1. When Diana accepted Mohamed Al Fayed’s invitation to holiday in St Tropez that July, his first act was to summon his son Dodi from Paris to join the first holiday with the princess and, as Brown puts it, "made wooing her an urgent imperative". "Dodi was the perfect antidote," says Brown, "charming, sexually attentive, intellectually unthreatening – and temporary." As Labour peeress Baroness Jay, former wife of ex–ambassador to Washington Peter Jay (she left him for the Watergate exposer Carl Bernstein and is now married to Aids expert and government advisor Professor Michael Adler), told Brown: "We’ve all had our Dodi Fayeds." It need never have come to this, of course.