LOST LOVE: Princess Diana in front of the Taj Mahal

Revenge of the undead Diana

Have 10 years really passed since that fateful morning after the night before in the Paris tunnel?

I had known Diana passing well, in the sense I had written about her from the moment she hove into sight. An early assignment was to be part of the reporting team which covered her wedding — I stood in the Strand to watch her procession proceed to St Paul’s and then shifted to Buckingham Palace for the balcony kiss. My only scoop that day was collecting a handful of tossed confetti as I saw Diana off at Paddington station as she and Charles left aboard their honeymoon train for Broadlands.

There came days of innocence when I went to Italy with Charles and Diana and witnessed the romance of her journey through Milan, Florence and Venice. Next, I found myself in the Middle East with the royal couple and in deep trouble with Buckingham Palace for reporting (correctly, for once) that the Gulf rulers had showered her with jewellery worth a million pounds. When I came to India with Charles and Diana, I was at the Taj when she sat alone on a marble bench, a monument to lost love. Before accompanying Diana to Mother Teresa’s home in Calcutta, I was at the notorious polo match in Jaipur, when she presented Charles with the winners’ cup but deliberately averted her face as her husband tried to give her a kiss.

“The bitch!” hissed a British photographer, for by then many of the veteran snappers, who had grown up with Charles, were starting to side with him against her.

From beyond the grave, Diana is still reaching out to extract a terrible revenge on those she considered her tormentors when she was alive. She will, alas, never be allowed to rest because there are too many people — royal experts, authors, “friends” — making money by continuing to trade in Bluechip Diana shares.

BOOKWATCH: Balwant Singh Grewal

Walk tall

When Balwant Singh Grewal’s wife, Harjeet, saw her husband emerge from customs at Heathrow, she burst into tears.

“I’m not the wife of my husband,” she wailed.

At the age of 68, her husband had heroically walked the length of India, the 2,560 miles from Amritsar through nine states to Kanyakumari and raised £100,000 for cancer and HIV research in London. But in the process, he had shrunk visibly.

“I am normally 156 lbs — I lost 28 lbs,” laughed Grewal.

The five-month walk confirmed his opinion that “India is many different countries in one”. And last week in London, the India Association (UK), a charity for whom Grewal, its chairman, raised the money, finally got round to honouring him with a celebration dinner.

Grewal, a Calcutta-born Sikh, will complete 50 years in the UK next year. He is now 70, a retired property developer and his two sons and a daughter have flown the nest.

Nicknamed “Bobby” by his English friends, Grewal is preparing for another charity walk on October 10 — this time “from the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh to the House of Commons in London”. When we had a chat last week, he had just finished an eight-and-a-half mile training walk near his home in Denham, Buckinghamshire, using the same Reebok trainers he had worn in India and which he had bought for only £31 at a shop in Uxbridge, west London.

He had once written to Reebok, suggesting politely that the company make a modest contribution to charity but “if you will excuse my language, the buggers did not even bother to reply”.

What inspired him originally was a travel book about Africa — “On Foot Through Africa by Ffyona Campbell”.

Grewal is now pondering my suggestion that he, too, has within him, a marvellous travel book — which he certainly does.

FURIOUS: Lord Swraj Paul

Taxing times

Lord Swraj Paul, who employs 3,000 people in the UK and has 15 plants in India (to increase to 30 by 2008) and another eight in America, is furious with the Tories for suggesting he has been exploiting his non-domicile status to avoid paying due tax.

It is his donation to Gordon Brown’s leadership fund which provoked the Tory attack: “Lord Paul has given £25,000 through Caparo Industries Plc — the UK arm of his company which is based in the British Virgin Islands. Lord Paul has been accused of having non-domiciled status for tax purposes.”

Swraj’s letter of protest has not elicited a response from Chris Grayling, the Tory Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary who made the criticisms.

“This criticism about non-domicility is made only by ignorant people who refuse to study what non-domicility means,” fumes Swraj. “It is not a tax dodge. It is the most stupid criticism. It was just mischievous, a silly remark.”

His (perfectly valid) explanation is that as a person who was born abroad, he is legally entitled to have non-domicile status but is still liable to pay tax on all his UK earnings. Money earned abroad for work done from Britain is also taxable in Britain but money earned, say, in America or India for work done there is taxable only in America or India and not in Britain so long as the profits are not repatriated to the UK.

“All my income which is in Britain I pay tax on,” he assures me. “I pay very substantial tax every year.”

Swraj’s latest acquisition — a 250-acre Buckinghamshire estate — demonstrates that the 76-year-old steel tycoon is very much domiciled in Britain.

Favouring fortune

Renu Mehta’s problem, if it can be described as such, is that she is far too good looking for her own good and possessed, she has been told by paps, of “the best belly button in Bilayat”. Still, as founder of Fortune Forum, a charity to enable the world’s super rich to help the world’s super poor, she is being taken remarkably seriously.

At the inaugural Fortune Forum summit in London last year, the 37-year-old UK born and bred Renu managed to get Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lakshmi Mittal.

For the second summit, due to be held also in London on November 30 “to tackle the interdependent issues of climate change, global poverty and healthcare”, she has booked Al Gore, former US presidential hopeful, as the keynote speaker.

She found time, I am happy to note, to do a fashion shoot for an Indian glossy which sent a writer and snapper from India and to tell the magazine that “Ralph Lauren is my favourite designer and Donna Karan dresses make me feel like a goddess”.

ON A ROLL: Dev Anand and Kartar Lalvani

Tittle tattle

As per custom, dinner guests leaving businessman Kartar Lalvani’s London apartment were last week gifted packets of his company’s Vitabiotics Wellman tablets which promise “health, vitality, energy for men of all ages”.

The one person who probably did not require the pills was sprightly 83-year-old living legend Dev Anand, who was in London ahead of the release of the actor’s autobiography, Romancing With Life, in early October.

Manmohan Singh will be doing the honours in Delhi later this month, God and Karat willing, followed by book launches in Mumbai, Calcutta and Frankfurt before he returns to London with Tina Ambani ée Munim, star of his 1978 movie, Des Pardes, and her husband, Anil.