Diana, Princess of Wales, was deeply and blissfully in love with Dodi Fayed, but would never have allowed herself to become pregnant outside marriage, her stepmother said yesterday.

Raine, Countess Spencer, told their inquests: “Diana was brought up in a quite old-fashioned way. I don’t personally believe she would have considered it. It would have been out of the question for her.”

The Countess, who arrived at the High Court wearing a black hat with a sombre veil, was responding to questions over whether the Princess had ever mentioned to her, as a confidante, that she was expecting Mr Fayed’s child.

She also told the coroner and the jury that the Princess was on friendly terms with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. “Her Majesty was always extremely nice to her, which she appreciated very much,” she said. “And the Duke was always extremely nice to her.”

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Ian Burnett, QC, counsel for the inquest, referred to allegations by Mr Fayed’s father, Mohamed al Fayed, the chairman of Harrods, that Prince Philip was behind a plot to murder the Princess. The Countess said: “Diana had never mentioned receiving any nasty letters from him.”

Lady Spencer said that she and Earl Spencer, the Princess’s late father, became close friends with Mr al Fayed after they were invited to launch an Escoffier cooking school at his hotel, the Ritz in Paris. Mr al Fayed was a “fantastic friend” and was very kind to her after her husband died, she said. Eventually she became a director of three Harrods companies.

She said that the Princess seemed to be in love with Mr Fayed. The Princess would confide in her because “she said I had no hidden agenda”, she added. She described Mr Fayed as “absolutely charming, very sweet, very quiet, very modest, with beautiful manners”.

After returning home from the holiday on which she met Mr Fayed, the Princess began seeing him regularly.

Lady Spencer said that the Princess was “effusive and blissful” about her relationship when they last spoke, by telephone, shortly before she died in a car crash in a Paris underpass.

“It was at that moment that I felt it was highly likely that she and Dodi would get engaged and then married,” she said. The affair should not be written off as a “summer romance” because it was “much deeper, much more profound and much closer” than that.

The Princess was obsessed by fears that a helicopter accident might befall her or the Prince of Wales, the Countess added. “She thought her telephones and her house were bugged and she was being watched,” she said.

Lady Spencer also said that the Princess was superstitious. “I know that she did go to different soothsayers, fortune-tellers, to such an extent that she forced me to do it.

“If they were so good, why didn’t one of them foretell the horrors of the accident?”

Michael Mansfield, QC, for Mr Al Fayed, pointed out that “two of them did predict it”. Lady Spencer said she did not know that, but she agreed that Diana felt she was being followed and that there was an undisclosed “they” who wanted her out of the way.

The hearings continue.

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