Princess Diana dreamt of becoming a world-renowned documentary film-maker living in Australia, New Idea can reveal. Her greatest wish was to settle down with the 'love of her life' - Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who she met in London in 1995.

'She wanted to lift Hasnat from the annoying grind and insane hours of the Brompton Hospital and into some place where they could live together in sunny exile with a swimming pool in Australia,' Tina Brown claims in her explosive new book
The Diana Chronicles.

In the months before her tragic death, Diana discussed plans to forge a career in TV, highlighting global issues. She planned to make a program every two years, each one the centrepiece of a humanitarian campaign.

Having raised the awareness of a problem - such as illiteracy or AIDS - a structure would be put in place to tackle it. This plan was a forerunner of initiatives such as those of Al Gore or Bill Gates.

But the night of August 31, 1997, when the princess died in a Paris car crash with lover Dodi Fayed, ended her dream of
a new career - and a new life Down Under.

As the 10th anniversary of her death approaches, the knowledge that Diana had so much more to give lends a poignant backdrop to celebrations of her life.

Diana, who once described herself as 'thick as a plank' and without academic qualifications, plotted her TV future with businesswoman and author Shirley Conran. 'She wanted professional fulfilment,' Shirley tells top author Tina Brown.

'She wanted to do something showing she wasn't an idiot.'
Tina says Diana was inspired by a documentary about her work highlighting the slaughter of innocents by landmines in Africa.
'She was very excited about all these future projects,' Tina claims.

But while Diana had new goals to aim for, her private life in the mid-1990s was still in turmoil, with the thought that people were out to get her. When her friend Gianni Versace was murdered in July 1997, Diana was holidaying in the Mediterranean on the acht Jonikal, owned by Dodi's father Mohamed Al Fayed. Dodi's bodyguard Lee Sansum found Diana on the deck early in the morning, gazing sadly out to sea.

'Do you think they'll do that to me?' she asked him. Earlier, on holiday in Rome, Diana startled her Argentine friend Roberto Devorik when she saw a photo of Prince Philip hanging on a wall.
'He hates me. He really hates me and would like to see me disappear,' she said. She told Roberto she would end up dead in a fake accident. 'I'm a threat in their eyes. They only use me when they need me for official functions and then they drop me again in the darkness.'

'They're not going to kill me by poisoning me or in a big plane, where others will get hurt. They'll do it when I'm in a small plane, in a car when I'm driving, or in a helicopter.' When Roberto asked why she didn't have bodyguards, she told him they spied on her.
Australian author Clive James adds: 'She saw the protectors as assailants. It seemed to me, she would rather have gone down in a hail of broken glass than live in fear.'

According to Tina, whose book is being serialised in America's Vanity Fair, Diana was not speaking with her mother or former sister-in-law Fergie when she died.

The Duchess of York had been 'sent to Siberia' for revealing in her book that after borrowing a pair of shoes from Diana, she'd ended up catching a verruca. Her mother Frances Shand-Kydd was against Diana's relationship with Hasnat, who she criticised because he was a 'Pakistani and a Muslim'.

According to Tina, the relationship with Hasnat 'was the most fulfilling Diana had ever had'. The princess confided to a friend: 'I found my peace. He's given me all I need.'

Diana fell in love at first sight with the workaholic heart surgeon when she met him on a visit to London's Royal Brompton Hospital. Some of her happiest days were spent at his modest, untidy flat, ironing his shirts, or popping on Marks & Spencer microwave meals for the pair of them.

Diana truly wanted to wed 'Natty' and sometimes talked into the night with her good friend Jemima Khan, then married to Pakistan cricket legend Imran Khan, about being the wife of a Muslim. Diana wanted to take Hasnat away from London and live with him in Australia, where he'd worked before with the famous surgeon Victor Chang.

But there were two problems. Hasnat couldn't face a future as the husband of the world's most famous woman. And his strictly traditional family regarded her as an outsider. Tina concludes: 'It was one of the ironies of Diana's life that she was searching to replace her dysfunctional family with one that didn't want her.'
And in the time following her devastation at the loss of her great love, Diana drifted into the summer romance with Dodi Fayed that ultimately sealed her fate.

By Phil Dampier

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