My healing time with Diana

Simone Simmons, small and rounded with bright red hair, often breaks into a huge smile and her large green eyes flash disarmingly. They match exactly the eyes of her three cats that are skulking around. Her flat in a north London block is decorated with pictures of ancient symbols, and ornaments are dotted around.

I manage to knock over a collection of carved figures perched on top of her television set next to a couple of crystal balls and she quickly gets up to put them back into place. She seems somewhat eccentric but at the same time, rather straight-talking, one of the reasons, she says, that the Princess of Wales liked her so much.

Unlike some members of Diana's circle, Simmons says she was often blunt with her. The day after Diana's infamous Panorama interview was screened in 1995, the Princess phoned to ask her what she'd thought of it.

"I told her had made a right prat of herself and said the only other person I'd seen making those wide, white eyes to the camera had been Myra Hindley," Simmons recalls. It was hardly the sort of comparison Diana had been used to.

The "energy healer", now 48, worked for the Hale Clinic, the upmarket alternative health centre near Regents Park that Diana frequented.

Their four-year friendship, which at times was intense, began in 1993 when the practioner was hired to "cleanse" Kensington Palace of "negative energy".

Their phone calls would sometimes last up to 10 hours, says Simmons, who, at the height of their relationship, would visit Kensington Palace as many as five times a week.

Prince Charles, inevitably, was often the subject of their deliberations. So what about the controversial Diana letter revealed this week in the Evening Standard as naming Charles in a plot to kill her in a car crash?

"There is no way Charles wanted her dead," she says. "I would like to see this letter forensically analysed to see if she even wrote it.

"It can't have been written in 1996 as Paul Burrell claims, because by then Charles and Diana had become friends. After the divorce she always referred to Charles as her 'ex-husband', very clearly on the phone and in writing, never as her 'husband', the word used in the letter. That's why I don't believe it could have been written then."

Of course, in the smoke and mirrors world of the Princess of Wales, even her closest confidantes can probably never be sure of the facts. Simmons accepts that after Diana's separation from Charles in 1993, she fell victim to bouts of paranoia.

"In 1994 she was convinced there was an Arab conspiracy, that the Saudi royal family wanted to kill her. It was just a feeling she had. Another time she thought the CIA wanted to bump her off.

"She sent me a very similar letter to the one Paul Burrell released but Charles wasn't named anywhere.

In the one she sent me, she gave a different name. She said she had sent similar letters to other people."

However, Simmons will not reveal who Diana accused - and says she has since destroyed the letter - but that the person named was not a member of the Royal Family.

So if, as she suggests, the authenticity of Burrell's letter should be questioned, what of its provenance?

"I don't know," she says. "There are a lot of questions. Why did he have it? She hadn't given him any letters to keep, I'm positive of that, because he was a member of staff. She'd give things to me and to a few other friends.

"Burrell says he loved her but I've heard him call her a bitch on several occasions.

"For most of 1996, she froze him out. It wasn't until the end of that year that the ice broke between them. He wanted to be special to her. He felt he was a member of the family, even though he wasn't."

What had happened between the princess and her butler to make her "freeze him out", where she would only communicate with him through other members of staff ? Simone smiles and shakes her head.

Like her friend Diana, Simone is something of a puzzle herself. She talks slowly and deliberately (perhaps one of the reasons her phone calls with Diana were sometimes marathons).

The daughter of a clothing manufacturer, she was born and brought up in north London, the eldest of three daughters.

She went to Hendon County grammar school, also attended by Peter Mandelson ("he was a pompous ass then and he hasn't changed") and instead of going to university, she became a medical secretary.

She never married or had children. In 1992, she became an energy healer, a power she says that she discovered when she was just six years old.

Returning to the subject that so consumed the Princess and the healer, Simmons insists that by the mid-Nineties, Diana would no longer have opposed a marriage between Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

"Diana said to me: 'I wish Charles would make an honest woman of Camilla.' She wanted him to be happy because she was happy then, having fallen in love with Hasnat Khan.

"She was quite forgiving towards Camilla and said to me: 'She is a Cancerian like me so she can't be all bad.' She had come to the realisation that Camilla had always been the number one in Charles's affections.

"Diana was so happy with Hasnat. She wanted to get married and have more children. She was on the Pill but she fantasised about getting pregnant and that if she did, then he'd have to marry her.

Diana was totally in love with him. She wanted to move away. She looked into moving to California. Hasnat had friends in Australia but he didn't want to move, his work was here."

According to Simone, Diana had even started converting to Islam, so she could marry Khan, born to a Muslim Pakistani family.

"She was really interested in Sufism, the mystical side of Islam. She kept a Koran by her bed and had started studying Islam. She had begun the conversion to Islam. It is a very big step to take. She adored him."

When Khan ended their relationship in 1997, saying it could never work between them, Diana began her affair with Dodi Fayed.

"That was definitely to make Hasnat jealous," says Simone. "There was no big love affair between her and Dodi and I know that she couldn't have been pregnant with Dodi's child when she died.

"When they were on the yacht Diana phoned photographers to tell them where she was and she was still calling Hasnat a lot from there. She manipulated the whole thing."

By then, however, Simone and Diana were not even on speaking terms. They'd had an argument in June 1997, caused, says Simone by people who were jealous of their friendship and had tried to turn Diana against her. It was one of several spats but Simone says they always repaired their friendship and that they would have done so again, had Diana lived.

One of Simone's cats slinks in and sits on my tape recorder. I think it must be time to go, to leave the world of princesses and energy healers.

It's easy to forget that there are two young men, one a future king of this country, who may not find this enduring soap opera as entertaining as the rest of us.