Princess Diana had "no regrets" about her controversial BBC Panorama interview with Martin Bashir and was "pleased" with it, a biographer has claimed.
Author Tina Brown, who wrote the book The Diana Chronicles in 2007, said the late princess "didn't have a bad word to say" about Bashir.
In the interview, Diana talked about her failing marriage to Prince Charles and his extra-marital relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles, famously claiming there was "three of us in this marriage".
Last year, a report by Lord Dyson found that Bashir deceived Diana's brother in order to secure the explosive sit-down chat.
In the aftermath of the report's release, her oldest son Prince William issued a rare statement revealing his “indescribable sadness” at the BBC's failings in airing the 1995 programme which plagued “her fear, paranoia and isolation”.
The future king said he was in no doubt that Bashir’s web of deceit “substantially influenced” what his late mother said and “was a major contribution to making my parents’ relationship worse”.
Meanwhile, Prince Harry also spoke out about the "ripple effect of a culture of exploitation and unethical practices ultimately took her life".
However, in an excerpt of Ms Brown's new book The Palace Papers, which has been published in Vanity Fair, she claims that friends of the late princess told her Diana "made clear that she had said exactly what she wanted to say on camera".
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She writes: "I don’t subscribe to the now pervasive narrative that Diana was a vulnerable victim of media manipulation, a mere marionette tossed about by malign forces beyond her control.
"While strongly sympathetic to her sons’ pain, I find it offensive to present the canny, resourceful Diana as a woman of no agency, as either a foolish, duped child or the hapless casualty of malevolent muckrakers."
Ms Brown also adds that when she was editor of The New Yorker she had lunch with Diana and Vogue editor Anna Wintour in New York in July 1997 - just weeks before her death.
She explains: "I was bowled over by the confident, skilful way she wooed us. Diana was always more beautiful in person than in photographs—the huge, limpid blue eyes, the soft peach skin, the super-model height. She told us her story of loneliness and hurt at Charles’s hands with an irresistible soulful intimacy that sucked us in, then switched to a startlingly sophisticated vision of how she planned to leverage her celebrity for the causes she cared about with a series of TV specials, 24 years before Harry and Meghan’s incoherent multimedia plans."
Ms Brown's book is set to be released later this month and the publisher claims it will tell the "real story" of the royals since Diana's death in 1997 - and is "full of nuanced details and searing insight".
It also adds that the author developed the book from her "years of research" and "intimate access" to the royals and will chart the Queen's "loosening grip" on the Firm.
