Diana's last phone calls show her fears about Camilla

As a long-standing royal correspondent, British journalist Richard Kay was lucky enough to have the ear of the Princess of Wales.

Over his years of reporting on her marriage with Charles, he and Diana had built up a good rapport, and it wasn’t uncommon for her to ring him for a lengthy chat.

Coincidently, she did just that a couple of hours before her untimely death 20 years ago today, and spoke of hopefully carrying her work of landmine eradication further.

Writing for the Daily Mail, Richard recounts that the father of Diana’s boyfriend Dodi Fayed, had wanted her to help create a charity fund for victims of landmines, as well as a series of hospices for children around the world, starting in his home country of Egypt.

Richard also remembers pressing Diana about her relationship with Dodi a few days earlier, and her immediately shutting down the idea of impending wedding bells.

“I’ve just got out of one marriage and I need another one like a hole in the head,” she said.

Diana was also concerned about the increasingly public nature of Charles’ relationship with her former love rival Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Richard recounts that she said, “How am I going to deal with it? What happens if they marry? I am fed up being constantly compared to Charles and Camilla.”

“She’s really not a nice woman.”

After the breakdown of her marriage with Charles, Diana famously said, “there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded”, referring to the Prince of Wales’ affair with his ex Camilla.

He later publicly admitted to being unfaithful to his wife after their relationship began to crumble, but for Diana, it started even before she walked down the aisle.

A fortnight before their wedding day, Diana got into a fierce row with Charles after she allegedly found a present he was giving to Camilla.

Charles was actually giving jewellery to a number of women who had played significant roles in his life as a bachelor, and his ex girlfriend Camilla was just one of them.

Diana recounted the incident in recorded tapes given to her auto biographer Andrew Morton.

“Anyway, someone in his office told me that my husband had had a bracelet made for her, which she wears to this day. It's a gold chain bracelet with a blue enamel disc,” she said.

“I walked into this man's office one day and said: 'Oh, what's in that parcel?' He said: 'Oh, you shouldn't look at that.' I said: 'Well, I'm going to look at it.'

“I opened it and there was a bracelet, and I said: 'I know where this is going.' I was devastated. This was about two weeks before we got married. He said: 'Well, he's going to give it to her tonight.'

“So rage, rage, rage! 'Why can't you be honest with me?' But no, [Charles] cut me absolutely dead. It's as if he had made his decision, and if it wasn't going to work, it wasn't going to work. He'd found the virgin, the sacrificial lamb”.

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