diana had had her period 10 days before the crash. Diana, Fayed and driver Henri Paul were all killed in the crash in a Paris underpass shortly after they left the Ritz hotel in the early hours of August 31, 1997.
Separate French and British investigations both concluded that the crash was caused by Paul being over the legal alcohol limit and driving too fast. Dodi's father Mohamed al-Fayed maintains they were killed because the British establishment did not want Diana, the mother to the heir to the throne, to marry a Muslim.