Diana 'against Charles being King'

She told divorce lawyers she thought the crown should skip a generation past the Prince of Wales to their son William.

Solicitors Maggie Rae and Sandra Davis also told the hearing at the High Court in London of how Diana spoke often of her fears that she would be killed.

The pair were present at a meeting in October 1995 with Diana, her long-standing lawyer Lord Mishcon and private secretary Patrick Jephson when she spoke of her conviction that a possible car accident was being planned.

Lord Mishcon, who has since died, had an account of the meeting - dubbed the "Mishcon note" - typed up shortly afterwards and later handed it to police. The note also details how Diana believed the Queen was about to abdicate the following year.

The inquest later heard from former butler Paul Burrell, who had returned from a dash across England to retrieve a letter behind one of Diana's final "secrets" - only to announce he had left it in America.

But his much vaunted "secret" - raised at the her inquest on Monday - turned out to be no secret at all, the coroner revealed.

Mr Burrell returned from a 382-mile round trip to his home in Farndon, Cheshire, bleary-eyed after two hours' sleep, to reveal that the letter was not there.

In a note to the coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, he disclosed what the "secret" had been. But the coroner told him in open court: "(There is) not in fact one secret but two secrets and you describe them to me in the letter. But having examined the matter it doesn't seem to me that they are secrets at all.

"Both pieces of information are fairly and squarely in the public domain in way or another, one of them indeed appears in your book The Way We Were."