MY HERO, or perhaps I should say my heroine, is Princess Diana. I remember seeing her for the first time when I was a school girl of about 10 years old. She was 19 and had just got engaged to Prince Charles. To me she seemed like a fairytale princess who had won her prince. And she was beautiful.

When she married, I watched it in amazement on the television, in awe at her dress.

All my school friends thought the same.

We all bought into the romantic notion. I think everyone did and maybe we needed it as an escape. She was the patron saint of single girls. If she could do it then there was hope for us all. It's the stuff of romantic fiction. Only it was a real-life fairytale.

In 1992, when Andrew Morton brought out her autobiography it was serialised in The Sunday Times and I was completely shocked at the revelations. I read that Charles had been having an affair with Camilla Parker Bowles all through his marriage to Diana, that she didn't believe she would ever be queen, and that she was so unhappy she had attempted suicide five times. I remember seeing the editor of The Sunday Times on TV and he was also profoundly shocked, ?How can this be true?" he asked. ?She always seems to be smiling?"

And it's true; she was always smiling and that was one of the most likable things about her. No matter what her pain, she put on a front; she was actually an amazing actress. I realise she may have been borderline obsessive. With one particular boyfriend, for example, hundreds of nuisance phone calls were reportedly found on his wife's mobile phone. But she was human and I admired her honesty, her openness about everything, even her health problems; very few people were admitting to being bulimic at the time.

She could have taken the easy path, stayed quiet and acted the part the royal family wanted her to. Back then the House of Windsor was untouchable and you have to applaud Diana because she blew the whistle on them. I think they expected her to put-up and shut-up. She didn't take that lying down, however, and she was up against some of the best PR in the world.

I was absolutely bowled over by her in the Panorama interview she did in 1995. I remember thinking she's either an amazing actress or she's telling the truth, and it turns out that she was telling the truth. She was such a brave, caring person; a genuine humanitarian who cuddled Aids' victims and really cared for their welfare.

I've always been one for a good conspiracy theory, and it's interesting that her butler Paul Burrows says that she was always prescient about her life. She attended psyches and clairvoyants, and she used to say she would last 15 years and no more in her role as princess. What's more, she knew that Charles would one day marry MCamilla. Supposedly she wrote to Burrows and told him that she would probably be done away with. A car crash had been foreseen by one of the psyches she attended, but the details were vague. She used to say, ?One of these days I'll go up in a helicopter and I won't come back down."

I do believe Diana was murdered. I've read all I can get my hands on about it and everything points to the same theory. Paul Burrows in fact claims the queen told him that there was some dark force at play. It's also more than a coincidence that every single security camera on the stretch of road where her car crashed happened to be turned off that night. What's more, despite a city-wide search, the owner of the white Renault that crashed into the Mercedes in which she was travelling was never found.

When the car eventually turned up, the driver was dead . . . he'd died of asphyxiation.

It's interesting too that Mohammad Al Fayed has never let go of the theory and when you think about it he has no reason to carry it on unless there's some truth to it.

I think Diana was just too much of a threat to the royal family. She was a loose cannon who had to be stopped. But of course she was more than that; she was a woman who fought back against the odds, who refused to be silent. She was strong and elegant and good.

Even when Charles and Camilla married last year, the brass band had to start playing to drown out the crowd's booing. She's still fighting back from beyond the grave . . .

rocking the foundations of the House of Windsor. She's still the people's princess.