Diana’s mother ‘called her a whore for sleeping with Muslim men’
The mother of Princess Diana called her a ‘whore’ for dating Muslim men, her inquest has heard.
Frances Shand Kydd made the ‘disgraceful’ comment when she discovered her daughter was in a serious relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.
The pair did not speak again before Diana died two months later, according to her butler Paul Burrell.
The sensational revelation came on the day that he told how:
• Diana was planning to marry Dr Khan;
• Her romance with Dodi Fayed was just a ’30-day’ fling;
• Prince Philip did write ‘cutting’ letters to the princess but would not have ordered her murder;
• The Queen warned him of mysterious ‘powers at work’ – but he had no idea what she meant. The 49-year-old former butler revealed that Diana’s bitter conversation with her mother happened in June 1997, during the last throes of her relationship with Dr Khan and just two months before she and Dodi died in Paris.
Mr Burrell told the High Court that the princess had held up the phone as they sat together on the sofa of her Kensington Palace apartment so that he could hear her mother’s rant.
He said Mrs Shand Kydd, who died in 2004, was a ‘formidable lady’ who often expressed herself ‘in extremely forceful terms about Diana’s consorts, especially if they were Muslim’.
Asked to describe what he had heard on that particular day, he hesitated.
It was only when the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, interjected, saying: ‘This is relevant’, that Mr Burrell replied: ‘Well, she called the princess a whore and she said that she was messing around with f****** Muslim men and she was disgraceful. She said some very nasty things.’
Mohamed Al Fayed’s barrister, Michael Mansfield, asked: ‘It was shortly after one of these telephone calls that the princess decided she did not want to talk to her mother again?’
Interestingly, while members of the ruling class in England simpered and whined in private about Diana’s actions, it is understood that Hasnat Khan’s family disapproved of the relationship. Aside from being an infidel, Diana was too famous and the romance distracted Dr Khan from his medical practice.