Al Fayed and the Diana inquest

Let it end here. Let this service mark the point at which we let her rest in peace and dwell on her memory with thanksgiving and cossion.”

Some hope. Not only has Fayed not shut up, he has managed to bring his astonishing conspiracy theory before a coroner’s court in London and get the court to take it seriously, or at least consider it. This is a tribute to his tenacity, to his will power, and to the great wealth that has enabled him to engage a cluster of London’s best lawyers to argue his case. But it is a dismal and dispiriting experience that he is forcing upon us, when we understand from the exhaustive French and British police investigations that his theory lacks any scrap of proof in its support and when all we want to do is to follow the bishop’s advice and let poor Diana rest in peace.

Fayed’s theory is familiar to everybody by now, but it is still breathtaking in its audacity: that Prince Philip conspired with the ”establishment” and MI6 to murder her because she was pregnant by Fayed’s son, Dodi, and so about to mother a Muslim child; that Henri Paul, their chauffeur, was a paid informant of the British and French secret services and a party to the murder plot; that Diana’s body was embalmed to conceal her pregnancy; that France failed properly to investigate her death, and so on and so on.

It is hard to think of any crime thriller that has ever attributed so much wrongdoing to so many people. Apart from the couple themselves, who Fayed claims were planning to marry, there is hardly a person involved, or accused of involvement, who is not portrayed as spectacularly malevolent. We are asked to believe that the French and British secret services, their police forces, the French medical profession, the British establishment, the British ambassador to Paris, and the husband of the Queen either were involved in murder or conspired to cover it up.

Even Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard and former Fayed employee who was the sole survivor of the crash in the Alma tunnel, is accused of having been “turned” against Fayed by the security services and lending his name to a “tissue of lies” in a book ghosted by them. He resigned from Fayed’s service soon afterwards, complaining of pressure to promote his conspiracy theories.

Fayed has engaged in defamation on such a scale that one might expect him by now to have been swamped by libel suits. But such are the extraordinary circumstances of the case, everyone’s desire for closure, and the allowance made for Fayed’s grief as a bereaved father, that he has been given instead an unprecedented chance to have his unsubstantiated allegations solemnly tested in a court of law. And even so, the poor coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker —who seems to me to have been conducting himself with exemplary patience and impartiality —has been accused by Fayed of introducing “highly contentious and disputed material” into his opening statement and presenting “an appearance of bias”.

It seems reasonable to presume already that, whatever the jury’s finding at the end of the inquest, Fayed will be loth to accept it. But then, whatever his feelings, he really must be persuaded to shut up.

© Guardian News Service