1. She was was born George William Ziadie in 1949 in Jamaica, to an elite family of Lebanese descent. She has said of her mother: "My mother was related to four of Jamaica's oldest families, and to say merely that she was out of the top drawer would not convey the quality of her breeding." Her accent remains an odd mix of Caribbean and aristocrat.

2. She was mistakenly identified as a boy by doctors due to a cosmetic malformation of her genitals. But she always knew she was a girl and sought help, despite being sent to a boys school. She was finally operated on aged 21 and was given a new birth certificate and name, Georgia Arianna.

3. Her current name and title comes from her ill-fated marriage of 1974: She married Lord Colin Campbell one week after meeting the 27-year-old in New York in 1974. He is the younger son of the 11th Duke of Argyll. Their marriage lasted less than a year.

4. Her gender reassignment surgery was revealed to the world by the Sunday People that year. She has said of the story: “I bitterly resent it, I resented it then, I resent it now and I will resent it until my dying day."

5. In 1992 she wrote an explosive biography about Princess Diana, Diana in Private: The Princess Nobody Knows, in which she said Diana had an eating disorder and had an affair with Janes Hewitt. At the time the claims were dismissed, but she was later vindicated.

6. In 1993 she adopted two baby boys from Russia, Misha and Dima. They are now 19. Dima recently defended his mother after the press criticised her appearance on I'm A Celebrity. He said: “She’s an inspiration to me. With age and time I’ve realised that many errors could have been prevented by listening to her advice."

7. In 2012 she wrote another explosive royal book, this time a biography of the Queen Mother. It suggested the Queen Mother's real mother might be the family cook, and that the Queen and her late sister Princess Margaret were conceived by artificial insemination, because their mother didn’t like sex.

8. She once dated Larry Lamb, the Eastenders soap actor, whom she described as a "darling". But she has never married again since Lord Colin Campbell, telling a newspaper in 2012: "Life doesn't always work out the way you expect. I can now see very good reasons for why I didn't."

9. She has also written a tell-all book about her mother's narcissistic personality disorder. She told a newspaper a sister had encouraged her to write it to so that "everyone will know what she had to endure".

10. She claims she no longer wanted to be known as Lady Colin Campbell after the divorce, instead preferring her original name, Georgia Arianna. She took out a press notice announcing her title should no longer be used, but said newspapers ignored it and publishers wanted her to keep the name since it implied aristocratic connections.