Dame Shirley Conran’s plan to leverage Princess Diana’s celebrity status with documentary series

Dame Shirley Conran devised a media strategy for Princess Diana in 1997 to leverage her celebrity status with a series of documentaries by the award-winning filmmaker Molly Dineen.

Dame Shirley, who died last week, had befriended Diana when she sought advice after her separation from Charles.

Tina Brown, in her book The Palace Papers, described the plan as a ‘startlingly sophisticated vision’, offering a film every two years to generate a humanitarian campaign for one of the princess’s causes.

Poignantly, Conran and Dineen were to launch the strategy during a Kensington Palace lunch with Diana on September 1, the day after she died.

The late Queen created the impression that she was aware of the work of the most obscure attendees.