Princess Diana

Perhaps the only thing more curious than the hazy details surrounding Princess Diana’s fatal car crash is the glacial pace by which new information about the actual woman trickles forth. Today’s news remains true to form. One of the late H.R.H.’s closest friends, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, just delivered some interesting testimony in London’s High Court. Contrary to repeated claims by Mohamed al-Fayed—owner of Harrods department store and father of Diana’s then-boyfriend, Dodi, also killed in the crash—the princes considered marrying Mr. Fayed an impossibility.

As part of the continuing, formal inquest into the cause of the couple’s death, Ms. Goldsmith, 73, recalled an intimate conversation the two once had. “[Speculation of their engagement] had been splashed all over the papers. I said to her laughably, ‘You are not going to do anything silly are you?'” she recalled, clarifying: “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.’”

Going on to snuff rumors that Diana was pregnant when she was killed, Ms. Goldsmith testified that that notion, too, is “impossible.” This belief, she said, is held because of something that happened when the Princess was visiting her home not long before her death—presumably something of a biological nature.  read more »

Today, at an inquest into Princess Diana’s death in 1997, Thomas Treasure, the former president of the European Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery, said that the late monarch may have survived the high-speed crash in a Parisian tunnel had the medics at the site not wasted so much time. Mr. Treasure, speaking in London’s High Court, called the critical minutes in question (which may add up to a sum of 30) a “window of opportunity,” adding that the emergency crews did “very substantial good” when they first arrived on the scene of the crash. After the injured princess was loaded into the ambulance, however, Mr. Treasure testified that “opportunities were lost …When I pick through this with the benefit of hindsight [and ask], ‘Was this recoverable?’ The answer is yes, it just about was.”

Diana may have survived but for lost time, surgeon says [AFP]

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Tina Brown’s new biography of her apparent longtime girl crush, the doomed Princess of Wales, is that one doesn’t feel totally embarrassed reading it.  read more »