In his recorded tour of Althorp, Charles, Diana's younger brother and the ninth Earl Spencer, recalls how his father would stand him before a painting of one royal courtesan and explain that the flowers surrounding her represented her lovers. A whole wall is dedicated to the paintings of Charles II's mistresses - the "Windsor Beauties". This is the environment which shaped the Princess of Wales. So much of her life is less surprising in its context. In the only interview to mark his sister's fifth anniversary, Spencer told The Guardian: "I think there was a feeling among those who were never Diana supporters of 'let's marginalise her and tell people she never mattered and tell people that in the first week of September 1997 they were all suffering from mass hysteria,"' he said. "All I can say is that here we are, five years on, and we're getting 1500 to 2000 people a day coming around here who really care about her. And these are not people who could just be dismissed as nutters. These are people who genuinely feel something still, and they won't be told that they didn't feel something in September '97 and they won't be told to forget her now."



Diana is buried in an unmarked grave on an island in a dark lake behind Althorp. At a mock Greek temple bearing Diana's silhouette at the lake edge, dozens of people lay flowers. Some pray. A tourist from Northern Ireland, in a typical comment, said: "She must be very happy here - poor girl had a terrible life. But she's got peace here at last." Or perhaps not. Recently Spencer had metal plates inserted just under the surface of the island because he feared "some demented person" might dig his sister up. Hunted in life. Hunted in death.

FIVE years after her death at the height of her beauty and infamy in a Paris car accident, Diana, Princess of Wales, continues to make headlines. This week came the serialisation of the tawdry memoirs of Diana's former official bodyguard, Royal Protection Squad Inspector Ken Wharfe. On a flimsy pretext - that she urged him to put the record straight if anything "happened" to her - Wharfe details her many affairs and dalliances. It was Diana's idea of a joke, he tells us, to carry a vibrator in her handbag while overseas. He also claims she harassed the wife of the art dealer and confidant of Prince Charles, Oliver Hoare - with whom she had an affair - with up to 400 obsessive phone calls from Kensington Palace. After secret meetings with Major James Hewitt (some say that, based on looks, the true father of Prince Harry), Wharfe tells how she would speed back to London from Devon in the physical afterglow of their sex.

She is portrayed variously as promiscuous, stupid, mad, bad, impetuous, erratic, childish, spiteful, selfish, petulant, misunderstood and isolated. But does it tarnish Diana's place in the hearts of the people? A recent BBC poll asked Britons to nominate whom they considered "great" enough to warrant documentaries on their lives. Elizabeth I and Diana were nominated first and second. To their ongoing irritation, Diana eclipsed the Queen and Prince Charles in life and, it seems, even in death.

With such goodwill towards her, it seems surprising that no event has been organised to mark the anniversary of her death on August 31. No official wreath-laying, no minute's silence in the Commons, no church service. A few will take their children to the Peter Pan playground - remodelled in Diana's memory after her death - in Kensington Gardens. Others will lay bouquets at the gates of the palace where she lived. But it does not compare with the grief that marked her death. "Not since Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 has a prominent public figure been so comprehensively airbrushed out of a nation's public life," the writer Robert Harris recently said. If Harris is correct, it is the Windsor family which has been wielding the airbrush. The Queen, who was at her least popular after Diana's funeral, has enjoyed a hugely enthusiastic three-month public celebration of her golden jubilee. Done in a way that Diana might have, she had public meet-and-greets and opened Buckingham Palace to the hordes for a rock concert. Meanwhile there is every sign Prince Charles will remarry. After the accident, Charles was public enemy number one and Camilla Parker Bowles ("the Rottweiler", Diana called her) was virtually banished. Five years on, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, has apparently given his blessing to the Prince to marry Parker Bowles.

Those who knew Diana argued that the relationship between her husband and Parker Bowles propelled her towards fast living and into relationships that ended in acrimony and disappointment. There was, so many said, a tragic inevitability about her end. But at least, they said, she was finally happy. Was she? Although her relationship with Dodi Al Fayed had been going for some months, there is doubt about it. Today it is becoming more apparent that she went to Al Fayed on the rebound from the man she loved deeply, heart surgeon Hasnat Khan, who called off their relationship fearing that external, cultural pressures and media intrusion would crush it.

Al Fayed's father, Egyptian tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed, is adamant their relationship was serious. He believes they were "murdered" - a view echoed by the world's conspiracy theorists - because the British establishment would not entertain the possibility that the future King of England, William, might have a Muslim half-brother. "It is very difficult for me as a father who has lost his son to come to terms with my loss - expecially as I am certain he was murdered by order of the highest in the land," Al Fayed says. " I will never rest until I have brought to justice those responsible for their murder." Al Fayed's lawyers recently claimed Diana was pregnant and that she and Dodi planned to marry. They claim that phone calls in which Diana discusses marriage plans and pregnancy were tapped by America's National Security Agency, using a British eavesdropping base. Al Fayed is spending millions to access what he maintains are the transcripts of the conversations to present them to an inquest into Diana's death - expected next year - to further his murder conspiracy.

Like most conspiracies, Al Fayed's is as difficult to disprove as prove. But it has captured the public imagination and is often quoted as fact. "It will never be dignified with an official response," a source close to Buckingham Palace told the Herald. "It is a conspiracy with no base in fact and it should be ignored." Because Diana died overseas she is subject to a British coronial inquiry. But the Palace is trying to stop it. Sources told the Herald that the Palace and Prince Charles are concerned that an inquest would give rise to conspiracy theories such as Al Fayed's. Not least, they point out, it would create unnecessary anguish and pain for Princes William and Harry.

Meanwhile, the parents of Henri Paul - the chauffeur who died in the crash along with Diana and Dodi - have launched their own legal action to clear the name of their son who, officials have maintained, was drunk at the time of the accident. Gisele and Jean Paul maintain that the blood tested at the time of their son's death was not taken from their son. They are trying to force the French authorities to release the blood samples so they can be tested against their son's DNA. "They could easily have made a mistake with 30 other autopsies done on the same day. It is possible they made a mistake," Gisele Paul says. "The 28th of August he passed his medical exam for his pilot's licence. Everything was fine. Three days later he was labelled alcoholic."