Diana's letters to Dodi read out

In one letter, thanking "Darling Dodi" for a six-day holiday on his yacht, Diana wrote: "This comes with all the love in the world and as always a million heartfelt thanks for bringing such joy into this chick's life."

And in another, sending him some cufflinks, she wrote: "Darling Dodi, these cufflinks were the very last gift from the man I loved most in the world, my father."

She added: "They are given to you as I know how much joy it would give him to know they were in such safe and special hands. Fondest love, Diana."

The princess's friend and confidante, Rosa Monckton, was asked by Michael Mansfield QC, for Mr al Fayed: "She was treating this relationship with Dodi as a serious matter wasn't she? It doesn't suggest it was little more than a fling after a couple of days."

Ms Monckton said: "She tended to speak and write in an extravagant way."

But she agreed the letters were not just written to make someone happy. "It was clearly more than that," she told the inquest jury inquiring into the deaths of Diana and Dodi in a car crash in Paris 10 years ago.

Ms Monckton gave evidence that Diana told her she would still have been in a relationship with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan but for the fact that he could not cope with the limelight of publicity and had ended their friendship.

Mr Mansfield suggested that Diana ended the relationship because she was in love with Dodi. Ms Monckton said that was not what Diana told her.

Counsel asked if Diana had misled her about what happened "because she was concerned about your hostility and animosity towards Mohamed al Fayed". Ms Monckton said: "She was not misleading me. We talked about it a lot."