She was a beautiful woman, but each photograph shows her getting progressively thinner. Like many exiles, Leila tended to have Iranian friends, including a network of cousins. "But I didn't know she'd been in London," says an Iranian contemporary (also thrown out of her country as a young girl). She speaks with a good deal of surprise; news usually travels fast among those who live what Guppy calls a "Persian life".She started working with good and noble causes, including the Mihan Foundation, and the Iran Heritage Foundation, which puts on exhibitions and promotes Iran through art and culture "They're ?tist and snobby," says one young Iranian.

"They'll organise balls, with tables for young people at £100 a head!" None the less, this was one of the few anchors Leila had, though she was very close to her family, she told Hola! magazine last year. But her mother lived in Paris, her brother in the US, and Leila spent most of her time living nowhere at all, a true exile."She was lost," says Guppy "She never got over the trauma. Her brothers and sister were older, so they coped better." She never stopped expecting that the family would be allowed back to Iran. Last year, in an interview with a US newspaper, she recounted a dream "There's one dream as scary as hell I'm in the palace and I'm not supposed to be there.

If someone catches me I could have my head cut off."Her brother, the self-styled "young Shah" Reza, has no such nightmares about returning. Now 40, with a secretariat in Falls Church, Virginia, and an imperialist website, he has become the flag-bearer for the Shah's family. His mother Farah, a regal presence in her Paris apartment, also runs a website, where commentaries and speeches and interviews are royally dispensed. Leila, though "she was very supportive of her brother" according to Guppy, had no website, no flag, no particular cause; she was more often seen in fashionable nightclubs and boutiques.