My bitter fight over Diana memorial

For someone who has just had a bit of a grilling in the press, Rosa Monckton seems remarkably calm.

She is in the kitchen, dressed in country-lady casuals (T-shirt, trousers, no make-up, loose, unstyled, brown hair, rather lovely blue-and-gold chunky necklace) at the large farm house she shares with husband Dominic Lawson, editor of The Sunday Telegraph, four dogs, two children and assorted animals that drift around - two ponies, a very friendly goat, ducks, sheep. She is tossing a salad and playing a game of pretendshopping with her seven-year-old daughter, Domenica. Her eldest daughter, Savanna, is on a sailing course.

"Ah, onions," says Rosa, adding a bit of balsamic vinegar to the leaves. "Onions!" says Domenica, cheerily but slowly, for Domenica is, almost infamously now, a Down's Syndrome child. She made the headlines when Princess Diana readily agreed to be her godmother and she was photographed in Diana's arms at her christening. "Domenica doesn't remember Diana," says Rosa. "She was too young."

She must be the only member of the Monckton-Lawson family who doesn't. Over the past few months, and particularly this past week, Rosa Monckton has become defined by the whole issue of Remembering Diana. It is impossible to open a newspaper without reading about the Diana fountain fiasco, and at the centre of it, this calm, rather unruffled, person who just happens to have been the chairman of the Fountain Committee since it was set up in 2000.

We are sitting in her study, telephone constantly ringing, photographs of Diana on the walls.

But, as level-headed, capable and mellifluous as Monckton seems, she says she feels utterly the opposite underneath.

"I am angry," she reveals, "very angry that the whole thing turned into a fiasco. I have worked all my life in the entrepreneurial end of the private sector and I have never experienced anything like it ... the nightmare of choosing the site, the European rules and regulations, the ticking and crossing of boxes that we may or may not have done, the utter time and time-wasting it has taken.

"Honestly, when you see how a Government department doesn't work, it is astonishing anything ever happens in this country. When I took this on, I had no idea what was in store. I thought we would all have a lovely time choosing a memorial that would befit the memory of Diana, and that would be that.

"Instead, it has dissolved into something far more public than it should have been. We (the committee) have all given up a lot of time to this. Not one of us has missed a meeting. I think all of us have felt - me, particularly, as it has been my name that has been dragged through the mud - very hard done by. It is quite damaging to my reputation as a businesswoman that somehow I cannot get a decision out of eight people sitting round a table on something that is actually very important."

Monckton blames a range of things: the fact it took more time than expected to approve a site; the fact that they had to battle with such pressure groups as the Kensington Garden people and the Hyde Park people; the fact that things got sticky when Monckton cast her controversial second vote for Kathryn Gustafson rather than Anish Kapoor, which she believed she had a right to do as chairman.

"I did have the right!" she exclaims. "I mean that it took four months to agree the site. And then, in February I cast my final chairman's vote. I was challenged a week later, after telling Gustafson she had won." Then, all hell broke loose. Monckton was accused of being conservative, of behaving in a high-handed manner, the Government got involved, the newspapers got excited, (Culture Secretary) Tessa Jowell stepped in, the committee met again and were still split, until this week, when Jowell also chose Gustafson's design and called an end to the whole kerfuffle.

"For ages, nothing was happening," says Monckton. "I rang every two weeks and said 'What is happening?' The problem was European rules and regulations. I was told that I probably did have a casting vote, but that it was irrelevant as we hadn't followed European procedures and guidelines. In the end, I bumped into Gordon Brown at the Queen's Jubilee pop concert and basically told him things needed speeding up immediately or I was going to go public.

"That was when Tessa got very involved. The committee did not come to blows, but we just couldn't agree. I thought the Kapoor piece was an interesting work of art but not a memorial. Those who were for it were making a statement about art, and it didn't carry the cargo of meaning that Kathryn's does. I think they had forgotten who this memorial was for, or, indeed, that it even was a memorial."

However, despite a final decision, Monckton has been severely criticised for her apparent lack of ability to achieve what seemed to be a relatively simple task. "It's not just the newspapers," she says. "I've had umpteen letters from members of the public, from people like the vicious group called the Diana Circle or something, saying incredibly mean things such as, 'call yourself a friend of Diana's? You're no friend. You are disrespectful to her memory. How can you have done nothing for her?'

"Then a whole other set of people have been wittering on about how the winning design 'isn't a fountain'. We never said it was going to be a fountain. But there seems to be disappointment about that. And now Vivienne Parry, 'friend of Diana', is at every press conference, talking to every camera saying 'Diana wouldn't have liked this memorial'. Well, Diana wouldn't have liked to be dead. How does this woman know what Diana would've wanted? It's not supposed to be about other people's egos."

Rosa Monckton is probably in the privileged position of having a better idea than most of what Diana would have wanted. Ten days before the death of the Princess, the two had holidayed in Greece together. They were, over the years since they met - both mutual friends of Lucia Flecha de Lima, wife of the Brazilian ambassador - in pretty much constant contact. When Diana died, Monckton and her husband were busy planning their house in East Sussex, which they hoped would be a "complete oasis" for Diana. "She could have had privacy here," says Monckton (true, the house is almost impossible to find). "When we were in Greece, a tourist took our photograph. Only the one. I told Diana not to worry. She said: "You'll see. It'll be on the front pages tomorrow.' I thought she was being a bit paranoid but she was right.

"Diana was many things," says Monckton. "She was difficult, capricious and manipulative. She wasn't a saint, but she was an unhappy woman. Deeply unhappy. Her work was her direct emotional response. She was so publicly vulnerable and frail, yet she fought through and always bounced back when one ghastly thing after another happened to her. She kept on going and I think that's why people identified with her, especially women."

But Diana and Monckton did not agree on everything. "She didn't tell me about the Panorama interview as she knew I would disapprove. Diana didn't like to be told things she didn't want to hear. It was unnecessary, self-seeking and wrong."

They also didn't speak for five months when Monckton called the Princess while she was on tour in Korea. "She was being very mulish for the cameras. I had seen her do this before. So I called her on her mobile and said: 'Look, you are not Diana right now, you are the Princess of Wales and you must do this properly because you are representing your country.' She listened to me, but the lines between us went dead for a while after that."

Monckton was at home when her husband told her about the car crash. "I knew Dodi was dead, but at that stage I thought Diana had broken her leg. I called her on her mobile. I left a message. I told her I'd be there in the morning for her."

She cried a lot of tears then, she says, but she doesn't now. I'm not surprised by that. For all her softness and accessibility, there is something rather steely about Rosa Monckton. Maybe it's the toughness of backbone she inherited from her military background - she is the daughter of retired Major-General Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. It is probably this that has helped her with Domenica. Life with a Down's Syndrome child is not easy. Her daughter rarely sleeps at night and needs constant attention.

When she was born, Monckton admits that she found it incredibly hard. She called Diana. "She was amazing. I had gone to pieces. I couldn't cope. I was grieving for the child I thought I knew, the one I had carried and then there was Domenica. Diana came to the hospital and swept Domenica up and said, 'Right, we're going to do this and this and you are going to see this expert and that expert and ...? I couldn?t have coped without her.?

A couple of days a week Monkton goes up to London. ?I need the break. I need to feel like me,? she says. She?s pretty much got the work-versushome-life sorted out now. When she was in her twenties, she banged on the door of Tiffany New York and demanded they let her set up a store in London. It was very successful, and when Monckton met Lawson at the age of 38 (?God, I wish I?d met him earlier and had lots of children with him, but life is never the storybook tale you think it is?) and had Savanna, life couldn?t have been more perfect. She took Savanna to the Tiffany office every day when she was a baby. ?It never occurred to me not to,? she says. ?I cannot see why employers are so hopeless about childcare. People should be able to bring their children in to work. I let all my staff do that, and it was a great, fun place.?

But after 15 years at Tiffany, rivals Asprey and Garrard persuaded Monckton to work for them. It was then, with Rosa now living under the sobriquet of ?Diana?s best friend? and getting a helicopter to work every day, that people started muttering about her being rather grand. ?Yes, I did get a helicopter to work," says Monckton, "but it was the only way I could do that and do the school run as well. And it wasn't glamorous. I would stagger out in the rain over a muddy field and spend the journey desperately smoothing my hair and changing my wellies for shoes." Monckton down-sized a year ago. She now goes to work one day a week as a nonexecutive director. "I believe in change," she says. "I don't just sit in a place of complacency. I don't even sit necessarily in a place of contentment."

She says that is why she and Diana got on so well. "The thing about Diana," she says, looking at a photograph, "is that she wasn't just this figurehead who sat about and did nothing. She resigned from her charities because she didn't just want to be a name; she wanted to be out there doing something. Her legacy is just that. I know that when Diana died, people wrote a lot of guff about how her death would change the fabric of the nation. I knew that was never going to happen. How can one person change what a nation stands for? But I believe Diana should be remembered for what she was - someone who really loved people, who moved people.

"She was magically inclusive and she knew who really mattered. If she visited a hospital, she would push past the mayor and the luminaries and go straight for the patients and the nurses who looked after them. That's why I chose the Gustafson memorial, because, for me, it symbolises what Diana stood for. A memorial should be something you participate in. It's not an untouchable work of art. The public can dip their hands in the pools and feel so included.

"It is utterly symbolic of Diana, with its circle of light and the movement of water. Diana loved water, just loved it. In her last letter to me, she wrote it was her favourite element. What did those critics want? Something like those horrid Queen Mother gates? In years to come, when no one remembers who Diana was, people will still find joy in this memorial. I do not doubt that for a second."