Diana inquest: Despite my wife’s tears, the judicial steel of this court has done us all a service
By DOMINIC LAWSON –
Dominic Lawson: thought the Diana inquiry pointless and extravagant
We are now well into the fourth month of the public inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed and the patience of the British media seems to have been exhausted.
Last week BBC’s Newsnight and The Guardian both proclaimed it a colossal waste of time and money, a mere indulgence of far-fetched conspiracy theories.
Even the more popular newspapers, which in the past have been obsessed with everything to do with Diana, have cried “Enough!”.
I confess that I am one of those who had thought at the outset that this was a pointlessly extravagant exercise, given that we have already had a two-year inquiry by the French police – who collected 6,000 pages of evidence – and a very thorough investigation by the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Lord Stevens.
His 832-page report, published just over a year ago, concurred with the French that Dodi’s chauffeur, Henri Paul, had been drunk, and lost control of the car he was driving at well in excess of the speed limit in the Alma Tunnel.
Yet Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, continued to insist that his employee was not responsible and that the deaths were organised by MI6 under the orders of Prince Philip, allegedly because Diana was engaged to his son and pregnant with a “Muslim child”.
He wanted these claims to be tested in a full investigatory inquest with a jury drawn from the general public. Now he has got his wish – and one commentator last week complained bitterly: “How gleeful he must be at what he has unleashed.”
I wonder if that is really so. He certainly looked anything but happy when I attended the court for two days while my wife, Rosa Monckton, was giving evidence.
Indeed, as witness after witness has paraded in front of Lord Justice Scott Baker, acting as Assistant Deputy Coroner for Inner West London, to be cross-examined by a battery of lawyers, the confident and yet changeable claims of the conspiracy theorists have been put under a fierceness of scrutiny they have never before had to endure.
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Princess Diana with close friend Rosa Monckton. She was reduced to tears while giving evidence during the inquest.
The allegation that the Duke of Edinburgh had written vile letters to Diana as her marriage to Prince Charles broke up had previously gone unchallenged, thus giving a sort of credence to an entirely malicious characterisation of his relationship to his late daughter-in-law.
Yet Scott Baker boldly used the power vested in his court to demand that the Duke’s office release copies of the letters.
I doubt the Duke was happy about this – the Royal Family would rather pretend that these proceedings were not taking place at all – but, once revealed, the letters showed that he and Diana had a very friendly relationship.
She addressed him throughout as “dearest Pa” and one of the letters began “Dearest Pa, I was particularly touched by your most recent letter which proved to me, if I didn’t already know it, that you really do care.”
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Paul Burrell attending the Diana inquest. The coroner revealed his ‘last big secret’ had already been widely published
Far from being detrimental to the institution of the Royal Family, as many claim of the public inquest’s intrusion into private matters, this has refuted the commonly held belief that the residents of Buckingham Palace had treated Diana with nothing but cruelty.
Other myths have been destroyed in more clinical fashion by the coroner’s smooth-toned but gently insistent barrister, Ian Burnett, QC.
The conspiracy theorists had derived great succour from an extraordinary account by Diana’s former butler, Paul Burrell, of the Queen warning him of “dark forces” at work in Britain. Whom could the Queen have had in mind? The security service? The secret intelligence service?
This phrase appeared in Burrell’s highly profitable book, entitled – without apparent irony – A Royal Duty. Yet under oath Burrell confessed that “the Queen never mentioned dark forces”.
To a doubtless frustrated Michael Mansfield, QC (Al Fayed’s barrister) Burrell lamely described his account of the Queen’s alleged dark warning as “an error”.
Burrell had ended his book with a tantalising suggestion that there was one big secret left, something he could never reveal, which must forever remain “between the Princess and the butler”.
What could that be? That Diana really had been pregnant? Again, Scott Baker showed a flash of judicial steel: he ordered Burrell to go back to his home in Cheshire, retrieve the papers which contained this “final secret” and show it to him the next day in court.
Scott Baker duly revealed to a court agog to learn the truth that this so-called final secret was not a secret at all: the document merely referred to Diana’s desire to live abroad, preferably in America – a fact which had already been widely published.
Thus, yet another pillar of the conspiracy theorists crumbled into dust.
Burrell’s humiliation at the hands of Scott Baker has been widely broadcast: not so his court’s forensic examination of the claims of Michael Cole, the former BBC “Royal Correspondent” who became Mohamed Al Fayed’s spokesman.
Cole told the inquest that he knew, in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, that Diana had been pregnant with Dodi Fayed’s child, and insisted Dodi had personally told him that they were going to get married.
Yet, somehow, the inquest had managed to find a letter which Cole had written to me a couple of months after the fatal accident, when I was editor of The Sunday Telegraph, in which he insisted that “Dodi never spoke to me about their relationship”.
Cole seemed most put out when questioned about this glaring inconsistency. He seemed even more troubled when shown a letter he had written to another newspaper some months after the crash, protesting that their suggestion that Diana was pregnant was “scurrilous” with “no factual basis” and demanding that the allegation be withdrawn.
At this point, even the scrupulously polite Scott Baker suggested to Cole that he had been “less than honest” – which is as close as any judge is likely to come to calling a witness in his court a liar.
Of course, Al Fayed’s barristers – and the Harrods owner is paying not just Michael Mansfield thousands of pounds a day, but also for the very eminent QCs representing the Ritz Hotel and the family of Henri Paul throughout the inquest – have had their moments, too.
In particular Mr Mansfield might regard it as a “result” that he had managed to reduce my wife to tears during his questioning about her friendship with Diana.
Mr Mansfield last week made great play with the notorious “Mishcon” letter of October 1995, in which Lord Mishcon, Diana’s then lawyer, recorded her fear that the “authorities” would “get rid of her” in a car accident, involving “brake failure”.
Lord Justice Scott Baker, however, drew the jury’s attention to the fact that in the Mishcon letter the Princess accompanied this claim with the assertions that Camilla Parker Bowles would also be “put aside” by Prince Charles so that he could marry Tiggy Legge-Bourke (William and Harry’s nanny) and that the Queen would abdicate in favour of Charles in April 1996.
I was not in court to see their facial reaction to this extraordinary catalogue of conspiracy theories; but, from my own two days of studying the jury while my wife was giving evidence, I can say that they are extraordinarily attentive – many of them taking frequent notes, even though transcripts of the proceedings are put up on the inquest’s website within hours. So perhaps we should thank Mohamed Al Fayed for insisting on a full investigative jury inquest.
Before it ends, however, he himself will be called upon to give evidence and face the sort of public examination that he has successfully demanded of others.
I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
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