Diana, Princess of Wales, told a confidante that she needed to marry Dodi Fayed like she needed "a rash on my face” shortly before the couple's deaths, the High Court was told today.

Lady Annabel Goldsmith, of Annabel’s nightclub fame, said she remembered the words clearly as they came in her last conversation with the Princess days before she died in car crash in a Paris tunnel.

Lady Annabel, 73, a former wife of the entrepreneur James Goldsmith, said she was sure Diana was having a wonderful time with Mr Fayed, but evidence that they were set to marry was wide of the mark.

Last week the inquest into the deaths saw love letters written by the Princess addressed to her “Darling Dodi”, she thanked him profusely for “bringing such joy into this particular chick’s life”.

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Lady Annabel was confident the letters were genuine, but said that she often wrote with such passion. “I always thought that Diana wrote very effusively. Her voice was always very effusive and she wrote very effusive letters,” she said.

Shortly before the couple died in Paris on August 31, 1997, newspaper reports were full of rumours suggesting that an engagement was imminent. Lady Annabel said that she asked Diana if the speculation was true.

She told the inquest in central London: “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.’ It was a very Diana expression.”

“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.”

She recalled the Princess saying “she had never been so spoiled” but had also suggested that marriage was not an option.

Mohamed al Fayed, Dodi’s father and the owner of Harrods, insists that the couple were murdered because Diana was pregnant and they were planning to marry.

Lady Annabel suggested there was no chance that Diana was pregnant when she died.

“I would say impossible. There was a reason for that,” she said confirming that something had happened while she visited the Princess soon before she died. “I’m confident, on the face of it, that she would not have been [pregnant].”

A Paris jeweller, however, claimed last week that Mr Fayed told him a few weeks before his death that he and Diana were going to get engaged.

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